CIT Blog » Teaching with Technology

Guest speaker Skypes in

Andrea Novicki — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:33:29 +0000

Owen Astrachan (Professor, Computer Science at Duke) invited a graduate of Duke, Ge Wang, to be a guest speaker to his Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet course (CS 82). Dr. Wang, at Stanford University, used Skype to connect with the 340 students at Duke, alternating between a video of himself talking, and sharing his computer screen for his presentation.

Astrachan reported “it just worked” and was delighted with how easily he was able to share a guest speaker with his students.

After this was posted, Heidi Madden directed me to a video showing a Duke German history class using Skype to talk to photographer Vince Cianni about his original photographs of the fall of the Berlin wall. Join them by watching the video.

Learn IT @ Lunch: Duke Wiki and Voicethread

Shawn Miller — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:20:25 +0000

OIT’s Learn IT @ Lunch series offers Duke faculty, students and staff an opportunity to get some information on new technologies in a relaxed setting. Two upcoming session might be of particular interest to Duke faculty:

Wiki Tricks: DukeWiki Advanced Formatting – highly recommended for those interested in using Duke’s Wiki tool to better manage research groups, projects and documentation.
VoiceThread – this session will be led by the developers of the VoiceThread tool: Monte Evans & Andrew Synowiez

Take out those cell phones in class

Andrea Novicki — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:52:45 +0000

Most students have cell phones, and more than half of all US undergraduates own an internet-capable handheld device and more plan to purchase one in the next 12 months (ECAR Research Study 2009). Why not use them?

How? Here are three ideas:

Cell phones and internet-capable phones can be used as polling devices, like clickers, to engage students during class. Poll Everywhere will supply an easy to use interface for small classes for free, or large classes for a fee.

Students could access information during class, to contribute to discussions or to inform critical thinking. How? Students could query Google or Google Scholar, access the library or librarian, use news sources, or specific applications for your topic.

Leverage student interest in texting to learn about their thinking during class, by setting up a backchannel, like Hotseat at Purdue University. A teaching assistant or other instructor can monitor the backchannel, and alert you to questions, problems, and student interest at appropriate points in the class.

Come to a discussion of using mobile devices for education, both in and out of class, on the second Tuesday of each month.

ProfHacker blog: Practical suggestions by and for faculty

Amy Campbell — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:28:21 +0000

ProfHacker “delivers tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.” Recent posts focus on topics such as not making assumptions about students’ technical skills, simple ways to enhance in-class group work, and handling Twitter spam. ProfHacker’s editors Jason B. Jones (associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University) and George H. Williams (assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate) are joined by a cadre of faculty and student authors from a variety of institutions to provide 2 or 3 useful posts a day.

Help Duke develop its roadmap for elearning

Yvonne Belanger — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:14:33 +0000

In 2009-10, Duke’s elearning Roadmap Committee is actively gathering input from Duke instructors and students about tools they use for teaching and learning. The Committee will assess the needs of the campus community to identify tools, support and infrastructure that should be centrally provided. Whether you use blogs or wikis, Blackboard or VoiceThread, Micrograde or Maple TA, Second Life or Flickr, the Committee needs your insight and ideas about what’s most important for the Duke community. What works well for the kind of courses you teach? What could be improved? What’s missing? Learn about the Committee’s process, findings and ways to get involved and share your ideas at a new web site, http://elearning.duke.edu. At this site, you can…

learn more about events we’re sponsoring and ways you can participate in the conversation (Get Involved), including an event for faculty coming up soon on Thursday, November 12 (register)
stay in touch with (and comment on!) what we’re hearing from members of the campus community (Your Feedback)
monitor our activities for the 2009-2010 academic year (Our Goal and Our Timeline)

Duke faculty use Flip cameras for teaching

Andrea Novicki — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:22:35 +0000

Duke faculty Jennifer Ahern-Dodson (Writing) and Kevin Caves (Biomedical Engineering) are featured in the article How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education published in eLearn Magazine.

Ahern-Dodson and Caves participated in CIT’s Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program, to share ideas about teaching with video with other faculty. In the article, they describe how they used Flip cameras from the Duke Digital Initiative for student projects in their courses.

Explore cell phones in teaching

Andrea Novicki — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:52:37 +0000

Meet with other Duke faculty and talk about ideas for using cell phones (or any small, mobile devices) in teaching, both in and outside the classroom.

At a previous meeting, participants discussed using these devices in class to engage students and foster interaction. Owen Astrachan demonstrated how he used Poll Everywhere with his class of 344 students. Poll Everywhere allows students to use their own devices as personal response systems, to give answers electronically in class.

Other participants discussed using applications that provide information relevant to the course, like Epocrates for accessing drug information, Labs 360 as a medical laboratory guide, or other applications for medical students. Other examples might be using the mobile version of the Wall Street Journal in a business class, flash cards for organic chemistry reactions, or spreadsheet applications for laboratories.

We discussed how instructors could incorporate the social networking and connectedness of applications like Smule’s Ocarina to engage students, and how Twitter could be used to build a community of students in an educational program.

