preparing prelab/lecture material video

There is a lot of talk about classroom flipping these days and I can see where this will be great - get the content deliver "out of the way" before the class meets, then spend the class time applying the content and trying to get it to a level of working understanding. In many ways we've been doing this in our Biology labs already via prelab content on video that is then applied with hands-on activities during the lab. One of the key things you need to be able to do easily is to capture your lecture/prelab/etc.  Dan Reis at TLT showed me a great tool the other day (free too) called Screencast-o-Matic. SOM allows you to identify a portion of your desktop that you want to be filmed. It also can simultaneously capture video of you so that the students can see you giving the talk.

Here's a screenshot of it in action. The dotted line is what will be captured and it will embed the video of you in there if you want it to. 

SOM has export functions for exporting into mp4, flv, and avi formats. It can also export directly to YouTube which would have some advantages. 

Note that while there are ways to do this kind of thing without the video, inclusion of the video I think is a nice touch that students will appreciate. 

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com

Flexible in-class polling without clickers

I have been able to play around with clickers here and there over the past year (see earlier post on 11/3/2012) and really enjoy some of the things they bring to the class. The things that bugged me about them though was 1) having to lug around the clickers (ok, it's not that bad but in addition to everything else I carry....), 2) the challenge for text entry for some of the models I tried, and 3) the troubleshooting we would have to do each time.

To address this I tried a different approach using PollEverywhere, one of many different on-line polling services. It took about a half hour to figure out the little things about it but it wasn't too bad. Here's how it addressed the issues noted above:

1. lugging around the clickers - no need to! Students can use any data-capable electronic device that they would normally bring. This includes cell phones (with at least texting capacity which is pretty standard these days), tablets, and laptops. 
2. text entry - very easy with any of the devices noted above and the way they send in the info is flexible: they can text the answer, tweet it, or use a web-interface
3. troubleshooting -  the students are using devices that they are already very capable with so there's no technical issues on that end. 

Other advantages: 

• I can see where this would address other issues too like batteries dying on clickers, or students forgetting their clickers (if they were required to purchase). 
• service is free as long as your class is under 40 students - which is the case for most of our classes here at Elon
• with text entry you can take the class responses and report them in a word cloud (see previous post) which is a really nice way to quickly summarize responses like this. 
• no need for students to purchase anything new - although if even a small percentage don't have a mobile data-cable device of some sort (including a laptop) that could be a limiting factor)

Disadvantages: 

• While probably 30 of my 33 students had at least one capable device on them, a few of the students do not carry these around regularly and therefore could not participate. 
• as a very simplistic texter I was challenged to communicate to the students how to text to the site. This only involves a few code numbers but nonetheless it turned out to take a minute for all of us to get on the same page. 

Poll the class then report back with a tag cloud

Had to take a minute to share this one. I've played a bit with PollEverywhere this year and really enjoyed how easy it is to create a quick poll and have the class use whatever means they want (texting, web-based entry, tweeting) to respond on the spot. Today I did that with my Microbiology class and asked them to use text-entry to give me a few association words that came to their mind when they thought of microbes. After polling them PollEverywhere gave me the option of reporting the results as a word cloud - here it is:

I have a previous post about word clouds but I absolutely loved this application of them - allowed me to show them the most common words that they had across their answers (the bigger the word the more common it was). Too cool and I think they appreciated it as well. 

Tag/Word clouds

Took a break from grading to see if I could figure out how to make tag clouds. These are neat graphical ways to highlight what things are prominent within a set of words - these words could be on a web page, a journal article, or whatever text you want to supply. In my case I wanted to see if this would accurately represent to the students what my course was about.

A quick search pulled up a number of free online tools to do this. I randomly chose http://www.tagxedo.com/.  I literally copied and pasted all of my notes into the entry box, chose a color scheme, and then chose the shape of my cloud (bacterial-shaped of course). Here's what I got for the lecture and the lab. 

Tag/Word cloud for my lab: 

 Tag/Word cloud for my lecture:

Pretty cool and honestly not a bad representation of the lab and lecture parts of the course. Basically it uses an algorithm to weight the font size by the frequency of the word, then fits the words into the shape. 

Actually I could see this being a neat way to show microbial community composition too. Tried it with Ben's fungi data from the Elon Forest. Added a new twist to - instead of capturing an image here is an iFrame of it so that it can be dynamic (see earlier post on Widgets). Scroll over the names to see the magic. Note that the shape is a nice oaklike tree - nice little touch although why can't they supply a fungus icon for us? 

Early view of next Moodle version

Recently I was able to sit in on a Webinar where they talked about the next version of Moodle that is coming our way (I believe in the next month or so). In the rush of finals I unfortunately lost my notes but here are a few notable things I remember

• file management looks like it will be a lot easier AND it will be much more straightforward to organize and share documents across courses and course sections. I see this as being great for some of our multisection courses where we tend to use the same documents - Sr Sem, Bio113, Bio102, etc.  Equally important will be that updating everyone's file on their page will be as simple as replacing the document that is in the main folder. For example, let's take Bio113. All base lab handouts are held in one folder that the lab coordinator maintains. All the sections essentially build aliases (links) to each file. If the coordinator updates the main file, everyone is automatically updated. 

