Best Practices with Mobile Tech: #adjunctchat Tuesday, July 15

Mobile Technology is here to stay.  It is a fact of academic life.

Many of us may try to resist integrating mobile technology into our classrooms. However, the fact is that it is now a part of our students' lives and it is something as teachers we need to think about whether we work in a traditional classroom or online. What are some ways in which mobile technology has changed the classroom?

First, there is the positive ways. Students have access to information on their mobile devises which can broaden the curriculum. Instructors no longer have to rely on outdated information and can bring in topical issues. This is true of all majors. Another advantage is that higher education students can be sent out of the classroom to learn, observe, and experience what they are learning in context. I often use my class time to send students out and observe while keeping in touch via mobile technology. Using technology in the classroom also helps the instructor to give instant feedback as students work in class. I am able to point to different resources or help students learn how to navigate through information, developing their information literacy, communication, and critical thinking skills.

Outside of class, students can contact their instructor or TA outside of office hours. This is especially important for adjuncts and contingent faculty who may not have access to offices or private spaces for discussion. And new mobile technologies allow for more natural conversation through facetime, skype, or google hangouts. I also am able to update my students, giving them access, through mobile apps for programs such as Trello.com, edmodo, googledocs, youtube or blackboard, to updated resources, feedback, and assignments. Finally, for "temporary" faculty, students can maintain a relationship once a faculty member has left the university. Social networking sites such as facebook or linkedin allows faculty to maintain that relationship which can be a reciprocal relationship for graduate school and employment. I will check in with my former students when I'm revising my classes to get real world feedback so my course stays relevant.

However, more often than not, faculty know the downside of mobile technology. Students become distracted with their technology and social media, neither listening to the instructor or classmates (if they do happen to be focusing on class work) nor being engaged in the class (checking email, messages, or facebook or even studying for another class). For an instructor it is difficult to know when a student is taking notes on their mobile device or communicating with someone outside of class (although grins during a discussion of marketing law are a dead give away).

There are also technology difficulties, such as the digital divide (those who have more advanced technology compared to those that don't), power outages, access to wifi (or lack of access), lack of support for individual devices, and incompatibility with other digital devices. Many faculty members are not confident to use technology that they either are unfamiliar with or have no academic support for. In addition, designing activities for effective use of mobile technology in the classroom may be time consuming as there may be technology testing and training used. For example, there are different designs for smartphone use, tablets, and laptops. Smartphones require a different format than computer based content. In addition, each screen shot on a small mobile device can be linked but normally can't be seen as a whole product.

Finally, the ability for students to reach an instructor 24/7 can lead to an adjunct or part-time instructor interacting with students above and beyond the time for which they are paid. Students rarely distinguish between a tenured, full-time, or part-time instructor and may expect unlimited access.

In this week's #adjunctchat, we will trade some best practices for using mobile technology (m-learning) both in traditional classes and online classes. We will look at the use of mobile technology in academics as a whole and the challenges for adjuncts specifically.

1) Do you allow the use of mobile technology in your courses? Why or why not?
2) What are some challenges in using mobile technology (especially for adjuncts/contingent faculty)
3) How might you integrate mobile technology into your teaching?
4) What boundaries do/might you need to create for effective use of mobile technology with your students?
5) What resources would you like to have when developing activities, resources, instructional design, technology for mobile use in the classroom?

This discussion is open to anyone interested in mobile technology in the classroom. I'll try to put up some links of examples I've used in my classes.

Using students to keep current on research

I know I have not posted anything in a while (and probably won't after this post). However, I currently am buried in grading papers from two different classes, trying to get final grades in as it is the end of the semester.

As I was reading through my student papers, I realized they had a wealth of research that I could use both in my dissertation and in my classes next semester. I have decided that texts don't have what I am looking for in my classes. I have begun to tailor the readings to my classes and assign readings from journals and academic websites. To do this, however, I need to stay current with the research. This is difficult at times, especially when I have pressing family, work, and academic responsibilities.

I have begun to cull promising articles from the resources my students used to write their final papers, an expanded reflection on a topic (or topics) of their choice within the course. I use these papers to help direct changes to the course (areas of interest to the students and areas that I might see as lacking, that perhaps I did not address in the class).

Based on my evaluation of their papers, I will then try to find new resources to address those areas I feel my course needs improvement in and come up with new activities that I can use in my class.

