Google's LMS- Google Classroom

Haha! This is how rumors get started-offhand blog post titles. But seriously, the big question that keeps coming up for me is, where the heck IS Google in this big mess of Blackboard-type learning management systems??  With Google docs, Google sites, Google search, gmail, and the imperfect but multitudinous stabs they've taken at social networking, PLEASE tell me there's someone at Google working on putting all this into one place! I mean, there's already a nice aggregation of these Google materials for educators---hook us UP in higher ed, Googs!

                    professors and TAs storm the Google headquarters demanding a Google LMS
                                                            photo credit: New York Times (February 25th, 2011)

Maybe it's a foible of my generation but if I were in charge of choosing a Learning Management System for UGA I would pretty much refuse to invest much money in it. (Or maybe it's because I'm obsessed with bartering ---Athenians, check out the Athens Time Bank for "indirect" bartering of all sorts!) But with all the budget cuts affecting UGA, wouldn't it be better to put, oh say HALF of the gazillion dollars, that might be spent on a new LMS and hire a small team of expert techie-teachers to train faculty on how to set up a good course management system for themselves using existing free materials. I understand the appeal of having everything centrally located and maybe each teacher's materials could be accessed from one central UGA hosted site but even if not, so what? We have a different textbook and a different classroom for each class, so if students had a different website to go to for each class, it wouldn't be the end of the world. then maybe the school could afford to pay staff (and TAs) a living wage and pay professors the competitive wages they deserve too.

I'm sure there are a lot of reasonable dissenting perspectives I'm leaving out of this idealistic rant so i'm looking forward to hearing some discussion from this. But remember you're talking to someone who has already chosen to use Open Office rather than Microsoft Office.

Private vs. Public Self

having done a small research project on facebook in higher ed, it seems like the most frequent issue that comes up is balancing the private and public side of yourself as an instructor. on the one hand, the research shows that high self-disclosure (in the appropriate sense) leads to better student interactions, motivation, and ratings of teacher competence!

i have always been a fan of being a real person to my students. i talk to them about favorite restaurants, my job as a yoga instructor, and even how interesting it is when an activity works with one class and not with another. but i wonder, is it necessary or even prudent to do this self-disclosure biz on FACEBOOK?

this is the place where anyone can tag you in a photo at any time. and sure, an embarrassing photo could be the result of a crazy night that you could choose not to have in the first place. but embarrassing photos also result when a friend catches you with your eyes half closed and Solo cup of iced tea in hand, when a friend posts a picture where SHE looks awesome but you have a big slice of bra exposed, or when you're onstage at an avant-garde theatre production called Hotel F*&k. the point is, that none of these are things that i should be embarrassed about, but that still doesn't mean that i want to publicize everything about myself to every student. if one of my students was artsy enough to have found out about that play themselves and bold enough to sit through it, then so be it. but some would be mortified by it and i see no reason to put THEM in that situation either.

This is an excellent place to start making your private self a little more private AND your public self a little more public

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/creating-your-web-presence-a-primer-for-academics/30458

some say that having a private self is a concept from another era, and if that's the case, consider me an old fogey.

Web/Video Conferencing Case Studies

I'm pretty excited about the most recent classroom technology tool I've learned about. And first of all, I should clarify that there IS a difference between web conferencing and video conferencing. i am kind of using them to mean the same thing here but if you'd like to know more about what distinguishes the two, i'll leave you too google to your heart's content :)

looking good, webcam man. i find it hard to believe he's on a work call with eyebrow acrobatics like that though....

this semester i have been trying to incorporate more case studies into my teaching and learning activities. since my students are tested using case studies, it only makes sense to give them practice with them. however, it has been incredibly hard to FIND good case studies! so with this technology in mind, I'm working to set up a real-world case study for my students where they can video(web) conference into a classroom, "meet" the teacher, hear about his/her problems, take a look at the classroom setup, and maybe even see the kids (with signed permission forms??). Then they would practice writing recommendations for the teacher/classroom based on whatever topics we're discussing.

