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!