One area many of my students wrote about was virtual teams. Many also wrote about social loafing (always a big topic for groups used in education) and decision making. With this in mind I have decided on trying to integrate two new activities in my class next semester:

1) The virtual/online class I teach often is difficult for the students. I have been dissatisfied about the task I give them to work on. It seems unorganized and students are often confused (although that is part of the task that I want them to learn from). I have decided to expand their task from one of "introductions" to one of sharing information. After reading Jenny Luca's newest post, I decided I would have each group search for a specific item/information and then combine their findings online. This way I can have them work together using a wiki or googledocs, and hopefully see how search engines filter results depending on individual preferences. Hopefully, the groups will be diverse enough that their results will be different. If not, we can address the idea of groupthink.

2) I am going to include a peer review grade in one of the projects. The two projects I set up for my group communication are different tasks with different communication requirements. One is a very structured task in which group members are assigned specific tasks and are given an individual grade for their work within the group. The second task is ill-structured, using a student generated code of conduct, student determined project, and meeting minutes or other written form of communication to document the group work. The first is teacher directed whereas the second is student generated. The two projects overlap with the intention being that students experience two different types of groups and the communication needs that different environments require. Because the second project does not have an individual part to it, there is a lot of social loafing to the project. I have tried to get students to create a code of conduct in which they generate some form of evaluation, but students do not perceive that they have the ability to enforce their code through grades, etc... So I have decided that their code of conduct will have a peer review piece that they will then review at the end of the semester and hand it for grading individual members.


I have no qualms of using my students to do some of the leg work needed to make my classes better. This is the type of student feedback that I feel is important and much better than anonymous questionnaires asking students "how do you like the class".

A Generation of Teachers

I realized yesterday as my son was teaching me how to text (yes, I couldn't figure out how to text on my phone!) that not only is this a generation of learners, but also a generation of teachers. I see this all the time in my class (online and face to face) and with my children and their friends.

So how are they different from my generation? My generation looked to the teacher for answers. Ultimately, the teacher was the expert who would "teach" us how to do things. If we don't know how to do something, we go to an "expert" who will know how to "teach" us how to do something.

What I noticed about my children's generation is that they take direction from the person who wants to know how to do something, asking a lot of information. I was impressed with the fact that my son asked me if I knew how to do "X", then showed me how to do it, then had me do it. He didn't always have the patience to let me make mistakes and have me try it again. Rather, being a typical teen, he looked at me in disgust and showed me again how to do "X". I find this is the same process my students use (with out the disgust) when showing something to their classmates.

Integrating elearning into the classroom: the preliminaries

The first step in integrating elearning into the classroom, either as an activity, a day of training, or a semester class is to establish why you have chosen elearning in the first place.

• What are your goals in using elearning?
• What do you expect your students to get out of the experience?
• Do you have the support of administrators (resource, moral, or technical)?
• If not, where will you get the resources or technical support, and how will you motivate students to use the elearning as a way of learning?
• How much time do you have to develop the activity, course, project? How much time do you have to implement the activity, course, project?
• What are the expectations of stakeholders in using elearning?

Once you have answered these questions, you can begin to determine if this is really something you can implement. While I am a great supporter of elearning, nothing is worse than having very little time to train instructors on the use of technology for use in one day's time (yes, I have seen that happen before, resulting in total failure of "elearning"). Likewise, many organizations opt for elearning as a time saving mechanism or cost cutting. If time is not saved (which most of us involved in elearning know is rarely a savings in time, but rather an increase) or costs are decreased, but at the expense of effective learning, then administrators and other stakeholders will be disappointed. Sometimes it is better to POSTPONE elearning until it can be done well.

Different levels of education

I read blogs that address a wide variety of education levels. My own Introduction to Distance Learning course had instructors from pre-school to community learning to universities and secondary schools. I have worked with them all at integrating elearning into their curriculum. However, there are differences between the different levels. Therefore, some of the questions each level of education needs to address includes:

• What skills do students have in learning, technology, and time management coming into the activity?
• What legal, moral, educational, and technology restrictions and regulations will students and instructors need to comply with at the level?
• How much autonomy can the student and instructor have for this elearning activity?
• What skills will students need to develop in order to accomplish elearning (i.e. level of literacy, foreign language skills, keyboarding skills, communication skills)? How (and who) will these skills be developed?
• What other stakeholders will need to be consulted in supporting the students' elearning? For pre-schoolers, for example, both the caregivers and support staff (if designated as disabled, this might have included physical and speech theorpists, social workers, and special education teachers). For employees, this might be supervisors or ITS to allow access to blocked sites or special software down loads.
  

