Engaging Learners In The 21st Century: Service Learning In The Classroom-Integrating Community Service Into Existing Curriculum

My colleagues Erica Franklin and Erika Baldt gave an excellent presentation at Engaging Learners In The 21st Century which rounded out our day at the conference. I took some notes that day, but a lot of this comes from Erica's slide set which she graciously sent me.

  • Service learning combines community service with course material and/or interests
  • It develops academic skills and a commitment to working with the community
  • Service should have correlation to course content, outcomes, etc
  • Flexibility
  • Hands on experience
  • Resume building and networking
  • Examples of service learning at BCC include Civility Week, Sleep Out For Homelessness, and efforts after Superstorm Sandy
  • Many benefits for an institution including partnerships, resource sharing, public relations, and strengthening alumni ties
  • Grammar discussion with middle school
    • Build posters with them about grammar errors in a program
  • Teaches graphic design and hireable skills for non teaching English majors

Engaging Learners In The 21st Century: Tweeting Sociology: A Dynamic Approach To Teaching & Leartning

  • Showed how he uses Twitter with classes
  • Some in room don't use Twitter because they thought it was about "gossip"
  • Students reluctant at first, but then engaged on their own with prof and each other (I am sure that process will sound familiar to my students)
  • Tries to engage students in social consciousness via tweets and retweets
  • Need to remember not everyone has smart phone or web at home. Still access issues...which is why i don't require it
  • I have had students tweet their paper thesis. must narrow down until fits 140 characters

Engaging Learners In The 21st Century: Useful Apps For Higher Education

Alexandra Salas ran the session on Useful Apps For Higher Education. Here are some of the apps she went over during the session. For some of these apps, my notes focus on the extremely frustrating limitations of them. 

  • Flowboard has memory issues and does not export, which annoyingly means it has to live in the cloud. I seemed to puzzle some attendees with my concerns about this, which terrified me.
  •  Prezi doesn't support audio? I am so glad I never bought into it.
  • Socrative is polling software for phones, tablet, web that could be useful.
  • I agree that an important part of Google Drive is permissions and how you implement them in grading or collaborative projects.
  • Doodle is a scheduling app. I think it over complicates things. I send a Google Doc with times to sign up to advisees/classes.

Engaging Learners In The 21st Century: Mission Possible: Creativity Anmd Scholarship In Freshman Composition

John Cartier has his students use composition level skills and paper formats (process, narrative, cause and effect, etc) to create a fictional story of a character. They pick from 23 tropes and then follow steps:

  • Draft one: define appearance and personality
  • Draft two describe character’s room, very detailed in thirds person
  • Draft three process of something and then narrative of a foil
  • Draft one research about something
  • Draft two turning point
  • Draft three additional narrative and 10 million dollar example
  • Draft four personal letter