Online Quizzes

Since we've been talking about student engagement, I thought that I would include a link to Maryellen Weimer's latest Faculty Focus article, "Five Types of Quizzes that Deepen Engagement with Course Content? She suggests having students complete an online quiz before class. The instructor can then look at the compiled summary of the quizzes before class and see what concepts need further explanation.

Engagement and Assessment Tools (Module 6)

Since I teach developmental reading and composition, I am interested in technology that will help students achieve success in reading and writing. Therefore, the technologies that I have chosen that will foster, engage, and assess student reading and writing skills are first, a classroom response system (CRS) and second, the discussion board feature on D2L, the learning management system (LMS) used by my institution.

Classroom Response Systems

First, I would use the CRS to foster, engage, and assess student reading skills. A CRS is software or hardware that allows instructors to poll students for assessment and/or engagement purposes. For example, an instructor may use a CRS to display multiple-choice questions within a presentation slide. Students then use cell phones or “clickers” to respond” (Lander & Stoeckel, 2012). 

Since my classes are usually small, under 25 students, I would not be using this method a lot so would not want my students to purchase clickers. Therefore, I would have those in the classroom upload the free app, Socrative (http://www.socrative.com/), to their cell phones to use as a response system. Then, I would have them use the app in pairs, with one phone per pair so that those without cell phones could still participate. Yes, we still have students who do not have smart phones. 

The synchronous activities would probably be game based activities involving reading comprehension skills with single right answers. Moreover, Socrative aggregates the results, creating visualizations. In this way, I would be able to see the levels of understanding for the whole class and individual students. According to Socrative (2016), this also allows instructors to “use class time to better collaborate and grow as a community of learners.” 

Socrative also provides a blog, Socrative Garden (http://garden.socrative.com/) with teaching ideas. Although I have yet to use this app, it seems like it would be a valuable tool in my toolbox of engaging activities.

Online Discussion Boards

Second, I would use D2L’s Discussion tool to foster, engage, and assess student writing skills. As most people reading this blog already know, the Discussion tool on an LMS, such as D2L, is a collaborative place where students can post, read, and respond to messages on different topics (University of Colorado-Boulder, 2015). 

Specifically, to engage the students, I would provide an open-ended prompt on a current class topic for students to answer initially and ask them to interact with each other by posting responses to the initial posts. Students will be able to answer over the course of days rather than minutes as in a classroom thus allowing time to ponder the question and their responses (McDougall, 2015). 

Another aspect of engagement is the chance for students to see what their classmates are thinking (Hall, 2015) and writing. To assess students, I would provide a simple rubric (Giacumo, Savenye, & Smith, 2013) attached to the discussion board so students can see how I will assess them and then each student can see how I have assessed him or her at the end of the discussion period.

I think that these two technologies would be great additions to my toolbox, providing a variety of modalities for the students and new formative assessment approaches for me.

References

Giacumo, L. A., Savenye, W., & Smith, N. (2013). Facilitation prompts and rubrics on higher-order thinking skill performance found in undergraduate asynchronous discussion boards. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(5), 774-794. Retrieved from https://www.bera.ac.uk/

Hall, R. A. (2015). Critical thinking in online discussion boards: Transforming an anomaly. Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 81(3), 21-27. Retrieved from www.dkg.org

Lander, B., & Stoeckel, S. (2012). Tips & Trends: Classroom Response Systems. Retrieved from http://acrl.ala.org/IS/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/2012winter.pdf

McDougall, J. (2015). The quest for authenticity: A study of an online discussion forum and the needs of adult learners. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 55(1), 94-113. Retrieved from https://www.ajal.net.au/

Socrative. (2016). Retrieved from www.socrative.com

YouTube Update (Module 5, continued)

My last post was about the use of YouTube in my college reading/composition class. Here is an update. Recently, I had each student in my reading/composition post a link to an instructional reading/writing video on the class discussion board. Classmates could then use those videos to review for the midterm. One hundred percent of the students posted! The second part of the assignment was to watch someone else's video and comment on it. Again, a hundred percent participation! This assignment is definitely a keeper.

YouTube, I Tube, We All YouTube (Module 5)

Enjoyment drives motivation that in turn drives learning. In the current visual and digital culture, students enjoy watching videos and looking at pictures. The use of Snapchat and Instagram verifies this. Therefore, using videos in classroom lessons and for review outside of class seems logical; they are fun, enjoyable, and thus motivating (Green, 2012; Lee, 2014). The study by Richards-Babb, Curtis, Smith, and Mingming (2014) bears out this idea. The students in their study ranked problem-solving videos over textbooks. Currently, the top site for videos is YouTube. a user-generated content provider and video sharing service, with more than one billion users who watch hundreds of millions of hours of videos daily (Buzzetto-More, 2015; YouTube, n.d.). Thus, the technology that I have chosen for this blog post is YouTube.

One of the benefits of YouTube for teaching and learning includes its multi-modal aspect. For  students, YouTube provides opportunities to see, hear, and replay as needed. For instructors, YouTube provides a way to present different perspectives on a topic. Although YouTube does have these benefits, its use also has challenges. For instructors, the challenge is taking the time to find videos that will be age appropriate and engage learners. For students, the challenge is sitting through a long, boring video chosen by the instructor. Thus, to foster student engagement through this technology, I have started to ask students to locate videos and post the URL on an online discussion board. From this assignment, the students and I will have a collection of videos on reading and writing for college. This solves the challenge of locating a variety of videos and locating videos that students will enjoy.

To sustain this technology, one strategy I would implement in my teaching context is to create a YouTube channel. On this channel, I would then put the selections that my students have found. In so doing, I would have a library of videos hand-picked by students.

References

Buzzetto-More, N. (2015). Student attitudes towards the integration of YouTube in online, hybrid, and web-assisted courses: An examination of the impact of course modality on perception. Journal of Online Learning & Teaching, 11(1), 55-73. Retrieved from jolt.merlot.org/

Green, A. (2012). The use of YouTube in further education colleges. Multimedia Information & Technology, 38(2), 14-15. Retrieved from http://www.cilip.org.uk/multimedia-information-technology-group/mmit-journal

Lee, H. (2014). Social media and student learning behavior: Plugging into mainstream music offers dynamic ways to learn English. Computers in Human Behavior, 36496-501. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.02.019

Richards-Babb, M., Curtis, R., Smith, V. J., & Mingming, X. (2014). Problem solving videos for general chemistry review: Students' perceptions and use patterns. Journal of Chemical Education, 91(11), 1796-1803. doi:10.1021/ed500280b

YouTube. (n.d.). Statistics. Retrieved 1 Mar. 2016 from http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/ statistics.html