[October’s Teaching Carnival was compiled by Delaney Kirk, a management professor at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. You can reach her via email or on Twitter . Delaney is both an educator and an edublogger--ask her a question or check out her tips on teaching effectiveness at Ask Dr. Kirk. This month she gathers tips on teaching, advice to share with our students, ways to utilize technology in the classroom, and suggestions for personal development, along with a challenge to write that academic book you’ve been putting off. –Billie Hara]
Know of a blog post (perhaps your own) that should be included in the next Teaching Carnival…?
- Email the next host directly with the address to the permalink of your blog post, and/or
- Tag your post in Delicious (or Diigo or other bookmarking service) with
teaching-carnival.
Tips on Teaching
- John Jones asks how do we prepare our students to write effectively in environments that don’t yet exist and Maria H. Andersen lists the skills we need to be teaching in order to future-proof our students’ education.
- Lisa M. Lane shares a teaching technique that’s working for her that she calls “Lab Day.”
- Lora Helvie-Mason uses a peer feedback technique in class to help students improve their presentation skills.
- Chris Westfall shares his video presentation on how to help students learn to make an elevator speech.
- Kevin Houston, Mike Robinson, and Franco Vivaldi present practical tips on teaching students to write mathematics.
- Giulia Forsythe looks at seven basic concepts to online teaching while Nedra Reynolds reflects on teaching online for the first time.
- Donald Clark recommends improving teaching effectiveness by recording your lectures.
- David Warlick reminds us that we need to instill a learning lifestyle in our students by creating a learning environment where students can practice skills they are being taught.
- Tim Hetland interviews Kelli Marshall on using Twitter in the Literature Classroom.
- Holly Pappas discusses handling the paper load when feeling overwhelmed by that stack of essays you have to grade.
- Nancy Sommers shares this insightful video of students discussing teachers’ comments on their papers.
- Roger Whitson discusses the need to assign and engage in collaborative digital products and shares tips on how to do this picked up at THATCamp Pedagogy 2011.
- Reynol Junco examines whether Facebook use affects students’ academic performance.
- Eric Clark asks the question, do learning styles even exist?
- Traci Gardner explores the balance between grammar enforcement and critical thinking.
- Jennifer Borgioli shares tools for writing quality rubrics.
- Delaney Kirk’s students illustrate how to bring outside experts into the classroom with their interview of Chris Brogan on Trust, Twitter, and Listening as the New Black.
Tips on Using Technology
- Lisa M. Lane shows us how to embed stuff on Blackboard, Moodle, and WordPress.
- Wesley Fryer walks us through how to annotate, correct, and edit documents on our iPads.
- Cybraryman shares links on how we can use QR codes in education.
- Tim Hetland looks at websites that can help track participation in the classroom.
- Chris Snider shows us how to customize our Facebook page so people can “Like” us.
- Lisa M. Lane questions research stating that faculty are embracing social media in the classroom while Tom Whitby makes a case for why we as educators need to make social media a part of our lives if we want our students to learn how to effectively use it.
- Cybraryman shares a list of hash tags for following conversations on education.
- Jenny Shank gives us five reasons why e-books are awesome.
- Sarah Horrigan throws away her paper and pencils and experiments with going paperless.
- Billie Hara cautions us to think before we tweet or blog especially if we’re talking about our students.
Tips for Our Students
- Ellen Bremen makes suggestions on what students can do to improve their grade after mid-terms. She also helps students in understanding how participation points are determined.
- PresentationSkills walks students through steps on how to overcome their nerves and do a better presentation in class.
- Barbara Nixon gives detailed instructions and advice to students on how to use Twitter.
- Lindsay Olson gives tips on how to use social media to get a job.
- Don’tFearTheInk reminds students (and the rest of us!) how meaningful it can be to send a thank you to someone who has helped you.
- Amy Gardner shares what she didn’t learn in college about finding a job after graduation.
- Pernille Ripp gives her top ten reasons why students should blog and Brandon Mercury announces a $1,000 scholarship for college student bloggers.
- Chris Fox and his fellow students at Writers’Bloc make videos teaching others how to write and as a result, find the answers to their own questions.
Tips on Personal Development
- Mike Kaspari lists Ten Quick Tips for Improving Your Scientific Writing.
- Jeremy Dean tells us the secret to getting things done without making people hate you.
- Jeffrey Heil shares these guidelines for cultivating a personal learning network.
- Sarah Horrigan tells us what’s wrong with using bullet points.
- Dave Dodgson asks others to share their experiences on using a blog as a reflective journal for teacher self-development.
- Heu Mihi reminds us that we’re not alone in those frustrating conversations with students.
- Wendy Dexler shares her experience in taking an online course with 100,000 others.
- Claire Potter shares thoughts on how Occupy Wall Street speaks to our broken education system and proposes that we Occupy Education.
- Robyn McMaster gives us tips on having patience while Marc and Angel share 50 natural ways to boost your energy.
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And if you’ve been putting off writing that academic book or dissertation, Charlotte Frost invites us all to participate in the first Academic Book Writing Month challenge (tweet about it using hash tag #AcBoWriMo). You can also join NaNoWriMo to start that novel you’ve been telling people you plan to write someday. Both challenges begin on November 1st.
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How about you? Do you have any last minute links you’d like to add to this month’s carnival? Did we miss your work? If we don’t know about you, we can’t link to you. So, let us know what you are up to in the classroom. You can easily have one of your blog posts about teaching in higher education included in an issue of the teaching carnival by doing any or all of the following:
Mikhail Gershovich, Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute & Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator at Baruch College, City University of NY, will compile the next Teaching Carnival (5.04). You can reach him via email or on Twitter.
Keep in mind, that if you don’t send us your posts, we might miss them. So send them on! We want to include you in our next Teaching Carnival. Lastly, we are looking for more contributors for the Teaching Carnival, so if you have interest in compiling links for one month, please contact Billie Hara for information.
[Image by Flickr used by Sister72 and used under the Creative Commons license.]


