Ask-Dr-Kirk

Tools For Managing Your Time More Effectively

Abhijeet Mukherjee shares 15 time management tools and apps. I'm curious about RescueTime, an app that you download to keep track on how you spend your time on your computer.

Quote Of The Day

Insightful observation...

Today’s students are not the students we were trained to teach. Ian Jukes

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

...A business professor's attempt at creativity :)

Free Rubrics For Teachers

One thing I've learned after 32 years of teaching is that using rubrics for exams, papers, and student presentations means less time grading and more specific feedback for the students.  Check out this website for thousands of free rubrics as well as templates for putting togther your own. 

Tips On Classroom Management

We've all had this happened. You give your students something to discuss with the person next to them and then you can't seem to get their attention back again. Raising your voice really loud doesn't usually do it as a room full of students can easily overtalk you. Dr. Rick Sheridan (Wilberforce University) shares his tips for regaining control of the classroom.

 

How To Retrieve What You've Read

Have you ever read a book and then months later can’t recall anything about the book? Or perhaps you pick up a book and start reading and realize after a few chapters that you’ve read it before? I know I have and thus I found this post by Dwayne Morris interesting: How to retrieve what you’ve read-almost instantly.

Tips On Preventing Plagiarism

Check out this interesting article by Professor Jeff Karon (University of South Florida) on plagiarism and how to prevent it.

Here are some other tips you might find useful:

Be proactive in preventing cheating on papers and assignments.  Let your students know that you expect them to do their own work and that cheating will be punished in your class. 

Put your university’s policy on your syllabus.  You should also be familiar with your university’s procedures on reporting cheating so that you follow the appropriate steps if this becomes necessary. 

Define the term plagiarism for your students.  Many of them do not understand the difference between citing and copying someone else’s work. 

Give specific and timely topics on papers so that students cannot simply access the internet for commercially produced papers.  Thus, a paper on sexual harassment in the workplace is easily available for sale.  A paper on sexual harassment policies in local companies in your town is probably not.

Have students turn in outlines and/or first drafts of their papers to you earlier in the semester and then have them attach those drafts to the final paper when it is due. 

Require students to turn in copies of all sources cited including websites, journal articles, and pages of books used.

Read the Bibliography. Dates should be required for interviews and websearches. If these dates do not fall in line with what is reasonable for the semester due dates, that should raise a red flag (tip submitted by Timothy Johnson).

 

Quote Of The Day

This quote seemed appropriate today. Be sure to vote!

 

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing either your temper or self-confidence...Robert Frost

How Many Ph.D.'s Does It Take To...

 

Source: www.phdcomics.com