A day-by-day account of connected learning in an actual college classroom. Spills, chills, thrills, and the occasional system crash, plus the tools to help you get connected too.
My old method of taking attendance was an EPIC FAIL! Okay, that’s an exaggeration—it was perfectly functional, but a major pain to administer. I had the students send an email to a drop box I set up on gmail (like classmonday@gmail.com or something) and include a subject line I gave them in class. What I had visualized was that my student worker could open the Gmail account, sort the messages by sender, and quickly find which ones were missing. Alas, in reality you can’t easily sort a column of messages in Gmail (at least I can’t) so it winds up being a manual seek-and-find to locate the ones who weren’t in the list. Workable, but not at all smooth or efficient. Time for roll-checking, part deux. Read the rest of this entry »
I can say in good conscience that I didn’t teach my students a single thing today. But that’s not to say they didn’t learn anything. Actually I cancelled class and assigned them to go hear one of several speakers who were on campus for a large conference; if my students wanted credit for attending, they had until 11 pm to send me a synopsis of the session they attended. What did I do all day? Ironically, I sat and wrote many of these posts you are reading, since I was a little bit behind when we launched the site.
Of all the achievements I’ve pulled off in this experiment, Day 13 was perhaps the best. No, I’m not talking about finding quiz software that really works; Day 13 was the day when I showed my students what parenting authors like to call “tough love.” We are now almost five weeks into the semester, and we’ve invested many hours in getting the students up to speed on the iPhone interface and our class policies and procedures. But every week, when it’s time for the quiz, we would have 5-8% who couldn’t take it, either due to phone problems or lack of a phone altogether. Day 13 was the day we fixed this problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Today was the day we finally tried our latest and greatest quizzing solution, “SurveyGizmo”. After several less than stellar quizzing efforts, I just knew today was going to go well. At least I had my fingers crossed that it would. You can read an in-depth review of SurveyGizmo and my experiences with it over in our tools and reviews section; the story there includes screen shots of how it formats up the quiz for the small screen. Click here to read the full review. I’ll report on how things went in my next post.
Day 12 was a project day, so after we checked attendance via email I asked my students to answer a single question for me using Nanotools, our very basic locally developed survey system. I explained the dilemma we face in designing an electronic quiz, specifically that the system can give them immediate right/wrong feedback on each question, OR it can let them go back and change answers during the quiz, but not both (NOTE: in a common student fantasy they receive feedback, then are allowed to change answers). My question was which they would prefer: (a) immediate feedback, (b)the chance to change, or (c) no preference.
Today, I learned an important lesson: Nanotools is appropriate for informal feedback ONLY. How did I learn this? I’ll let you take a look at the graph of responses, and you can observe two things. First, the responses 
were roughly split between the first two options. And second, my class of 69 students managed to log a total of 86 votes. This peculiarity was pointed out to me after class by an astute student, and in talking with him I learned that the students had discovered early on that they could vote multiple times. Read the rest of this entry »
Day 11 marked our first exam, covering three chapters of material, and since we could check attendance based on who took the exam, this became our first completely phone-free class day.
One of the big questions I hope to answer is whether or not we can identify a solution robust enough to administer a major exam (50 items) on the phone. Given the amount of trouble we have had giving 10 item quizzes on Blackboard, I have no interest in attempting it using that tool. Hopefully one of our alternative quiz platforms will be more reliable, although it will have to be virtually bullet-proof before I’m willing to risk it on something as significant as an exam. For example, what happens if the server hiccups in the middle—do my students just lose their work or can they log back in and continue? Or what about the students who need the entire fifty minutes–what do they do when the file goes down for 5 minutes in the middle? These and many other questions remain to be answered; if we are potentially able to take the final exam on the phone I will consider that a major achievement.
Of course electronic exams are a good news/bad news proposition: good in that they provide feedback immediately, very bad if that feedback leads the students to cry out in despair or shout for joy while others are still testing. Perhaps we can count off 10 points for any of them who yell?
