I’d like to write today about a topic that is rather pertinent, as I’m gearing up to embark on teaching an intensive summer class:  How do you facilitate effective, online discussions?

The use of online discussion boards is increasing — I’ve seen some instructors use class blogs, and encouraged students to post questions and discussions, or perhaps posted a discussion question and required students to respond (via blog comments, for example).  Some instructors use class wikis.  Many course management systems (CMS) now automatically include discussion boards.  I was thrilled to find that this was a feature of our new CMS that I’ll be using this summer.  But then I remembered my experiment last summer, using a course blog and asking students to post comments or questions on the posts.  It fell flat.  What went wrong?

As I’m considering what to do differently, here are a few things that I’ve gleaned from my readings about how to promote effective discussions online.

1.  Make it comfortable

Last year, I just encouraged students to “post questions or comments” on the blog.  I thought that the need to get help on the homework or content would be a sufficient driver to do so.  I guess not.  It’s sort of sticking your neck out to post something online to a group of people you don’t know very well.  This year, my first homework assignment includes some “getting to know you” questions, such as their major and interests and hobbies.  Part of the assignment is to then post whatever they feel comfortable posting on the class discussion board.  This serves several  purposes, (a) getting them to discover the discussion board, which is where some other assignments will be posted, (b) giving them a chance to get to know their classmates, and (c) making their first posting something that is not about the content, but something that is hopefully more interesting.  This kind of “ice breaker” is considered best-practices for online discussion boards, as is providing a “social cafe” part of the board for off-topic posts.

This relates in part to what is called “social presence,” which is the sense of knowing someone online.  Getting a sense of their personality and selves through their postings.  There is a lot of research to suggest that people engage more fully in online discussions when they feel like they know the people they are talking to.  This is an important consideration for the instructor, too — how do you seem like “you” online?  Maintaining an informal tone can help.

2.  Give them a reason to do it

Again, last year, I thought that the motivation of getting help on homework would be sufficient, but it wasn’t. This year, I’m having students submit two types of assignments to the online discussions.  I’m hoping that by having them posted in the discussion forum, it may spark some discussion, or at least students can read what their peers write and see if their struggles are similar to those of their peers.  The two assignments are:  (1)  Post-reading, pre-class preparation questions, asking them to observe something in the natural world or explain something from the reading.  Since the point is to make sure that they do the reading and that they’re thinking about it, rather than that they get the answer right, the option to see each others’ answers is OK.  The other assignment is (2) posting pre-quiz review questions.  I’ve told them that if there are no questions, there is no review.  My hope is that they can start seeing each others’ questions and hopefully responding, and maybe even use this as an online study group.  We’ll see if it works.

3.  Tap in to their desire to share

Derek Bruff wrote on his blog, “Agile Learning” about Clay Shirky’s book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.  I haven’t read the book, but Derek’s posts provide a really useful summary.

In Chapter 3, he focuses on what motivates people to contribute to…. social initiatives. He draws on research by Deci, Benkler and Nissenbaum, and others to describe four common intrinsic motivations: the desire to be autonomous, the desire to be competent, the desire for connectedness, and the desire to share.

So, Derek asks,

“How do you tap into your students’ desires for autonomy, competence, connection, and sharing?”

There are many ways to do this in-class as well, of course, but online, one might ask, what do students want to share?

4.  Make it authentic

To answer the above question, what do students want to share, I think it’s important to make the online assignments authentic and interesting.  In other words, it’s important to provide well-designed questions for the discussion, that help students stay focused and interested.   Derek suggests using questions based on the reading for that day, but one has to be careful to ask questions that students want to answer, that they are interested in sharing their opinion about.  Fact-based reading quizzes don’t promote an interest in connectedness.  You either got it right or wrong, what is the motivation to see what your classmates said, other than to see if you got it right?  Rather, thought-provoking questions are more likely to spur authentic discussion.

5.  Instructor’s role

And what do you do, once discussion gets rolling?  Mostly, just stay out of the way — don’t respond to every comment, so students don’t feel like you’re Big Brothering.  If you act like a good listener, you can know when it would be a good time to interject or add your insight.   If students get off-topic or post inappropriately, it is better to contact them separately, rather than shaming them in public.  Your people-skills are important online, just as they are in-person.  But it might be useful to post some summarizing comments at the end of the discussion, to wrap it together.  And of course, before things get started, it’s important to make it clear to students why they’re doing this, what the payoffs are, and how it relates to the topics being covered in-class.

6.  Credit?

I’m really torn on this one.  Early talks that I saw on the topic of online discussions said to make it really clear to your students what you expect of them in their discussion posts, in terms of quantity and quality.  That students should be graded on whether they post, but also on the richness of their posts, since many instructors find that students will post a cursory and shallow response in order to get credit, but that that doesn’t fulfill the spirit of the assignment.  If one wanted to grade on richness, one can easily use a “0/1/2″ scale, which is very helpful for grading such participation-oriented assignments.  “0″ means you blew it off, “1″ is that you did a somewhat adequate job but with something lacking, and “2″ is the default, for solid work.

