At the start of my summer class this year, a quiet and diligent student asked a seemingly innocuous question.  “Do you allow use of laptops in class?”  Sure, I said, as long as they’re on task.  I had my TA sit behind her a few times and double-check — she was indeed simply using the online lecture material and taking notes as she went.  I was satisfied.  And she was the only student bringing a laptop to class.

But somehow, around week 2 or 3 (out of 5), something changed.  It was so insidious, I didn’t even realize there was a problem until it was too late.  While I had been distracted by the rigors of teaching a summer course, somehow more laptops had snuck their way in.  I was writing on the board, and looked up and realized that about a fourth of the class wasn’t looking at me.  They were looking down, at their laptop or their cell phone.  I became more emphatic, gesturing to items on my slide, or saying, “as we can see here” as I worked a problem on the board.  But despite the fact that I knew that my gestures and board work could NOT be included on the online lecture notes, they did not look up to see what I was doing.  In the final week of class I had a guest lecturer, and I noticed that one of my students was focused on his laptop screen rather than this energetic, award-winning instructor.  I quietly went and stood behind him, and indeed, he was looking at something completely off-task.  I whispered to him to please focus his attention on the lecture.

What is even more shocking, at least to me, was that this was in a small class (only 18 students) where there is no hope of anonymity.  I’m standing right there in front of them, I know their name, and yet somehow texting and laptop use “crept in” behind my back.  Also shocking was the fact that this was no ordinary lecture class, where I was simply reading off the lecture slides and working through example problems from the book.  I had made great efforts to make the course interactive, with clicker questions, hands-on experiments, worksheets and activities, computer simulations, small group discussions, and interactive demonstrations.  Students were paired with “learning groups” that rotated each week.  They were asked to discuss challenging questions with their neighbors.  I had them get up out of their seats to do mini experiments and see how physics really worked.   We discussed explicitly, several times, how important engagement was for their success and their learning.  And yet, when we got into lecture-mode to wrap up and understand these engaging activities that we’d done — so many of them were tuning out.

What happened?

Even in this ideal environment, the temptation of digital distraction was too high.  I might view this akin to addictive behavior now, and realize that students need more explicit support in order to do the right thing for their learning.  I think that the biggest mistake that I made was to fail to have explicit guidelines for use of technology (laptops, cell phones) in class.  I just didn’t think I had to, but now I know that was wrong.  And when I saw *some* off-task behavior, I should not have ignored it for that one time, since that sent an implicit message.  I think that it’s important to be aware of the classroom culture or social norms that are being established, either explicitly or implicitly.  I spent a lot of time implicitly setting up a culture of collaboration, but did not attend to creating explicit guidelines for engagement and behavior in class.

Social contracts

An instructor here at the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote a fantastic article about establishing social contracts about digital distraction in the classroom.  Rather than setting down rules from above about student behavior, Dr. Sieber has students collaboratively develop behavioral guidelines for the virtual and in-person classroom.  This “initiation ritual” helps to create a cohesive community, as well as help students to learn to navigate the online platform for the course.  I wrote last month about improving online discussion boards, and I think that this would have been an excellent first required activity for the online discussion — to establish a social contract.

In a nutshell, here is what Dr. Sieber does with her students:

• They write two social contracts, one for in-class behaviors and one for online
• Students first post their expectations of themselves and their peers
• Students vote on each proposal
• The individual ideas are put together into a working constitution for the class
• Students agree to enforce the constitution

Dr. Sieber says that the way that the instructions are framed to students helps to guarantee the success of the enterprise, and provides some sample instructions in the original article.  One thing that shines through to me in all her writings are the immense respect that she has for her students and for the utility of this process.  Over and over I’ve found that students are remarkably sensitive to subtle indications of instructor regard.

In talking to Dr. Sieber, I know that she finds that she does not need to explicitly ask students to address technological distractions .  Students always bring up issues such as laptop and cell phone use in class.  See the original article for details on what rules students often impose on themselves and their peers.

A few years ago, my son chose for his Halloween costume a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, black leather jacket and a white mask with no features. I asked him what he was supposed to be and he shrugged his shoulders; he didn’t really know. I told him that as soon as he got to school, someone was going to ask him what he was dressed up as. It was inevitable. And so knowing that, shouldn’t he practice his response to the question he knew was coming?  If he practiced it, he would know it and would be prepared to answer the question.

Similarly, my husband Jay, who teaches biology, advises his students to practice writing short answer essays when they are studying for one of his exams. Students know that those questions will be on the test, so why would they not practice and try to write one prior to the exam? The idea is that you should practice what you know you will need to do, and it will help you learn. Surely, if you know something is going to be asked, shouldn’t you be prepared to answer it in the same way?

