How Not to Lose Control of a Class

By: Colleen Flaherty

It might be every professor's worst nightmare: losing control of a class with no hope of getting it back on track. That appears to be what happened this semester at Texas A&M University at Galveston, where a management instructor threatened to fail the entire class for poor behavior before the university intervened. The professor described a class full of students who wouldn't do the work, who weren't performing according to his expectations and who were consistently rude to him.

The specific case certainly appears to be an outlier, and questions remain about how and why the situation got so extreme. It nevertheless captured the attention of fellow faculty members, probably because many have struggled at one point or another with classroom management.

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5 Ways to Enhance Student Learning Using Free Rice

By: Travis Thurston

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to online quizzing games regardless of the topic or content. I get enthralled trying to outwit my Facebook friends and move up the leaderboards, spending more hours than I'll admit here trying to do so. I'm not the only one either. Millions of people share this same addiction, which got me to wondering: is there a way that teachers could tap into the quizzing craze, ideally using questions related to course content, to teach material and greater life lessons all at once?

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Google Classroom Update: New User and Developer Tools

By: Leila Meyer

Google's Classroom platform for creating, sharing and grading assignments is gaining integration tools for administrators and developers, as well as other new features requested by teachers.

The company is offering a developer preview of Classroom's new application programming interface (API) until the end of July. According to the company, the API will let administrators "provision and populate classes on behalf of their teachers, set up tools to sync their Student Information Systems with Classroom, and get basic visibility into which classes are being taught in their domain."

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