However, I have several colleagues who argue against providing grading incentives for items such as clickers, or discussion boards.  This kind of motivation, called “extrinsic motivation”, since it is tied to something that someone is imposing on you from the outside, can sometimes become the end in itself rather than the learning.  My colleague Ian Beatty argues that clicker use in class, for example, should all be for the intrinsic, self-directed motivation of learning the material and doing better in the course.  Derek Bruff wrote on this topic too, in the same posts about the Cognitive Surplus book, about how assigning credit for participation can negate the social contracts in the classroom to participate. Could the same be true of online discussions?  Does assigning a grade reduce the motivation to authentically participate?  The research on grading clicker questions seems to suggest that it might — in classrooms using high-stakes grading incentives for correct answers to questions, the conversation devolves from making sense of the material to desperately deciding on what the right answer is.

I think the best answer, for most of us, might lie somewhere in between.   Provide some credit for doing the assignment, enough to push them to the discussion board, but not so much that that is the only reason that students are engaging in the conversation.

7.  Other ideas?

Some other suggestions that I got from a talk by John Thompson of Buffalo State College at a conference a few years back:

• Give specific guidelines and rubrics regarding acceptable responses
• Don’t just settle for opinions:  Opinions must be supported with rational discourse.
• Don’t have too many, or too few, discussions.  Use enough so that there is fresh content, but few enough to avoid dilution.
• Bring in a guest participant
• Publicly acknowledge good participation in order to encourage it
• Ask for more detail when students submit shallow comments
• Relate your personal experiences, and keep some humor and fun in it
• Have students lead discussions on a rotating basis

Please share your experiences or best-practices on using online discussions in the comments!

Image by JohnnyMrNinja

Since my last post on the Flipped Classroom, I’ve stumbled across enough particularly good resources on a similar topic to merit a follow-up post.  The idea behind the Flipped Classroom is that classtime is better spent in helping students to apply ideas (e.g., working problems, doing labs, or in other words making sense of the content) rather than in the traditional lecture content-delivery mode.  So, students watch mini recorded lectures at home to get the content, and then spend class time applying the ideas, with the teacher as a coach.  You can see more about this technique on the previous posts, or at Learning4Mastery. In this post, I will talk about ways to help students use pre-lecture time to adequately prepare for class — whether you’re using a flipped classroom model or not — and the research behind some of those techniques.

Have student reading habits changed?

It’s a common complaint:  Students don’t read the book before class.  It’s probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences.  Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it’s a real challenge for an introductory student to muddle their way through all that information to try to extract useful information from it.  So most don’t bother — they go to class to see what content the professor thinks is important, and then use the textbook to help them to do the homework and guide their exam studying.  But this constrains us to use class in content-delivery mode: If students don’t know the first thing about Newton’s Laws, then how can we do anything in class other than tell them about Newton’s Laws?

Do they read?

Some of my colleagues at CU Boulder studied how students use textbooks in introductory physics (Podolefsky and Finkelstein, “The Perceived Value of Textbooks: Students and instructors may not see eye to eye.” The Physics Teacher, 44, 6, 2006),     Noah Podolefsky, one of the study’s authors, summarizes it below (as quoted from a physics teacher listserv):

In a nutshell, what we found was that few students read the book before class, more student did read (but still not many). However, there was no correlation between reading habits and final grade.  We interviewed students and basically found that they had different strategies for
reading – some read straight through, some read in a non-linear way (going back and forth), some just read the summary. Some students didn’t use the book because they scoured the internet for resources that made more sense to them. We couldn’t find any consistent patterns that related reading habits to performance in the class.

From their data, he claims, it was not clear that encouraging students to read the textbook would have actually helped them.  There’s no correlation between reading the book and doing well in the class, and students are reading in so many different ways that it’s hard to say anymore what “reading” means.  Noah postulates:

I can speculate as to why textbooks are not read, and perhaps not that useful, which is that they aren’t very well designed tools for learning physics. They’re pretty good for re-learning physics if you already have a good framework (i.e., you’re an upper level physics major or grad). But they don’t match very well how new comers (intro students) learn.

I think that this is why we, as academics, get so frustrated when students don’t read.  This is how we learn a new topic — by reading a journal article or a book.  But we’re experts, and we can make sense of the information as it’s presented in the book.  But students are novices, and need more guidance.

So how can we provide that guidance?

