The ShowMe app has just become available through the iTunes app store. ShowMe lets you create audio-narrated whiteboard diagrams. The diagrams can be uploaded to the ShowMe site (after you have registered at their site). The diagram can be uploaded as either a public or private drawing. A private drawing can be shared with others by giving them the URL to the drawing. Public drawings can be searched at the ShowMe site. From the web site, the drawing can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, email, or embeded in your web site or blog.
You may want to consider getting a stylus. You can read reviews by clicking on the links in this post.
When you open the app (which works only in landscape view), the toolbar shown below appears. In addition to drawing and erasing, images can be imported from your Photo library on your iPad.
Screencasts could be viewed by students for reviewing material covered in class.
If each student or group of students had an iPad, they could be assigned to create a screencast on a particular topic, which then be viewed by the teacher and other students in the class (either at the ShowMe web site or at the class’s web site).
In a post of Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List, Richard Felder answers a letter in which the person indicates that their teaching evaluations by students when active learning strategies are used and that the students want to be taught using passive techniques such as lecturing.
Felder explains that "An important part of our job as teachers is equipping as many of our students as possible with high-level problem-solving and thinking skills, including critical and creative thinking" and that "well-implemented student-centered instruction is much more effective than traditional lecture-based instruction at promoting those skills."
It’s important that the students know why you are using the active learning techniques. Felder states, "If you tell them you’re doing it because research has shown that it leads to improved learning, greater acquisition of skills that potential employers consider valuable, and higher grades, most will set aside their objections long enough to find that you’re telling the truth." (See Felder, R.M. (2007). Sermons for grumpy campers. Chem. Engr. Education, 41(3), 183-184, http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Sermons.pdf.
Additional questions that he asks are:
"Did you use the new method long enough to overcome the learning curve associated with it? It can take most of a semester to become comfortable with and adept at active learning, and if you’re using a more complex technique such as cooperative or problem-based learning and you’re not being mentored by an expert, it might take several years."
"If you got unsatisfactory student ratings, did you check references on the method to see if you were doing something wrong? For example, did you assign small-group activities in class that lasted for more than 2–3 minutes or call for volunteers to respond every time? (See Reference 4 to find out how both practices can kill the effectiveness of active learning.) The bibliography suggests references you might consult for each of the most common student-centered methods."
"In your midterm evaluations, did you specifically ask the students whether they thought active learning (or whatever you were doing) was (a) helping their learning, (b) hindering their learning, or (c) neither helping nor hindering? If you do this, you may find that the students objecting vigorously to the method are only a small minority of the class. If that’s so, announce the survey results in the next class session. Students who complain about student-centered methods often imagine that they are speaking for most of their classmates. Once they find out that very few others feel the way they do, the grumbling tends to disappear immediately."
Here are some references provided by Felder:
Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2007). Cooperative learning. In P.A. Mabrouk, ed., Active Learning: Models from the Analytical Sciences. ACS Symposium Series 970, Chapter 4, pp. 34–53. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/CLChapter.pdf
In the article, "Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn?" Daniel Willingham, he states that he hears two suggested ways technology has changed the way students think. Some have suggested that without the multimedia that technology provides, students will become bored. Some have suggested that technology has allowed students the ability to multitask.
Willingham states that there is some truth in the first suggestion but none in the second. The focus of this post is to discuss the first suggestion and ignore the second since no one can truly multitask.
Is technology needed in order for a student to be engaged? And how is technology best used to engage students?
Willingham explained in "Why Don’t Students Like School?" that a good way to engage students is to pose solvable mental problems. These problems are not necessarily puzzles but rather can be activities that present students with mental challenges such as when listening to a story and attempting to anticipate what will happen next.
"In order for technology (or any instructional tool) to increase student engagement in academic content, it has to aid in presenting problems as both challenging and solvable."
"…there is nothing inherently interesting about the technology (at least once the newness wears off ); students are not interested in all software or all hyperlinks. It’s the content and what the user might do with it that makes it interesting or not."
As always, the bottom line is that the design of the instruction is more important than the technology.
In an earlier post, I discussed the learning strategy called whiteboarding. If each student (or least each group of students) had an iPad, they could use the iPad as a whiteboard and record what is written using ReplayNote. ReplayNote is in essence used for screencasting so what ever is recorded can be uploaded to YouTube or an email can be sent, which will contain an URL to a webpage containing the screencast. The videos can be up to 10 minutes long.
Although most people can type faster than they can write, some may have a difficult time with the keyboard on the iPad and would prefer to hand write their notes. If you want to convert your hand-written notes to text, try WritePad.
If you are a member of a group that needs to work on a project, consider using ThinkFold. With ThinkFold, you can create list that other members of the group can view in real time.
In his post, The $2 Interactive Whiteboard, Frank Nochese describes the use of whiteboards for teaching physics. The focus of his article is that too many times professors and teachers are engaged in pseudoteaching which doesn’t engage the students.
If you want whiteboards that have a handle on them, go to WhiteboardsUSA.
In my opinion, in order to make this type of teaching effective, students need to have read the textbook before class and the instructor needs to have a lot of questions for the students that engage them in higher order thinking. The book, Lecture-Free Teaching, has some ideas as to how to implement this approach.
In her article, “Teaching and Learning in an Interactive Classroom,” Dee Silverthorn indicates that she does not advocate getting rid of lectures entirely since there are some concepts that are difficult for the students to learn and by presenting the information to the students, the professor has the opportunity to ask and answer questions.
