If you are in need of some inspiration today, I would suggest that you listen to the video by Taylor Mali on what it means to be a teacher. He describes himself as a poet and has created the New Teacher Project to "direct 1,000 people into the field of teaching through poetry, persuasion, perseverance, and passion." Well we did get snowed in at the Southwestern Educational Research Association meeting in San Antonio last week. We should all be very proud of the terrific graduate students from Lamar University who made presentations at SERA. In talking with other participants, LU made a big impact. An interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us that to help reduce the number of dropouts in freshman biology courses, professors at the University at Buffalo have turned to the power of collaboration and cloud computing to build an online teaching tool designed to explain concepts better than a textbook can. They have turned to a tool called Pop!World to visually present the topic of evolution. The hope is that it will visually engage students. “Teaching from a text gets boring to them,” says Dr. Bina Ramaurthy, a research associate professor in the department of computer science and engineering. I hope you are planning to join the Lunch+Learn on plagiarism tomorrow in 108 Setzer Center. You can visit the CTLE website for more information.