Join us:

Register for our next discussion at 10 am on October 13.
E-mail Andrea Novicki to suggest topics.

EtherPad: real-time collaborative writing

Shawn Miller — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:37:43 +0000

A Mashable blog post listing “15 Essential Web Tools for Students” includes several tools that faculty may also find useful. We’ve written about Evernote, Delicious, Zotero and even Google Docs before (and they’re all a part of our Web2.0 Toolkit). One newer web app mentioned in the post is worth noting: EtherPad.

At first glance, EtherPad is not too unlike Google Docs – it’s also an online word processing tool of sorts. However, even though Google Docs allows collaboration with others (by sharing and editing the document), it only allows one user to edit the document at a time. EtherPad allows collaborative editing by several users in real-time.

EtherPad is still relatively new, meaning the editing features aren’t exactly robust – but when you’re doing collaborative writing, getting ideas down quickly is more important that the final formatting and markup. Word, HTML and text files can all be imported into a “pad” or you can just start from scratch. Pads can be exported in various formats (text, PDF, Word, etc), and there’s even a nifty “time slider” feature that can “play back” all the edits via a timeline.

No doubt, those teaching writing courses, or other courses that need to be able to capture rapid text-based collaboration, have been waiting or a tool like this. Here’s the catch:

Pads are free and public by default. You can invite anyone else by emailing them a URL (they don’t even need an EtherPad account). The downside here is that the Pad is public and anyone could potentially view it.

Free, public pads are limited to 16 users. That’s 16 users at the same time. Here in the library, we recently used Etherpad as a way to collaboratively construct notes during a guest speaker’s session – the only problem being that more than 16 people wanted to add something and basically had to wait until someone one of the other 16 users would “leave” the pad

Want privacy and the option for more users? EtherPad has a “pro” version available.

NOTE: If you’d like to try EtherPad, you can try it by editing the document in the screenshot (the text of this blog post).

Talking about Tweeting – DDI Twitter Lunch

Lenore Ramm — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:46:12 +0000

Earlier in September, several of us met as part of the monthly DDI Twitter program brown bag lunch discussion series. One of the overall goals of the program is to encourage a few faculty members to actively use Twitter in their courses, but another goal is to have meaningful discussions among interested faculty on academic uses of Twitter.

After introductions, I provided a list of potential uses of Twitter in a course (below). We discussed everyone’s ideas for using Twitter, which ranged from trying out Twitter in a language class to tweeting as an entire discipline to develop its community. Attendees were concerned about privacy, as far as FERPA and HIPAA, and representing the university as an institution. Attendees expressed a need for Duke to have an explcit social media policy, without stifling its use. Despite perceived complications, there was a lot of excitement about potential for spontaneous student participation, particularly from those who are more introverted. I also demonstrated two Twitter clients for following a large volume of tweets, Tweetdeck for the desktop and the web-based Tweetgrid. Two additional discussions sessions have already been scheduled for this fall, so you can register now.

Use cases for which all students would need a mobile device, laptop or be in a lab during class:

Polling each student within class
Participating in a class “back channel,” which would consist of lecture summaries, commentary and questions

Use cases for which a portion, but not all, of students would have access to a mobile device or other computer during class:

Tweeting in groups of 3 to 5 students where the tweets reflect the group consensus following a discussion

Use cases for which students would have access to a mobile device, laptop or desktop machine outside of class:

Students could receive information tweeted by the instructor and/or teaching stafff on course administrative issues and reminders.
Students could receive tweets from the instructor and/or the teaching staff on course related topics.
Students may tweet containing links to course related research.
Students may tweet reflections on course materials and course related topics.
Students may search for tweets using course related keywords or follow relevant #hashtags (e.g. #iranelection)
Students may follow experts in the course discipline or pertinent public figures.
Students may use Twitter to conduct interviews with one or more followers.
Students may tweet notes from course readings.
Students may tweet field observations or lab results.
Students participating in service learning could communicate from a remote location and record observations or reflections.
Both students participating in remote service learning or study abroad could use Twitter to maintain a connection with their classmates or advisers on campus.
Foreign language students may tweet in the course language and follow Tweeters from their respective countries.
Students may tweet to request help from classmates, the instructor or teaching staff.
Students may tweet creatively, taking advantage of the 140 character limit in order to condense a large idea into a brief statement (e.g. literary works, world religions described in a single tweet)
Students may do research using tweets as data.

Using video to comment on student writing

Andrea Novicki — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:44:01 +0000

Julie Reynolds, in Duke’s Biology Department, was recently showcased on the Techsmith’s education blog for her innovative use of Jing, a program that captures images and video of your computer screen.

Dr. Reynolds uses Jing to comment on her students’ writing, and to have students comment on each others’ writing projects. Dr. Reynolds pointed out that when it’s impossible to schedule face-to-face conferences, she can talk about students’ writing rather than simply to write comments in the margins. Jing allows her to record highlighted passages for students to see while she talks about them. Her students also use Jing to comment on each others papers.

Read a fuller description on Techsmith’s blog.

See examples of Dr. Reynolds’ review and student peer review.