blog moved

Hi -  as of July 2014 I have combined my website with my blogs and therefore this blog has now been relocated to http://adizzolab.wordpress.com

You can follow this blog topic more directly at the following URL: https://adizzolab.wordpress.com/category/tech/

This transfer has included importing all of these past Blogger posts

Blogger is a great tool but WordPress is letting me manage multiple things in one shot which is always a plus!

Prepping a plan for tech use for the upcoming semester

Note: This blog post will be sort of a rough draft of a post that I'm putting together for TLT. 

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: 

1. figure out what your goals are for the class
2. figure out what tech is out there to help attain those goals
3. understand where your student knowledge base is relative to this tech
4. try to understand what other tools the students are using that you may not be aware of
5. 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

Reader aggregation using Flipboard

There is a lot of information out there that I would like to access at any given point and that's becoming challenging. This information exists in many forms - for me that currently means news feeds, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook groups, YouTube channels and Instagram feeds. Feed aggregators are great ways to pull in all of this different information into a one-stop site. I think the primary allure of these aggregators is that rather than log into many different accounts to access these things, I can simply open up the aggregator program and it all is channeled through there.

Flipboard is my app of choice. Not only does it pull all of the information into one place, it also makes it into a ridiculously attractive magazine style format. It is also extremely flexible, having apps for most prominent mobile devices (including iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Android-based devices).

I've actually written about this one just this past June but thought it was worth revisiting. One of my personal charges with the Technology Fellow is to enhance faculty awareness of all the great tools that are out there. There are a lot of great blogs and feeds out there, including our own TLT group's but I suspect many of us are not set up to easily access them - Flipboard is a great solution for this. Once everyone gets hooked in then it becomes easier to have the information delivered right to you.

Consider trying this one out - especially if you have a mobile device.

time to restart posting!

After taking a little time off from this blog it's time to start posting again! Please let me know if you have any ideas for topics you'd like to see

strategy for using Polleverywhere

Since I've taken up the Fac Tech Fellow position my blog posts are sliding into a number of different venues, but I'll try to keep posting here too when I can.

I revisited the in-class polling today in Intro Bio. I love asking open-ended questions, having the students think about it on their own for a minute, then answer. This helps engage them, but I can't fully assess what the entire class knew, just the few who I can get an answer from. Back to polling then! I have done this before and enjoyed it but what I really wanted this time was to make it efficient. I don't want to have to go through explanations every time I want to poll, and I want them to be able to answer quickly. My solution was as follows:

• set up one single poll that allows full text entry
• provide the students with a handout that spelled out all the different ways that they could add their answer to this poll. Remember that as long as they have either a web or text-capable cell phone, a tablet, or a laptop with them, Polleverywhere.com lets them put in their answers by....
• .....a simple website interface
• .....texting to a 5 digit number, then they have to provide one specific 6 digit number each time that directs them to the specific poll, then they type their answer
• .....tweeting to an address that has the specific poll

A picture of the handout is shown (with the numbers blocked out so noone can hack it :) )

Note that the students did not have to log in at any time. Also, I asked the students to bookmark the sites or text location. Since I will just reuse the same poll over and over they won't have to mess around with inputting different numbers every time. 

Will it work? Well, I polled 2 times in class today after an initial time when I stepped everyone through it. The students seemed to have minimal issues getting going for each poll and I didn't feel like I wasted any time on technical issues. 

reposting of a blog entry I did on the FacTech Group - might be of interest to those using iPads/iPods

http://elonfactechblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/flipboard-as-a-reader-and-potential-for-teaching/

reBlog of another post

http://elonfactechblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/real-time-monitoring-of-class-lab-data-using-google-forms/

Here's a post I just made for a Faculty Tech group blog that I'm participating in. The post describes an experiment with realtime data monitoring for my "unknowns" lab in Microbiology. Hoping this works - will really enhance the efficiency of this lab!