Faculty Tools for Teaching & Learning

For this Thursday's open-topic blog, it seems appropriate to talk a little more about myself and my training (more than the brief blogger profile can include). I've been teaching in higher education for ten years, and full-time at the University of Central Missouri for seven.  I am a tenured Associate Professor of History in the Department of History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Cross-Disciplinary Studies.  I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the face-to-face, hybrid, and online formats, and on topics that include: U.S. nineteenth-century history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, American military history, and the history of flight.   I have also taught honors seminars and writing seminars for our history program majors. My Ph.D. is in American history from Rice University, and I have also taken graduate coursework in instructional design as part of the Educational Technology Leadership program at the George Washington University.  I have over one hun...

The origins of this blog are twofold: a sense that faculty could use a research librarian for faculty development, someone that can help direct colleagues to recent scholarship and publications, highlight case studies, and share ideas for exploring a new teaching skill or strategy.  The second is to create an online workspace to support a face-to-face faculty working group I facilitate in the Kansas City area. I plan to post blogs on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.   Tuesday Tools will be blogs that focus on sharing and testing out an ed tech app, website, or tool.   Saturday Strategies will discuss best practices, course design ideas, and project or assignment plans--strategies that can help change the dynamic of your classroom and increase engagement and learning. Thursday posts do not follow a specific theme but still broadly relate to instructional design and learning--they may be a review of a recent book or article, a case study, a post by a guest auth...