Digital Tools in the Classroom

Grademark, Turnitin, Moodle, Blackboard, Google Docs...

Many of these tools are being used in classrooms across the country. The question is: To what end?

As a community college professor, I am required--at the barest minimum--to use the course management system (CMS) Blackboard to post student grades and my syllabus. Beyond those two requirements, the rest is up to me. Like many old dogs, I am somewhat slow to learn new tricks. In the late 90s, I was one of the first teachers to have a computer in my classroom in Georgia. It was one I had brought from home, and the IT guy at school helped me get it set up and online. For years, I used an excel spreadsheet that I created in 1996 to calculate student grades. Even in the early 2000s, I had a pretty extensive web page when I taught at Pennsylvania College of Technology. Even so, I have had difficulty utilizing the Blackboard resource to its fullest potential. After reading Lisa Lane's article “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching,” in the online journal First Monday, I now know why. Lane argues that there is a very real difference between instructors' teaching and discipline expertise and their information literacy expertise. In other words, individuals may excel at traditional classroom teaching but fall seriously short in their ability to use digital tools to instruct. Lane dubs us "novice faculty."

I am a prime example of what she talks about. Though I have experience with some technology, I am not trained to use technology to teach in the classroom. I have stayed primarily within the first tier surface layer of Blackboard and used it mostly as a course management tool to grade and provide information, rather than as a teaching tool to engage students is blogging, portfolios, instant messaging, and research. Lane says "Expert users contextualize their resources fluidly and organize materials effectively, while novices just upload and share files, hoping students will find them."

Lane also notes that "Blackboard can be highly intimidating to learn, and may 'seriously hinder' choices the faculty member makes while using the tool." It's not that I haven't been offered countless opportunities from my school's resident Blackboard expert, it's just that, like many others, I have not chosen to avail myself of them. Part of this stems from my own busy schedule and part of it, as Lane notes, is that "faculty requests for help focus on what the technology can do, rather than how their pedagogical goals can be achieved." What that means in practical terms is that too often the Blackboard training offerings are the same thing over and over, just trying to get faculty up to speed with the basic functions.

On the other hand, there is ample opportunity for me to tinker. In part because of this class, I have spent far more time fiddling with Blackboard and its myriad uses than I have in the past. In his most recent podcast, Dr. Chuck Tryon stated that part of his purpose in the Technology 518 course is to overwhelm us as students. It's an important reminder to us as faculty that our students are under pressure, not only to complete their assignments, but to learn new technologies along the way. Mission accomplished, Dr. Tryon!

Readers one and all, I sincerely apologize for getting behind in my blogging. 

My new posts will follow shortly!

Paper or iPad?

I am generally a pretty laid back teacher. I do teach at the college level and have only had one instance where a student's behavior was consistently distracting enough that I had to pull him aside and let him know that the continued behavior would result in him being dropped from my course.

That being said, the issue of the distractability of personal devices, including laptops, tablets and cell phones, is one that has become a frequent topic of discussion among educators. Knowing how easily I am distracted in the presence of these devices, it is not surprising that many educators have banned them from their classrooms. My current situation provides me the great fortune (?) of multiple perspectives on this issue: that of student, teacher, and parent.

My attitude from the student standpoint is twofold. First, I know myself well enough to know that using a laptop to take notes would not be effective for me. I have a very specific method for note taking, and while the computer might be useful to help me organize after the fact, I like to have the ability to write in the margins, draw arrows, and make other types of notations that would be difficult to make on a computer. Second, I know that during any real or perceived lull, I would be tempted to be off task and use the device for some other purpose. Am I likely to be browsing Facebook? Probably not. But it wouldn't be a surprise if I were using it to play spider solitaire or scrabble. These days, all my coursework as a student is on line, so the temptation is not there, but at a recent faculty in-service, the speaker was so dry that I sat, unabashedly (though pretty far in the back), and played games on my cell phone.

