Interested in using technology to enhance student learning? Explore available learning technologies that can help improve student engagement, and hear from some UVA instructors on tools that are working for them.
Enable student growth as teachers and learners through a validated cycle of peer and personal assessment.
This tool enables student growth as teachers and learners through a validated cycle of peer and personal assessment.
In this Learning Tech blog post, UVA Associate Professor of History Jennifer Sessions talks about the power of Peerceptiv in engaging students in the assessment process and helping them become better readers and editors.
Peer review of writing assignments is an important component of many of Jennifer Sessions’ history courses, and she regularly uses Peerceptiv to facilitate this process. She shares some of her experiences with the tool and recommendations for others who might be considering a similar approach.
The thing I really appreciate about Peerceptiv is that it doesn’t just help students improve individual papers. It helps them become more effective readers and editors. It sounds hyperbolic, I know, but I regularly use the term “magical” in describing this power to colleagues. The anonymous online system depersonalizes the peer review process and facilitates more objective, honest feedback, which means writers get better, more useful feedback on their own drafts. But even more important, reading and providing feedback on several of their colleagues’ drafts allows students to see what does and doesn’t work for the assignment, to think through why, and to talk about how to make a given piece of writing more effective.
In this instructor spotlight, UVA Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Lecturer Adam Barnes talks about how Peerceptiv is helping to tackle communication and collaboration challenges in his courses.
This spotlight on UVA's Adam Barnes shows how Peerceptiv has elevated his engineering students' communication skills, increased his grading efficiency, and helped to manage assignments in his large courses.
Adam Barnes, Senior Lecturer of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA), was unsatisfied with the mastery of teamwork skills in his courses. The American Board for Engineering and Technology Accreditation (ABET) underscores the need for engineers to proficiently 'communicate and collaborate' as they will in their careers after graduation. Previously most courses relied upon traditional group work, which was deemed 'good enough,' but left many students frustrated with the unbalanced efforts of their peers. Adam recognized the necessity for a more targeted strategy to elevate communication skills within his classes. Adam now utilizes Peerceptiv across three distinct courses within the engineering curriculum, marking a deliberate shift towards a more comprehensive and tailored approach to address communication challenges.
Post questions and polls, display dynamic updates as responses are entered, and export results to your gradebook.
This tool helps to facilitate interactive activities such as knowledge-checks, quizzes, or polls for real-time or asynchronous engagement and integrates easily with UVACanvas.
UVA Math Professor Paul Bourdon discusses how he and his colleagues are using Poll Everywhere to engage students and gauge their understanding of course concepts.
UVA's Paul Bourdon discusses how Poll Everywhere is being used in various math courses to promote small-group discussion of interesting problems, monitor student understanding, and help students assess their own understanding of course concepts.
I use classroom polling to promote small-group discussion of interesting problems during class, to monitor student understanding, and to help students assess their own understanding.
All introductory calculus courses are flipped this term. Students are required to complete, an hour before their class is to begin, an online “class-prep” assignment. Fairly often classes start with a polling problem designed to help students review terminology and concepts introduced in the class-prep assignment. Results of this polling may prompt instructors to review the basics for the day’s class a bit more or a bit less than they had intended.
UVA Education’s Ottilie Austin shares how Poll Everywhere helps her students engage with and inform the course material through the tool’s various activities.
UVA Education’s Ottilie Austin shares how Poll Everywhere helps her students engage with and to inform the course material through the tool’s various activities.
Choosing the right tech tools for your teaching means making strategic choices, weighing costs against payoffs, and staying laser-focused on your course goals—and that is what this guide aims to help you do.
This guide will help you ask the right questions to make good tech choices for your teaching and provides examples for how to weave technology into your courses.
In technology, as in so many things, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It takes college students one hot minute to figure out when technology is just a useless embellishment, and they’re unforgiving when you have no good answer for why you chose to go with digital materials when pencil and paper would have sufficed.
Using technology well means being selective. Choosing the right tech tools for your teaching means making strategic choices, weighing costs against payoffs, and staying laser-focused on your course goals — and that is what this guide aims to help you do. It’s for anyone who is in the process of creating a new course or redesigning an old one and needs advice on which technologies to use, how to use them, and why.
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