Ask Your Students Why They Use AI

When it comes to learning and teaching, AI is not a standalone issue.  It intersects with many of our longstanding topics of discussion and concern at Denison, from helping our students persist through challenging work to figuring out how to best teach and support students who come from a wide variety of high school experiences.  

Ernesto Reyes reflects on how transparent conversations with students about their own AI practices can help us understand the variety of motivations and find ways to address those issues proactively and productively.

Continue Reading

Fudge Points: A Quick Way to Change Grades in Canvas

While using SpeedGrader in Canvas you can adjust scores after they have been autograded. This allows for quick manual score correction due to autograder issues, like partial answers or other situations that warrant a positive or negative change in scores. 

When manually grading in SpeedGrader, you need to click the green checkmark in order for the grade to save in the gradebook.

Continue Reading

Taking a Midterm Moment

As faculty, we are not generally in the habit of taking time to pause and appreciate our accomplishments. There is always the next class meeting to plan, the next set of grading to finish, the next book order to submit. And those are only the things on the “classes” section of our to-do lists.

So let me take a post-fall break minute to say congratulations and well done on making it halfway through the fall semester! On

Continue Reading

Mixing it up at Midterm Time

When October fatigue hits us and our students at the same time, occasionally it is tempting, against all of our better Denison instincts, to take the path of least resistance and just provide information and hope that students are listening.  For days when you feel yourself working to resist that impulse, “3 Ways to Liven Up Your Lectures” has some great tips and reminders for small changes to help keep your students (and yourself) engaged with the material and one another.

Continue Reading

Helping Our Students Connect with Each Other

It’s easy to assume that on a small campus like Denison, our students are already well-socialized and highly connected with one another before they ever get to our classrooms. But in the wake of Covid-19 and other dynamics of the 2020s, even Denison students often need some coaching to connect with each other.  “Why One Professor Fosters Friendship in her Courses” offers some specific reasons and strategies for encouraging student connections, and if you take a minute to ask around, your Denison colleagues probably have even more!

Continue Reading

AI Feedback on Writing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Students frequently ask AI for feedback on their writing, so we need to teach them how to interpret that feedback. This week I am sharing some materials I developed to do that. In my W101, when students peer review rough drafts, I am now integrating lessons on AI feedback. I teach an 80-minute class, and during the first half, students work in pairs on a traditional peer review exercise.

Continue Reading