HURRICANE ISAAC
The post-Isaac BRCC campus looks amazingly well. We hope that our students, faculty and staff made it through the hurricane unharmed as we make the move back to "normalcy."

GROW YOUR DEPARTMENT
Are you looking to increase the number of majors in your discipline. A panel, Active Learning: Engaging Activities to Create Eager Students, at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association pointed to ways to draw students to your classes. The session featured accounts from faculty members -- at community colleges and four-year institutions who teach both introductory and upper-level courses -- who have moved beyond standard textbook-and-lecture teaching methods to make anthropology more tangible, and make it come alive. What they learned suggests that the best way to save anthropology on college campuses may well be to allow students to actually experience anthropology by using active learning experiences.

BLENDED LEARNING
You may have heard of the term blended learning and wondered what it meant. Blended learning in its simplest form is about having students use online tools to communicate, collaborate, and publish to develop the 21st-century skills they need to succeed. With blended learning, teachers can use online tools and resources as part of their classroom instruction. Using many of the online tools and resources students already are using for social networking, blended teaching helps teachers find an approach that is more engaging for this generation of students. The benefits of blended learning include giving students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge while appealing to diverse learning styles and fostering independent learning and self-directed learning skills in students, a critical capacity for lifelong learners. Liz Pape has more information in her article Blended Teaching and Learning.

WHAT DO YOUR STUDENTS HEAR
Susan M. Brookhart has written a good article on the benefits of formative assessment. She says, "Feedback is effective only if it helps students improve their work. Thus, the most important characteristic of feedback is that students understand it and use it. Whether or not feedback is effective depends on what students need to hear, not what you need to say." She goes on to explain how assessment can help a student improve and gives a number of suggestions for effective feedback.