If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Recently I’ve been reading a book about how to create memorable teaching experiences, and have been considering how to be more intentional about incorporating these teachable moments into my classroom, with the goal of having students engage with the course materials in a more meaningful way, and to have classroom lessons “stick” beyond the few hours that we have together each week. It’s a tall order, and I feel as though I am often working on more mundane things such as rubrics, uploading documents to Canvas, or grading quizzes rather than really thinking about how to teach. However, when I do have one of those magic moments in the classroom where I can see the lessons have struck home, it makes it worthwhile to keep trying for more.

Thus this month I offer to you a wealth of teaching resources that you have as close as your keyboard, in the hopes that you might find some of these materials to be either inspiring, or to create more efficiency for you so you can focus your time on the craft of teaching:

  1. Canvas Commons  (note: you will need to login to Canvas to view these resources) Within Canvas you can search on lesson plans, assessments, and learning modules that have been shared by your peers from around the globe. These elements can be copied and modified for use in your existing Canvas courses.
  2. Adobe Exchange for Education This resource has hundreds of lessons, rubrics, assignments, and tutorials that are available to all of you for free. Additionally, many of these resources use basic Adobe Creative Cloud tools, and can help your students to develop digital fluency.
  3. Magna Campus Teaching Resources (note: you will need to login to Blackboard to view these resources) This is a video repository that can give you guidance on solving a myriad of classroom issues such as how to ensure academic honesty in online assignments or advice on grading class participation.

As our teaching giveaway in this month’s newsletter, I would like to offer copies of Chip and Dan Heath’s book, The Power Of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, to the first three Chapman faculty members who write me an email message (remy@chapman.edu) describing an extraordinary moment in their own classroom.