About a month ago after the registration period for spring closed I contacted the registered students in the class and gave them a quick survey to see 1) what kind of tech they had (ie. iOS vs Android phones, tablets, laptops, etc.), and 2) their level of use of some prominent web-based tools (ex. Google docs/spreadsheets/presentations/calendars, Twitter, etc.). Now as the Spring approaches I want to be able to take what I learned from this survey and hit the ground running.What kinds of things will be easy to get going in class, and what things will take more time to get the students up and running?
First a recap of what I learned in my survey of 16 3rd and 4th year students in this particular class:
- almost all have a smartphone, and for most of them that is an iPhone
- email and texting is their preferred communication form, as opposed to phone calls, tweeting, or Facebook
- all of them are comfortable with the Google tools suite
- few use electronic calendars to keep organized
- All use Facebook, less than half use Twitter or Instagram or Flipboard. A surprise to me personally was that 80% of them use Pinterest
- only about half of them have tablets or related readers
- only about half of them were interested in electronic texts
- very few of them use or maintain blogs
Armed with this information, I can now start planning what tools will be useful for this semester. Here's what I've done:
- set up a YouTube channel for the class. Students are going to be set up to share relevant videos with everyone else. YouTube is now under Google control so students will not have issues subscribing
- set up my Google calendar for the class - only about a third of the students reported using this but it will help that one third anyways (and keep me organized!)
- set up professional Twitter feeds to be displayed within the Moodle course. Not many of them seem to use it themselves and I find it to be a little tricky for first-timers so this will allow them to see the material without having to muck around through it.
- set up a Flipboard magazine for the class (http://flip.it/daelU). Not many students have tablets (this is where Flipboard really shines) but Flipboard now allows magazines to be viewed on the web.
- set up a static PollEverywhere site to be used for the class. This allows the students to bookmark a URL/textnumber/twittertag that they can use the whole semester when I use in-class polling
- set up a class Pinterest page (http://www.pinterest.com/adizzo/microbiology-class-bio253-board//). Pinterest is new to me but the students seem to love it so we'll see how this develops
- Lastly - and probably most importantly - I am in the process of putting together a Moodle page that is an assignment for the first class. This page steps them through how to do all the basic setup. I am thinking about using some simple tasks and to award badges (more on this in a future post) to help me know the class is able to access all these tools.
My developing strategy for good tech use in teaching:
- figure out what your goals are for the class
- figure out what tech is out there to help attain those goals
- understand where your student knowledge base is relative to this tech
- try to understand what other tools the students are using that you may not be aware of
- set up and prepare the tech tools
My goal is to hit the ground running in that first week and hopefully this plan will help me set the tech part into place.
NOTE 1/27/2014 - the more formal blog was posted on the TLT blog site
