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Canvas Webinars

03/25/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens

Get a live, online orientation to Canvas.  Ask questions. Attend more than one. Find support. 

 

Canvas training will be offered in the form of Zoom webinars this term. Each of these will consist of a one-hour session on the basics of Canvas, including how to change your personal settings, how to navigate your courses, how to communicate within Canvas, and other key aspects of the platform. Here is the schedule:

March 31 - 10-11am (Mattias Olshausen, eLearning Coordinator): https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/178343018 

March 31 - 2-3pm (Jenn de Leon, Advising Coordinator): https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/223242690 

April 2 - 10-11am (Mattias Olshausen): https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/155265487 

April 7 - 10-11am (Mattias Olshausen): https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/971201677 

April 7 - 2-3pm (Jenn de Leon): https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/657252558 

April 9 - 10-11am (Mattias Olshausen): https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/801370026

To join one of these webinars at the listed time, copy and paste the appropriate link above into your browser. If you have any questions about what will be covered, please contact Mattias Olshausen at elearningadmin@bigbend.edu

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Jody Quitadamo headshot and one with her daughter Lark at a Cancer fundraiser.

 

You are working through a health challenge that affects about 255,000 women a year and 2,300 men.  Did being a research-oriented academic and role model affect your approach to your diagnosis?  Have you shifted any priorities that might be evident in your work?

Like most patients at the time of diagnosis, panic sets in and you do the thing you should not do: Google. Seriously, I should know better.  But down the rabbit hole I went, and everything I encountered caused me serious anxiety. But after that brief lapse of judgment, being a research-oriented academic greatly impacted my approach to fighting breast cancer.  That, and my husband is a cell molecular biologist who is basically a walking encyclopedia.  There are years of research that have advanced our understanding of the disease and how to most effectively treat it, so information-gathering became a daily ritual.  Researching brought me great comfort.  I felt empowered and it helped me stay positive and centered. 

During treatment, you become a bit of a shell of yourself, bare and a little heartbroken. I told myself when this started that I was going to be as positive as possible, to be vulnerable, and authentic. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I tried to just focus on each little step because thinking about the full path to healing overwhelmed me. And I didn’t want to miss the gift of growth and evolution by wishing the cancer away or feeling negative and angry all the time. Thus, I wanted to continue working during treatment to keep my mind occupied. In a weird and unexpected way, I was secretly thankful for our Covid bubble because it kept me cocooned from the scary outside and normalized teaching online. I also learned to let go – at least partially - of perfectionism, something I’ve struggled with all my life.  Cancer puts things into perspective.  I just couldn’t create the perfect Canvas site or recorded lecture because I didn’t have the physical or mental capacity to dedicate all that energy to a single thing. Now that I’m cancer-free and back in the classroom, I am enjoying myself more because I have less stress and burnout.  I truly feel closer to my authentic self than ever before, both as a human and an educator.  That’s a gift for which I am very grateful.

Quote from Judy Quitadamo
Jody Quitadamo Quote. 

 

Do you remember the precise moment, book, or class that history captivated you?  Or was it more of a path?

My journey was more of a path with unexpected turns. And it was very much tied to my passion for teaching, which was also a winding road of discovery. I was largely indifferent to history growing up. It seemed to consist of memorizing “one damned thing after another,” as the saying goes. Like most young people, I was too focused on the future so the past mattered little to me. When I enrolled in college as a single mother with a two-year-old daughter, I would not have considered majoring in history for a second!  But one day, in a British literature course, my professor walked in with a Kodak carousel projector to display images set in Victorian England and provide us with historical context for assigned readings.  And it dawned on me: what I found more interesting was the historical context in which the books were set more than the fictional stories themselves. The next quarter I enrolled in my first college history course, 20th century China of all things.  My professor was amazing. He made history relevant to my life and taught me that historical knowledge is a powerful currency. We’ve now been good friends for 20 years.  

