Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhat are the benefits of personal storytelling in the classroom? How can an anecdote enhance or support direct instruction? Join Rob and Jared as they discuss their own views on storytelling and reflect on their conversation with Dr. Q. View a transcript of this week’s episode. Podcast links Resources Chat with us!
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How I Used ChatGPT to Reimagine “Introduction to Literature”
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhen I was asked to teach a face-to-face section of LIT-2300 this semester, I was a bit hesitant. While I have experience teaching literature to high schoolers, I had never taught it at the college level. With the campus-wide subscription of OpenAI’s ChatGPT EDU in place, I decided to integrate AI not as a grading shortcut or a novelty (although a Gatsby bot that appends every answer with “old sport” is very tempting), but as a teaching assistant. Using a dedicated ChatGPT project (“LIT-2300 TA Bot), I developed lectures, discussions, and creative learning materials grounded in Cedarville’s theological framework. My first steps were to start like any…
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Transform Your Teaching: Storytelling with Dr. Quentin Schultze
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhat are Dr. Q’s essentials for good storytelling? How can storytelling be used as an effective tool for teaching and learning? Join Rob and Jared as they chat with Dr. Quentin Schultze (PhD in Communication from the University of Illinois – Urbana) about how he uses storytelling to connect with his students and make content more memorable. View a transcript of this week’s episode. Podcast links Resources Chat with us!
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Transform Your Teaching: Gamification Success Stories
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhat are some studies that have demonstrated the effectiveness of gamification? How can the work that others have done to gamify their classes help you? Join Rob and Jared as they discuss examples from five different gamification studies. View a transcript of this week’s episode. Podcast links Resources Chat with us!
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Student Perspectives: GenAI and the General Writing Major
Reading Time: 4 minutesIn August, Cedarville University became the first evangelical Christian university to implement campus-wide educational ChatGPT. This has been met with a lot of different responses—enthusiasm, fear, disdain, apathy. I know some people who use it for everything. I know others who would equate AI use as an unforgivable sin. I’m Sophie, a senior studying Professional Writing and Information Design, and I land somewhere in the middle, if a bit on the “less AI” side. But there are some specific contexts where I do (or do not) use genAI—so let’s take a look at those! In my education The first day of class, all of my professors banned…
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Transform Your Teaching: Have You Tried…Starting a New Series?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhat do gaming, storytelling, and music have in common? Can they be used in innovative ways in our teaching practices? Join Rob and Jared as they begin a new series where they will explore how these seemingly uncommon applications in education could be used in innovative/common ways. Have questions about some of the topics we’ve discussed recently? Drop all your burning questions in our form for an upcoming Q&A episode! View a transcript of this week’s episode. Podcast links Resources Chat with us!
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Transform Your Teaching: Metaphors that Stick with Dr. Barbara Oakley
Reading Time: < 1 minuteHow can teachers use brain science to design more effective lessons? What do metaphors, working memory, and even a “quadrapus brain” have to do with student learning? In this extended episode, Rob and Jared chat with Dr. Barbara Oakley, author of Uncommon Sense Teaching, about how metaphor and clear direct instruction help both “race cars” and “hikers” learn more deeply. View a transcript of this week’s episode. Podcast links Resources Chat with us!
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Highlights from OpenAI on Campus: 5 Takeaways
Reading Time: 3 minutesOpenAI was on campus earlier this week to run some training sessions for both staff and faculty about how to effectively use ChatGPT in your workflow. Sessions covered everything from prompt engineering to effectively using the various tools accessible through our Cedarville workspace. We’ve got a quick recap of the biggest takeaways from the sessions, so let’s dive right in. Set up your personalization/memories settings This is super simple to set up! When logged in to ChatGPT, click on your name in the bottom left corner, then click “Personalization.” From there, you can enable customization, set the style and tone ChatGPT uses when responding, add custom instructions…
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Summer 2025 Canvas Roundup
Reading Time: 2 minutesWelcome back for another semester! Summer is always a busy time and a welcomed break from the school year. Because of that, we’re going to highlight some of the Canvas changes to make sure you’re up to speed with the current status of things. Assignments Canvas has made a few tweaks and adjustments to Assignments this year – they made it simpler to update due dates for assignments with “assign to” available in more places, they added a way for students to self-assess their work with the assignment’s rubric, and they have an annotation assignment type! For full details on each of these changes or features, check…
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Beginning of Semester Reminders and Tips
Reading Time: 2 minutesWelcome to the start of a new semester! Today we’re going be chatting about some tips and reminders to make the first week (and the rest of the semester) easier. We know there’s a big chunk of time between semester starts, so it’s easy for some of these things to slip your memory. Combining Canvas sections You may be teaching multiple sections of the same course but want to combine all your students into one section so you have a single place to work on the course. Canvas makes it simple to combine those multiple sections into one. A brief note: you’ll need to combine them before…