From the perspective of a teacher, I am fairly open to allowing students to use laptops. I'll admit, though, that the courses I teach do not require extensive note taking. In a matter of two or three class sessions, my students are aware that there is no real need for one and they tend to stop bringing theirs to class (or taking them out). Since I teach at a community college and my class sizes are small, I also learn all my student's names, and I call them out when I see them using their devices inappropriately. Having had my share of disruptive students when I taught high school, I can also appreciate that tablets or computers might at least prevent some students from being troublesome. I sometimes see my students texting under their desks or in their laps or using their phones somewhat furtively. I generally ignore them, and find that their classmates give them plenty of dirty looks for being rude and disrespectful. I sometimes comment on it, especially when there is some clear task that they are supposed to be working on. I have mentioned this in other posts, but I am fortunate (this semester anyway) to have all my classes in a special tech room that has both an inner U shape of tables for 20 students and an outer perimeter of computers. This setup is ideal because I can easily send students to computers when necessary and pull them back when they're not. This type of classroom should be the standard.

As a parent, my views get a little fuzzier about laptops and tablets in the classroom. My children are in second and fourth grades and I am adamantly opposed to electronics as a matter of course. Partially this is because I want them to be learning in a hands-on manner, and they are. Also, I know how easily they are distracted. But these is no denying that tablets especially are hands-on devices. Is there a difference between completing a math worksheet and working the same problems on a tablet? I'm not sure. The research that exists supports both perspectives.

This past spring, an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled "To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand" chronicled Princeton graduate student Pam Mueller who makes an interesting discovery when she forgets her laptop and has to take notes by hand. She  knows she must take excellent notes because she is the teaching assistant for the course and will be sharing her notes with others. In June, she co-published the findings of the research she conducted with the professor from that course in an article titled "The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard." The gist of the findings is this: when we take notes with a computer, we are more likely to simply transcribe the lecture, word for word. When we take notes by hand, we are more likely to process the information as we write and listen so that what we have on our paper is not a transcription, but a fusion of listening and understanding. This is found on Bloom's taxonomy as students leap from knowledge to synthesis. It is the kind of critical thinking that we want for students.

Putting aside the pedagogy and best practices of the lecture as a teaching method, it is no surprise to me that, given the task of note taking, pen on paper is better than keyboard. My own personal experience supports this in many other settings as well, including solving math problems, revising papers, and conducting experiments.

A final caveat is that I do not contend that there is no place in the classroom for these devices. With careful planning and use, they should be excellent support tools in the classroom.

Diigo or Don't You?

I have to admit my reluctance towards using an online bookmarking application. I had never heard of Diigo or the numerous other free bookmarking apps until taking English 518. In fact, I confess that I don't even really use the bookmarking capability that I know my internet browser has.

I spent a little time reviewing Diigo and delicious and tried to determine for what purpose I would use them. The classes that I teach at Catawba Valley Community College have just been redesigned to an 8 week format, so we're on the verge of ending our first mini-mester and beginning our second. Since the course is so short, our department determined that we would use an overarching theme during each of the four mini-mesters to guide student reading and writing. This time around we are using the theme of technology, and the next theme will be health related.

Coincidentally, I received an email yesterday from one of the social sites I like to browse, LifeHack, which highlighted an article titled "5 Reasons Why Naps Should Be a Mandatory Part of Our Day" which also featured a picture of this adorable sleeping kitten (bonus!). 

Following that train of thought, I began brainstorming about how I could use sleep-related articles for a portion of the health theme.

Before I knew it, I began finding all sorts of excellent resources, both mainstream and scholarly, that could be used for the course. Then, like the proverbial lightbulb, I thought, "Diigo!" I downloaded the app, signed in on my computer and began bookmarking. Going along with the flow, I found myself in a peer's office and brainstorming further health related subtopics. My colleague downloaded Diigo, and we organized several subfolders and added many articles to them. Within 25 minutes, we had a big picture view of the next eight weeks.

