The age-old question of how to keep learners engaged is being answered by new age answers: augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). With these emerging technologies, topics come to life for students. The experiences are novel, learners have control over their interactions, and can therefore become immersed in their experience.
Without any equipment except my cell phone, I tapped into the free Google Expeditions app and invited a virtual skeleton into my office:
Have you ever made a lecture video? If so, have you watched it? What do you think about your pacing, the environment you shot in, and your performance?
More importantly, what do you think your students would say about your videos? Would they say you’re:
Boring?
Unfocused?
Hard to see or hear?
In a distracting environment?
Verbose?
Fear not, even with the driest of materials, you can still put on a scintillating lecture. Today I’ll share with you some tried and true techniques to get the most out of your filming time, and to improve the end product both for you and for your students. Continue reading
On Feb 15th, the Center for Educational Technology (CET) at DePaul University hosted our annual Tech Fair, inviting faculty, staff, and students from the College of Education and across the university to socialize, demo tools and gadgets, connect with organizations, and participate in a discussion on educational technology.
Some folks out there would say that a tablet can do what a computer used to, and others argue that while they are always improving in capabilities, tablets are still not occupying the same space in terms of computing power. Desktop computer sales in general have been on the decline for several years now, and tablets keep trying to further bridge the gap. As someone who spends many days testing, evaluating and re-evaluating software and hardware, this situation begs me to answer the question: can I really ditch the laptop?
I know that classroom mobile phone policies can be a fraught subject. Student distraction is a real concern, and handheld technology gives students a tool that introduces a constant stream of outside input (social media, news alerts, games) that often seem far more interesting than the class material or activities. One way to combat this is to make the phones or devices part of the learning experience.
During the 2016–17 academic year, the Mobile Learning Initiative (MoLI) conducted a pilot of Poll Everywhere as a classroom response system. Poll Everywhere is a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) clicker system used primarily to poll or quiz students in a face to face classroom. Poll Everywhere allows students to answer questions in class on their personal device (phone, tablet, or laptop) and visualizes their responses in real time. It’s an easy way to engage students, build more interaction into your teaching, and gauge student understanding. It’s also a great tool to use for “fun” in the classroom, from a quick icebreaker to a complex trivia competition.
I currently teach online and hybrid Mathematics courses in the College of Science and Health. My courses are computationally intensive and often require the professor to write equations or diagrams on a white board. This presents a particular challenge when creating screencasts for online delivery, which requires a combination of hardware and software. I will focus primarily on the hardware for this post, the software is worthy of another complete discussion.
Before going on to the hardware, I should mention some of the software tools. First you need a screen capture software to record the screen and audio. Free screen capture software includes Jing and Screencast-O-matic. The most robust, paid versions include Camtasia Studio for Mac and PC (also from Techsmith) and ScreenFlow on the Mac. (I use ScreenFlow.) Next, depending on the hardware solution chosen, you will need a drawing tool. A great freeware app is Open-Sankoré for Mac/PC/Linux. (Note that the latest version of Open-Sankoré does not work with Mac OX Yosemite. OpenBoard is a workable alternative.) Khan Academy is well known for their engaging videos (PC only) which works with SmoothDraw. On the Mac side, there are a couple of candidates. I use Deskscribble and FlySketch. Of course, there are some hardware alternatives which are included below. Continue reading
Sort of? I can’t claim that the information I’ll share will help you make a case for your department chair or dean to pony up money for this (or to allow you to use any educational funds already allotted to you for this purpose). But, when I’m making a decision to divert the Game of Thrones action figure portion of my paycheck to an expensive tech gadget, coming up with a professional reason to buy a toy always helps ease the stress of the decision.
Disclaimer: So, yes, I woke up at 2:00 am April 10 to put in an order for the Apple Watch. I didn’t make an appointment to see the watch in person – I knew I wanted the Apple Watch Sport, since my primary reason for purchasing it is to replace my FitBit, and I also knew I wanted the smaller watch face size, since I have chicken-leg-sized wrists. A colleague of mine made an appointment with her husband and said it was well worth it, since they both ended up choosing different watch options from what they had anticipated purchasing.
There are many, many reviews out there (some of which will be linked below, and Mashable’s is my favorite) from folks who have actually had this thing on their wrists for a week or so. My focus here is on helping you – and me – justify the purchase as “for my job as a teacher”: Continue reading
I still shudder when I think of standing with my father curbside watching his laptop being carried away in the trunk of an anonymous city cab. We couldn’t chase the cab, we had no recollection of which cab company it was, and my dad had paid the driver in cash. Everything on his computer was instantly, mercilessly gone. All we could do was stand there and watch, slack-jawed.
That was a decade ago.
Just last week, I had a harrowing experience of my own: I spilled water on my laptop, completely destroying it. The Macbook Pro was pronounced dead on arrival at the Genius Bar.
I felt horrible and lamented my carelessness to my partner. He just shrugged and said, “thin client; no biggie.” Continue reading
Up until now, the reports of the death of the textbook industry have been greatly exaggerated. Remember when the PDF was going to change everything? But this week, I have seen a couple of really cool stories that have convinced me that the traditional market for textbook is in its last days.
The first story is the preview of Plastic Logic’s new electronic-reading device, which premiered at this year’s DEMO conference. You can watch the five-minute demo below.
While similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which was launched last year, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is made from plastic instead of glass. That makes it lighter, thinner, and more durable. But what really sets it apart from the Kindle is that it’s open. The Kindle is a closed system. The only content I can read on a Kindle is content that Amazon makes available. That stinks. I want to determine what I read on my e-reader. I want to read my documents, my reports, my PowerPoint presentations. If I have a digital copy of a book, magazine, or textbook, I should be able to upload it to the e-reader. Plastic Logic lets me do that.
The second story that helped seal the fate of the textbook industry comes from WNYC’s On the Media. It’s an interview with Preston McAfee, an economics professor at the Californina Institute of Technology. Dr. McAfee was unsatisfied with the intro-to-economics textbooks on the market, so he wrote his own, and then he did something really cool. He licensed his textbook under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use the book for noncommercial use. Dr. McAfee hopes that other economists will add to the book, improving it, and thus create an open-source textbook. If it works for software, why not textbooks?
You can listen to the whole interview here:
I see the combination of these two ideas really changing the textbook industry. The e-reader eliminates the need for a physical object, and the Creative Commons open-source textbook eliminates the expense of the content. In addition, it allows faculty to create a textbook that is unique and tailored specifically for each individual class and that can actually be updated and revised during the quarter. It makes me want to go back to school.