The Active Class

By guest blogger Ben Van Dusen of the University of Colorado at Boulder

By now everyone has heard the sizzle of Apple’s new “magical” device, the iPad, but many are left wondering if there is any steak behind the sizzle. Is this a device that is going to revolutionize our K-12 classrooms or will it wither on the vine like it’s beleaguered ancestor the Newton?

If the iPad is going to shake-up our classrooms it won’t be on its own. The strength of the iPad is its ability to easily integrate a wide variety of digital resources into a single intuitive package. Imagine a classroom where the students are engaged in small groups working collaboratively on a single document. The students are simultaneously using the  google doc app while the teacher is monitoring their progress both visually and digitally. Students walk home with light backpacks now that they’ve turned in their out-of-date static textbook for dynamic digital textbooks. When they get home they access their homework, the day’s lecture notes, and an enrichment video all through their Blackboard app. The homework is submitted digitally through WebAssign where students receive real-time feedback on their answers. The educational applications for the iPad are too numerous to list here, but teachers have the opportunity to create a suite of applications specially tailored to fit their students’ needs. While many of these uses for the iPad have been tried before on other devices, the iPad has the potential to create a tipping point with its portability, price, power and intuitive user interface. There are also specific applications that take advantage of the iPad’s unique hardware, such as the Star Chart application that allows a student to see the names of the stars and constellations by pointing their iPad in any quadrant of the sky.

Digital textbooks are shaping up to be a killer application for the iPad by providing dramatic improvements over standard textbooks on several fronts. Most students are stuck using textbooks that were over-written to cover any material a course could possible review while also being generic enough to be accepted by any audience in any state. Because of the significant expense of buying new textbooks, students are often saddled with worn textbooks full of outdated material, especially in subjects that frequently change, like the sciences. Digital textbooks allow teachers to produce dynamic books that cover the exact materials for the course, in the order they are taught, include problem sets specifically tailored for the course, and provide interactive simulations directly in the reading. The best part is organizations, such as cK-12, are creating digital “flexbooks” and allowing schools to use them for free. Schools can enhance student learning and save hundreds of thousand of dollars in the process.

Among my fellow Physics Education Researchers the biggest call for concern over the iPad is its lack of support for Flash and Java. The majority of the science simulators, such as the PhET simulations, are written in java and have yet to be converted to HTML5. That barrier to access, however, is coming down. This winter,  Adobe announced their release of a new compiler that can convert Flash animations into HTML5. There are also third party applications, such as Skyfire, that will play Flash video on iOS devices (actually Skyfire’s servers download the Flash video, convert it to HTML5, and then pass it along to the phone). The release has been such a hit that Skyfire has temporarily marked the product as “sold-out” because their servers couldn’t handle the stress of the traffic. Neither of these products are perfect solutions nor do they address the issues with Java, but they signal a new direction. It is only a matter of time before all of your current Flash and Java content will be iPad compatible.

With the iPad on the market for only seven months it is too early to know exactly what impact it will have on education. There is research being done on a range of applications of the iPad in K-12 education but the results from these studies are still a ways off. But with the expanding app store, the continually updated iOS, and the inevitable evolution of the iPad the future looks promising. Over the last decade no one has shown more foresight or caused more creative destruction then Steve Jobs. There is no better technology company to bet on to bring our classrooms into the 21^st century.

Image:  Glenn Fleishmann on Flickr

“Fed-up professors say texting is the new doodling” is the national newspaper headline of a trend story that grew some serious legs online—passed prof-to-prof on Twitter and Facebook with amazing speed!

That’s because profs are also into sharing news in realtime via micro-messaging of course. And though we might not care to admit it, that means we’re often seen texting and tweeting during conference presentations and staff meetings, not unlike our students.

But students are texting and tweeting while WE’RE teaching! Therein lies the rub. Profs may be “fed-up” due to injured pride at our possible lack of interestingness, but we know that time-starved students’ attention is a casualty of the velocity of digital culture and deeply ingrained multitasking habits. At the same time, and just as likely, profs might be “fed-up” with all that Gen Y phone-tapping because we’re deeply concerned about student outcomes. Unfocused students fiddling with their phones in class can’t be good.

Or can it?

A study published last month in The Journal of Computer Assisted Learning showed tweeting students get higher grades. That research enjoyed enormous peer-to-peer promotion from edTech-minded faculty, students, and administrators (my Principal even tweeted it!). Turns out (to the surprise of how many?) that by live tweeting the lecture, actively engaged students are doing some serious thinking and learning.