It will be a lot to plan, but I have at least one teacher on board willing to try, so keep your fingers crossed for me!

Old Person Syndrome: boring PowerPoints, fear of clickers

As I continue to study the art of teaching, I keep hearing about clickers, aka "student response systems". But until last week I hadn't actually considered using them in my 25 person education class. "Why over-complicate things with technology? Why limit face-to-face communication further for this digital generation?" I rationalized myself right out of a new experience, something I always promised myself I wouldn't do.

With my thirtieth birthday around the corner, there's no way I'm letting Old Person Syndrome get me now! This rarely diagnosed disorder is actually more common than you think: The CDC estimates that 70% of adults over the age of 25 are suffering from this disease and 29% of the remaining 30% are carriers for this lethal virus. Once infected, sufferers die a slow death of boredom and mindlessness, as their novelty-seeking muscles atrophy and their Beginner's Mind shrivels and fades.

When engaging in classroom preparation with a true Beginner's Mind, teachers not only use technology, but use it creatively and efficiently, thereby eliminating students' needs to send out tweets of boredom regarding their teacher's ineffective use of clickers.

But clickers work in conjunction with PowerPoint...Good luck getting students to suddenly wake up to engage in some active learning if your presentation reflects the typical symptomology of Old Person Syndrome. Common symptoms of the disease include an unhealthy fascination with animated slide transitions and a more-is-better mindset when it comes to slides. In other words, the Old Person Syndrome sufferer is still too enamored of the existence of PowerPoint to actually think about using it effectively.

We in the ancient halls of academia could learn something from the business world. Keep things snappy, attractive, and approach each lecture as if you're selling the idea to your class. I have been experimenting with this idea this semester, so each time I introduce a new learning theory I put myself in the mindset of a prototypical behaviorist, for example, and try to convince my education students that THIS is the idea they've been waiting for, the one that will make all their educational nightmares turn to pleasant dreams. The business magazine Inc. recently published this how-to article about creating an effective PowerPoint which I highly recommend. Replace "business model" with "theoretical model" and "marketing" with "research" and it might as well have been written for a professor with Old Person Syndrome.

One of the ideas in this summary is the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes, size 30 font (or bigger). This keeps the words to a minimum, both on the slide and coming out of your mouth. I'm going to experiment with this in my next lecture, in conjunction with my first time using clickers, so I'll let you know how it goes. Haven't started planning yet, but I'm feeling younger already :)

My Sight's on Google Sites!

You wish the pun-iness would end, but it won't on this blog! stick around and I'll try to make it worth your while.

I was beyond impressed with the ease and attractiveness of Google Sites the other day. In class we walked through setting up our own site and talked about applications to teaching.

Because I'm not sure whether I'll teach another class during my time in graduate school, I decided to set up a personal site highlighting my teaching and research to help me when I'm on the job market (one day, it will happen they say).

Aesthetics are very important to me, so the clean layout and subtle design templates were immediately appealing.  Re-arranging the sidebar was the only task that seemed unintuitive to me, so perhaps there are more user-unfriendly flaws to be found. But I plan to finalize this site, and if all goes well, use it for a class!

If I'm still teaching the same class at UGA in the fall, I think it will be a great tool for this class in particular. My students often remark that this is one of the most useful classes they take in their time as education majors This is not a pat on the back, since i am not the designer, just the instructor!

What's funny though, is that we (the 9 TAs teaching the same material) don't actually teach them many classroom strategies at all. Apparently, they're mainly just grateful to have all the theoretical jargon disambiguated for them. But by having a place to aggregate resources, there is real potential for them to compile practical strategies...linked to theory names of course! :)

Getting Some Perspective on My Perspective

Having taken the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) that I mentioned in my last post, I now know that I teach from a "Developmental" and a "Nurturing" perspective.  I certainly agree with this assessment, although I'm surprised that some other perspectives didn't show up strongly in my profile as well. Evaluating the validity of the TPI is a post for a different day however! In today's post, I will speculate on what each of these perspectives might possibly mean for me as I explore teaching-related technology.