One thing that some faculty have tried are multimedia modules to help guide your students in their pre-class preparation.  For example, the University of Illinois has created a suite of multimedia modules, about 10 minutes long, which each guide students through some of the main ideas in the text for a particular topic.   Students watch the videos before class, and take a short quiz on their content to encourage participation. Below are a few such resources that are available online, but please let me know of others that you’re aware of:

1. Physics: Multimedia Modules; 20-minute lessons with pictures and audio from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne.  Published work on effectiveness here.
2. Various science: Hippocampus. Short lessons on various topics from the Monterey Institute of Technology, including some recommended ones on physics.
3. Chemistry & Physics: Georgia Public Broadcasting.  Videos on science, recommended by a high school teacher.
4. Chemical Engineering: LearnChMe screencasts from CU-Boulder. A richly developed suite of materials on engineering topics.
5. Various science: Learning4Mastery website by Bergman and Sams covers high school chemistry, physics, earth science, astronomy, calculus, and biology, though their style is idiosyncratic and less easily incorporated into another class

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Some other ways to guide students in their preparation are:

1. Skip the multimedia part and just record your own lectures (using, for example, Panopto).  See some examples of this in physics here and here.
2. Use pre-existing lectures such as MIT Open Courseware, or other lectures available on iTunesU.
3. Ask students a pre-lecture quiz, to encourage and guide the reading, or simply ask them what was confusing or what they don’t understand.  This can also guide you as the instructor as to what students are struggling with.  This is called Just in Time Teaching, or JiTT. The quiz can be multiple choice and graded in your course management system to reduce grading burden.
4. Have students write a brief summary of the reading, and a question that they have about the reading.

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The research.

Of course, the big question is, does this stuff work? The answer is probably, as always, “it depends.”  There are few, if any, plug-and-play solutions in education.  How an instructor uses these resources, and coordinates them with the class time, is essential.  That said, here are the results of a few studies.

The UIUC multimedia modules have been studied for several years.  One way to look at the effectiveness is to look at a particular topic, and show students either the multimedia modules, or let them read the traditional textbook.  When they did this (Am. J. Phys, 2009), students did better on a subsequent test on their learning of that topic than with the text-based presentation alone.  That’s not too surprising, since using multiple modes of presentation is typically better than only one mode.  The UIUC folks have also used the multimedia modules in several courses — students watch the modules, and then take a short quiz on their understanding before class.  In another publication (Phys. Rev. ST, 2010), they found that students overall performed better on these “preflight” questions than did students in traditional lectures.  However, they have also reported that students don’t do much better, if at all, on course exams (Am. J. Phys, 2010).  Their interpretation of these results are that students are masters of efficiency.  If they’re aiming for a “B”,  then they’re going to get that “B” with as little work as possible.  So, by guiding students, the modules might have helped them to be more efficient in their studying practices.

Another study in Biology (Lents and Cifuentes, Web-based learning enhancements, J. College Sci. Teach., Nov/Dec 2009), some lecture attendance was replaced with video lectures that consisted of the visual of a powerpoint slide presentation enhanced with audio voiceover.  They found no effect (negative or positive) on student learning from this substitution.  While these authors were aiming to reduce student time-on-task for their largely commuter college, this does suggest the next step — having students engage in video-based learning at home and using lecture time for additional engagement — could be beneficial.

So, it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt to add some sort of pre-class preparation, and if you find some way to guide your students through the topic in a way that is more suited to novice learners than a dense textbook — it could help free up some of your class time to do more in-depth learning.

I’ve written before on the idea of the “Flipped Classroom” for science instruction, where some of class content is moved outside of class time.  Video lessons are recorded in advance, and assigned as homework, freeing the in-person instructional time for working to apply and master that content with the guidance of the instructor.  This is not that radical of an idea — after all, in English class, students read the book before class, and then discuss it in class.  Science is somewhat anomalous in that we think that content delivery has to happen during instruction because students can’t wrestle with the ideas on their own.

I just had the opportunity to take a workshop on the flipped classroom from one of its’ active proponents, Aaron Sams, and wanted to share a few of the ideas I got there.

First, here’s a short YouTube video where Aaron Sams describes his Flipped Classroom, which I think gives a good overview of what it looks like in practice.

Aaron Sams – The Flipped Classroom

You can read more about the Flipped Classroom at several places:

• Learning4Mastery site about the technique
• Aaron Sam’s blog
• The Flipped Classroom network (where educators share ideas and support)
• The Daily Riff article

First, Aaron emphasizes, there is no such thing as “the” flipped classroom.  Every educator can take a different approach that matches his or her goals and classroom setting.  The way that he does his classroom is that he spends 5 minutes on a warmup activity, 10 minutes of Q&A time on the video, and then the rest of the class is spend in guided independent practice and/or labs. Of course, he’s in a high school setting, so his class size allows for such an approach, but stay tuned for some ideas that I got for use in the college setting.

In order to flip your classroom, you need three things:

1. Quality instructional videos (made by you or someone else)
2. Engaging class activities
3. Assessment to see if it worked.

Engaging class activities

Let’s start here.  What are you going to have your students do during class?  Worksheets?  Group work?  Labs?  The key is that the activity allows you to get in among the students, interacting with them so that that class time is better used to help guide them and allow them to achieve mastery of the content you want them to grasp.   The videos are meant to get at the lower levels of understanding (e.g., “remembering”).  The class time is meant to get into the higher levels of understanding (“application,” “synthesis,” etc.).

