How often have you heard something like this:  Because the millennials/generation Yers/digital natives… are already familiar with the technology, we have to …

Just ignore it.

As much as such propaganda intimates tech-shy teachers, it might be a myth that today’s students are innately tech-savvy .  I have often heard from faculty members complaining that students do not actually have the kind of technological competency as people give them credit to.   The label of “digital natives” or other such labels do not mean much as there is much disparity within the group.   We cannot actually predict how tech-savvy a student is simply because he/she happened to be born between 1980 and 2000.  As John Hermes mentioned in a recent conference, there are still students who put numbers in an Excel and then use calculators to add them up.   We are certainly not alone in such suspicion.  Read this Economist article the net generation, unplugged for more information about tech-savviness among students.

What this means is that educators can help move students along, beyond Facebook and Twitter, to tools and uses that can help students in their personal productivity and learning.  One might expect some kind of technological classes to be teaching them what to do, yet from my long experience as a student I realized that nothing works better than the role model of a teacher who has learned to use technology in an engaging and productive way.

As strange as this may sound, digital natives need your help!

I am personally worried about this “banning” approach.   I have given my reasons in a telephone interview (Interview Audio) with Dr. Maureen Wideman from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in their recent newsletter.   I made some similar remarks about the issue in today’s presentation.

Also in our mobile learning survey, students voiced their dissatisfaction that they are not allowed to bring computers into the classroom.  Some feel they are punished for those who do not behave responsibly in class.  One student writes that he does not come to the university to be a “transcriptionist” to write notes on a piece of paper and then transcribe these to their computer.   Maybe it is a time to make some change?

What do you think?  Do you have any strategies to turn distraction into opportunities?  Let us know so that we can help share your best practices.

You are probably using these daily, but have you considered including some videos in your class (online or in the classroom)?  Here are some advice been given by Dr. Bonk and participants in a recent workshop held at the Heartland e-learning Conference held at the University of Central Oklahoma:

Good uses:

• Use videos as supplemental materials;
• Use videos as discussion starters;
• Use videos as  ”vaults”, repositories of reusable teaching content;
• Use videos as discussion starters (bringing it all together);
• Use videos to improve memory (something you want students to learn till they get it);
• Use videos of experts students would otherwise be unable to “meet”;
• Use videos as an “add-on”;
• Use videos in a “mix” in a flexible combination of learning objects;
• Use videos as “advanced organizers” to structure a discussion;
• Use videos for “pause and reflect” during your teaching process;
• Use some “summary” videos to end a teaching session (to sustain interest);
• Use “pro and con” videos to present two sides of the argument to promote critical thinking;
• Use videos for healthy competitions;
• Ask students to find, share or even create relevant videos before class meetings.

Bad uses:

• Irrelevant uses;
• Overuse;
• Using videos of poor quality;
• Using videos that are too long;
• Risking copyright violations;
• Having limited time for use (showing a 10-minute videos when you have only 2 minute left);
• Not watching a video yourself before releasing it to students;
• Using video as “babysitter” (use it because you cannot be there to teach the same content);
• Including automatically generated “related” videos that may not be relevant at all.

Also, try to post some of your own videos, if you don’t mind the potential risk of becoming a “Professor Celebrity”.

During an e-learning workshop taught by Dr. Bonk of Indiana I am taking right now (talking about distraction!), participants are asked to use green, yellow and pink (for red) post-its to indicate educational technologies or methods they consider using or would not use.  As I sat closest to these notes, I took some notes here.   See if these are also what you consider/would not consider using (some overlapping exists between categories, naturally.)

Green: (”What I’ll use”)

• Online videos
• Adding voice variety
• Podcast, vodcast
• Archived streaming
• Free resources such as 60second recap
• Video conferencing
• Jing
• Youtube
• Flexible learning (flexible combination of online/mobile/face-to-face format)
• Virtual icebreakers
• Electronic manuals/tutorial

Yellow: (”What I’ll consider”)

• The “cloud”
• Virtual world
• Video chat
• Jing/screenr
• Screen capture

Red: (”What I won’t use”)

• Clickers
• Take students to a computer lab
• Online museums
• Telepresence
• Wearable tech
• Virtual world
• Coaches on mobile
• Wikipedia for academic reference

Dr. Dray uses avatars on Blackboard in all his MBA courses both on site and online, including Information Technology and the Future, e-Commerce Marketing and Management, and Practice Management in Health Care Systems.

“Avatars are another tool to help us communicate with students in their ever increasing virtual world. Students like them because they are prevalent in computer and internet applications. Seemingly, they are everywhere, including: games, social networking, help screens, online instruction, chats, messaging programs, blogs, and artificial intelligence programs. ”   Dr. Dray said.  The web site Voki offers a variety of “avatars” to choose from.  You may be able to find one that looks like you.  The cool thing about it is that it has a number of options for you to broadcast your voice.  You can record your own voice (1 minute), use the text-to-speech options to broadcast your voices.  You can then copy the embedding codes to your Blackboard course.

(To play, simply click on the triangle play button.)

