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

To Blog or Not? Is that the Question? (Module 4)

The second part of the most recent EDUC 8306 assignment was to reflect on the challenges and benefits of  my blogging experience. After some thought, I have decided that my biggest challenges include keeping up the momentum of writing the blog entries and composing formal assignments to post in a medium that is more informal.

On the other side, the benefits for me in this assignment so far has been writing for a wider audience and the experience of blogging on a regular schedule.

However, I am unsure which would outweigh the other if I was doing a blog on my own. 

Twitter in My Toolbox (Module 4)

My older daughter tweets all of time by retweeting interesting information and resources in her field of wildfire management. Even though she doesn’t create her own tweets, people follow her from many countries besides the U.S., such as Canada, Australia, and England. Her curation and aggregation of these resources has become valuable to her and others. I would like to introduce the power of Twitter to the students in my university/community college basic writing courses by adding it to my teaching and learning toolbox.

Since 2006, Twitter, a social networking site, has provided a microblogging service (Kassens, 2014). Increasingly, scholars have shown that Twitter can enhance and support college teaching and learning (Andrade, Castro, Ferreira, 2012; Forgie, S. E., Duff, J. P., & Ross, 2013; Kassens, 2014; Ricoy & Feliz, 2016; Veletsianos, 2012). After reading theses scholars, I see that I might use Twitter to share resources and facilitate writing practice in my basic writing courses. How and why I would do this comes next.  

At first, I would provide Tweets consisting of resources and announcements for students to read. Such Tweets would include credible information sources for students to use during the research unit. I would also provide supplemental resources for readings used in class (Forgie, Duff, & Ross, 2013). For example, when we read an essay by Kent Haruf, a Colorado author, I would Tweet the link to a Washington Post article written by one of his former students. After the students felt comfortable accessing and reading Tweets, I would move to having them Tweet or Retweet resources that they find online. Writing practice would come next. I would like to have my students use Twitter to summarize resources. For example, each student would choose a resource to read and summarize, and then tweet the summary to the whole class.

The benefits of using Twitter in this way for these students are twofold. First, the whole class would know about a variety of resources, and seconds, students would be practicing their writing skills in an authentic setting. The challenges of this technology are also twofold. First, the technology would be new to most of my students, as indicated by an informal poll of them; and second, the technology would be new to me, so my learning curve would be steep.

Using Twitter would increase student engagement. By engagement, I mean “interactions with faculty . . . with peers” (Pascarella & Terenzini; Kuh as cited in Junco, Heiberger, & Loken, 2010) both inside and outside the classroom. Through Twitter, students would be interacting with peers and faculty between class meetings (McArthur, & Bostedo-Conway, 2012). By using Twitter, students and instructors would be able to continue class-time discussion outside of the scheduled session (Junco, Heibergen, & Loken, 2011; Kassens, 2014). Not only can microblogging improve student-to-student interaction, thus creating a learning community (Ricoy & Feliz, 2016), but it can also enlarge the classroom to become part of a larger community built around shared interests and activities (Kassens, 2014).

Thus, Twitter would be a good addition to my toolbox for 21^st century skills, but I most likely won’t start using it until Fall 2016 as I am focusing on teaching and learning with D2L this semester. I’ll let you know how Twitter works at the end of 2016.

References

Andrade, A., Castro, C., & Ferreira, S. A. (2012). Cognitive communication 2.0 in higher education: to tweet or not to tweet? Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 10(3), 293-305. Retrieved from www.ejel.org/

Forgie, S. E., Duff, J. P., & Ross, S. (2013). Twelve tips for using Twitter as a learning tool in medical education. Medical Teacher, 35, 8-14. Retrieved from www.medicalteacher.org/

Junco, R., Heiberger, G. and Loken, E. (2010). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00387. 

Kassens, A. L. (2014). Tweeting your way to improved #Writing, #Reflection, and #Community. Journal of Economic Education, 45(2), 101-109. doi:10.1080/00220485.2014.889937

Ricoy, M., & Feliz, T. (2016). Twitter as a learning community in higher education. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 19(1), 237-248. Retrieved from www.ifets.info/

McArthur, J. A., & Bostedo-Conway, K. (2012). Exploring the relationship between student-instructor interaction on Twitter and student perceptions of teacher behaviors. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 24(3), 286-292. Retrieved from www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/

Veletsianos, G. (2012). Higher education scholars' participation and practices on Twitter. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(4), 336-349. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00449.x

Technology outside the Classroom (Module 3)

For this blog entry, I will focus on technology that can be used outside the classroom at my institution. Frankly, any technology that can be accessed by the internet is available to my students and me. Also available to us through the institution are the learning management system Desire 2 Learn (D2L); Microsoft 365, a suite of productivity software; and One Drive, a file hosting service in the cloud (formerly known as Microsoft Office Live; Denton, 2012). In addition, students and I have available our personal mobile hardware -- smartphones, tablets, laptops.—all of which I encourage students to use. According to a simple classroom poll, all of my students have at least a portable computer or smartphone.

Some of the applications and software I currently use are Microsoft Office Word and Outlook email, parts of D2L, Wikipedia, wikis, and YouTube. I would like to learn other applications in Microsoft such as Access and Excel. I would also like to learn how to use OneDrive. Since the university’s IT department does not offer workshops, the professional development opportunities available to me are two-fold. First, I can ask the administrative office technology instructor for help; second, I can watch Microsoft Office tutorials. Even though those tutorials have been around for some time, I have not used them; however, taking Walden’s “Effective College Teaching: Using Technology to Support Learning” course has spurred my interest in drawing upon that training. Regardless, I would like to see the university provide regular training on Microsoft products.

I believe that expanding my range of computer skills will add to the effectiveness and efficiency of my classroom life.   

References

Denton, D. (2012). Enhancing instruction through constructivism, cooperative learning, and cloud computing. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning, 56(4), 34-41. doi:10.1007/s11528-012-0585-1

Educause. (2011). 7 things you should know about organizing files in the cloud. http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-organizing-files-cloud