Videos

“We don’t use a tool for the sake of using a tool,” says Dan Spencer, “we use a tool when it is appropriate for the job at hand.”  Similarly, you shouldn’t make a video for the sake of making a video.  The pedagogy must drive the technology, not the other way around.  So, what do you want your students to learn?  Consider:  What do my students need me physically present for htat I currently assign out of class, and what I can I remove from class time that my students do not need me present for?  Direct instruction / problem sets / and lab reports, are common answers.

Consider a single lesson to start.  If you want to have students work on problem-solving skills, perhaps model problem-solving in your screencasts.    If you want to guide them through the book reading, perhaps create an online version of the lecture to help cue their attention to the important ideas (this has been done and studied some at UIUC).

Here are some example types of videos:

• A lecture (can use pre-recorded ones, like MIT Open Courseware)
• Video of you demonstrating how something works in real life
• Video of a lab procedure
• Guided problem-solving
• Homework solutions
• Prelab activity
• Exam review

So, in the college setting, you could imagine using this sort of approach perhaps once a week, to go over homework, to help students get started on homework, to get them ready for an in-class activity.  If the videos are useful and help students either do better in the course, or get a good grade more efficiently, that motivation may be enough for them to watch them.  And you can then use the in-class time for tutorials, small group work, or other activities.  Sure there’s some up-front work to be done, but once the videos are done, you can use them over and over.

You can see a wide variety of example videos on the Learning4Mastery YouTube channel. I highly recommend checking it out — just a few minutes will give you a better sense of what can be done.

What kind of equipment might you need to do this?

An iPad makes it very easy.  Use ReplayNote to import a PDF, or ShowMe is a free app.  ScreenChomp allows you to download the result as a video.  And you can make your own stylus for an iPad for more precise drawings using these instructions here.

An annotated Powerpoint is also very easy.   Use screen capture software to record your screen (Camtasia is nice but pricey, Jing has a 5-minute limit, and Screencastomatic is all web-based).  To annotate the powerpoint you can use:

• A tablet (like the $60 Bamboo tablet), though I found this to be a bit clunky
• Activeslate on your Promethean or Smartboard, if you have one
• A document camera (like Ipevo for $69) to focus on paper.  This seemed to be the easiest to do equations.

A webcam is helpful, to capture video of yourself.

It’s nice to have pop-up boxes (“callouts”) to point out certain items on your screen.  You can do this automatically in Camtasia, but you could do it in other software with manually created callouts.

A calculator emulator is very helpful, so you can model how students would calculate some of these quantities.  Just google Calculator Emulator to find a wide variety of emulators.  Here’s one.

Aaron had some tips to consider:

• Aim for about 5 minutes
• Use one video per topic, rather than cramming everything into one video
• It takes about 30 minutes to record and edit a 10-minute video (at least, once you get good at it)
• Do we need it perfect, or do we need it Tuesday?  Be satisfied with imperfection rather than obsessively editing.  You can correct your mistakes with callouts.
• Create PPT’s that have blank spots for the webcam image and the calculator emulator, as well as spaces for working out example problems.
• Think about how you want the final lesson to look when creating those PPTs.

Assessment

If you’re going to challenge students to learn at a higher level, you have to test them at that higher level too.  Use continuous formative assessment to see if they’re achieving your standards.   Have them make a Prezi to indicate how ideas in the class are connected.   Have them work together on a group research project.  Whatever it is, have it match your instruction, so that your goals, instruction, and assessment are all aligned.

Students often struggle to get the key concepts in any discipline — this is certainly true in physics, the subject that I teach.  They can regurgitate the formulas, or recite a law, but many students don’t quite put it all together to see what the physics really means — how those laws and equations affect the way the world behaves.    One of the enduring findings of education research (particularly in the sciences; but if you’re in the humanities, keep reading, there’s something for you here), is the necessity of using multiple representations to get an idea across.  Examples of multiple representations are:

• Words (textbook, lecture)
• Pictures and sketches
• Diagrams
• Equations
• Graphs
• Data

Different representations help students with the content in different ways — equations can help with computational ability and mathematical insight, whereas a visual can help make the concept or idea more concrete.  In fact, if we want to promote qualitative (instead of quantitative) skills in our students, concrete representations such as graphs or diagrams or pictures can be much more useful than abstract numbers and words and equations.  Furthermore, experts actually use different representations of a problem in a more flexible way than students do — suggesting that being able to produce and use different views of a problem is an important part of being good in a subject.

I keep running across fantastic tech visualization tools, so I wanted to share them here.

Create a Timeline:  Dipity

This one is for the humanities folks, as well as the sciences.  A cool tool called Dipity allows students to create and share timelines amongst each other.  Students can add pictures, web links, and put the event on Google Maps.  This is great for providing a historical perspective for scientific topics, or outlining the history in any discipline.  It’s interactive, visual, and provides a birds’ eye view of a subject.  A recent article in the Science Teacher suggests this tool for making a historical timeline of chemistry and chemists for the International Year of Chemistry.

