Teaching with Technology
Technology changes quickly. This page aims to keep up with it.
1. Make your own virtual "textbook" with USB drives for students
Sometimes students have trouble downloading videos, sound recordings, and readings from my website. As an alternative, I give students USB flash drives at the beginning of the semester onto which I copy readings, videos, handouts, and anything else they might need. Warning: clarify to students that the material you're giving is protected under an educational license and they aren't allowed to distribute any copyrighted material.
USB flash drives are cheap. A 1 GB flash drive, which can hold more readings, images, audio files, and videos clips than you can get through in a semester, costs around $10. If students are reluctant to pay, joke that if they get nothing else of your class, at least they'll leave with a perfectly good portable storage device. And it's a lot cheaper than most textbooks.
How to do it: before the semester, buy in bulk (buy.com, newegg.com, tigerdirect.com) as many USB drives as you'll need for your students. On the first day of class, ask students to bring the amount you paid, and when they pay you, give them a drive.
Once you set up folders on your own computer, it's simply a matter of dragging and dropping the documents onto the flash drive. I also install free a media player, VLC media player, which ensures that all students will be able to open the video/sound files on the drive, regardless of what software they've got installed on their computer.
2. Use Web 2.0 Theory in the Classroom
The theory of Web 2.0, developed by Tim O'Reilly in 2005, is that the internet works at its best when it makes users generate content. That means everything from book reviews on amazon.com to bulletin board type websites like ebay and craigslist to reference sites like wikipedia.
How to apply this to teaching? One way that I've tried is to have students generate content for my teaching website. I've done this four ways:
- A collaborative bibliography that annotates research sources that other students might use for class papers.
- A writing articles page where students write and design webpages on various writing topics.
- Student blogs relating to material covered in class.
- Webpage commenting: students can add ideas, ask for clarification, and evaluate the assignment prompts for my class. They can add to informational pages, too, which all automatically appear below the existing content (scroll down to the bottom of this page to see "login or register to post comments").
Web 2.0 theory has a number of applications to teaching theory. It allows students to be content producers, thereby making them involved and vested in course subject matter, giving them learning agency. It also teaches them a sense of audience--their writing can be read by not only me and classmates, but by anyone who has arrived at the webpage. And finally, it gives students a sense that the work they're producing for the course is not just an assignment, but is useful and relevant.
3. Save paper. Exploit the internet. Make an eSyllabus.
An eletronic syllabus can allow you to embed hyperlinks. This makes your syllabus efficient: instead of listing library hours, the college plagiarism policy, proper MLA citation, etc., simply hyperlink all this--and hyperlink to any online readings.
Instead of using MS Word documents (which some students may not be able to open), it's best to make PDF files. Once created, they're permanent (so students can't accidentally delete or change portions of the document), and they are universal, can be opened on Macs or PCs, as long as the computer has Adobe Reader installed on the computer (which it usually is, and if not, is free to download). There are a number of ways to make PDF files.
You can use Adobe Acrobat (which is not free, but your school may include it on campus computers). If you have Adobe Distiller installed, you can simply go to your word processor and "print" your document as a PDF file (look under the print options for Adobe Distiller).
You can also use any of the free PDF file makers out there. One of the best and most well known is CutePDF.
4. Make your website a community
- Put a class photo on the homepage. Early in the semester. In my class, we have "stuffed animal day," where students get extra credit if they bring in a stuffed animal, and we take a class photo.
- Post grades online for the whole class to see. Yes, you heard right. I was hesitant to do this at first because I didn't want to encourage the wrong kind of competition. But I found a compromise: I give students a codename so they can see their grade, and see where they rank in class. But the codename gives a sense of privacy.
- Have students post a bio. Even better, set up your class website so that each student has a homepage where they can introduce themselves, add a photo, list their interests, favorite websites, etc.
- Maintain a class blog. I have students post informal writing to our class blog, which is online and visible to other students. Students can read classmates' thoughts about the day's reading or reflections on classmates' writing development. It has the added bonus of making students more aware of writing for an audience.