According to the summaries of each perspective, a Developmental perspective means that teaching is planned and conducted "from the learner's point of view". I'm trying to think about how this might relate to the technology that I use with my students in my current and future classes; I'm imagining that a survey might be in order to find out what and how my students think. But then again, if "the goal is to help learners develop increasingly complex and sophisticated cognitive structures", they might not really know what they don't know. This perspective seems to require quite a lot from the teacher in terms of presenting probing questions and parsimonious examples. Although this perspective does not explicitly require that a teacher is an expert at his or her content like the Transmission perspective does, it seems to me that a teacher DOES have to at least be an expert with their techniques, methods, activities, and TECHNOLOGY in order to make them work for these complex learning goals. I'm interested in thinking more about what insights this Teaching Perspective might have to offer me in terms of technology.

My secondary Teaching Perspective, Nurturing, indicates that students' deepest learning happens when they feel efficacious and supported in their efforts. Although on the surface this perspective might seem to represent a "touchy-feely" classroom where everyone gets an A for effort, the equation for assessment takes into consideration each individual's growth and progress toward clearly-set expectations. One rudimentary technology I already use in my Introductory Educational Psychology class are online journals students write on the topic of their choice, 6 times during the semester. For this assignment, technology serves to make the assignment flexible because it can be submitted any time until midnight the night before a topic is covered in class and private, in the sense that classmates won't ever see me hand back a journal with comments or grades. Are there potential benefits from technology that I'm not capitalizing on here though?

One interesting part of the TPI, which I didn't even pay attention to when I took it for the first time nearly 6 months ago, is that for each perspective you are giving a score for your Beliefs, Intentions, and Actions. My scores for each were all in roughly the same range except for the Transmission perspective. For this one, my Beliefs and Intentions were quite low, but my Actions were several points higher. Coming from a very Constructivist graduate Education program, I certainly don't intend to present myself as an expert, as I don't believe that that's the best way for students to learn. However, because that's the traditional model of education, and the one I was exposed to the most growing up, my actions show that habits run deep! Interestingly, the way I use my course management system, eLC, is predominantly to TRANSMIT information to the students---PowerPoints, syllabus, and grades, with no emphasis on student feedback, creating community, or presenting challenging questions to further their development. Whoops! Guess we don't always do what we mean to do!

Cultivating Growth, Cultivating Interest

Gardening as a metaphor for teaching & learning is one of my favorites because it provides myriad opportunities for discussing the science and art of education. In my first post, I am simply turning the soil to see what I'm starting out with in terms of beliefs, doubts, goals, and dreams. I hope that by bringing it all to the surface for fresh air, I can maximize my growth throughout this process.

As I learn and blog about teaching with technology, my main goal is simply to cultivate my own interest in the topic. I believe that, like habits and personality traits, interests can and should be actively cultivated. Although imagining we have total control of our lives is a dangerous illusion, I believe that if one wants to be a person with a passion and skill for using technology, one can make intentional choices to make it happen.

On that note, I must confess that I have taught in a room with a SMART board for 4 semesters and haven't taken the time to figure out an interesting way to use it in my Educational Psychology class! When I took stock of how much time had passed without learning about a technological tool right under my nose, the fear of becoming an old fogey in the classroom kicked me in the pants and right into this class! 

However, I tend to believe that the most important characteristic needed for learning is a warm and caring relationship between teacher and student. Unfortunately, as many of us know from family dinners spent in front of text messages, Hulu, and iPads, technology is often used to separate us from each other and from our true selves. So I must admit that I'm starting out this journey with some skepticism about the usefulness of ever-increasing amounts of technology in the learning process. 

The science of when and why certain tools work for certain purposes in conjunction with certain teaching philosophies will be a good starting off point for me. I'm ready to evaluate my Teaching Perspectives Inventory score, re-read my Teaching Philosophy and start digging!