From that point on, my intention was to pursue a doctorate in Chinese history.  I participated in the McNair Scholars program as a first-generation college student, traveled abroad for research purposes, and participated in whatever experience would help me reach my goals. But I was also a single parent and concluded that pursuing such a lofty degree was a selfish endeavor.  I pivoted and chose, albeit reluctantly, to go into high school education.  I spent the next year working on my secondary social studies teaching certification, only half excited about my career choice. That all changed on my first day of student teaching.  It was like magic! I discovered that I loved teaching and that I was pretty good at it. I poured a lot of love and energy into those 10 years in the high school classroom. That was a very special time for me.  But after a decade, it was time to move on.  Now that I’m at the community college level, I find I have the best of both worlds.  I get to continue teaching and building relationships with students while diving deeper into history in a more scholarly way.   

 

What journals, listservs, groups, or other sources do you use to keep up with your discipline? 

 

I consider myself a history educator first, historian second, so most of the groups and sources I rely on focus on pedagogy and outreach in my discipline.  I’m a member of the OPSI Social Studies Cadre, made up of about 35 K-12 and post-secondary educators who serve as a social studies teaching and advisory team for the state. We strive to improve social studies and civics education through curriculum development and outreach.  It’s very exciting work.   I also volunteer annually as a judge for National History Day. For me, it’s an opportunity to support middle- and high-school students who spend months conducting original research on historical topics.  It’s a very formal but supportive competition and the students produce truly remarkable research projects.  I really love the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which includes its own journal, History Now, and provides high-quality educational programs and resources that have been a game-changer in my classroom. I also subscribe to Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, which has become an invaluable resource for the newest ideas in social studies pedagogy. In terms of my disciplinary knowledge, I subscribe to a few journals, like The Journal of American History.  But I mostly rely on monographs and well-researched historical accounts with large scope.  I’m currently reading the book Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America ( Online and Find at Library:  GENERAL HQ 1418 K47 1980), an older publication but a groundbreaking work on American women’s history.


What book, poem, or study have you read that engaged you so deeply you were changed?

 

There have been so many, and currently Brene Brown is my superhero. As a teenager, I remember reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (  Find at Libary PR 9199.3 A8 H3 1998) It was my first encounter with a dystopian novel and themes like misogyny and oppression.  I found the story extremely terrifying yet prophetic. It awakened an early awareness of the power of a woman’s voice as a social justice weapon.  Perhaps without realizing it, that book planted a seed for my future as an educator.

Jody Quitadama and her daugher Lark at American Cancer Society Event.
Jody Quitadamo with daughter Lark. 

 

 

 

 

David Mayhugh banner Juxtapositions

 

You have a rich background of cultures and languages. Could you share some of those places and experiences?

 

        I was born and raised as a missionary kid in Macau, China.  At that time, it was still a Portuguese colony.  It is right by Hong Kong, so there were some British influences as well.  In general, Macau is a unique blend of East meets West.  At the time, I did not realise that most places in the world probably don't have the juxtaposition of a 2,000-year-old Buddhist temple and a 400-year-old Catholic church being down the street from each other or walking on cobblestone roads seeing a pastel coloured government building next to the historical family home of Dr. Sun Yat Sen.  Culture and language are always intertwined and being a missionary kid in Macau gave me exposure to Portuguese, Chinese, British, Filipino, Korean, Brazilian, and North American (US and Canada) cultures and languages.  You learn to be quite comfortable hearing multiple languages, at once, whether you can understand them or not.  It gave a lot of opportunity to find similarities and differences between the cultures and blend them together into my own personal culture.  For me, it was mainly a blend of Chinese and American cultures, as these were the strongest two in my life growing up.  I could probably talk more about all of this, but let us move on for now.

Macau Cathedral

Ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral in Macau. (2009). Wikimedia Commons. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20091003_Macau_Cathedral_of_Saint_Paul_6542.jpg

Almost all academics have personal research projects they sometimes work a lifetime on just as a matter of curiosity or passion.  Do have one or more?

        

        When I came to the US for university, I made sure to take my English 101 and 201 courses right away.  In these courses, I was given the opportunity to research my own topics much of the time.  I knew I wanted to be a math teacher.  I had experience going to international schools with kids from many different countries and had some idea that math was taught and organised differently around the world.  Pretty quickly I started to consistently research international math education.  Thankfully, at that time the second Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) had just been conducted, and new data and analyses were being published.  The results showed that many of the top-ranking countries for mathematics were in South East Asia.  This of course piqued my interest, having grown up in SE Asia!  Ever since then I have looked at studies and books that have tried to figure out why this is.