In more than a decade of teaching in various formats and settings, I can confidently say that Day 10 was one of the easiest class days I have ever experienced. While I would love to give credit to connected learning tools, the real reason is that I was out of town. The timing of the trip was good, since this was group project day. The students did check in with g-mail, then they worked in their teams.
Just FYI, the group project in this class involves teams of 7-8 students developing, purchasing, and reselling an actual product. We loan them up to $500 (real money!) and they have to generate a return of $250 for an ‘A’. The proceeds go to scholarships and non-profit groups. It is probably one of the best ways I know to introduce new students to business at its most basic level. It is also pretty stressful for many of them.
My only real concern about days I am absent is that my students might rate these days as more enjoyable than the days I am present…
Day 9 was a totally new experience for me. Since most of the students in this class are literally 3 months out of high school, we took a full class period to talk about how to study for college exams. I also let the students write and evaluate exam questions, several of which I used on the test. As far as connected learning goes, we checked roll and that was it. But I will mention (since we’re talking about writing questions) that once your students are tied into a session with their personal response system, you can include questions that help you learn a great deal about the people you are teaching. Read the rest of this entry »
Day 8 was our first round of data collection and the results were eye-opening. You can read the details of this first survey here (link later), but first things first: how did we get informed consent? As you may know, informed consent is a formal statement which tells the student important things like, “You can choose to participate or not participate in this research,” and “If you drop out, we won’t lower your grade,” and “We promise not to inject you with an eerie luminescent substance which might turn you into the Incredible Hulk.” Actually you only have to include that last one if you’re doing medical research.
Informed consent is a really good idea; it came about back in the 70’s when a fair number of psychology researchers were abusing undergrads for research purposes. So now all our research has to be approved before we can do it. Smart for the students, smart for the university. The traditional way to do it involves paper (see my discussion here about “paper vs plastic”), so you wind up with a pile of papers signed by students. Read the rest of this entry »
Day 7 will always stick in my mind as the day I finally got to use the response system as I have envisioned it. To start our discussion of international business, I asked a simple question and let them respond to it: Who is the largest international trading partner of the US? Canada, China, Japan, or Germany.
An overwhelming number chose China, while only one student chose Canada (which is actually the correct answer). At that moment, and for probably 5 minutes thereafter, I had their attention. Why? Because my question raised questions in their mind, and inquiring minds are open minds. It was a great moment. The rest of the class experience went about the same way and I felt like we might finally be getting where we want to be.
This class period also featured M*A*S*H*, the Monday App Showcase. I highlighted two free apps, Shazam and Cowbell. If your classroom has a document camera, you can probably set your iPhone under the scanner and let the students see on the screen what you are seeing on your small screen. By the way, neither of these two apps has any real practical value; I mostly wanted to get them thinking about the sorts of things they might find in the app store. I also asked for volunteers to share their favorite apps in a coming class period.
Today was our second electronic quiz, and it went…okay. We had three specific interface-related problems this time around. One student wanted to review a previous answer and hit the back arrow; the quiz was set to disallow this and with the Safari browser, rather than a simple dialog message, the student got locked out. End of quiz (final score 40%). Unhappy student.
A second student emailed later that day to tell me why he scored 60%: he ran out of time. Whether this was due to log-on problems and a late start, loading problems during the quiz, or some other issue, he did not feel like the quiz was a realistic test of what he had learned.
Perhaps most interesting was the student who requested the paper quiz (we once again had 6-8% use paper). When I asked if he was having technical problems, he held up his phone and explained that he could not read the small text. What I saw was a properly formatted question which filled only the center third of the screen and needed only a tap to zoom in. I supplied the tap and he was fine. This was just another reminder of the need for training in the fundamental interface skills required by all our students.
It was rumored years ago that frustrated execs at Apple had discovered that some percentage of the population were not able to master the basic double-click needed to use a one-button mouse. I don’t know if this story is true, but it seems clear that even in a “tech savvy” generation like this one we need to provide a good bit of hand-holding in the early stages of the process, otherwise we risk alienating students from the very tools we are trying to introduce.