• currently when you set up an assignment you have to wade through a myriad of options, often times only to figure out later it was the wrong option. Now the assignments will all be under one "set up assignment" feature where you can then customize it - I think that will be much easier than the current setup. 

• while it is not new, the personalized learning designer was being pushed as something that doesn't get used enough. I can't claim to have explored this much but I liked the automated messages that you can set up that will get sent to students who meet some condition like having low grades, or who haven't logged in in a while. I can see where this would be a good push for certain students.

link to the 2.0 version manual: http://manuals.moodlerooms.com/display/JOULE2/Teacher+Manual

1st try with clickers

A few weeks ago I got a hold of a set of clickers so I could try them out in my Bio101 course. After a few busy weeks I finally got a chance to use them and here's a very initial reaction

What was the use? 

• I stole a great idea from Sri and was having the students classify music by building a character dataset which we then analyzed for similarity. Had them come up with 10 music "Traits" (examples were acoustic, slow, techno, etc.) then played them clips of 4 songs chosen so that some of them would be likely to be very similar no matter what traits they had chosen. They each scored the traits for each song. Next as a group we built a class character matrix based on the traits they had scored. We used to clickers to have them give their input on what they had scored for that trait, then took the majority. For this part they only input they had was either A-yes, or B-no (although somehow some students still ended up voting C,D, or E....).  Next we tested a hypothesis that they developed - that the Jennifer Lopez and the Rihanna songs were more similar to each other than either were to the Harry Belafonte song. After showing them how to do one of the calculations, I let them calculate one and then enter it anonymously on the clickers. For this the students used the numeric option which allows them to type in a number. I decided not to show them the results on here but addressed that there was a mix of correct and incorrect answers. 

My goals/hopes - that students would be more engaged overall, would have fun doing something pretty complex, and that they would all feel comfortable answering questions.

Ease of learning how to use them - VERY easy to get going with these. The TLT folks kindly loaned me a set of ~30  iClickers. This comes with a base that you plug into your USB port, and some very simple software. Took about 5 min to get it all set up and to try it out in my office

Ease of setting up in class 

• took a few minutes to pass them out, then a few more to help students who had never used them before. Not bad but I hadn't budgeted that in. In classes that use them regularly I hear that they just get the students used to grabbing the clickers when they come in
• very quick to set up base and open up the software

Issues that arose  

• I think I could see my self getting tired of lugging a set of 30 of these around. The specific units for this are pretty big, as is the base unit.  
• Showing the students the results of a survey (which is one of the highlights - they were clearly excited to see if they were right/wrong) has a catch. Personally I write my notes on the whiteboard and in this room the screen comes down right over most of the whiteboard. Furthermore, the room I was in had an automatic lowering screen so you can't just shine the computer onto the whiteboard. So I had to choose - do I want to show them the results or my notes? If you are someone who uses your computer as the main thrust of your lectures (such as powerpoint talks) then this would not be an issue

Did it help accomplish my goals?

• students definately seemed more engaged  
• students were having fun - At the recommendation of one of the TLT postings on this subject I would hide the results of each survey until everyone had voted which added an element of suspence that they seemed to like. Even the fact that a few people kept mistakenly clicking options I wasn't giving them loosened them up a bit. 
• there was a high participation in the answering - usually only one student gets to answer any question that I ask the class, but now almost all of them did. 

Interesting features that I will try to investigate in the near future

• taking attendance - if you have the students always pick up a clicker then you can use it for attendance which I think would be easy and neat. Obviously you would have to assign a specific clicker number to a specific student for the semester and train the students on that. 
• preset questions - if you are organized enough to know all the questions you want to ask them ahead of time then you can have them set up. Doubtful it will work for me but could be useful for others

collaborative slide exercise

In the middle of trying something new right now. Having just covered transcription/translation for my Bio101 class, I wanted to have a presentation about different proteins to highlight the diversity that exists in these molecules. What I decided to do was make a collaborative Google presentation which is Google's version of Powerpoint. I chose a bunch of cool proteins, added the names onto each slide and then "shared" the presentation with the students. They were then told to claim one of the protein slides and to add info and graphics on it.

One of the things I found neat was that there wasn't a single student who wasn't familiar with Google documents. They all knew how to access the documents and how to work with it.

One of the things I found fascinating was logging onto the presentation and seeing as many as 8-9 students working on their slides all at once. I didn't do it but technically I could have instant messaged them through the program at that point too

Technically you can export the Google presentation into Powerpoint, but they also have their own presentation player right in the software - just hit play and it plays on your screen just like Powerpoint. Tomorrow when I go to class that's exactly what I will do - no collating of slides or having people upload - because they all worked on it together at the same time. Very cool...

screenshot showing that 4 people were on editing at the same time