- Make use of an email mailing list. And make the messages friendly.
- Make a chatroom for virtual office hours and student discussions.
- Place user-activity widgets on your website. I have a "who's online box" where students can see other classmates currently logged onto the site. I also have a "my contributions" box that shows each student what they've contributed to the site.
5. Consider making your own class website
Most schools provide virtual classroom environments like WebCT or Blackboard. But it's pretty easy these days to make your own, and if you're willing to put in the extra effort, it gives you more control over course design and features.This involves three steps. First, you have to purchase the rights to a domain name, like www.myclassisawesome.com. This usually costs less than $10 per year. There are many websites that sell rights to domain names. The most well known is probably godaddy.com.
Second, you sign up for a hosting company to be the server for your website. They keep all your webpages and files on their server. Again, there are many web hosting companies. I use epowhost.com.
You don't have to build your website page by page, either. Website Content Management Systems (CMS) make this pretty easy, and the best one designed specifically for teaching is moodle.com, also eFront. I use drupal.org, which is more complicated, but gives me a bit more control. Another popular CMS that is used more for blogging, but can definitely accomodate an online community is wordpress.com.
6. Give students audio feedback
In the past, some teachers gave audio feedback by recording onto cassette tapes. With the internet, it's a snap. All you need is a microphone and the
free sound editing program, Audacity, which among other things, allows you to save your recording as an .mp3 file. This allows you to make a 5 minute recording that is less than 1 MB, which is easy to download from the web, or to email to students.
7. Videotape your lectures and add them to youtube
While you can host video on your own website, youtube just makes it easy (and accessible to a larger audience. It also converts the video files to a small file-size format, which will allow your students easier access. It also makes it easy to embed your video into your website, as I've done here.Again, free open-source software, like the video editors VirtualDub or Avidemux, save any extra cost. You do need a digital videocamera, however.
8. Design your website from the students' point of view
Read my tips for effective web design. And remember to make information and navigation redundant. Make sure students can find how to login easily, and can get to course readings, etc., through multiple avenues. For more on this, read Jakob Nielsen's article which weighs the pros and cons of redundancy.
9. Get familiar with the tech-savvy of this generation of students (the "millennials"), and incorporate it.
Use instant messaging (AIM) for virtual office hours and/or classroom discussion forums. Use Google Docs and Spreadsheets for collaboration.And read up on the millenial students: Melissa H. Sandfort & Jennifer G. Haworth, Whassup? A Glimpse Into the Attitudes and Beliefs of the Millennial Generation (Journal of College and Character, 2006)
Claire Raines, Managing Millenials (Generations at Work, 2002)
Generation X and The Millennials: What You Need to Know About Mentoring the New Generations
Generational Clash: Educating Millennials in a Boomer Institution
“Screenagers” and Virtual (Chat) Reference: The Future is Now!
10. Take advantage of great free software
There's a great, up-to-date list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning on the web, and my top recommendations are below:
Office Suite
Open Office
Has spreadsheet, word processing, presentation, and database programs that do everything that MS Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Access do, and can open and edit all Microsoft Office Documents. You can also save your as Microsoft documents.
Media Player
VLC Media Player
Plays virtually any audio/video recording you have.
Web-based survey
surveymonkey.com allows you to easily create named and anonymous surveys, which can be put to use in a variety of academic settings
Mail Client
Thunderbird
Like Microsoft Outlook, but I think better! Allows you to check multiple email accounts at once.
Audio Editing
Audacity
Video Editing
VirtualDub
Avidemux
Camtasia Studio 5 allows you to record everything you do on screen, and even add sound commentary. An indispensible resource for online classes. You can download a 30-day free trial from their website.
Image Editing
GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program)
Does everything the popular Photoshop program does, but is completely free. It has a bit of a different interface and look than Photoshop.
File Conversion
CutePDF
PDF Creator
Portable Applications
If you use a USB drive to transport your classroom files, you might consider getting familiar with the programs you can run off that USB drive. Read about it at portableapps.com.