This article is from The Teaching Professor. Try a free one-month trial with coupon code TPMONTH. After your complimentary one-month trial period, the monthly subscription cost is $19. You can cancel your subscription at any time. This offer is only applicable towards the monthly subscription and ends Tuesday, December 26, 2023.  I remember my first year as a tenure-track professor as a nightmare. For reasons I won’t belabor, my teaching stunk. During class, my face was red and hot with humiliation as I fumbled through the content. During lectures, I prayed that no one would ask ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new. The rise of ChatGPT, Google Bard, New Bing, and others in the academic space, however, is skyrocketing. My initial encounters with this rising AI were biased. As I scanned topics like academic integrity, academic dishonesty, and plagiarism, I quickly adopted others’ persuasive opinions based on limited information.   A few months ago, however, I attended a presentation that gave me a more complete view. Students were already using it as a tool, so I opened my mind to understanding what purpose AI served in the higher education classroom. Most ..read more

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new. The rise of ChatGPT, Google Bard, New Bing, and others in the academic space, however, is skyrocketing. My initial encounters with this rising AI were biased. As I scanned topics like academic integrity, academic dishonesty, and plagiarism, I quickly adopted others’ persuasive opinions based on limited information.   A few months ago, however, I attended a presentation that gave me a more complete view. Students were already using it as a tool, so I opened my mind to understanding what purpose AI served in the higher education classroom. Most ..read more

I began my teaching career in August of 2001. Over the years, I have seen countless instructional plans, new technologies, supposedly groundbreaking research, and have attended every type of professional development opportunity imaginable. I was always doubtful about the flavor of the week–until I learned about Visible Thinking Routines.   Visible Thinking Routines (VTR) were developed as part of the Harvard Project Zero. They are a systematic way to view students’ thinking and encourage reflective practice. They involve a series of steps or questions to help reveal students’ thinkin ..read more

As I sat in a lecture attended by all first-year students at our college, I noticed the scale of a troubling trend: the rise of “snapnotes.” Snapnotes are what I like to call when students “take notes” by snapping a picture of a PowerPoint slide on their phone. While the trend has been around since the advent of phones with reasonable cameras and data storage, anecdotally, the COVID-19 pandemic has made this practice much more widespread.   The negative results of this practice for students could not come at a worse time, with disruptions to middle and high school classes due to the pande ..read more

As I sat in a lecture attended by all first-year students at our college, I noticed the scale of a troubling trend: the rise of “snapnotes.” Snapnotes are what I like to call when students “take notes” by snapping a picture of a PowerPoint slide on their phone. While the trend has been around since the advent of phones with reasonable cameras and data storage, anecdotally, the COVID-19 pandemic has made this practice much more widespread.   The negative results of this practice for students could not come at a worse time, with disruptions to middle and high school classes due to the pande ..read more

Remember CliffsNotes, the predecessor of Course Hero and similar web-based study resources? Like many GenXers, I had a few of those study guides with yellow-and-black covers in my L.L. Bean backpack along with my textbooks and kelly green Trapper Keeper. Sometimes I wonder about those long-gone study guides. Did using CliffsNotes constitute cheating? Were they merely handy summaries that students used to review before a test? Did teachers know that students were reading them?   Fast forward more than 25 years, and I’m the one in the teacher’s seat at a college on the Georgia coast. L ..read more

Remember CliffsNotes, the predecessor of Course Hero and similar web-based study resources? Like many GenXers, I had a few of those study guides with yellow-and-black covers in my L.L. Bean backpack along with my textbooks and kelly green Trapper Keeper. Sometimes I wonder about those long-gone study guides. Did using CliffsNotes constitute cheating? Were they merely handy summaries that students used to review before a test? Did teachers know that students were reading them?   Fast forward more than 25 years, and I’m the one in the teacher’s seat at a college on the Georgia coast. L ..read more

 Social media’s evolution from a groundbreaking phenomenon to an everyday staple has generated widespread discourse on its role and influence in modern life. Notwithstanding the calls for its abolition by some critics, its ubiquity suggests that it is here to stay, necessitating a thoughtful approach to its application. Particularly interesting is the notable increase in social media interaction among everyone, including undergraduate students, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as documented in a March 2021 Vox article. This surge, driven by the need to bridge the gap of physical isolation, h ..read more

 Social media’s evolution from a groundbreaking phenomenon to an everyday staple has generated widespread discourse on its role and influence in modern life. Notwithstanding the calls for its abolition by some critics, its ubiquity suggests that it is here to stay, necessitating a thoughtful approach to its application. Particularly interesting is the notable increase in social media interaction among everyone, including undergraduate students, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as documented in a March 2021 Vox article. This surge, driven by the need to bridge the gap of physical isolation, h ..read more