A recent research article showcased in The New York Times points to the effectiveness of taking practice tests in order to study.  Most students study in a very passive way—they highlight their books, or read over class notes. The research suggests that passive studying techniques may be less effective than actually practicing what you will ultimately need to do to show you have learned something. And that is to retrieve the information.

In the study published in the journal Science, researchers found that practicing retrieval led to greater learning gains than did studying with concept mapping. The authors propose that “a retrieval event may actually represent a more powerful learning activity than an encoding event” (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011, p. 1).

Concept mapping is often used by teachers to help students make connections between facts, and is considered to be a very active learning task. Students may be asked to use all of the information they have learned about genetics to create a map showing the major concepts and the connections between them. This activity is thought to be an effective studying tool. The recent work by Karpicke & Blunt (2011), however, suggests otherwise.

Even though self-testing has been shown to have tremendous value, many students ignore it when they are preparing for exams. When Henry Roediger of Washington University asked students how they study he found that “they think they know it because they have read it so many times, but they haven’t practiced the skill they’ll need on the test, and that is retrieval.” Roediger & Karpicke (2006) found that testing students immediately after they had studied a passage promoted much better long-term retention than if a student simply studied the passage over and over. And yet it was the students who repeatedly studied who had more confidence in their ability to recall details later.

Not only is self-testing and retrieval shown to be beneficial for learning, so is the practice of retrieval even when you think you already know something. If you study the capitals of the countries of the world and you think that you have mastered the fact that the capital of Turkey is Ankara, should you ditch that card? No, you should leave it in your stack and keep practicing retrieval. To have really good long-term learning you need to keep coming back and retrieving information, even if you think you know it.

The idea that self-testing drives learning is key to the efficacy of Prep-U, an online quizzing tool where students can take practice quizzes relating to their course content. Prep-U is an adaptive system and provides students with questions at exactly the right difficulty level for them. Students answer questions one at a time and must submit their responses before seeing the next question. In this way, students have to really think about the question and to commit to an answer before moving. Moreover, even if a student answers a question correctly one time, they may still see the same question, or a similar question, again in a later quiz. In this way, students keep practicing and retrieving information, and learning is supported. The effects of self-testing are also thought to be enhanced by feedback on whether or not answers are correct. Prep-U delivers this feedback, thus providing students with the opportunity to re-study areas of weakness and come back and take another quiz.

Used as an augmentation for any course, Prep-U can harness the power of using testing for learning, and it can encourage students to study in the most efficient and beneficial way for maximizing long-term learning.

Karpicke, J.D., & Blunt, J.R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 772, 772-5.

Roediger, H.L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006) Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17, 249-255.

In just a few weeks I’m heading to Houston Texas for a teaching strategy refresh weekend at the #Clickers2011 meeting June 3-4. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity and/or can spare the time to be there, the line-up of speakers looks fantastic, and it would be great to connect. If you think it’s time for a tech tool refresh to put more interactivity into your course, come meet with us—100 technoprofs brainstorming connected teaching methods is a hugely valuable opportunity—don’t miss it!

Derek Bruff is headlining, as he should be, considering he wrote the book (literally!) on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems. Derek is a walking storehouse of tips, tricks and best pedagogical practices for getting the most out of clickers across the disciplines. If you have a clicker question, no matter what brand of device or type of course you’re working with—send it to @DerekBruff and he’ll be sure to have a response or resource. I’ve sent several new clickerprofs to Derek for advice and he’s always been super helpful.

I’m sitting on a panel called “Beyond the Status Quo: Encouraging Innovation in the Classroom to Meet Today’s Challenges” with Derek and some other edTech friends including Scott Jaschik who is Editor of Inside Higher Ed, Jim Julius of San Diego State University, and Doug Duncan from UC-Boulder. The full lineup of papers is here.

As you can imagine, the group with be a fairly mobile- and socially- connected bunch, so there is sure to be many valuable tidbits on the live tweetstream at #Clickers2011. For all the micro-highlights, meeting updates, and related clicker resources, follow us at @iclickerclique.

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.

We have the handouts and recording from the Sept. 28th “Make Clickers Work for You” webinar all pulled together!  Sorry for the delay.

You can see the recorded webinar here, including the chat feed, my audio, and the entire presentation.

The handouts can be downloaded as a zip file from our STEMclickers website.

This was a very successful webinar, with over 100 people in attendance!  Thanks everyone for coming, and for great discussion on how best to use clickers to promote student learning.  Stay tuned for future webinars, which may include:

• Writing great clicker questions
• Doing professional development for faculty on clicker use
• Clickers in K12 environments
• More…?

Got other ideas of what webinars you would like to see — on clicker use or on other types of educational technology?  Please let us know in the comments.