Interactive Simulations:  PhET

Admittedly, this is a plug for a tool from the University of Colorado (where I work), but it’s a good one.  The PhET Interactive Simulations are specifically geared to provide multiple representations of a topic — in  Energy Skate Park, for example, students can see the visual (the skateboard), multiple graphs (of energy vs time, for example), and play with it to see the effects of changing a parameter (like gravity) in real time.

Data visualizations – Tableau Public

I wrote about Tableau Public on my other blog. This is a very cool free software (for PC only) that lets you input your data, and then write in interactivity so you can play with the results to let you gain insight into the underlying patterns. The importance of data representations for understanding has been written about by Edward Tufte before.  I can’t recommend his work enough.   See an example of Tableau Public here.

Have your students draw

This is pretty low-tech, but I want to encourage all instructors to have students draw out what they understand — it gives you wonderful insight into their thinking and lets them gain new understanding through the process.  Felice Frankel (who does wonderful projects on scientific images as art) recently embarked on a project called Picturing to Learn.  College students were told to draw a picture to explain a particular scientific concept to a high school senior.   The results were meticulously documented on the website, and give insights into how students think about different topics.  You can register for full access to the database, and learn to interpret student drawings for yourself.  A great tool for teachers!

There are a ton of other visualization tools out there.   What are your favorites?

Image by Steve Jurvetson on Wikimedia

When I talk to people about education reform — about doing innovative things like using clickers and peer instruction, or interactive demonstrations, or small group work, a lot of instructors balk.

• How can I give up that much lecture time?  We have a lot to cover.
• Students don’t do the reading — so they’re not able to discuss the material yet, they’re starting from scratch.

One great solution to this is called Flipping the Classroom.   The “flip” has to do with where the content is presented.  The standard instructional model is something like this:

But that leaves the toughest part — applying the ideas to homework and problems — to students, struggling on their own.  “How often have you wished you could help confused students as they were doing their work — instead of trying to pick up the pieces the next day?” asks a recent article in The Science Teacher.

The flipped classroom is one answer to that.  The fully flipped model is something like this:

“I no longer go to work to ‘perform’ five times a day; instead, I look forward to going [to class] and interacting with my students all day,” says high school teacher Jonathan Bergmann, who along with Aaron Sams has been actively promoting the idea of the flipped classroom in high school.  In the flipped class, instructors create video podcasts for students to watch — either of lectures, or solving a problem, or demonstrations — and post those for the students to watch at home.

I feel like the fully flipped classroom, with the lecture time used exclusively for hands-on and interactive work, is likely to continue to be more of a draw in K12 education.  In university culture, it’s difficult to go completely interactive given the larger class sizes and the higher expectations that students will spend time becoming proficient in the material on their own as well.  But there is a movement towards creating coursecasts in higher education — where an instructor can videorecord an entire lecture (for watching instead of a live lecture, or for archiving purposes), or perhaps outline a problem or important details.  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created web-based lectures for their physics department.  These pre-lectures walk students through key concepts or problems — not replacing the reading, but helping to guide students through the important ideas.  Their research shows that the pre-lectures help make students’ studying more efficient, because they’re oriented to the important principles in the large lecture series.  And here in my home institution of Colorado, the Chemical Engineering department has made an impressive number of screencasts, typically narration by an instructor to supplement the lecture.  A variety of research (like this paper) suggests that the addition of vodcasts can be helpful tools.

Anything that can be done to take some of the content out of lecture and save lecture time for actually working on understanding and applying that content – the better for student learning.  Even if you don’t consider a fully flipped classroom, some of these more small-scale ideas can be valuable changes to any course structure.  After all, what value should the class time offer?  If all students are getting is static information delivery, they can get that from a book.  Your expertise as an instructor is better spent working on the challenging parts of using the information.

The Flipped Class Network

Bergmann and Sam’s website

A very nice post by Derek Bruff on the inverted classroom, posted at the same time as this one!

Images:  Mosborne01, Science Education Initiative.

Why I’m a Blogging Cheerleader

This semester I launched blogs for two of my classes (here and here), and as happens each year, I’m struck by the students’ original thinking, digital skill, and overall creativity.

I’m also impressed by how quickly they assume ownership of the blogs. When a prof sees that kind of engagement around an assignment, it’s a very good day.

In their blogging, students deliver results far beyond my expectations, and they require minimal tech-support (I use blogger, it’s free, very easy to figure out, allows for up to 100 bloggers, and there are many amazing free premium design templates).

My excitement about the student-authored blogs inspires me to travel all over the place enthusiastically encouraging other profs to incorporate blogging into their courses if they are not doing so already. Why? because in my experience these blog assignments are a source of pride to students and faculty alike. No matter the subject, blogging allows students to flex their digital creativity and let’s face it, there’s just not enough creative opportunity in most people’s everyday lives. Let’s create some!

What’s the ROI in Student Blogging? Ask an eMarketer!

