MEASURING THE EFFECTS OF TEACHING
One of the burning questions for us as teachers will always be "Are my students learning?" One of the ways we determine that is by assessing what we have taught. Good assessment provides the answers to the questions "Am I teaching?" and "Are my students learning?" The faculty development workshop set for October 17 is designed to help you create assessment instruments that can provide the data to answer these questions. Testing 101: Assessing Student Learning, to be held in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building/Mid City Campus) promises to be an active learning experience. We will delve into the rich and interesting topic of testing on many levels. So let's take some of the guess work out of testing and assessment together. If you would like to join your colleagues for this workshop, register now.

DON'T LET TEACHABLE MOMENTS SLIP BY
Have you ever had a bird fly into your classroom while you were teaching? What about planning to show a really compelling video and having the technology malfunction? Do you remember what class you were teaching the morning of September 11, 2001? All of these examples provide a teachable moment. Don't get me wrong. I am not comparing the three incidents in any way. What I am urging you to do is to not let a change in your plans cause you to miss the great opportunity. Nothing resonates with our students like real life. Dr. Judy Willis says, "Rather than viewing a spontaneous teachable moment as a distraction, planning for these moments in advance facilitates making the most of a moment to engage students who are already at a heightened state of attention and awareness." She suggests you have your students write a quickwrite about how the experience made them feel. Quickwrites require students to write for three to five minutes without stopping. If their inspiration stops and they don't know what to write, tell them to write the last word over and over again until inspiration hits them again. After the time limit is complete, have them read what they wrote silently and ask them to underline one or two phrases they consider most important. You can then have them share those highlights with the class. If you determine that this really sparked great interest, you can turn this into a larger assignment and have them write an essay, expanding what they started in class. Teachable moments provide us with a wonderful opportunity to use a sometime emotional moment to build class community and make lasting connections.

CAN YOU BLACKBOARD
The turnout was terrific for the two Blackboard workshop sessions on Thursday. It was extremely nice to see some of our new colleagues from the former CATC on the Mid City Campus. The feedback was great as well. Sandra Guzman, science, wrote, "My lab reports are going paperless!" Barbara Hasek, science, wrote, "The presentation was very helpful and I will start using the due date feature immediately." Jessie Hornbrook, liberal arts, wrote, "I am definitely using this now to grade my 50+ student writing assignments in all of my classes!"  Angela Pursley, business and social sciences, wrote that she likes using the "student view of the grade center." Darnella Jackson, nursing and allied health, wrote that she appreciates "how easy it is to create a course in Blackboard." The next session of the Blackboard Series is just around the corner. Gradebook: It's Not Just for eLearning Classes will occur on Tuesday, October 8 with sessions for the two levels of learners. The 3:00 PM session is for beginners while the 4:00 PM session is for advanced users. You can register for this faculty professional development opportunity now.

ARE YOU FRIENDS WITH GRANDMA ON FACEBOOK
Barbara Fister's recent post on her blog raises some interesting questions about college writing instruction in the age of digital overload. She writes, "How do we prepare students for a world in which so much of their writing will be digital and published in a fluid, communal, multivocal space? How do we talk about the rhetorical issues of purpose, audience, argument, evidence, and tone when we aren’t limiting ourselves to certain academic forms of writing? As the Stanford Study of Writing has shown, students may be better at rhetorical moves than we think precisely because they have practiced them in digital spaces with real purposes and real audiences. But given the complexity of modern forms of public writing, what issues beyond the usual writing issues might be worth considering? Should we be talking about the difficulty of self-representation in a space with multiple audiences, including your friends, your future employer, and your grandmother? Should we talk about who owns our texts online and what platforms such as Goodreads and Facebook can do with our contributions? Should we talk about balancing free speech and civility with case studies of people behaving badly online?"