Last night I accessed the articles  from my home computer (that's the beauty of this type of app), and began assessing their viability in terms of lexile levels and student interest.

And just like that, I'm converted!

The Internet Archive and Primary Sources

This spring, many students at CVCC will be reading the non-fiction book, Enrique's Journey. About a young man from Honduras who travels to the United States for a better life, Enrique's Journey puts a face on immigration. The topic of immigration, which has been highlighted recently in the political sphere, is one that is divisive and very heavily tied to our modern notions of the American Dream.

Our assignment for ENGL 518 this week was to explore the Internet Archives to learn what they contain, and suggest possible ways to use them in the classroom. Knowing that we will be reading Enrique's Journey and talking about immigration, I decided to find out what kinds of resources could be found using the archives.

What I discovered is overwhelming, to say the least, but also highly accessible. Through the Library of Congress on the Archive, teachers can access lesson plans and thousands of primary sources.

Just a basic search with the term "American Dream" produced thousands of hits. There are viewpoints like this one, and this one, and this one.

It is my thought that I can use the archive in multiple ways. First, I can have the students take a look at what the American Dream means in modern times. Then, I can use the primary resources about the immigration experience over the last century to provide some context for students.


Often, the messages that students get from watching and listening to current news are oversimplified. By using some primary resources to look at immigration from another perspective, students can develop their own opinions about the current immigration situation in the United States.

Wiki Reality

The debate over the reliability and efficacy of Wikipedia as a valid source of information rages on. I recently found out through my ENGL 518 Technology course that the word wiki-wiki means fast in Hawaiian. The first creator of a Wiki is Ward Cunningham. He apparently learned the word wiki-wiki on a trip to Hawaii when he was instructed to take the wiki-wiki bus - the very fast bus. Since the introduction of Wikipedia to the technological world, the standard paper encyclopedia has seen its hard copy demise. There are those who lament this demise and those who applaud the currency of the online format. The fact that there is even a debate about using encyclopedias as a source of information -- as a citation on a paper -- is clearly ridiculous.

Why? Because anyone who has taught writing at any level beyond middle school knows full well that encyclopedias are not academic sources for research. At the elementary and middle school level, when students are learning the basic concepts of research and fact finding, they are introduced to the encyclopedia as a credible source of accurate information. The information contained therein is meant to be factual and unbiased. Of course we know that there is really no such thing, but we allow younger students to experiment with using sources beginning with the encyclopedia.

Moving beyond that basic introduction to finding sources to support their ideas, students beginning as early as middle school and certainly no later than high school are taught more advanced methods of research. It is specifically stated at this level that encyclopedias are no longer valid sources for citation in academic papers. This is because encyclopedias represent what is considered to be general knowledge. Academic papers are meant to go beyond general knowledge into deeper analysis, including synthesis and evaluation. So, while students may use encyclopedias to gather some basic information in the beginning stages of research, it is expected that they will only use that information to advance their thesis, not as direct support for any thesis.

Maybe in all the confusion of this debate, that fact has become lost. I certainly consider Wikipedia a fairly reliable source for basic information, and I have used it on countless occasions. I appreciate that it is continually updated, and I value the idea of crowd-sourcing. Are there only certain experts who hold this knowledge? Absolutely not. And aren't we teaching our students to be active learners anyway? Wikipedia recognizes that there are many who can contribute to the body of general knowledge that is found in encyclopedias. In a well-written and insightful article on this topic by Maria Bustillos, the author relates the extensive process that Wikipedia uses to monitor and edit the articles it contains. She ends her own article by discussing the impact that the written word had on the oral word, which had previously been the guiding force of "general knowledge."  She states that this change resulted in a culture of individual ownership of ideas. This newest evolution focuses far more heavily on shared or collaborative efforts toward defining general knowledge. I, for one, believe that this progress will not only benefit the sphere of knowledge, but that it is probably the best chance for solving most of the modern day problems this world faces.

