Educational Resources
Here you will find a collection of educational resources that our team has created and compiled. Many of these were created as support materials for the faculty workshops we provide on campus regarding best teaching practices, incorporating educational technologies in the classroom, and leveraging the learning management system, ACORN.
Feel free to reference, share and distribute these resources with your colleagues, and should you want clarification on something, don't hesitate to contact us at ltid@acadiau.ca.
Research has shown that incorporating short, formative activities within your regular lectures can benefit your students by increasing their classroom engagement, deepening their understanding of the material being studied, and aid in long-term retention. In this handout you will find activities suitable for the beginning, middle and end of your lectures, as well as activities specifically designed to help your students recall key information, predict what is to come, and mitigate fluency illusions.
Graphic organizers are simple tools that can be a game changer for students who struggle to organize information, or who benefit some creating a visual representation of the information being learned. There are an abundance of types of graphic organizers freely available on the internet, and in many cases you can either create your own, or have students make them in their own notes. Filling these out can also be used in coordination with lecture activities.
| Cluster/Word Web | Fact or Opinion | KWL Chart |
| KWS Chart | Persuasion Map | Problem/Solution Chart |
| Sequence Map | Step-by-step Chart | Story Map |
| Timeline | Venn Diagram | Close Reading |
Creating lesson plans can be a valuable organizational practice that helps teachers conduct regular reflection on their own teaching practices, to take stock of what's working and to identify what's not. Having a plan is helpful to instructors in a moment of hesitation, and can also help establish a timeline in class which opens up the possibilities for incorporating activities into lectures. The format and level of detail will be different for each person, according to their preferences. These are just a few templates to help you get started - feel free to edit and re-purpose them.
| Template 1 | Template 2 | Template 3 |
| Template 4 | Template 5 | Template 6 |
| Template 7 |
The thesis templates and usage guide are provided to help students write a thesis more easily by providing a template and set of instructions for using the features of Word and Zotero which are useful for writing large documents. It is our hope that it should be significantly easier to work on a template that is completed with many of the format requirements of the thesis than to start fresh.
Templates are provided for MS Word and for LaTeX. Most students will use the Word templates. However, most students in Math and Computer Science will use the LaTeX templates. LaTeX has a significant degree of strength in writing documents with a significant amount of mathematics content and other content with very fine formatting requirements, and may be of interest to some other students with those needs. The Word template has been used with LibreOffice/OpenOffice; however, it does not do many of the automated tasks when used in LibreOffice/OpenOffice, but it does save time in that many initial formatting tasks and preliminary pages have already been done.
Note: although the templates are prepared with some care, not all requirements can be perfectly replicated in a template, and your department and supervisor(s) may have different requirements. Please make sure to consult your supervisor and the Research and Graduate Studies regulations about specific requirements.
If your discipline is listed in the table below, please use the templates and guide appropriate to the discipline. Otherwise, use the 'General' template.
| Discipline | Format | Guide | Honours | Masters | Zotero Citation and Reference Style |
| Psychology | Word | Download Guide | Download | TBD | APA Style already comes with Zotero |
| Sociology | Word | Download Guide | Download | Download | ASA Style (last updated: Sept 22, 2014) |
| General | Word | Download Guide | Download | Download | Use a style specific to your discipline. The repository for Zotero styles can be found here. |
| General | LaTeX | Download | Download | Normally, with LaTeX, you will use the BibTeX for your reference list and bibliography generation. If using Zotero to manage your references, you can save your references to a bibtex file (in the templates, this is thesisbib.bib) before building your pdf file. MIT has produced a good guide on using Zotero with BibTeX/LaTeX. |
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