Friday @ the Center
March 19, 2010
Teaching and Technology Grant Winners
Congratulations to the following faculty, who were recently awarded a 2010 Teaching and Technology Grant: Baine Craft (Psychology) and Chris Sink (School Counseling) for “PC Tablet Technology to Enhance Face-to-Face and Online Instruction”; Wai Lau (Mathematics) for “Coding and Implementation of Differential Equations Homework Problems in WebAssign”; and Derek Wood (Biology) and Ben McFarland (Chemistry) for “Facilitating Lecture Recordings in the SPU Classroom with Wireless Microphones.” Teaching and Technology grants are sponsored annually by Instructional Technology Services, the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development, and Computer and Information System. The purpose of the grants is to evaluate curricular uses of instructional technologies through a test pilot to determine if adoption enhances teaching and learning.
Grant Writing at SPU: Budgeting
In constructing a budget for a grant proposal, you should work directly with the Finance Office, which, in most cases, will need to review and approve the proposed budget. The Grants Office is available to work with you and Finance through this process. Two key budget policies are 1) All proposals for external funding including course load reductions must be calculated to include a percentage of the faculty salary plus benefits. Exceptions must be approved by the Dean and the VPAA. 2) All proposals must follow SPU’s indirect cost recovery policy, which requires that applications include the maximum indirect cost recovery allowed by the funding agency.
Developing Independent Learning: Metacognitions
Skill 8 for independent learning, based on Terry Doyle’s Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Center Environment, is monitoring one’s own learning. A key component of independent learning is metacognition, monitoring your progress as you learn and making changes in your learning strategies if things are not going well. Doyle provides several suggestions for building metacognition: encourage students to reflect on what they do that is effective and to name or label their effective learning strategies, model strategies by thinking aloud or by asking students why you did something, show the conditional nature of thinking skills—how a major part of using thinking skills is knowing when not just how to use them (“Here we do this, but there, we would do that”).
Have a great spring break,
Susan Susan VanZanten |
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