To sum up the study’s implications: by encouraging students to livetweet the class, they practice valuable skills in distilling and reporting highlights and key points from the lecture or discussion. In the process, the classroom becomes both more transparent and increasingly connected to the culture at large, opening up possibilities for students’ friends, parents and other publics to actively participate or observe. This one simple mobile learning technology enables most key aspects of constructivist learning. And whereas texting may involve SMS fees, tweeting is free.

Livetweet P2P teaching

When classrooms are connected to the web through livetweeting, “students can become teachers,” to quote Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, speaking on a panel about technological innovations at schools at NBC’s Education Nation summit earlier this fall. With digital tools like phones and laptops, plus online access to the web (including Twitter) students “can teach their teachers; they can teach each other,” Hastings observed, basing the comment on his experience as an educational philanthropist and e-learning technology developer.

For teachers wanting to encourage this in their classes, step one is to figure out how live tweeting fits with learning objectives. For a journalism class at Carleton University in Ottawa, that wasn’t difficult—-the next generation of digital reporters knows that news doesn’t break, it tweets. In a recent lecture presentation where livetweeting was encouraged, one student remarked: “People in the class were all doing it; it really got everyone to actively participate. And even if they weren’t tweeting, we had the stream up on the screen for everyone to follow along.”

Once a prof settles on a course #hashtag and ensures it’s well publicized among students, it’s easy (and free) to aggregate the tweetstream using a live tool like TwitterFall. However, be on alert for hashtag hijacking—set up a moderator for sure. Tech-forward teaching is hands-on teaching.

Need more ideas for how to support student livetweeting? Check out this excellent presentation by Tiffany Gallicano, Assistant Professor of Media & PR at University of Oregon.

At the beginning of each term, students try to find seats in my already-full courses, and the stream of emails begins. This year those requests are a little bit different, indicating a new trend in professor-student communication, and the ratcheting up of Gen Y digital expectations in higher ed.

My students are asking for push notifications of open seats.

No can do.

The registration system at my university doesn’t offer this service for students. There’s no opt-in for them to receive SMS, emails or ping alerts about vacant course spots in real time. In other words, course selection isn’t your parents’ OpenTable or eBay auction.

But should it be?

Moreover, as a prof, I don’t have access to the registration numbers in real time. There’s no way for me to monitor the situation and give my students a push-on-request. The administrative assistant could monitor and manage a wait-list, but that’s not autopilot, that’s time consuming human effort. And in any case, that’s not what students are asking about. They want that Apple Concierge style personalized auto ping messaging.

The current infeasibility of this request at my school is beside the point. The more interesting aspect concerns students’ shifting expectations about connectivity, news alerts, mobile messaging, and system monitoring.

The next wave of digital and mobile student services will be all about the ping.

Of course there are already SMS services enabling profs to push notify their students. For example, Todd McCann, also known as “Professor Textblaster” at Bay College in Michigan received national news media attention for his innovative digital initiatives to keep students on track using micromessaging. Likewise, a new start-up Remind101 is currently in private beta at an East Coast university, designed (by a GenY entrepreneur) exclusively for educators to send students sms reminders—certainly worth a look.

There are many ways that professors could use push notifications beyond letting students know about empty seats. In an effort to raise student outcomes, we can text reminders about tests and deadlines, or send weekly sample quiz questions. In class, we can use SMS for polling, or to test comprehension, or to distribute links to web resources.

Interested in more details? For some international perspectives, check out this study (link opens pdf) “M-learning: texting (SMS) as a teaching & learning tool in higher arts education” by the University of Winchester in the UK. Also see this study (link opens slideshare) from researchers at The University of Minho in Portugal, filled with statistics and ideas for using SMS to improve students’ connectedness, comprehension, and test results.

Accustomed to auto-notifications from Facebook, for movie openings, pop-up tip alerts for local deals, and preferring texting to voice communication anyway—Gen Y students are asking for a digital push to help them stay organized and get ahead. Is higher ed ready?

Last week I attended EDUCAUSE with the i>clicker and Panopto crews to talk about how to use a range of  technologies for innovative teaching in higher ed.

QR codes are hot!

Without a doubt the talk about QR codes in classroom and on campus was the biggest hit of all the mini-presentations I did, and here is the video: QR codes if you’d prefer to download or view just the slides, here they are:

It seems the barcodes are getting a lot of interest at the moment from educators and businesses both small and large. As more professionals, students, and educators adopt smartphones, it makes sense to experiment with mobile information sharing through QR codes. Although surveys of smartphone use put the figure at about 20% of the total mobile phone consumer market, in fact that number jumps to nearly 50% when we look at entrepreneurs, according to new research by Forrester. Among higher ed students there is a considerable percentage of smartphone users, but likely due to cost it hasn’t hit the tipping point yet. However according to Nielsen media, smartphones are projected to overtake feature phones in North America next fall.

