Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom pt1

Thanks to Diane Pike who dropped “Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom” (ISBN: 0-7879-8049-8) into my campus mail box. It’s making its way around the Academic LFCs. I’m reading some of the articles pertaining to the Natural Sciences.

First, I don’t think a laptop U is the right direction for a small institution like Augsburg. Student Computing has noted that something in the realm of 80% or more of the incoming students have computers, with more and more being laptops. Requiring the students to get another laptop meeting the institution’s requirements (assuming theirs does not) is bad way to start the relationship.

That being said, the examples in the book don’t require student laptops. They are applicable to departmental laptops (i.e. Biology, Chemistry, and hopefully Physics) or to computer labs. With computer labs, a space that is configured in a multi-use layout like Foss 22B or the Honors Lab seem best. A traditional classroom row layout would hinder the group activities. The major activity categories — student data collection, student assessment, student self-assessment and student research — all sound like active learning / inquiry-based learning which I think suit the learning styles of the Net Generation.

Here’s a summary of the first article:

• Teaching Statistics by Taking Advantage of the Laptop’s Ubiquity: The faculty member likes to create communities of learning and found laptops help achieve that goal. He also subscribes a bit to just-in-time teaching and likes to have student input drive the daily sessions with the syllabus being the road map for the course. Oh, he also likes peer-based learning. Basically, he’s a good fit for this model.
  He used discussion boards in their CMS very effectively to support all 3 of the characteristics I just noted. Apparently he used paper-based questions on the readings before — what a nightmare! He also used pre-class online quizzes on the readings to help students practice and to provide him with guidance as to what to do that day. I like this strategy a lot. However, creating the quizzes can be time-consuming the first time. But once you have a quiz bank setup, updating the questions is easy.
  His example activity of understanding a variable and computing expected value and variance speak more to an approach of having the students actively work through the concepts in class with real data. This is just what Math students could do with Mathematica in a Calculus lab, and often do at Augsburg.
  An interesting side note, he noted the desire for the CMS to have a rating system for the student posts. Hhhmm, moodle does that. 🙂

180 articles on blogs in education

You can find over 180 articles and essays about blogs in education at http://kairosnews.org/blogbib . I think they’ve been well-established as useful teaching tools but if anyone needs some justification, you’ll probably find what you need.

Innovations Conference presentation

I almost forgot to mention here that I presented at the first Innovations in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges. Originally it was to be Diane Pike and myself presenting but the Midwest Sociological Society Annual meeting was the same weekend and Diane was an organizer. So it was up to me!

I presented a brief (20 minute) summary of the paper we submitted to the conference. The paper is titled “Student Evaluation of Courses: Kicking and Screaming into the 21st Century.” It was progress update of the ongoing online course evaluation project. The second pilot is currently in process, closing April 29. It’s been a great project and I’ve learned a lot.

The progress we’ve made would not have been possible without the excellent programming work by Robert Bill. His python code has made the process possible without having to rush into buying a product. Assuming the new form is approved by the faculty, as well as the online delivery, it looks like Flashlight Online is our best bet. Being a nonprofit and an organization dedicated to teaching and learning — as well as a resource for best practices — makes it a good fit for us. No product will be perfect, but Flashlight has the right approach to the endeavor and makes a good partner.

Innovate Feb/March issue: IncSub

Steven Downes (he’s everywhere nowadays in my areas of interest) had started a column in the last issue of Innovate called Places to Go.

He reviews IncSub, a place to explore open source technologies like moodle, wordpress, tikiwiki, drupal, mambo,phpbb (the first 3 I’m using actively currently). They have all of these and more installed on their server. You can sign up to use their server and have access to all of these great tools (monthly fee of course).

A Learning Blogosphere (1): Into the Deep

This blog entry talks about how a junior- and senior-level business course in databases created blogophere around the course. It also highlights some of the advantages of blogs in an educational setting. Some great quotes are….
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