Dr Nathalie Tasler

Category: Teaching

  • From classroom to tweet?

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    Can ‘real life situations’ be recreated in social media? When I ran the exam preparation buffet a couple of weeks ago, the greatest ‘take away’ for the students seemed to have been peer support and getting advice from students who were from higher years. For instance the 2nd year student providing crucial tips on institute…

  • Prevent students from developing bad habits.

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    Reflections on participating in our annual Learning & Teaching Showcase (you will find the poster on page two). Prevent students from developing bad habits. That is pretty much the aim of my 1st year academic development module. For my poster I used the cliché of ‘long thin induction’. Clichés have the advantage that at least everyone…

  • Exam Buffet for Exam Diet

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    Exam Preparation and Coping with Stress Living a bilingual life gives me the very annoying super-power to see beyond words, for instance: exam diet. Oxford English Dictionary explains that ‘diet’ describes activities ‘in which a person or group habitually engages’.* However, my superpower enables me to completely ignore the contextualised meaning and jump straight to…

  • Teaching is a High Risk Profession

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    The topic: teaching as a high risk profession keeps emerging this year, creating a strange pattern of forced reflection. It became particularly prevalent a couple of weeks ago, when for the first time in months a student challenged me during a seminar. Teaching a high risk profession: or not? Most of you will not know…

  • Proxies and ‘as if’ to establish ‘real-life context’

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    Auracalia have been my penultimate proxies. Observing these fossil trees can have you time-travel to prehistoric times and spaces. An aspect from my undergraduate studies meandered into my awareness recently: the idea that educational institutions (are supposed to) provide a safe space for learners to try out for ‘real life’ situations. An idea I try…

  • Feedback—Fed Back

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    The final exercise in the feedback session was: Evaluation forms—revisited. At the end of each module (or sometimes when I am developing new sessions at the end of a session) I hand out feedback forms asking the students very focused and often slightly leading questions about their experience of my teaching. So to keep up…

  • Feedback Rules!

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    This week raising awareness of feedback, the different forms of feedback and its impact on the students’ academic as well as professional development was on the agenda. I wanted to ensure the students would gain some understanding of how feedback works not only from their perspective but also from the perspective of academic staff. Yes,…

  • Plagiarism, Referencing and Pop Quiz Traps

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    Teaching plagiarism and referencing can be boring not only for the students but also for the lecturer. However, my colleagues had a brilliant idea! Last year they created a clicker session; alternating information about plagiarism and referencing with quiz questions the students could answer via a voting system. It works really well, particularly when being…

  • Paraphrasing versus Summarizing

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    Making students truly understand the difference between summarizing (as establishing the essence, the key messages of a text) and paraphrasing (as rewording someone’s ideas, or arguments into ones own words), is rather difficult. So I needed some help, and recruited YouTube. Before I delved into explaining differences between summarizing and paraphrasing, I made the students…

  • Mastering Balloons

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    Using Balloons to Explore Argument Structures at Master Level So I wanted master students in the College of Social Sciences to understand the basic argument structure from premise to conclusion. Experiencing that it is not in all cases a straight forward logical structure. The Prep Work I found journal articles that are relevant to the…

  • Department Rules: My ‘Brain Pickings’ Favourite

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    I follow a myriad of pages and groups online perpetually looking for ideas, incentives, challenges and anything and everything that could inform my work. One of my favourites is: http://www.brainpickings.org/ The ten rules for teachers and students easily translate into the context of higher education. The picture below is from the latest blog-post. Rule 1 …

  • More Adventures in Teaching Undergrads

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    Using museum’s techniques for teaching got me hooked, I am completely revamping my workshops and lectures. This year, I will have some rather big classes, in which group work and a dialogue with students will become near to impossible. The Problem Experiential (of course) one of the most difficult things to ask a first and…

  • Experimenting with infographics

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    Addendum 2021: since 2013 things have moved on a bit and h5p offers now more possibilities for creating interactive graphics or graphic layouts. http://infogr.am/beta/

  • Trying out @stripgenerator

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    I had to share this. So my colleague found this gadget. And since we are currently preparing starter packs for new students I just had to experiment. Addendum 2021: Strip-Generator seems to be out of commission now. However, I found a freeware option that is working (May 2021) Comic Strip Maker Online & Free –…

  • English is like Make-Up

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    Nathalie Tasler
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    Hiding behind a second language–bilingualism Homework task: I as a writer. I wrote my first stories when I did not yet know how to spell properly. So I substituted the difficult words with drawings in the middle of sentences. Poems, diaries, two novels (that patiently wait for my sporadic attention), blogs (Garment Witch and With Heart Mind…