News

Join us for CTE's annual Educational Technologies Week on Monday, March 12 to Friday, March 16, 2018. This year's Educational Technologies Week features topics such as learning spaces, Flipping the Classroom, Course Design for Blended Learning, VoiceThread, Crowdmark, Lightboard, and more!

The dates and times of all 18 sessions are available on the schedule.

Join us for our first LITE Grant Lightning Research Talk for presentations from two Waterloo writing centres. Learn about how the French Writing Centre harnesses collaborative learning and about new methods piloted by the Writing and Communication Centre to successfully equip students for dissertation writing in their dissertation bootcamps. 

Registration is required.

Date: Wednesday, January 31, 12:00-1:00

Presenters: Rocky Penate, Cynthia Tremblay (French Studies), Clare Bermingham, Nadine Fladd, and Nicole Westlund Stewart (Writing and Communication Centre)

We welcome Maris Weiss to CTE as the Centre’s new Administrative Assistant. In her role, Maris will provide a wide range of departmental support, including administrative support, financial management, human resource management, technical support, safety planning, and support to the Director. Maris joins us from Campus Wellness, where she worked in administration and customer service, and brings previous experience as a life skills facilitator, personal support worker, laboratory technician, and medical office administrator to her role at CTE. Welcome, Maris!

The Office of the Associate Vice President, Academic and the Centre for Teaching Excellence are pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Full Grants. Since 2012, 14 LITE Full Grants of up to $30,000 have been awarded to instructors and staff investigating innovative approaches to enhancing teaching and fostering deep student learning at Waterloo. We are excited to announce the funding of three new projects this year:

• Open online interactive workbook for intermediate students of French as a second language. Cynthia Tremblay, Loula Abd-elzarak, Nicolas Hebbinckuys, Mikalai Kliashchuk, Rocky Penate, and Kanstantsin Tsedryk (Department of French Studies).
• Optimizing student engagement: Developing a suite of tools to monitor engagement during university lectures. Daniel Smilek and Jeff Wammes (Department of Psychology).
• Objective structured clinical examination as a summative clinical competency examination for the doctor of optometry program. Patricia Hrynchak, Stan Woo, Jenna Bright, and Andre Stanberry (School of Optometry and Vision Science).

The smaller LITE Seed Grants provide funding up to $5,000. The first Seed Grant deadline of the year is fast approaching: February 1. For more information, explore the LITE Grant website, which includes application guidelines, descriptions of funded projects, and sample proposals. Please contact Crystal Tse or Kristin Brown at the Centre for Teaching Excellence for support.

For our 10^th annual Teaching and Learning Conference: Motivating Our Students and Ourselves, we invite you to submit proposals for presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and poster presentations that share your practices and research related to motivating deep learning in students and motivating ourselves as instructors. For more information about the Conference and to submit a proposal, please visit the Teaching and Learning Conference website.

Proposal deadline: Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Conference date: Thursday, April 26, 2018

For our 10^th annual Teaching and Learning Conference: Motivating Our Students and Ourselves, we invite you to submit proposals for presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and poster presentations that share your practices and research related to motivating deep learning in students and motivating ourselves as instructors. For more information about the Conference and to submit a proposal, please visit the Teaching and Learning Conference website.

Proposal deadline: Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Conference date: Thursday, April 26, 2018

Shahrukh Athar, one of CTE's Graduate Instructional Developers, has been named a recipient of the 2017 Teaching Assistantship Excellence Award from the Sanford Fleming Foundation. Offered annually to one recipient in each academic department in Engineering, the award acknowledges the excellent contributions made by Teaching Assistants to the undergraduate educational program. Shahrukh is a PhD student in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Congratulations, Shahrukh!

If you're a TA or instructor who wants to learn how to provide classroom support for student mental health, join CTE's Kristin Brown for this important workshop on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2:00-3:30pm. Participants of the workshop will learn how to identify opportunities for enhancing student resilience and well-being in the classroom and apply effective strategies when working with undergraduate students. Register today. 

Kristin recently received her PhD from the School of Public Health and Health Systems at Waterloo, where her research focused on how evidence can enhance practice in education.

Sequential art (e.g., comics and graphic novels) has been shown to be beneficial to learner understanding in diverse fields such as medicine, management, and biology. A large portion of the workshop will be dedicated to the "pencils-on" experience of creating a comic, either in a team or individually. Individuals from all faculties and disciplines are welcome. No artistic skills or experience required! Registration is required.

Date: Nov. 8, 9:30-10:45; Location: EV1 241

JOIN US! Tuesday, November 7

The Centre for Teaching Excellence is a decade old! Please join us to celebrate this milestone on Tuesday, November 7 from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm in the courtyard of EV1. Mario Coniglio, AVP-A, will share a few words of congratulation at 3:30 pm, followed by some brief reflections on the past ten years by CTE’s Director, Donna Ellis. You are welcome to drop in to the event at any time. Beverages and snacks will be available.

Please RSVP using this quick online form: https://uwaterloo.ca/cte/rsvp