Ling's takeaways from COLTT

Infographics: 
I went to a fun session on infographics at the COLTT. If you don’t know what infographics are, visit http://piktochart.com/ to see tons of examples. I was not new to infographics. When we work with faculty, we always ask ourselves if infographics would be useful to communicate ideas visually and effectively to our learners. The new idea I learned from the session was that infographics was a very powerful tool to elicit an emotional response from your audience. I want to share with all of you a design template for possible infographics. It’s helpful to spend a few minutes to complete this design template before we jump into the actual creation phase.
Item name:
Intended audience:
Ideas on the product (e.g., website, poster, filier, slideshow):
Type of information (concept, process, instructions, data, fun facts, etc.):
Key components:
Intended reaction/emotion/action: 

Flipping classrooms:
Flipping classrooms was one of the hot topics at the conference. I have two major takeaways.
1. What if my students don’t read?
Sadly, this topic was brought up quite a lot at the conference. It’s a common challenge faculty face these days. If students don’t complete their assigned readings before the class, and you go over the readings with them during the class, they’re smart enough to figure out readings are not necessary. These are the strategies to “force” students to read:

• Ask them to summarize the readings in 150 words. 
• Use a couple essay questions/quizzes (depending on disciplines) to diagnose students’ comprehension of the readings. This type of diagnostic questions should be assigned low stake grades and used regularly throughout the term. Use the results to customize your teaching materials and address common misunderstandings in the class. 

2. Games and learning
One presenter who teaches freshmen time management had a great success in incorporating board games such as Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders in her classroom. She could have just presented her students with real life scenarios to discuss in the class. However, once she introduced the game concept to these scenarios, students got competitive and were motivated to complete all assigned readings before the class in order to perform well and beat other teams. Learning happens in a fun environment!