Teaching, Tech, and Tidbits Digest

The posts below are from a bi-weekly digest that encapsulates a range of evidence-based best practices and cutting-edge insights on innovative teaching strategies, effective use of technology, student engagement techniques, and effective assessment, to name a few. The content, diligently curated or crafted by the director Dr. Lew Ludwig, is grounded in robust research and drawn from a wide array of innovative articles, books, and online resources. The goal is to support timely,  ongoing faculty development with the most current and impactful knowledge in the field.

Teaching: Validity Matters More than Cheating

Posted on by dalkej

In a CfLT-sponsored webinar on assessment and gen-AI on March 3, Leon Furze (longtime educator, education administrator, and now Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation on AI in writing instruction) shared an academic article, “Validity Matters More than Cheating,” which argues that academic integrity needs to focus on “assessment validity” rather than “cheating.” Cheating is a question of moral integrity, whereas validity is a process by which educators ensure that students have met learning outcomes.

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Teaching: Kids These Days Can’t Read

Posted on by dalkej

I’ve been in education long enough to recognize this as a familiar faculty lament. Over the years, I’ve heard numerous concerns:

  • Kids these days can’t compute a square root.
  • Kids these days can’t graph (or factor) a third-degree polynomial.
  • Kids these days can’t use an abacus.

You see the pattern. It seems that the longer we teach, the more likely we are to encounter this sentiment.

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Teaching: Responsive Teaching in Action

Posted on by dalkej
No one responded after Michael Tangeman posed a thought-provoking question to the whole class and allowed for appropriate wait time. Instead of moving on or answering the question himself, he skillfully pivoted, asking students to turn to a neighbor and discuss their thoughts first. This simple shift transformed the classroom dynamic—creating space for engagement, rather than silence.

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Teaching: Magic School AI

Posted on by dalkej

Despite Sydney Green’s proficiency with AI prompting, she often finds extracting specific tasks from advanced models like ChatGPT or Gemini to be time-consuming and sometimes unproductive. To address this, she turned to Magic School AI, a platform offering over 80 AI-powered tools designed to assist educators with lesson planning, assignment creation, and material generation. It’s user-friendly, click-based interface allows users to interact without the need for specialized prompts.

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Teaching: Teach Students How to Make Informed AI Decisions

Posted on by dalkej

My approach to AI in my writing courses is primarily to teach students how to make informed decisions about when it is appropriate and inappropriate to use AI. Part of this involves helping them understand what they do and don’t learn when they use AI. To that end, I include an AI policy statement on every assignment as well as a table that identifies what students learn if they use AI for some tasks vs.

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Tidbit: Adopt or Resist? Beyond the AI Culture Wars

Posted on by dalkej
I was talking with Matt Kretchmar after our recent session with Leon Furze on “Understanding GenAI in Education: AI and Assessment.” He was very excited about Leon’s approach to move beyond merely moralizing about students cheating and focusing on how to productively live with this new reality. In particular, Leon emphasized a shift in perspective:

In Validity matters more than cheating the authors argue convincingly that the concept of cheating is an unproductive frame for academic integrity, and we should instead re-centre the concept of “validity” in assessment.

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Teaching: Why Students Won’t Read- and What to Do about it

Posted on by dalkej
While reading is a mainstay in most college classes, it has gotten increasingly challenging to engage students with their assigned reading. In the insightful piece “Why Students Won’t Read—and What to Do about It,” our friend Chirs Hakala offers practical advice on how to foster deeper engagement with reading materials.

Although this piece first appeared in the summer of 2022, pre-ChatGPT, it still has legs.

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Teaching: Marc Watkins Beyond ChatGPT

Posted on by dalkej

Marc Watkins, Assistant Director of Academic Innovation & Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at Ole Miss University presented to Denison Faculty online on January 13th, 2025. Here is a link to a recording of his presentation: 

Beyond ChatGPT- Developing a Framework for AI Literacy in Writing Courses

Click here to see the additional resources he provided including the slides for the presentation as well as activities for faculty to practice with Lex, Gamma, and Notebook LM as well as activities for students on prompt engineering, Chatbot Arena, and Quick, Draw!

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