Month: January 2014
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Seating Arrangements in Your Classroom
by Nick Yaremchuk, Teacher, The International High School, VIU More and more teachers that I talk to are considering how seating arrangements in their classrooms affect their teaching, affect their students’ learning, and affect discourse in their classrooms. For many educators, gone are the days of straight rows of desks with students facing the front…
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Where Do You Learn That?
By Carrie Johns, Secretary Registrar and Convocation, Registration Centre, VIU My son is two years old. He learns new skills and new words at an incredible rate: yesterday, he pulled on his shoes by himself – today, he asked for chocolate milk and French fries for dinner. (I expect that tomorrow, I’ll hand him the…
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Life and Learning
By Deirdre Godwin, Program Assistant, Professional Development and Training, Faculties of Health and Human Services& Trades and Applied Technology, VIU Life is a learning experience. When I was growing up, I always swore that I would never be a teacher. My father taught for over 30 years in the Nanaimo District, and I guess I…
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Going Text-less
By Sandra Johnstone, Teaching Faculty Member, Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU A round of applause This semester – Spring 2014 – I experienced a first in my teaching career. While we were reviewing the course outline for my first year earth science class the students broke out into applause. Now, I flatter…
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The Journey of Becoming a Teacher
by Greg Klimes, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU I never considered myself a “teacher” nor was it ever a career aspiration of mine to become a teacher. That word implied someone who taught in the K to 12 environments, many whom I have the utmost of respect and admiration for. I…
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A lesson I bring to my VIU students
By Susan Lymbery, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation and Faculty of Arts and Humanities, VIU I’d been twenty-five years out of high school when my son encouraged me to enrol at Malaspina University-College. Eight years later, I found myself teaching at Cowichan Tribes Yu’thuy’thut Adult Training Centre. One day, as…
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Some thoughts on Textbooks, Open Textbooks and Reviewing for BCCampus
by Jessie Key, Teaching Faculty Member, Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Technology, VIU Textbooks are one of the primary resources of instruction for most courses at the university level. They can act as a framework or backbone to the topics addressed in the course by providing explanations, examples, and practice problems to students. An ideal…
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We Should Let Our Students Cheat
By Laurie Meijer Drees, Teaching Faculty Member, First Nations Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, VIU As teachers, we should let our students cheat. We should encourage them to cheat. We should teach and model cheating. Good cheating. Why? Because cheating is a way of finding answers using clever short-cuts, sharing information, learning about individual…
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Collaboration and Creativity in Action
By Sherryl Maglione, Teaching Faculty Member, Faculty of Academic and Career Preparation, VIU Today revealed one of those ‘aha’ moments that teachers are occasionally humbled to experience. At the beginning of the term, my main focus as facilitator is to create a community of learners who feel safe, are comfortable with each other, become alert,…
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What Helps Me Learn: Reflections from International Students Video Project
During International Week at VIU we attended a panel discussion of international students reflecting on the process of their learning organized by The Faculty of International Education and the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL). The students provided such valuable insights in their reflections that we decided to try and get them back to…
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ePortfolio Overview
What is an ePortfolio? One of the most comprehensive definitions of ePortfolios comes from Gabriele Bauer from Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Delaware: The academic ePortfolio is a selective set of online, reflective, integrative, and personal documents that present how you have developed as a scholar-teacher in your discipline. It offers evidence of…