Day 4 was our first semi-normal class day. In other words, all my predictions about how much more efficient my teaching would be with connected learning tools are turning out to be completely wrong, since I basically killed a full week getting us all up to speed on the course tools and technologies. Hmmm…
Today we started with a “teacher trivia” event, in which I placed multiple-choice questions about me on the screen and students guessed the answers; this item is normally done on Day 1, but our limited time that day didn’t accommodate it. This event used a very basic classroom response system (Nanotools, see links) which allows question creation on the fly. It went nicely for five questions, then crashed. We finished out the exercise in the traditional way, asking volunteers to answer. Not so ‘connected’ today… Read the rest of this entry »
(OK, that last line about disaster around the bend was totally made up. Sorry if you feel misled. I’ll give you full credit for your quiz to make it up to you.)
Day 2 was intended to address everything which went wrong in Day 1. That sounds ambitious, but in Day 1 I identified several areas we had to address before we could move ahead. In order to do this, I created a full-day session called “Connected Boot Camp” (you can read the details in the tools section on this site). The purpose of this experience was to insure that every student in the room could, at a minimum, use the basic class tools to take quizzes, register attendance, and respond to in-class polls.
Day 1 was intended to be a comfortable get-acquainted session. We would talk about the course, I would share some info about me, we would discuss connected learning and use their iPhones for the first time to take a short quiz over the syllabus (they would do this in groups and I would help them so it was very low key). As any professor knows, DAY ONE MATTERS, so I planned it out very carefully.
The Connected Prof 