Ways of engaging students in digital environments.
- Use the lowest common technology possible to promote student access, control, privacy, and security.
- Cheer first, then teach, especially with digital literacy.
- Practice micro-appreciative language.
- Automatically drop a certain number of assignments, without question, allowing students to have a couple bad weeks without hurting their final grade. This allows conversations about life difficulties to focus on supporting student needs without dwelling on the logistics of makeup work.
- Disregard college early alert systems for more immediate weekly reviews of grades with emails. Early in the semester I do phone calls, and once I’ve established trust I follow up with emails. Follow up, follow up, follow up.
- Use the "maximum" grade feature in D2L to alert students to line-in-the-sand fail potential as soon as possible.
- Get names right orally and in written communication. Apologize when haste or autocorrect make you get it wrong. Encourage avatars to put names with pictures in digital spaces.
- Script (auto-complete) supportive sentences and paragraphs to make including support statement easier and faster. For example, " ";coun" becomes "Students report to me that talking to a Normandale counselor helped them feel better and able to manage their lives. If you’d like to talk to a counselor, you can call them at 952.358.8261 or see their page at https://www.normandale.edu/advising-and-services/advising-and-counseling/counseling . Their services are free and confidential. " ";ty" becomes "Thank you for your question." And "dtms" becomes "Does that make sense?" This is much better use of technology than the "Intelligent agents" of D2L.
Linked is a plain text version of these suggestions for Engaged Teaching.
Jack Norton
Faculty in History
Normandale Community College
jack.norton@normandale.edu
@jacknorton
https://jacknorton.org
https://jacknorton.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/how_to_engage_students.txt by Jack Norton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
