Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom pt3

Now to article #3, Incorporating Laptop Technologies into an Animal Sciences Curriculum. This was a challenging course as the students took the laptops to farms! Amazingly the institution ran fiber to the farms and installed wireless there. That was apparently easier than getting electricity to the barns. They had some excellent opportunities for students to use laptops to document their observations of cows getting ready to give birth — the students stay at the farms for a few days (day & night) when their cow is due. It sounds like they used some digital cameras. I bet with iMovie and a digital video camera they could do an impressive analysis.

One thing that I liked was how they used the laptops to keep up on current issues in animal science — something a static textbook cannot do. This seems rather obvious to me and I know many of our science faculty use the web for current science news. My hope is with the RSS module in moodle 1.5 we can incorporate news feeds into the course sites. With the class that I co-taught with Aimee at St Kates we had an RSS feed from the Shifted Librarian in the course site in tikiwiki. Having that constantly changing list of articles was great especially when posts would come up that were applicable to what we were covering in class.

The article goes on to explain how they use laptops with the various labs and activities — basically, I could never take that class or be a vet.

We have spell check!

I just installed the WordPress spell check plugin from coldforged.org. This was the one feature I was missing from iBlog. Of course iBlog had the nice MacOS spell check as you type going for it. But this plugin uses aspell! Aspell is a buddy of mine as it’s the same speller that moodle uses. Hopefully this’ll mean the quality of my entries will improve.

Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom pt2

Onto the next chapter, Laptops in Computer Science: Creating the “Learning Studio.” The Data Structures class in this example looks to suffer from the problem typical of a large lecture & lab course. The lab is taught by someone other than the main faculty member and the lectures get out of sync. There was also a lack in consistency in lecture and lab due to problems with who was leading them. With a small department Augsburg should have consistent courses. The problems they’re trying to solve shouldn’t be ones Augsburg has to worry about. While our Data Structures course does have a lab, the lab is taught by the faculty member.

The redesigned course used online self-assessment quizzes in the CMS to help shape the daily lecture. It’s interesting to see this strategy again. And it doesn’t have anything to do with laptops — just a student-centered just-in-time-teaching approach. In addition to the lecture, they added a lecture exercise (lex). The lex is a directed small-group exploration of the topic of the day with the faculty and TA available for help if needed. In their conclusion, they essentially say that this is an exercise in active learning. Again, laptops not required. But flexible space is key. And flexible space is inefficient and rows are efficient. Hopefully by the end of these articles I won’t be sneaking into work at 2 AM to re-arrange the labs!

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. 🙂

Indiana U students Phish for Test subjects

From the Wired Campus Blog (this one has had some good stuff!), 2 Indiana University grad students did a research study on privacy and the public sphere. Using public information, they sent customized emails to students that appeared to be from their friends directing them to a website which required authentication. Once there they authenticated with their IU logins — oops!

I find this so informative/educational for people. We always try to tell our faculty, staff, and students don’t believe the From and don’t click on web links in emails (especially if you’re not expecting them!). I was amazed to read that the students did go through their IRB — Human Subjects Committee — process. People just trust email too much.

moodle.org running moodle 1.5

I’m making my way through the changes you can see on moodle.org now that it has been upgraded to moodle 1.5. Here are some highlights

• Unread posts : on the course page each forum lists the number of unread posts, in each forum each discussion lists the number of unread posts in it, users can turn off the tracking of unread posts too
• Journals replaced with online assignments : The assignment module is now plug-in based to allow for future growth. You can see screenshots here of the online assignment. It looks great and the grading got a whole lot easier.

Both look like winners. I hope 1.5 is ready for fall. It’s definitely the release suitable for the campus.