There are many great course wikis and blog examples online to inspire professors thinking about how to develop this kind of course assignment. If you are curious about why students should blog, and which educational outcomes sync well with this activity, consider the following tips drawn from professional business bloggers. Although there are heaps and mounds of outstanding educational sources explaining the benefits of blogging, these fresh takes from the private sector are very insightful and valuable for educators to consider. From my perspective, these five ideas are immediately transferable from corporate cultures to HE classrooms.

1. Blogging is an opportunity to do self-directed research (insight borrowed from Valeria Maltoni/Conversation Agent blog).
Research has a bad reputation as a time-consuming drag, and maybe it once was, but in the age of Google it certainly isn’t any longer. Background blog research is an opportunity to indulge one’s curiosity and explore the corners of the web, collecting the best sources out there. “You start a topic with what you know,” writes Valeria Maltoni, “and expand it into things that others know,” which sounds a lot like self-directed learning to me.

2. Some of the best blogging is inspired by personal passions and interests. (insight borrowed from Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog)
Rather than worrying about writing just for the teacher, and giving the prof exactly what they want to read in exchange for an A+ — blogging assignments can be used to encourage students to investigate connections between course-related topics and issues they’re genuinely passionate about. When students write online for themselves and their peers, demonstrating expertise and personal investment, it’s highly likely the resulting blog posts will be creative and original compositions that are more fun to read and write.

3. Blogging encourages us to develop professional communication skills and increased media savvy. (insight borrowed from Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation blog).
Blogging is writing in public, and that means spelling counts, embedded links need to be tested, and the information shared must be the highest quality it can be—else it’s immediately obvious to all that the author is neither thorough nor careful. It’s not just about A+ composition—blogging is also a demonstration of digital media skill. “The more media savvy you are,” Joel writes, “the more the likelihood will be that you will take that extra second before tweeting something, updating your Facebook status or publishing that blog post to ensure that the information you are about to share with everyone connected to you is as accurate and reliable as possible.” If the public nature of blogging encourages students to do a bit of extra proofreading, the blog-cheerleader in me thinks hip-hip!

4. Blogging involves sourcing and reading a lot of other blogs. (insight borrowed from Bret Simmons on the Student Branding Blog) There is likely no faster way for students to learn best practices in writing for the web than reading other blogs. The practice of reading online means students will bump into various perspectives and industry debates, news items, history, and controversies, when seeking out new blog topics. “Read blogs by those in your field,” advises Simmons, “watch what others are doing and integrate into your blog the things you like and eliminate the things you don’t like.” Not only does this informal “peer-to-peer” blog mentoring drive students’ self-improvement, it can also help them develop a distinctive voice and writing style, through comparing themselves to other active bloggers.

5. Blogging promotes community online and off. (insight borrowed from Chris Brogan/chrisbrogan.com) When students blog, and get participation points for peer-to-peer blog commenting, the result is class cohesiveness online and off. A class blog is a virtual venue wherein students can be encouraged to “make a point of engaging [the] community often in the comments section, on their blogs, on the other social networks where [they] cross paths” (Brogan). It’s a lesson in collegiality and if they use a service like Disqus, those comments become a part of their online digital footprint and personal brand. But how to assess student comments on a blog? Here’s a collection of blogging rubrics to get you started developing your own evaluation criteria:

• “Blog Reflection Rubric” from Jim Julius at SanDiego State University
• “Blogging Evaluation” from Brenda Dyck at Master’s Academy College
  and some pdfs:
• “Blog Journalling Rubric Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy” by Andrew Churches
• “Blogging Scoring” from Christopher 
Long
 at Penn State
• “Blogging Assessment Rubric” from The University of Regina

Digital creativity

Internship season is just a few months away, so it’s a great time to think about how to help students put their best foot forward online. I’ve rounded up a few innovative ideas for digital resumes that would be useful as the basis for professional development workshops, or in some cases would work as course assignments.

Video Resumes
Of course the best video resumes are innovative in terms of their narrativity and film-making techniques. But concentrating less on mastering advanced editing and more on developing a compelling concept and storyboard are key to producing an impactful student video resume. Below is an examples of an entertaining, unconventional, effective and memorable video, and there are more examples on Mashable.

How to do this digital storytelling activity in the classroom? If there is not a student AV rental option on campus, and no film and media department to advise and/or loan video equipment, consumer electronics will do the trick, from webcams to flipcams. A seminar conversation about best practices in video resumes is naturally connected to discussion about personal branding — which for a prof interested in digital literacy, is a teachable moment.

