Issue link: http://ncumarketing.uberflip.com/i/1003100
TEACHINGTIPS Adia Garrett, PhD Adjunct Faculty, Department of Psychology Helping Students Leverage Technology Simply applying to work at NCU changed my approach to teaching in a meaningful way. Our unique 1:1 model of mentoring students taught me the value of developing genuine connections with each individual. I eagerly paid close attention to each student's strengths and areas of improvement, so I could be sure to compliment and encourage them. I spent hours giving detailed feedback, suggesting tools that would help them improve APA style, explaining how to conduct literature searches and more. In my first few weeks of teaching at NCU I felt like I was more helpful and attentive than I had been in the 15 years I have been teaching in higher education…until I started seeing students make similar mistakes week after week. I could not figure out why my caring, detailed feedback was not being incorporated in subsequent submissions. I began to ask a few of my students to schedule a phone or Skype session so we could discuss the feedback; I was worried that my communication was not as clear as I had hoped. All it took was a few phone calls to realize that some of our students do not know how to use all of the technology available to them. Some did not know how to view comments in MS Word and were too ashamed to tell me. Others read and understood the comments, but did not know how to perform the functions necessary to appropriately address the feedback (e.g., using EBSCO to save citations in APA format, creating a hanging indent or inserting page breaks to preserve correct pagination). To address the challenge of helping students apply feedback, I have found Jing to be an invaluable tool. I realize that many "How To" resources are already available on our NCU Library Page and in The Commons. Similarly, students could use Google and YouTube to find help doing just about anything. But our students are often busy and do not want to sift through the overwhelming amount of resources available. Jing allows me to give personalized feedback in the form of short demonstrations. It saves me the time of trying to write a long list of instructions (that may be far too boring to read) and is a great way for students to feel that their instructor genuinely cares about their success. I'm sure there are other programs that allow instructors to achieve this goal. I do not mean to promote any particular product. For an example of how I use Jing to provide instructions, please click on the short Jing below that I just created for a student who is having trouble with finding and citing reputable articles for a project she would like to pursue. https://www.screencast.com/t/unUeCtio2T If you are interested in downloading Jing (for free), click here: https://www.techsmith.com/jing-tool.html Happy screencasting! – Adia