UArts Libraries's List: Teaching Tools

"Following discussions with First Term Seminar faculty, we have the following specific ideas for tackling common areas of confusion."

Gettysburg College -
Designing an Effective Library Research Assignment

"A well designed resource-based assignment can develop students' research and information skills, critical thinking abilities, and subject knowledge.  Liaison librarians are available to collaborate with faculty to design assignments that promote information literacy and subject learning at the same time."

"The exponential increases in the number of information resources and technology tools available today have made libraries more complex than ever. This phenomenon of "information overload" has led to the increased importance of Information Literacy and critical thinking skills on the part of today's college students. An information literate student is able to recognize their information need and then locate, evaluate, and use effectively and ethically the needed information. Enabling students to go beyond the confines of an assignment and focus on the process of seeking solutions to their information needs is crucial. Information literacy enables students to recognize the value of information and use it to make informed choices in their personal, professional and academic lives. An important first step in laying the foundation for an information literate student body is the collaboration between faculty and librarians in creating effective research assignments."
| Library | Pace University

Putting Educational Innovations Into Practice
Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.

All webinars are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license. This means you may broadcast them for classes and professional development, and may also use the content in your own presentations, as long as you give credit to Google, and use the same license for the work you create. 

Educators and instructional designers recognize that instilling curiosity in students encourages their disposition to learn. When students are magnetized by a new idea or a new situation and are compelled to explore further, regardless of external rewards, they can be said to be truly motivated. In each new project, they discover seeds for a future project or a new question to examine. Curiosity is a heightened state of interest resulting in exploration, and its importance in motivating scholarship cannot be ignored. Curiosity is also a critical component of creativity, and fostering curiosity and creativity in today's learners is a challenge faced by educators and instructional designers alike. Before presenting instructional design strategies for fostering curiosity, it will be helpful to provide some background.

This archive is being compiled to serve as a library of information about different artistic movements, art groups and specific artists. Its purpose is to educate people about the different movements and show people that there are other movements worth looking at, and specific artists that users may never have heard of.

We realize that art teachers in highschools and even professors in universities tend to gloss over these movements and forget about them. Thus this archive is endeavouring to include EVERY art movement worthy of mention, no matter how small.

article on truth and wikipedia

SPARK stands for Short Practical Academic Research Knowledge. These sessions provide faculty and staff the opportunity to learn about scholarly research and library resources.

The Research Guidance Rubric is a tool that assists GVSU faculty in the design of research assignments that guide their students toward effective research. This document advocates for assignments that give concrete and specific guidance on research methods. In most cases, we believe this is the best approach.

New research suggests less-creative people do more innovative thinking when they are told individualism is the norm, and instructed to conform.

The PBS Arts Online concept is the core of the PBS strategy for strengthening arts awareness, appreciation and education in America. PBS Arts will promote awareness, spur greater interest, and increase understanding of visual, cultural and performing arts.

No one has ever been able to really answer that question. There have been theories. But, no one knows the real story. Now, it's your turn to try to solve this mystery - one of the most engaging in all of literature.
from Maryland Public Television

In this wonderful teaser for Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, one of the 11 best art and design books of 2011, Italian art director and information designer Francesco Franchi discusses the role of the designer as a translator of journalism.

a list of sites and tools about visual literacy 

list of sites and tools on data visualization

Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity by Phil Beadle is unusual in that it’s both a strong, pointed conceptual vision for the nature and origin of creativity, and a kind of activity book for grown-ups that invites you to learn how to implement the skill set of creativity through a series of hands-on exercises applicable wherever your creative journey may take you, from the studio to the classroom to the boardroom.