Teaching with video

At EDUCAUSE we also talked with faculty about ideas for using video in teaching. Everything from videorecording whole lectures (lecture capture) to taping the answers to FAQ in advance. The video of that mini-presentation is available. One point that often gets mentioned when faculty debate videorecording the lectures is whether it will encourage students to skip class. This, despite reams of research to the contrary, remains a real point of concern. In this presentation we turned that query on its head, to suggest that if professors need to miss their own class to attend a conference, video recording some lecture material in advance may be just the ticket to increase flexibility for faculty. Here are the slides:

It’s back to school time and at The Active Class we’re thinking about fall projects involving educational technology development.

Are you curious about using social media in your courses but are not quite sure how to take the next step, or to connect it to student assessment? Do QR codes and other mobile teaching ideas intrigue, but you’d have to see it in practice to assess the true value before implementing in your courses? What about videorecording some of your lecture material –would you be interested to know more about the costs, how to get students involved in production, and the impact on student outcomes (as well as how coursecasting can help make your schedule more flexible)?

I’ve learned everything I know about highly wired teaching techniques from connecting with a huge network of digitally-savvy peers and tech-fluent students. Being able to talk with an experienced edtech instructor and user can help answer high- and low-tech questions, inspire classroom application ideas, address anxieties and troubleshoot issues. That’s why in just a few weeks I’ll be at EDUCAUSE to connect with attendees around a series of three short presentations.

These tech teaching talks are designed by and based on my active experience in the classroom here at Queen’s University in Canada, where I using mobile and social technologies with groups ranging from 20 to 700 students at a time.

And here’s the plan for the EDUCAUSE meeting:

October 12, 2010 Live at 4:30-4:50 PM Booth 1676: How to use social media to support P2P technology mentoring for faculty and students
Business is embracing web 2.0 technologies to enable consumers to engage with brands and each other, and on campus we can follow suit, supporting peer to peer technology mentoring. This talk offers practical suggestions for enabling P2P interactions and increasing community engagement gleaned from corporations with the highest “digital IQs.”

October 12, 2010 Live at 5:00-5:20 PM Booth 1676: How to use QR codes on campus and in class
From self-guided campus tours, to mobile websites, to lab equipment manuals, QR codes are environmentally smart (less paper!) and leverage students’ digital proclivities (and those smartphones in knapsacks). This talk offers practical ideas for using digital barcodes as part of a social and mobile educational initiative or marketing and communications campaign.

October 13, 2010 Live at 10:00-10:20 AM Booth 1676: How to use video coursecasting while keeping attendance high and outcomes higher
Students appreciate it when video coursecasting is available, but we often hear concern from faculty who worry it will be a disincentive to attend class. This talk reviews some strategies for using video to supplement the syllabus and lectures, to support a variety of student learning styles, (including as a remedial tool, for ESL students, and to increase accessibility for students with disabilities) and to add flexibility to instructors’ own schedules.

If you cannot be in California to meet in person, please consider connecting virtually on the Facebook page, Twitter stream or comments section below. I’d love to know: how are you using these and other technologies in your classrooms, and what are some of the unexpected outcomes you’ve experienced? If you had one tip for a new teacher seeking to adopt a new digital tool, which one has the most impact on student learning in your opinion?

QR codes (also called matrix codes, so you can see why I might feel an affinity with them!) are gaining in popularity in North America (they’re already big overseas in Japan and elsewhere). With more students buying smartphones, and more professors interested in developing mobile learning solutions, QR codes in the classroom are worth considering.

A QR code is a fancy “quick response” barcode. It can be decoded (scanned) with smartphone software (available free for all phones) and once scanned, it sends the smartphone to a website whose URL is embedded in the code. It’s a pretty painless process: open QR code app, hold phone up to QR code, take a photo, then click to follow the embedded link. Or, you can set up a QR code so that scanning it causes the user’s smartphone to open an email program and auto-insert an address, or to open the text messaging feature and insert a pre-fab SMS.

In business, these QR codes serve many purposes having to do with linking the physical and the virtual worlds. Pasted on store shelves, product labels, or machinery, they can provide user manuals, background information, user reviews, or mobile coupons on-demand and in-hand. The QR trend is catching on quickly in the real estate industry. Posting QR codes on roadside For Sale signs means mobile house hunters can instantly access all the listing details—and contact the agent right away.

QR codes are one way to “close the loop from print to mobile,” says Ted Ianuzzi, VP Sales and Marketing at Didmo. And as such, they are efficient “mobile Trojan horses” that can be used to distribute all kinds of digital content “on the spot.” So then, how might we use these fancy barcodes in teaching? [read more]

In this post I’ll consider two very different families of smartphone apps, both informational in function and designed with different kinds of learning and self-improvement in mind. I offer them as two examples of innovative digital initiatives that could inspire those in higher ed interested in mobile learning object use and design.

