Dos for Working with Students: Notes from the Institute on Teaching Strategies

Part of today's program in the Institute was to have two of our own faculty, Alex Reid from Professional Writing and Paul van der Veur from New Media talk about their work with the millennial students.

Paul gave a low tech list of Do's for working with students and technology. He began by saying that incorporating media takes time. Our incoming students assume that technology will be there and they are not intimidated by it. They tend to be great consumers of technology and yet are not at a point where they are able to create good media content nor are they at a point where they are able to think critically or reflectively about it. And here are some do's Paul recommended to faculty integrating technology into their teaching:

• only ask students what you're willing to do yourself
• you can learn it with them
• be honest with your students
• be enthusiastic
• think about ways to support student learning: peer to peer, groups, individual projects
• take advantage of the resources available
• keep them moving on their assignments
• frequent assignments work better than one big assignment
• set boundaries, expect students to push them but it's better than no boundaries at all
• keep assignments meaningful and relevant to students, their lives now and their aspirations after graduations
• keep your expectations low
• be prepared to change and adapt
• prepare for contingencies
• be prepared to put in a lot of extra time.

I would also add be prepared to be engaged, challenged, stimulated and changing. It will be a lot of fun!!!