On September 28th (10 am PT /  1 pm ET) I’ll be presenting a 1-hour webinar on effective use of clickers.  Please consider joining us!  I’ve been working with instructors on clicker use for a few years now, and am looking forward to taking this interactive workshop online.  A recording of the webinar will be available too — check the blog, or register to get an email with the recording.  This will be focused on use in college settings, but please join us if you’re in K12, as well — many of the messages will apply to you.

Register here.

We’ll talk about:

• What is peer instruction and why does it work
• What makes a great question
• Example questions
• Common challenges
• Effective wrap-up discussions

If you want to see some of my past workshop materials, take a look here.

Here is the full description from the registration page:

In this interactive webinar, we’ll explore tips and ideas for incorporating clickers into your particular class. Clickers offer a powerful way to increasing student engagement and improve learning. At the University of Colorado, we have transformed our classrooms by using clickers to promote peer instruction. We’ll show research results on the most effective use of clickers, and discuss common challenges. In particular, we’ll focus on the attributes of “great” clicker questions, discuss example questions, and share ideas on facilitating effective wrap-up discussions once all the votes are in.

Questions, or things you’d like to see discussed in the webinar?  Post them here!

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 –

Presenting lectures by Powerpoint (or other digital software) offers many advantages, like the ability to easily archive your lectures for future semesters, or to share your lectures with your students in advance of class, not to mention saving students’ eyesight from your messy handwriting.  But Powerpoint can have serious drawbacks when it comes to engaging your students in your class.  “Powerpoint sucks the energy out of a room,” says Diane Sieber (Faculty, University of Colorado – Boulder).  When the screen lights up, students take it as a cue to tune out.  We’ve all had this experience — we scan the slide, and while we wait for the presenter to read through their bulleted list, we daydream about what we’re having for dinner tonight.

“There’s something about the forced march through this linear structure,” says Diane, that makes students feel like there’s no risk to not paying attention.  It tends to make the instructor move faster through the material, reducing any hope that students can both follow the lecture and take notes.  “Hopefully when we get to the end of class we’ll be on the last slide,” she jokes.

Power corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely, claimed Edward Tufte, a leading critic of Powerpoint. If you want critiques of Powerpoint, there is a plethora of material on the web (such as the Gettysburg Address as created in Powerpoint, below).  But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.  Like all technology, Powerpoint is a tool.  So, how can we use it better?

http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

One of the things that Diane Sieber recommends is creating non-linear classes, which can take off in any direction that you please.  Rather than the linear structure of Powerpoint, she creates Mindmaps, which emphasize the larger concepts with a concept map and help keep students anchored in your main points.  I may blog about that more later.

Another idea is to combine the best of traditional chalk with Powerpoint, and use programs that allow you to ink up your Powerpoint interactively. This digital+interactive blend is the driver behind Smartboards and other interactive whiteboards, and with a tablet PC you can also add drawings and other annotations to slides.  I wanted to highlight one particularly  useful (free!)  tool that was designed by science education researchers, specifically for educators.    Ubiquitous Presenter is a free tool designed for use with a Tablet PC, to interactively ink slides, AND allow students to add their own ink from their seats. From their website:

UP offers the structure and detail of pre-prepared slides along with the flexibility of on-the-fly inking, leaving you free to pursue tangents, correct mistakes, and provide step-by-step in-class examples. Slide minimization and whiteboard features provide you with any extra space you need. Students can synchronize with your presentation via a web browser and watch it real-time, or remain unsynchronized and move between the slides at their leisure. All of your progressive inking is saved on the web, so students can return later and step through the lecture for review.

Writing out equations or solving problems long-hand on the slide forces the instructor to slow down (and it’s easier than creating complicated formulae in digital software), as well as archiving the handwritten material for students’ later review.  Plus, solving problems live in class reduces the tune-out factor:  There is something happening for students to follow, rather than pre-prepared bullet slides.  This approach has more flexibility, allowing the instructor to target student questions, for example.

Since students can interact with the slides themselves via a web browser, this opens a wide variety of opportunities to make lecture interactive.  One example given by the developers is to prepare a slide with empty graph axes.  During a lecture demonstration, the instructor can pause and ask students to predict — via the graph — how velocity and force will vary over time (for example).  [Students don't need a Tablet PC to do this, only a web-enabled laptop or cell phone].  The instructor can review and display these predictions, opening class discussion.   This can also be an effective means of displaying the outcome of group problem solving to the class as a whole.

Student work in UP: http://physics.csusm.edu/physics/faculty/eprice/research/UP/UP.html

This is just one way in which instructors can make use of the handy features of digital presentation, but tweak them to allow additional classroom interaction.  Stay tuned for more ideas in the future!

More information:

• About Ubiquitous Presenter (UP) (including instructor guides)
• Download UP
• Examples of UP used in physics classes
• A nice little video of UP in action
• Research on UP
• The Physics Teacher article on UP (subscription required)