Alex Halavais has posted a few followups to his blogging in the large class (roughly 400 students) experiment. He has gathered together quite a bit of student feedback, and describes some of the technical and pedagogical hurdles he encountered while teaching his course on “Cyberporn & Society”.
The ideal classroom
The recently published results of the NetDay Speak Up survey revealed an interesting model of what students consider the ideal school.
When asked to “describe a new school for students just like you–what would be the No. 1 technology you would need,” the leading response from students in every grade was access to personal laptops they could take home.
Sixty-two percent of students in grades 6-12 said a mobile computer is integral to a 21st-century classroom. More than 40 percent of this group said a modern classroom should include cell phones, interactive whiteboards, televisions, digital cameras, video cameras, scanners, and CD/DVD burners.
Also, students expressed a strong desire to learn in a more hands-on way. They said they’d find math more engaging if teachers infused more technology into their lessons. They also said they want to explore science through technology simulations, field trips, and “CSI”-like problem-solving exercises, rather than textbooks.
Posted in Pedagogy, Technology
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Is e-mail obsolete ?
A new Netday “Speak Up” survey by Dell and Bell South suggests that while teachers are increasingly using email to communicate to students, students are increasingly abandoning email for instant messaging (including cell phone SMS).
“Students have told us that eMail is still valuable–mainly for storing and transmitting documents and for communication with adults,” said Julie Evans, chief executive officer of the nonprofit group NetDay. “IM is more valuable to them because it is instant, and they can speak with multiple people at the same time. I believe that this highlights a greater sophistication in student tech use–and a trend for us to watch.”
In addition to instant messaging, students are more likely to use social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook to support their communication habits. “At least 50 percent of students, by the 12th grade, have some sort of personal, MySpace-like web site,” she said. “This generation of learners seeks community online.”
Posted in Pedagogy
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Talkin’ about Podcasting
In one of the last colleague teas of the spring series, we talked podcasting. This included some production tools, ideas for teaching with the medium, concerns about how not to use this kind of technology, and of course examples.
Academic honesty & copyright policy as a WebCT quiz
Our recently released guidelines for online course development includes the requirement for a policy “quiz”:
This should be a link to a quiz, located on the left navigation sidebar. The quiz contains two questions, including a link the UVM Academic Honesty Policy, as well as a brief paragraph stating the student’s understanding of copyright law. The student must answer in agreement to both to pass the quiz.
Basically, the student must acknowledge the existence of the respective UVM policies. This is similar to those license agreements you must agree to before installing software on your computer (you do read them, right?).
We’ve provided this quiz as a file that you can import into your course. In addition, I’ve created a “screencast” showing how to import the quiz into your course. WebCT includes documentation for this as well.
Guidelines for Online Course Development
We’ve recently published the guidelines we use when developing online courses. While this document is geared toward those using WebCT to develop fully online courses, it should also be of interest to anyone planning an online addition to their traditional classroom experience. For more about WebCT at UVM, visit the WebCT@UVM gateway page, or the resources area of the CTL website.
An interactive color theory game
John sent me this great interactive game for learning colors. COLOR box : a color theory game looks kind of like tetris, but instead of focusing on shapes, the object of the game is to use the additive color system to combine colors of adjacent blocks.
Posted in Design, Fun, Inspiration, Resources, Toys
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Creating teaching aids with Squidoo
An intriguing example/experiment with the Squidoo web service as a teaching tool. The “lens” is in this case a sort of shareable, comment enabled organized bookmark list. It kind of reminds me of a more interactive the bibliographic section of a syllabus. It’s even got links to materials available on amazon. (Via Tame The Web.)
CTL Workshop at the Fleming Museum
I’m finally, finally getting around to making this post about the recent CTL-sponsored workshop at the Fleming Museum. Well-attended and really interesting, it was led by Evelyn Hankins, Curator and Margaret Tamulonis, Manager of Collections.
Posted in CTL Home Page, Workshops & Events
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Colleague Tea: Web Tools for Teaching
Last Friday’s Colleague Tea brought together 7 people to discuss some of the web tools currently available at UVM that can be used in teaching. We had a nice mix of participants, with some having used one tool, others having used another.
What tools did we look at? What teaching applications were considered?
Posted in Workshops & Events
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