 

What do your read, listen to, watch, or do to keep up with your profession?

 

While there are a bunch of things teachers do to stay current (read books and articles on pedagogy or learning, follow #MathEd on Twitter, be part of National organisations like NCTM, go to conferences, etc.), I think what continually ends up being the most impactful in my teaching are times where I get to meet with my colleagues and discuss conferences or study a book together.  It is here where we get to analyse the research and figure out how to put into action in meaningful and feasible ways for our teaching and students.  Moreover, we continue to then analyse our implementation and work through the cycle of research – implement – analyse – adapt – re-implement to continually improve and grow.  


As a student, when did you know you were more math than English? 


​This is hard to determine.  I never thought of myself as being more math than English until high school.  It was then when studying and learning the two became more distinct.  I think it might be better said I started seeing a distinction between math and language arts.  What I mean is that we could switch to compare any other language besides English and Math and I think there would be similar distinctions.  English as a language in and of itself was not contrasted with math any more than Mandarin, Cantonese, or Portuguese.   

 

David Mayhugh Quote

To get to my point, it was in high school that I more clearly noticed how we studied math and language arts.  In math, we used the same foundational truths (axioms) and logical deductions for everything we did.  This meant we could follow each others’ reasonings and follow the math.  Using deductive reasoning it also gave use a logical guarantee and confidence to know what are studying is true and accurate (given the presuppositions).  

However, in language arts it seemed that outside of grammar it was never clear what our foundational truths were nor how to navigate.  Most of what we studied did not have an author’s guide to explain their thinking let alone purpose.  And yet, language arts expected us to figure this out.  Moreover, the strategy to do this mainly consisted of inductive reasoning, a fair amount of assumptions made, and very little explicit teaching of the hermeneutics used.  For me as a student at the time, it came across as we cannot know without a doubt what the author was originally intending but there is an expectation that I must come to the same conclusion as the teacher.  Again, this was my perception at the time.  How was the teacher supposed to be able to know and how could I trust that?  How was I supposed to be able to this independently without the expertise of the teacher?  I am a very literal person, so things like poetry or metaphor were much more difficult to understand, let alone justify.  

To put it simply, math was studied in a way that is universal regardless of my lack of cultural understandings and with quality logic while language arts was studied in a way that seemed sloppy and extremely biased, at the very least, with no guarantees.  So for me, I naturally gravitated and toward that which was accessible to me no matter who I was or where in the world I was learning it.

 

What book, poem, or study have you read that engaged you so deeply you were changed?​ 

The Bible is the clear and easy answer to this question.  I say this not only from a personal perspective because of the truths that change lives, but also from a more academic perspective.  From the last question, you might notice that studying language arts is not something that I have really enjoyed and have struggled with in my academic life.  As I have gotten older and learned more about determining and using quality hermeneutics, applying these to study the Bible has not only helped me better learn to read and understand it but also better connect to and use the skills of being a mathematician.  Both theology and mathematics are axiomatic systems and can be studied systematically. 

 

 

 

Big Bend Community College William C. Bonaudi Library invites you to attend our Wednesday Webinars. PJs are OK! Login as you are.

The Library is beginning weekly online webinars about Library and Research topics. All students and faculty are welcome to attend these small size online presentations.

Ask questions and interact with your Librarian from the comfort of your own home or wherever you are.

Flyer for the Webinars.  The text is repeated under the image.

 

DATES AND TOPICS:

November 13
Library Orientation

November 20
Databases A-Z

December 4
Library Orientation

December 11|
Google :  Advanced Search and Google Scholar

REGISTER

Register for a reminder and to have presentation materials emailed to you:
https://forms.gle/HrVDLDM7DsMiZLCM8

OR SIGN IN AT 6:30PM DAY OF WEBINAR

Or sign in at 6:30pm:
https://bigbend.zoom.us/j/685047380