Diving In

It works out great that I am taking this course at the same time that I am teaching a new course this fall; both are focusing on technology. I've spent a lot of time considering my relationship with technology, both in the planning for my fall courses, and in my  personal life. After hours of grading last night, I finally put down my stack of papers, noted that I had less than six hours before the alarm would ring, and I still felt compelled to finish my game of scrabble. Scrabble!

This past spring I hit a breaking point with Facebook and what had begun as a plan to unfriend a bunch of people, quickly turned into a decision to suspend my facebook account altogether. Admittedly, I hadn't given more than a few hours a month to my facebook account in years; however,  when I did get on it, I found two things happening simultaneously that left me feeling worse than when I'd begun. First, I found that it was a time suck. Like the Lay's commercial, "You can't eat just one." My intention to just glance, inevitably turned into a marathon of catching up on months or more of posts. Second, the longer I was on, the more increasingly irritated I became with both the banal and the political and religious commentary that I read. Just like in personal encounters with the truly prejudiced who seem to have no qualms about spewing racism or sexism as though it's patently obvious that everyone around them surely agrees, I often felt somewhat assaulted by some of the views of my so-called friends - even my own family. So it was with determination, and even a little bit of pride, that I declared myself no longer active on Facebook.

Well, this week's reading and focus is not on Facebook, but on (in my mind, anyway) Facebook's evil twin, Twitter. Just when I'd taken a stand, I find myself in a course requiring me to get a Twitter account (and later in the semester, to reengage on Facebook).  

The required articles for my English 518 course have run parallel to the readings I have assigned my students and all of it has had me thinking deeply about my relationships online and offline. On the one hand, it's been a great experience to reflect on what it means to be a friend and how that plays out in both face to face and online interactions. As an instructor talking with my students about these same issues, I've struggled to find positive aspects of new technologies like Facebook and Twitter. I know that my students are engaging heavily in this atmosphere, and I don't want to view their participation as only a negative. This week I had them read an article titled, "Just How Many Facebook Friends Do You Need?" They recently wrote a rough draft responding to a writing prompt for an illustrative essay which read: New technologies help keep friends in close touch. They were to agree, disagree, or both, and provide thoughtful examples to support their position. After their first draft, I provided the Facebook article so that they could go in and add support from an article. Several students wanted to know immediately if they could also find another source to include in their essays. I agreed, and then shared the essay I had to read for English 518 by Clive Thompson titled, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” from the New York Times Online. What I really like about both of these articles is that they offer differing perspectives. On the one hand, it is true that we should be aware as a society -- as a culture -- of our interactions, both online and off, and wary of too many superficial relationships or the dreaded #FOMO (that's fear of missing out, for the uninitiated). And I don't think it will ever cease to be true that intimate relationships require face to face contact. On the other hand, social media is not simply a narcissistic exercise. As the Times article, and others, suggest, there is something to be gained from following our friends and reading about their every move. There is a way to know them through these sites. On a less personal level, there is an opportunity through Twitter and these media to participate, globally and in real time.  



I will admit that, as I was preparing to obtain a twitter account and launch my first tweet, there was a pressure to be clever and relevant. Is this how my students feel? Despite reading Dr. Tryon's lecture notes and listening to his advice about creating an account, I still ended up attaching my name to my account, which I didn't completely mean to do. I also sent a pretty pathetic first tweet about my first tweet, as though millions of people haven't already sent the same or similar message. I guess, though, that I am an optimist, and I love learning, so I'm going to give it a heartfelt try.  I've already found some great resources out there. I'll also admit that I felt a surge of excitement after I followed Dr. Tryon @chutry and he immediately followed me. I have a follower!

By the way, I briefly polled my college students this morning in class and they confirmed what I have recently read/heard: they rarely use Facebook (since so many older people like me have signed up); instead they love Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (unless, of course, we oldies invade that too heavily, too). In the meantime, I stand by my first tweet, "Now I'm as cool as my kids (my students, that is)!"

You can follow me @eebeeleebee