Tag: teaching tip

Guest Post: Teaching OM Using a Smart Pen

Wende BrownDr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College. Her earlier Guest Post describes her blended learning course. 

I am constantly trying to integrate evolving technology in my entirely online classes to help students with the learning objectives.  I further provide these online resources to blended students as reference materials for additional help on study plan and homework submissions they need to complete outside of class.  A couple of years ago my husband gave me a smart pen for Christmas– the Echo LiveScribe pen (see http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/echo/). At first, I found learning to use and sharing the output in my online classes a challenge. But in the past year LiveScribe seemed to resolve this issue with an Adobe format which makes it much easier (see example  Problem 1.9 ).

This past fall I started adding pencast tutorials like this example to my Operations Management course using select Study Plan problems.  I had viewed similar tutorials others developed for math classes and thought it might be helpful for my students in operations management.  I typically find my students really struggle with the analytics in this field.  At this point I have a small sample size, and I further complicated my data collection and analysis for comparison purposes by changing homework requirements (actually added further work to better align with another university for articulation).  While making the homework more challenging, the overall average grade went from a C to a B since I developed 31 pencasts!  Students tell me they can replay these pencasts multiple times to help the analytical concepts ‘sink in’.  I also have 24 other video tutorials showing students how to use POM for Windows or Excel OM to solve similar study plan problems.  Yet students tell me “the pencasts helped the most” in their feedback.

Wende can be reached at huehnbrown.wende@spcollege.edu.

Teaching Tip: First Day of Class Activities

professorThere’s no discounting the importance of the first day of class, writes teaching expert Dr. Maryellen Weimer in Faculty Focus (Jan.9, 2013).  What happens that day can set the tone for the rest of the course. Here are 2 activities for using that first day of class to emphasize the importance of learning and the responsibility students share for shaping the classroom environment.

Best and Worst Classes — In this activity, you write on the board: “The best class I’ve ever had” and underneath it “What the teacher did” and below that “What the students did.” On another section you write “The worst class I’ve ever had” and then the same two items beneath. Ask students to share their experiences, without naming the course or teacher, and begin filling in the grid based on what they call out. In 10 minutes or less, two very different class portraits emerge. Then move to the “best class” section of the board and tell students: “this is the class I want to teach, but I can’t do it alone. Together we have the power to make this one of those best class experiences.”

First Day Graffiti —  Flip charts with markers beneath are placed around the classroom. Each chart has a different sentence stem. Here are a few examples: “I learn best in classes where the teacher ___” “Students in courses help me learn when they___” “I am most likely to participate in classes when___” “Here’s something that makes it hard to learn in a course: _____” “Here’s something that makes it easy to learn in a course: ____” Students are invited to walk around the room and write responses, chatting with each other and the teacher as they do. After there are comments on every flip chart, the teacher walks to each one and talks a bit about one or two of the responses.

Guest Post: Jazzing Up Your OM Syllabus

Howard WeissOur Guest Post today comes from Prof. Howard Weiss, at Temple University. Howard is the developer of the POM for Windows and Excel OM problem solving software that we provide free with our OM texts.

When I began teaching in 1975 I would write my syllabus by hand and my secretary would type it on mimeograph paper for duplication and distribution to students. The mimeograph morphed to Xerox, and in the 1980s I began to type my own syllabus using my PC. When the internet became available I stopped reproducing the syllabus and had the students download it for themselves. I kept the syllabus black and white since many students did not have a color printer.

At this point, color printing is available to all of my students, either at home or in our computer labs. This allows me to include graphics (eg, Labor day, Halloween) on my syllabus in order to make it more engaging.

wordleMore recently I have begun to add a word cloud to my syllabus. A word cloud is a visual representation of the content of a document or web site. The size of the font of the words in the word cloud is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the document or web site. This enables viewers to very easily pick out the more important terms and concepts in the document.

Wordle.net is a web site that enables users to very easily create their own Word clouds. I have taken my course syllabus, modified it some, and used wordle.net to create the word cloud (shown here) that I have included on my syllabus. Wordle gives the user the opportunity to customize the cloud by selecting the font, the colors, the layout (horizontal, vertical, mixed), and the maximum number of words in the cloud. The word cloud improves the appearance of my syllabus and it gives a sign to the students that I am current in that I use the recently developed word cloud representation.

Another use: When a colleague retired recently, we took his resume, imported it into Wordle and gave him an 18” by 24” framed picture of his resume’s word cloud–a very unique, highly appreciated gift.