The AppCourse: Slick, Bundled, Feature-rich

When it was launched this year, the BarMax iPhone app earned a lot more press coverage than it did paid downloads.  Why?  It came with a price tag of $1K. That’s right: one thousand bucks.  At first (and I cannot be alone here) I assumed it was a mixology app for bartenders. I was wrong. I also thought it would be panned by reviewers as an outrageous idea with an unreasonably exorbitant price point. Wrong again. Critics agreed BarMax was well worth the cost.

BarMax delivered a total mobile learning solution for law students preparing for the California bar exam.  Developers justified price by explaining that this agile, premium content was on par with the information delivered through their in-class prep course, which is in the $3,000-$4,000 tuition range.

On a side note, I agree that “the thought of being able to spend $1,000 with one click on your iPhone remains a little terrifying,” as MG Siegler at TechCrunch observed.  Yet as mobile banking catches on, and users buy and sell stocks and manage investments via smartphones, and as more mobile commerce options become available, surely large-scale financial transactions on the mobile phone will be less scary—at least for some users.

Following in the footsteps of BarMax, another professional training appCourse, this one for only $29.99.  [read more]

That students use text messaging, mobile web-surfing, and social media sites in the classroom is not news. Prohibited or not, the behavior is commonplace, according to self-reports from students who admit to using SMS even during exams. “Students feel texting is no big deal….even without the teacher’s approval it is common for students to text under their desks or even in their pockets,” reports one student newspaper in California. Not surprisingly, some professors feel differently about the textual distraction, and are often offended, confused, or even threatened by the loss of control. As such there’s a constant stream of case studies in the press about generational clashes over unsanctioned mobile media use in the lecture hall.

Not long ago, the issue was students using notebook computers in the lecture hall to surf the web and visit MySpace and Facebook during class. As a result, some professors opted to turn off the wi-fi and ban laptops. However, mobile phone use is far more difficult for instructors to control and shut down. Today most students have cellphones and smartphones that are web-enabled and complete with data plans for dedicated, private, and reliable service that stays up regardless of whether the prof throws the switch. This handheld computing is causing more technopanic on campus.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, a professor at Syracuse University is so offended by students who find their cell phones more interesting than their professors, that if he “catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he’ll end the class on the spot and walk out.” Recently one high school teacher in Wisconsin had his perpetually-texting 14 year old student arrested. At University of Texas, El Paso, one professor is so disturbed by what she considers disruptive mobile technology (students texting while she lectures) that she confiscates phones and suggests we might consider a ban of cell phones while learning, similar to some cities’ and states’ prohibitions against the use of cell phones and texting while driving.

While “some teachers ban cell phones and laptops on sight, others figure, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” observes reporter Jennifer Brooks at The Tennessean. Indeed, many instructors and professors who strongly believe in the potential of educational technology take a far different approach to texting and surfing millennials. Some design classroom activities using cell phones and pedagogical projects involving mobile social networking. As recently reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Todd McCann, an instructor at Bay College in Michigan, uses SMS to remind students of upcoming deadlines. When he launched the service, approximately 70% of his students opted-in to receive the text messages notifying them of upcoming paper due dates and the like. McCann commented that, rather than resisting new communications and digital technologies, as many of his colleagues do, he was instead opting to meet students “where they live“—in other words, to offer students support online. Also in Michigan, this time at the high school level, a pilot project (funded by a $250,000 grant from Verizon) using cell phones resulted in students’ achievement scores increasing by an average of 25 percent.

Students’ fascination with mobile communications technology is leveraged at many universities where mobile app development is part of the curriculum. This is timely because, as Malcolm Brown, director of Educause Learning Initiative recently observed, “Mobile technology has indeed arrived,” in higher education, “but are we ready?”

The answer at Abilene Christian University in Texas is a resounding YES, as the school prepares for the spring 2010 launch of Apple’s iPad. Increasingly, professors and students alike want to be connected “wherever they are,” said George Saltsman, executive director of the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning, because “we are becoming an increasingly mobile society.” ACU wants to be a leader in “understanding how mobility works in education and in society.” Likewise at The University of Illinois, professors were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how mobile technology can enhance undergraduate students’ learning experiences.

From texting to tweeting, many educators are investigating how to leverage millennials’ preexisting technical savvy when it comes to mobile and social computing for educational ends—rather than fighting what appears to be a losing battle for control over a disconnected classroom.

image credit: woohoo megoo on flickr