Online ePortfolios

There are plenty of tools for building ePortfolios, but after asking them, I learned that my students are partial to Flavors.me, Wix, and About.me. There is also Behance, which has a LinkedIn App to showcase thumbnails of creative work on a personal LI profile. Here’s a detail from a Behance portfolio by graphic design student Matthieu Pieters:

Visual Resumes

Infographic resumes are an emerging trend, which is an opportunity to talk/teach about the importance of data visualization, visual literacy, information mobilization and accessibility, iconography and design thinking in our information society. Here’s an example from Pruek Wiyaporn:

I’ve collected a few more examples of visual resumes, including low-cost and free templates, online websites, and Powerpoint/Peynote slide deck versions here. For a quick and possibly in-class activity, have students take their traditional word processed resume and Wordle it—for instant revelation of their dominant personal brand messages. For a lesson on how to create infographics, you might want to show this truly amazing 60-second flowcapping video.

LinkedIn Resumes

And lastly, for students with a LinkedIn profile, converting to a printable, linkable, customizable resume is nearly instant using the Resume Builder app. For ideas for what to include in a workshop on Linked In for students, here is a detail from this handout from DePaul University:

I’ve gotten more and more excited about some of the tools that Google offers (for free!) that can help in collaboration and class discussion.  I want to highlight a few that I’ve recently become more familiar with, and how they might be used in the classroom.  The wonderful thing about most of these applications is that they inherently support social learning and student discussion.  Many of these applications are more obviously geared to K12, but with some creativity they can be applied to a wide variety of academic settings.

First, do you get confused signing into Google?  You don’t have to have a Gmail account.  Any email will do to create a Google account.  And if you have the problem where people invite you to share a Google Document but use the wrong email address, you can associate multiple email addresses with your Google account:  From within Google, click “settings” in the upper right.  Under “personal settings” look for “email addresses” and click “edit”.  Add an additional email address.

1.  Google Documents

If you haven’t yet discovered Google Docs, you are missing out.  I was first told about Google Docs in, of all places, the Apple store by a random passerby.  Google Docs is a suite of online word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools (think MS-office goes online and free).  They can be made private, shared with a set of individuals, or made public for viewing or editing.  Students could collaboratively fill in data into a Google Spreadsheet, or an agenda for a meeting can be embedded in the site and collaboratively edited.  Several helpful tips about Google Docs are on this article which talks about applications such as using a Google Doc for a student speakout, collaborative student presentations, and peer-edited essays.

2.  Google Wave and Google Groups

If what you want is really want is a discussion board, Google has a few nice options.  Google Groups basically creates an email listserv, with an online archived discussion thread.  An option that could have some more power is Google Wave, which was temporarily suspended but now it’s back.  This provides a rich real-time discussion forum, but it’s so much more than that.  You can collaboratively edit a document or create an agenda or brainstorm.  To get an idea of what a wave looks like, see this Wave on Using Google Wave in the Classroom.   Waves could be used for student discussions, but also for professional discussions like this — like a beefed up version of Twitter or blogs for enhancing your professional learning.  More on Google Waves in the classroom here.

3.  Google Sites

If you need an easy website, especially one that multiple people can edit, Google Sites is pretty handy.  Google Sites is sort of a webpage builder for dummies; choose a template and fill in your content just like you would on a website, and hey-presto, you’re published.  They have templates for creating wikis, class websites, and more.  This can be a great way to build a course website, especially if you’re making use of a lot of other Google tools because here’s the wonderful thing:  You can easily embed a bunch of other Google applications into a Google Site, such as documents, spreadsheets, or discussion boards.  Any Google Doc can be embedded (and made open for editing, if you wish).  Videos can be embedded, with an accompanying public document where students can provide commentary on the video.  A class calendar can be created on Google Calendar and embedded on the site.  There are just a ton of “gadgets” that can be embedded; just choose “insert” and choose “more gadgets”.  Many of these gadgets are customized for education.

My colleague Ed Johnsen has compiled a helpful site detailing some of the different things that can be done with a Google site at an example site here .

Some other ideas

(many courtesy of Edudemic)

• Google Earth, Google Sky and Google Maps all have potentially useful applications in Geology education.  Geo Education has more.
• Use Google News to include current events in the classroom
• Make an iGoogle personalized homepage (similar to My Yahoo) to provide a one-stop shop for resources related to your course
• One that I’m going to try right away is Google Notebook. Sort of like a web-based scrapbook, you can organize information from the web in a single location.  Helpful for researching a topic or collecting teaching ideas.
• Google Sketchup is a super powerful tool for making 3D drawings; helpful for geometry and drafting.

Helpful resources:

• A wonderful collection of links related to Google applications for education (thanks to Matt Kuhn of McREL).
• Google for Educators discussion group
• Google Apps for Educators provides suggestions and training for using Google Apps for educational use
• 15 little known ways google can help teachers (Edudemic)
• 100 ways Google can make you a better educator (Tech Learning)
• Google for Educators makes many of these tools available (for free) in a closed system for a K12 school.  A free IT solution!

Wave image from Malene Thyssen on Wikimedia; others in the public domain

** I’m giving a free webinar, Tuesday November 9th at 1pm EDT. “Writing Great Clicker Questions” is geared toward college science faculty, but all are welcome!  **

I’ve been giving workshops for faculty and K-12 teachers on the effective use of clickers (personal response systems) for the past few years.  By “effective,” I mean using research-based techniques that help students learn.  Across the board, the studies show that clickers are best used to promote student discussion (peer instruction) — clickers can be a way to increase student engagement by getting students to wrestle with challenging questions.