Dr. Dray suggests that faculty members try using avatars on Blackboard.   “They are easy to use, maintain, and can be customized to look like you. Some are stand alone caricatures and some speak/move (Voki application). I recommend using them in a limited fashion: a brief welcome to your class in the announcements”. He also lists some other uses: “reminders under assignments, and class praise for tasks well done via email.”  Indeed, students may sometimes find it refreshing to “hear” an instruction, instead of just reading texts.  As Dr. Dray correctly pointed out, this is no substitute for you in teaching a lecture, but it offers some opportunities for you to diversity your online materials once in a while.  Dr. Dray said most of his students are adult students, but they still like his uses of the avatars a lot.

Here is an example of an “avatar” I used myself. I found someone that looks very much like me 15 years ago. You will also notice you can add your own background to the picture to customize it.

Most teachers are familiar with the traditional VARK learning styles made popular by New Zealand educator Neil Fleming. There is an interesting article in the January edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses possible problems with the interpretation of learning style research. Although the existence of learning styles is not disputed, the conclusion of the authors is that the delivery of content to learners is more complex than simply determining where on the VARK scale a student lands. They contest that a particular student may have a clear preference for one style over the others, but actual learning outcomes studies with good experimental design show that every student learns best when multiple methods of instruction delivery are used.  They believe that there is no clear evidence that professors should tailor their lectures to fit their class preferred learning style.  In fact they say that the research points to better outcomes when the instructional style is tailored to the content rather than the learner.  For example, all learners regardless of learning style preference might learn cellular mitosis better by viewing animated models of the process rather than reading about it.

The authors of the study noted in The Chronicle challenge some venerable concepts of learning theory.  If you would like to read the entire research paper written for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest it can be found at the link below.

http://psi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/105.full

Feel free to discuss this article by clicking on the Comments link below this post.

I am going to present at the Spring 2010 Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Web Conference in March, but in the meantime, I find there is a lot we can learn from Eduause ELI in the way they organize the meeting. It is rather impressive.  They use Adobe Connect to conduct the conference with two previous sessions to train the speaker and to “meet and greet”.   The program also has a “Ning” page, which has various widgets to enable synchronous and asynchronous communications, as well as the sharing of resources.  It may seem a little overwhelming for first-time users, but I see huge educational potentials of Ning as the tool is rather flexible to customize for informal learning communities.  I would not use it for a particular class you teach as things created here may not be as portable as a Blackboard course, though Blackboard can certainly learn from such sites in the design of user interfaces.

Here is the Ning home page and in case you want to explore and see if there is a professional organization for you to join.  Here is an example of a Ning community.

Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, wrote a thought-provoking article called Beyond Critical Thinking in a recent issue of Chronicle Review.   In this article, Dr. Roth warns that “we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers.”  ”For many students today, being smart means being critical.”   The “thinking” piece somehow got lost.

Students are exposed to unprecedented amount of information today on the Internet, and in various public media.  Everyday they are exposed to new facts, assumptions, conclusions, implications or ways of reasoning.  Given this exposure, critical thinking should be a habit.  Yet this habit cannot be formed without deliberate training in the related skills.

Several years ago, I co-authored a paper with educational professor Dr. Nega Debela on using online discussions to promote critical thinking.  In this paper we collected some student feedback on what makes or breaks online discussions in terms of facilitated critical thinking.  I hope this is helpful as you design your online discussions.

I also recommend A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking in which Mr. Haskins lists a list of hindrances to critical thinking.

Foundations of Critical Thinking has a rubric that may help in evaluating student thinking in their assignment or their interactions in an online setting.

Please let us know if you have some good practices or stories to share as you develop student thinking skills in an online or regular course.

At Oklahoma Christian University we probably all know what a fine conductor, musician and educator Dr. Adams is. What is less known is his ability to create a harmony of various technology tools for his educational purpose.

In a spring course (Chorale MUSC 1311 01), Dr. Adams has students submit their rehearsals to Blackboard using a variety of tools. Here is what he did:

First he exported the rehearsal piece into various learning tracks, and uploaded them to iTunesU site set up for the course. He also included the music sheet in PDF format in iTunesU for students to use.

Students are then asked to go to iTunesU to get the sheet music and the learning track for his or her specific part. Instruction is given in the Course Document area to help students learn how to slow down the sound file to assist learning.

Students then can listen to the practice music on their laptop or iPod/iPhone once they have downloaded it. They can listen to this as often as they want, and wherever they want, in the dorm, when they walk, or even when they drive.

As students listen, they practice their parts and get ready for a recording.

When students are ready to record, they record their voice rehearsal using iMovie (Instructions are provided in Course Documents on Blackboard). Again, students can record it in a variety of places, including a case in which a student recorded it in the front seat of his car.

Students submit their movie projects using the Blackboard assignment tool.

Dr. Adams graded these projects by viewing these recordings from the Grade Center.

Other than the flexibility this format of assignment provides, students are able to listen to their tracks as many times as they want. Computers are never tired of playing the music students need to rehearse. Dr. Adams said this made a huge difference in student learning as students may learn at different speeds.

This method should also work very well for other music or language courses. You might want to give it a try if Dr. Adams’ creative method works for you!