Make it relevant to use elearning

Finally, many just integrate elearning into learning because that is what everyone else is doing. As the first set of questions indicate, it is not always relevant to use elearning.

In my experience, there are three main reasons for integrating elearning into a curriculum:

1. To reorganize time for instructors to create a better use of time (i.e. going to a conference or teaching at multiple locations at the same time) or to allow instructors to teach when they cannot physically be present with the students
2. To provide opportunities for students that might be limited by classroom space, schedules, or resources (including funding)
3. To develop technological skills and understanding of the use of technology in the 21st century society

It is always important that you choose a course, activity, or project that will be relevant for the student, the curriculum goals, and the organizational capacity to support elearning. I always recommend that my students begin with the question, "What can you NOT do now, that elearning might allow you to do?" This might be giving individualized attention, connecting students to the outside world, allow your students more time to reflect as a means of learning, provide access to information to a greater number of people, or help to develop specific skills such as communication, writing, or reading. It depends on the organization, the curriculum goals, and the level of education.

Teaching in the 21st Century: The discussion continues

I am swamped with getting my grades in for the end of the semester and working on my dissertation (while I have some time). However, I could not let Ken Allen's comment on my previous post go unanswered. As I composed a response, I realized it had turned into a post!

Technology for teaching vs. teaching technology

I agree with you that this is a "learning" issue, not just an elearning issue. I am sure you have had the same experience with the debate of how much science a science teacher needs to know to teach science.

I think teachers are underappreciated as the assumption is that if you know a content area, you can "teach". In New York State, secondary school teachers need to have two master's degrees, one in their content area and the other in education.

What gets dicey is what should the education degree include and in New York state the degree includes courses on writing (across the curriculum), but not necessarily technology. In other words, should high school teachers be teaching technology per se or should they be integrating the use of technology within their classes so students get the practice of using technology in multiple contexts (as happens currently with writing?) In addition, many of the new graduates are armed with new pedagogies which might integrate technology into the curriculum, but the system of assessment and the pedagogical structures within the school make it impossible for these teachers to implement these new strategies into their teaching.

An alternative school, which my daughter may be attending in the Fall, integrates these new pedagogies. The fact that they had 15 times more applications for each teaching position than most schools demonstrates how teachers would LIKE to use a more updated pedagogy in their teaching, but are not allowed to due to the curriculum and organizational culture within many schools.

Preparing Teachers for the 21st Century

So back to your original question as to how to prepare teachers for the 21st century, I would propose the following:

1. Teachers should learn technology and how it can be used (conceptual and pedagogical) as part of their education degree. This should include the same format that writing across the curriculum course include such as technology for science, technology for communication, technology for the humanities, etc...
2. Teachers should understand the implications of the use of technology on learning
3. Teachers should learn how to work with technology specialists in designing activities that will help to reinforce the theoretical principles learned in "technology class" (i.e. allowing for practice in multiple contexts so students understand the affordances of technology within a certain context)
4. There should be a push to implement "technology classes" as part of the curriculum, just as there are "writing classes." These classes focus on the conceptual and skill building needed for the 21st century. Then other classes reinforce these concepts and skills in throughout the curriculum.
5. There should be an effort to have "technology curriculum specialists" the same way there are "writing curriculum specialists" that teachers can use as a resource. In addition, teachers should be required to integrate technology use into their class (as is currently being done with writing) with a certain % of activities using APPROPRIATE technology for that discipline. For example, the use of a graphing calculator or SPSS software for a math course would be appropriate. Concept mapping or blogging would not be appropriate as it does not teach computing which is needed in the field of Math. On the other hand, the use of excel would not be appropriate for a Language Arts course, but a Ning would as a means of improving communication skills is central to most English Language Arts curriculums.
   

Using technology in a no-tech classroom

I just found out that one of the classes I'm teaching will not have a LCD projector or computer as part of the classroom. There is wireless computer access. The course is "Speech Composition and Presentation", which can be taught without technology. However, last semester I used a variety of video clips to illustrate concepts we were covering in class. In addition, I used technology such as a free teleprompter (web-based) or powerpoint, technologies that are becoming more and more important to use effectively for communicators.

So my quandary is how to teach this class with limited access to technology. I decided to open this up to readers in hope they had some suggestions. Next week, I will outline some of my ideas for addressing this problem.