The most enjoyable part of the workshop is when we discuss the challenges to using clickers this way.  Now that I’ve gotten a chance to stand on my soapbox and say how I’m suggesting clickers be used, I’m turning it back over to the teachers to bring up the realities of the classroom.  This is where we really get into the meat of the topic.

Over and over, the main thing that teachers bring up as a major challenge is “writing questions,” or “finding time to write questions.”  We’re not used to seeing challenging questions that are used to help students learn, rather than just to check to see where they’re at.  So, where do we start in writing them?

I’ve recently started to break down the question-writing process into three main areas:

1. Mechanics
2. Depth
3. Goals

Mechanics refers to the wording of the question.  Is it clear and jargon-free?  Are the distractors (the “wrong” answers) tempting?

Depth indicates whether the question requires high-level cognitive processes, or whether it’s relatively shallow.  I find Bloom’s Taxonomy to be a helpful rubric for considering the depth of a question, and the question stems and verbs associated with each level of Bloom’s are very useful in brainstorming questions.

Goals addresses the fact that there are various goals for clicker questions.  Are you surveying students?  Trying to figure out how much they know before your lesson?  Giving them a chance to apply a concept that was just discussed?  Testing what they learned at the end of a lecture?  I really like Ian Beatty’s take on this — and the below outline is taken from one of his short papers written for teachers (TEFA Note #2, Sept 2007).

I am interested to hear what others make of this kind of breakdown of different aspects of clicker questions.

One other item to note is that we’ve compiled some clicker question collections (mostly for STEM education at the college level) on our STEMclickers website.

Want more? Come to the free webinar, Tuesday November 9th at 1pm EDT. “Writing Great Clicker Questions” is geared to college science faculty, but all are welcome.

So many great blog posts in the education realm this month, I wanted to highlight some of them on the blog.

The Innovative Educator: Want to be a great teacher?  Don’t go to PD. Peter Kent argues that we shouldn’t go to lots of workshops to learn how to use the latest tech gizmo — it’s going to be gone tomorrow.  Instead, create and rely on your own professional learning networks (PLN’s).  By reflecting on your own practice using three guiding questions, you can create and grow your own professional practice.

…and if you want to create a PLN but aren’t sure how, Free Tech for Teachers posted about Teacher Connecting — Find a Collaboration Partner

… and the Innovative Educator also wrote two posts about 5 ways to build your PLN and another about Innovative Ideas for Getting Teachers Excited about Building their PLN, using both social media tools and regular face-to-face contact.

Derek Bruff: Student Motivation and Class Participation — Lessons from Cognitive Surplus. Want to get your students engaged in some of the social media and web 2.0 tools out there?  Derek shows how he is applying the principles from Clay Shirky’s new book on people’s motivations to contribute to social enterprises — the desire to be autonomous, the desire to be competent, the desire for connectedness, and the desire to share — to his classroom this semester, through online discussions, social bookmarking, and a collaborative project.

Technology Tidbits posted about the Top 10 Sites for Creating Surveys/Polls. A helpful reference, with a little information about each service.

Free Tech for Teachers also gave a nice list of 47 Alternatives to Using YouTube in the Classroom. This is the most comprehensive educational video post I’ve seen!  Screening videos in-class can be a way to partition your lecture.

Derek Bruff: Clickers, Private Universes, and Agile Teaching. Derek argues that clickers (classroom response systems) allow you to get inside students “private universe” in a way that’s not generally possible in a large (more than 15 students) class. It’s hard to know what’s happening for so many students without something like a clicker to help you out.

Derek Bruff: Going Nonlinear in PowerPoint. Want to ask the right question for the audience, rather than a linear march through pre-determined clicker questions? Here, Derek shares some neat ideas for non-linear incorporation of clickers using a big powerpoint clicker deck, “choose your own adventure” clicker questions, and Prezi.

Tips, Tools and Technology for Educators: Top 5 Social Media in Education Myths. Think social media is all about entertainment?  Think again.  Read these common myths about social media in education, along with several handy links on how some K12 educators are using it in the classroom.

… In a similar vein, the Innovative Educator wrote about Don’t Silence Students. I was aghast to learn of a university who only allowed students to comment on a social media site through pre-approved drop-down comments, because otherwise students might use inappropriate comments.  The purpose of the teacher is to guide and support students in making meaning through appropriate conversation.  Hear from a teacher who allowed students to earn the right to their own individual blog.

Free Tech for Teachers: 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year. What a great post, with an outline of several really robust tools and how you might use them, from TodaysMeet (which I just discovered and think could be really cool), Twitter, creating podcasts, Wikis and blogs. Amazingly, he has also published a free 58-page guide on how to use these things, which I’ve embedded below.

// How to Do 11 Techy Things in the New School Year –