Tech Tips for Teaching & Learning

Public Speaking Resources for Teachers

Here are some interesting and inspiring Public Speaking sites for teachers.

• Allyn & Bacon's Public Speaking Website                                                                           Contains six modules about the process of public speaking -- Assess, Analyze, Research, Organize, Deliver and Discern.
                        http://www.abacon.com/pubspeak/
• Strategies to Succeed in Public Speaking
    Includes goals, success requirements, preparations, resources, and related information.
    http://www.school-for-champions.com/speaking.htm
• American Rhetoric
    An impressive index of thousands of famous speeches.
    http://www.americanrhetoric.com         
• Advanced Public Speaking Institute
    Choose from 20 categories and over 100 articles to help with public speaking.
    http://www.public-speaking.org/default.htm
• Public Speaking Skills from Mind Tools
  Learn to speak and present clearly and effectively. Improve your speaking skills with this Mind Tools guide to speaking effectively in public.
    http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/PublicSpeaking.htm
• Study Guides and Strategies: Public speaking
    Features techniques and strategies for speaking in public and presenting presentations.
    http://www.studygs.net/speaking.htm

This information is from the EduHound website:
http://www.eduhound.com/cttarchives/030608ctt.cfm

 

MIT offers new website for high schools

MIT's new site, Highlights for High School, includes over 2600 video and audio clips, as well as lecture notes, animations, and assignments from MIT professors and students. Special sections are included for AP Biology, Calculus and Physics, and many of the courses are well-suited to advanced high school curriculum. Check it out!

Discouraging Plagiarism

There's no doubt that the web has provided whole new "opportunities" for plagiarism. I'll never forget the time a student (not from CDH, but in an evening college course I was teaching) turned in a White Paper written by Janet Reno as her final paper! That one, of course, was not difficult to spot; the writing was quite different from other writing I'd seen from the student, and I was able to find the original material through a Google search in about 10 seconds. Fortunately the internet not only makes it easier to plagiarize, it also makes it easy to find plagiarism!

Alice J. Robison of UW-Madison has published a great essay online: Designing Assignments to Discourage Plagiarism. She offers practical suggestions, such as breaking an assignment up into smaller tasks, using peer review, and avoiding giving generic assignments not specific to your course. She also includes examples of such assignments. Definitely worth a look!

Please comment with strategies you've found helpful (or not) for discouraging plagiarism...