2020.0309
Invasion of exotic plants driven by socioeconomic change elevates disease risks
Invasive plants can not only interfere with the recovery of native plants, but also become hotbeds of arthropod disease vectors. Increased number of chigger mites that can transmit deadly scrub typhus was observed under exotic plants with its invasion facilitated by industrialization, say disease ecologist Chi-Chien Kuo and colleagues from National Taiwan Normal University and Taiwan Centers for Disease Control in a new study published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
2020.0121
Cloud Class Room Built by NTNU Team Selected as Horizon Report Exemplar Institution
With the advancement of internet and smart devices, a team of National Taiwan Normal University developed a "Cloud Class Room". Using smart phones and tablets with internet access, students in the class can answer or express ideas in class. Teachers can Immediately know the learning situation of students, thus have a more effective teaching environment. The system has been online for more than 4 years. The system is available in 15 languages with more than 60,000 teachers and students registered worldwide with more than 500,000 records. CCR is recognized as Horizon Report Exemplar Institution in 2019, which was selected from over 60 submissions from various institutions in the United States and internationally. Before, the teacher often ask onstage if there’s any question and only get a silent response. Some teacher would ask students to write notes if they have any questions. This is not only time consuming but also ineffective.
2020.0109
How Mobile Learning Can Support Global Student Engagement
An advanced version of a web-based instant response system, CloudClassRoom (CCR), which incorporates gaming features (competitive and mentally stimulating) entitled GEARS (Gamified Electronic Audience Response System), has been developed by Dr. Chun-Yen Chang’s research team. CCR-GEARS is written in HTML 5.0 and works on every Internet-capable device without software or plug-in installation. CCR enables teachers and students to participate in question-answering activities by using their own mobile devices, such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets. By this means, every student in the classroom can express their thoughts instantly as well as anonymously. CCR provides the teacher with a rough picture of student learning progress in real-time. Leveraging the capacity of mobile devices, CCR supports text and multimedia responses. We recently added a gaming feature (GEARS) to CCR, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first instance in the world of incorporating gamification into an Instant Response System. GEARS encompasses the following functions: 1) learners will gain points when providing a correct answer; 2) learners may use the earned points to exchange ‘weapons/props’ to answer the following questions; 3) the weapons/props enable the features of ‘time extension’, ‘option deletion’, ‘the whole-class answer patterns’ and ‘peek into someone else’s answer’; 4) a completion board is renewed after each question, and finally 5) winners are able to ‘make’ their public statements. There will be more gaming functions added, and research conducted about this new adventure. Findings suggest that CCR can stimulate students’ learning motivation and improve their achievement in science.
2019.1127
Do you have the “right” sense of humor? Exploring the humor styles of Taiwanese from neurocognitive to socio-cultural perspectives
How humorous are the people of Taiwan compared to those in other countries? What are the gender and cultural differences in the use of different humor styles? Is it possible to help students with Asperger syndrome to develop their positive humor styles?
2019.0822