The free software, VUE (Visual Understanding Environment), is used for creating concept maps. VUE can be installed on your computer but if you want a class of students to have access to VUE, you can install the VUE on a server. But if you don’t have access to a server, you can install the VUE applet in the Public folder of a DropBox account. Although the main use of DropBox is for synchronizing files across multiple computers, DropBox can also be used for sharing files (and accessing with others by placing them in the Public folder, by placing the VUE applet in the Public DropBox folder, anyone can create their own concept map with VUE.
Here’s what you need to do.
1. Go to http://vue.tufts.edu/download/index.cfm and set up a new account if you don’t already have one.
2. Once you have created an account, you will be taken to a page where you can download the Applet.
3. The applet will be downloaded as a zip file. Unzip the file which will create a folder called vueapplet. Place the folder in your DropBox Public folder. You can rename the folder if you like.
4. One of the files within the vueapplet folder is named “index.html.” In order for others to create a concept map using the VUE applet, you will need to get a URL that will access the index.html file. The instructions for getting the URL can be found on DropBox’s site on this page. Give this URL to others and they will be able to create a map using the VUE applet.
Although YouTube allows you to create hyperlinks to other YouTube videos using the Annotations feature, if you want to create a hyperlink that will go to an external site, you can use the LinkedTube. You won’t be able to create a hyperlink within a video that is playing at the YouTube site but if TubeLink will allow you to embed the video in a Web page, blog, wiki, or any site that will accept the HTML code for embedding a video.
Want to share files? Need more than the 2 Gb limit in Dropbox or Box.net? Pogoplug allows you to share the files of a USB drive over the Internet. See Pogoplug at http://www.pogoplug.com/home-en.html
Apple’s word-processing program, Pages, can now create ebooks. Files exported in the ePub format can be imported into iTunes which will cause them to show up in the Books section of iTunes. After you have synced your iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone with iTunes, the ebook will appear in iBooks.
In order to create ebooks with Pages, go to Apple’s support page found here. Interestingly, in the section “More details on using ePub,” it indicates that video can be embedded in the document. What it doesn’t state is that audio files can also be embedded into your ebook.
If you decide to create an ebook using Pages, which states that you need to download the file, “ePub Best Practices.” You can use the document as a template or import the paragraph styles from the ePub Best Practices document into a new or existing Pages document.
One of the nice features about videos embedded in an ebook in iBooks is that you can choose to make the video full-screen.
In the “old” days of educational technology, we asked students to create Powerpoint or Hyperstudio files. But now they can create multimedia ebooks that can be read on an iDevice.
If you have your students blog and you want them to be able to keep their postings after the class is over, consider using Anthologize (AnthologizeYou will need a WordPress installed on a server; in other words this will not work at the hosted WordPress.com site.
Here are some apps that students might want to use if they own and iPad:
Course Notes – http://www.coursenotesapp.com/ – With this app, you can organize your notes into multiple subjects, export them via email, transfer note sessions with other CourseNotes users, track assignments and ToDo lists for each subject, and build your own dictionary. In upcoming versions, you’ll be able to add drawings and images into your notes. $4.99
Audiotorium – http://audiotoriumapp.com/ - This app will allow you to create audio into your notes. You can also share your notes with friends. (As of this writing, Audiotorium is not available in the App Store so I don’t know the price. This site has some photos of it.
The following are excerpts from the February, 2010 issue of Campus Technology, page 34.
I recently read some interesting information that was compiled by Project Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization that surveys K-12 students, teachers, administrators, preservice teachers, and parents nationwide to understand the trends in student learning. In 2008, they surveyed 281,500 K-12 students.
“When Julie Evans, the CEO of Project Tomorrow, gives presentations to higher ed leaders, she discovers that they are usually interested in the students that will be going to college in a couple of years – the high schoolers. But she explains that “looking at the middle school students or upper elementary students – in grades 3 through 8 – is actually a better instructional tool for them, because those kids have a very, very different view from their high school peers.”
“As example of those differences, she points to their viewpoints about online learning. ‘The traditional, conventional theory is that high school students take online classes because they want to get college credit and they want to have a class that fits into their schedule. But when we look at middle school students, they’re more interested in blended learning – where they take a traditional class with a teacher and then also have an online component.’
“Her point: ‘If I’m a college CIO (chief information officer) or CTO (chief technology officer), and I’m only thinking about the 100 percent online class that my students are looking for, then I’m not properly preparing for that next generation of students coming up, who want a blended approach. I want to be building for kids I’m going to see five-plus years from now.’”
“Evans lists nine attributes that characterize these students:
- They’re self-directed in their learning.
- They’re untethered from traditional education.
- They’re expert at personal data aggregation.
- They engage in the power of connections.
- They create new communities.
- They’re not tethered to physical networks.
- They prefer experiential learning.
- They’re content developers.
- The process is as important as – and sometimes more important than – the knowledge gained.”
“Ultimately, Evans says, “students want to define and direct their own educational destinies.” That will, she explains, require schools to develop new kinds of learning spaces, move to more social-based learning, tap digital resources that add relevancy, and move learning beyond the classroom walls, whether those walls reside in a district or on a campus.”
Here’s my take on this – Many of these characteristics such as being expert at personal data aggregation, they engage in power of connections, and they create new communities are features that tell me they are very comfortable in the online world. The fact that to them “the process is as important as the knowledge gained” tells me that they would prefer to learn by doing rather than by listening to a lecture or even engage in a discussion. They are content developers. They like to create and experience what they are learning.
So how do we change the learning environment? As already indicated, hybrid learning may help. Connections and learning communities are not made (or at least not as easily) in 50 minute periods. But learning that can be accomplished anytime, anywhere using mobile, portable devices that have wireless access will allow these students to thrive.
