Category Archives: method

Playing with Microsoft Reflect, “a well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”

Yesterday, a colleague pointed me to Microsoft Reflect, “A well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”, and I had a quick play. It’s a tool to support reflection in educational settings (something that I am thinking about a lot in the context of teaching sustainability). Since it is not designed specifically for use in higher education it feels a bit unconventional in my context, but on the other hand, many of the tools offered in there are similar to what I do anyway, but now they are all collected in one place and can (allegedly, I
haven’t tried yet) be easily integrated with for example Canvas (our learning management system) or Kahoot (an online voting/quiz tool), which we use regularly.

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Structuring fieldwork as a jigsaw to increase student responsibility in, and ownership of, their projects

I am a huge fan of Kjersti‘s excellent teaching, it is always so inspiring! She, together with Hans-Christian, developed a jigsaw method to structure preparation for a student cruise, the cruise itself, and then writing of cruise reports. We wrote it up and submitted it for a forthcoming book on field teaching (which I will share links to as soon as they become available), but here comes an extended version for you already!

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iEarth GeoLearning Forum 2023 Bingo

Unfortunately, I can’t join the iEarth GeoLearning Forum in person today, but at least I can be there in spirit (and contribute with a Bingo to be played during an active lunch break). The idea is to get students and teachers and staff talking to each other, about their experiences learning and teaching, and also their disciplinary pet topics. Let’s see how that goes! (Also, this is the first draft, not sure if/how it has been edited after this. But I’m sure it’ll be fun in any case!)

How to create an Activity Bingo for teaching purposes

We have recently shared our experiences with a Bingo game to nudge students to make the most out of fieldwork (Glessmer et al., 2023), and I have created Bingos for other purposes, like designing courses with Universal Design for Learning in mind, or for my freediving club’s summer camp, or the iEarth GeoLearning Forum 2023 (yes, you can look forward to that!). And now, Kjersti and I have come up with the Bingo of Bingos: A “how to design your Activity Bingo for teaching purposes” Bingo! Because who doesn’t love a gamified approach to basically everything?

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How can we adapt a teaching method for our purposes? The “Doughnut rounds” example

One thing that often surprises me is how seriously many teachers take teaching methods. As in, there must be fixed times for each of the phases of think-pair-share. Or there is an exact percentage of students that must answer a question correctly for a teacher to move on to the next topic. Or  that sort of thing. That is NOT how I use methods, and here is my attempt at explaining what I do instead.

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Another serious game for teaching sustainability that I like: the Climate Fresk

As you’ve seen from my recent Biodiversity Collage posts, I have gotten into serious games as tools for teaching. Today, I am reading up on a different game, the Climate Fresk (which I also got introduced to when I got to play it in a workshop led by my awesome colleague Léa Lévy, and which she and colleagues have evaluated as teaching tool in our context). Let’s see what experiences other people have had with it!

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UDL bingo: challenge yourself!

There are a ton of things on my to-do list for this week before I go on vacation, but I really don’t want to do any of them right now, and so much not so that I, instead, just put together a “UDL bingo” that we can use to challenge ourselves! (Procrastination is best when you still do something useful, right?) Of course, the goal would be to do more than what is suggested on the bingo card, but this is at least a start!

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Teaching about a deep approach and surface approach to learning

Things I didn’t try beforehand and that still worked out well: asking participants to brainstorm what students do who perform well in their courses, what less successful students do, collecting & clustering keywords for both on the whiteboard, and then projecting a picture from our Active Divers freediving training on top to stress the point that it is a surface APPROACH and deep APPROACH to learning, and rather than an inert quality in a student, that it’s often a strategic decision which one is being used (and a surface approach might be the strategic choice in many cases!), and that instruction can encourage one — or the other.

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