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6 Best Practice Tips for Encouraging Masks in your Classroom

Masking Scripts: 6 Best Practices

What are best practices for encouraging students to mask up in in-person course meetings?

  1. Syllabus: Encourage students to mask up in a prominent spot on your syllabus.* I added the University mask poster to my syllabus. Even if you taught online for the first few weeks of the semester, and already handed out your syllabus, you can update the syllabus. In addition, see the University’s recommended language for syllabi.

    Syllabus Example
    Syllabus Example
  2. Canvas: Encourage students to mask up in a prominent spot in Canvas.  Consider creating an announcement: I added the CoFA Mask Campaign image to my Canvas announcement, which I sent as a Welcome message. 

    I wear my mask because
    Canvas Message
  3. Free Masks: Provide masks in class – Before class starts, have a slide up that says, “Feel free to take a free mask!”
    1. Note: All faculty may request free masks from their Building Manager. You can requests as many masks as you need for your students. Find your Building Manager by navigating to your building here. 
  4. Participate in CoFA’s “I wear a mask because” campaign. Share your image in Canvas and/or in announcements to students. Take a selfie of yourself wearing a mask and send it to Cami Yates (cami.yates@austin.utexas.edu) to be shared on COFA’s Instagram accounts. Ask her for a copy, and she will send it to you. 
  5. Model mask-wearing in class: Don’t take your mask off unless pedagogically necessary or for a sip of water (stand 10ft back when doing so). If you need to remove your mask for comfort, call for a break and step outside. 
  6. Stay up to date on mask recommendations from the CDC and endorsed mask language from the University.   https://protect.utexas.edu/faqs/

In addition to these six best practices, you can also survey your students about their masking preferences and sort students into sections/small groups with others whose preferences are similar. Find an example survey here. You can also incentivize mask-wearing following the provost’s guidelines (under Incentives) here: https://provost.utexas.edu/aps-faculty/instructor-faqs-for-the-fall-semester/.

 

 

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1 Easy Way to Capture Attendance and Aid in Contact Tracing

Sign up for the Take5 Mailing List here. 

I needed a simple way to take attendance AND aid in contact tracing this Fall. My colleague Christine Wong used a QR code to take attendance at our new graduate student orientation. It gave me the idea to use that process for my course.

In this episode of Take5, I provide a video walk-through of how I am going to automate attendance in class and aid in contact tracing. There are probably far more elegant ways to do this, but we are short on time and my main concern is contact tracing.

Steps if you don’t feel like watching the video are listed below.

Continue Reading 1 Easy Way to Capture Attendance and Aid in Contact Tracing

, Filed Under: Box, Digital Pedagogy, Hybrid Teaching, Online Teaching, Teaching Tips, Uncategorized, Video

A simple way to receive and organize large files from students and collaborators: Box File Requests

This spring, I visited an in-person class session for one of our amazing, hybrid-led studio art courses here on the UT Austin campus.  Students were in the midst of mid-term critiques and reviews. The instructor diligently created a learning environment to ensure all students – in-person or online – could fully engage in the critique. This was no easy task. It required the faculty member to show all the students’ video projects during class time. For the instructor, having to download each students’ project from Canvas or e-mail was cumbersome. In my efforts to advance digital pedagogy such as this, I wondered how to help more faculty with large asset submissions? Continue Reading A simple way to receive and organize large files from students and collaborators: Box File Requests

, Filed Under: Academic Continuity, Big Ideas, Learning Outcomes, Online Teaching, Retrieval, Uncategorized

Redesign Checklist for Instructional Continuity

We just lost 10+ days due to the February 2021 Winter Storm. An event such this will likely happen again in the future. Below, find a checklist to help prioritize how to redesign your syllabi and content and guide decision making during academic continuity situations.

 

Revisit the Big Ideas of the Course – Redesign activities to ensure those big ideas are met.

What are the lynchpin ideas for your course? The ideas that without which, students’ subject-matter understanding may very well fall apart?

For example, for my Design Pedagogy course here in UT’s College of Fine Arts, one of the big ideas is that all learning involves the making of memories. I want to ensure that the content we planned to address during the February 2021 Winter Storm closure that feeds that big idea is retained in some fashion.

Direct your redesign with threads to your big ideas. Eradicate items that lightly or minimally build toward big idea development. Continue Reading Redesign Checklist for Instructional Continuity

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Getting Non-UT Guests into Zoom

CoFA is collaborating with artists, designers, and musicians from all of the world: We’ve had guest lecturers from across Europe, engagements in Taiwan, and collaborations in India just to name a few. So, how do we ensure non-UT participants can join our Zoom meetings? Check out this quick video for all the details you need.