Version 3 of peerScholar is here!!
Hey there, this message is from your friendly neighbourhood peerScholar team and the team that manages the Portal (Blackboard) here at the University of Toronto.
We’re writing with good news. We’ve completely recoded peerScholar to make it an even cooler learning technology that you can use to develop your students thinking and communication abilities. For detailed information about V3, check out vision.peerScholar.com … but as a quick summary of what’s different …
- Even easier and more intuitive for both instructors and students
- Mobile friendly
- Allows richer assessments by both students assessing peers, and instructors assessing students
- Supports some forms of group work, with more coming soon!
- Cleaner look and feel
- Stable, Assessable and Secure
- Ready to expand further with support for new pedagogical contexts and pedagogical research
We are currently all working hard to have the integrated version ready for use with full support in place. The integration will be released in Portal (Blackboard) courses on Monday September 11th.
In the meantime, if you are planning on using the integrated peerScholar in your classes this fall, the best course of action is to hold off creating any new activities until you receive a follow-up e-mail from us letting you know all is in place and ready to go (with pointers to documentation and support videos).
If your situation demands you get going sooner, or if you have concerns related to this transition at all, please feel free to reach out to Steve (steve@peerScholar.com) or Dwayne (dwayne@peerScholar.com) with any questions or worries.
Thank you for your interest and use of peerScholar. It is now widely used at U of T, and each use gives our students more practice with the core cognitive skills that will bring them success!
OH WAIT! One more thing. We are also very interested in how peerScholar is being used at University of Toronto. The University would love to feature some of “use-cases” with their documentation to give future users a sense of what’s possible with peerScholar. If you’re willing, we would very much appreciate if you could write up a short blurb that provides the context in which you use it (e.g., A First Year Intro Psych at UTSC) and a few details about what you ask students to do. If you want to add a positive endorsement … so much the better. Please also indicate whether you are cool with your use-case being shared outside of U of T or whether you would prefer it for internal consumption only.
Please send your use-case to Saira (saira.mall@utoronto.ca), CCing Steve (Steve@peerScholar.com). Thanks!
Steve Joordens, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Co-ordinator of Pedagogical Development
University of Toronto
Director of R&D Cogneeto.inc
3M National Teaching Fellow (2015)
