(The Lack of) Paperless Courses

I remember my freshman year here at the university. The first week of each semester I would be inundated with multiple packets of paper for each course I was enrolled in, these were the distribution of the class syllabi and projects for the semester. It was nice to have everything laid out in front of me so that I could integrate the information into my own calendar and plan accordingly.

My junior year the campus had shifted towards a greener idea with regards to distribution of paper. The syllabi for courses were no longer to be printed out, but instead made available on course websites. This was fine, I still had access to the syllabus whenever I wanted and I could still easily integrate due dates into my schedule. I felt better about taking a step to a greener campus.

I am now in my senior year and courses are still distributing syllabi by email or course website, but the thing that bugs me is homework submission. Shouldn't we take the next step to a greener campus? I am going to take a look at our education courses in specific for this discussion. All education courses that I have enrolled in and am currently enrolled in have a Moodle or Compass website to supplement the course and distribution of materials, which is great so that professors/TAs do not need to print and hand out during class. My gripe is that I need to print out my assignments (which can be in the range of 3-15 pages long) and turn in to my teachers.

What is the point of printing out our assignments if we have Moodle or Compass, both which support document submission. Our teachers need to embrace the technology they are trying to teach us to use in their own courses. They should be willing to allow us to upload our assignments to these sites and be able to use a commenting tool in a word processor or in a PDF viewer (because really, they only comment in margins anyway). This would be a great next step to a greener campus here in our own education department.

One of my C&I professors is already embracing assignment submission on Moodle. The first year of my secondary education program my professor had us print out our assignments to bring to class to talk about them as well as upload them to our Moodle page under an assignment post. It turned out that we didn't get around to talking about our assignments the majority of the time, so now we do not bring printed assignments to class anymore, but he encourages us to bring our laptops in order to see a digital version if we are to discuss it. My professor chooses to disseminate assignment grades via email and not through the Moodle grading system, but this is a step in the right direction. If my other education courses this semester supported Moodle/Compass uploading, I would have saved 35 pieces of paper + ink so far.

A question: How do you feel about becoming a paperless course? What would this mean in terms of planning and grading?

Using Twitter in the Classroom

I see a lot of tweets in #edchat and #edtech about using twitter in the classroom and specific ways to use twitter, but how does this actually look like in a classroom? What programs are used to show these tweets? What do you specifically do with twitter that makes it a unique tool in the classroom?

I wanted to find the answers to these questions because I feel that twitter can be very useful in a class where students are very likely to have a cell phone (a regular cell phone can still support text-message based tweets to their twitter account).

I encourage you to watch the following video about twitter in a large classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8


Right now I will explore the following question:

What programs are used to show these tweets?
Tweetchat.com looks like a promising place to view chats in close to real time for displaying chats or participating in them at home (away from the classroom).

EduTweet is also pretty cool, it looks like it would serve like a clicker system in a classroom, the students post a tweet with a hashtag specific to the question (e.g. #math231q1) and the teacher can search this tag and EduTweet will generate a chart with all of the different answers provided by the students. I think this would be good in a math classroom for numerical answers, or even for a multiple choice prompt.

TweetDeck is used in the above video as the facilitator of the twitter discussion. I think this is nice because you can set up columns and show multiple discussions at once so the students can view these all at the same time whereas I think the others are limited in this sense. You could ask the class a question about one thing and then a second thing without removing the first question's feed so students can refer back to it if they want.


Do you have any other ideas of programs that can be used to facilitate the use of twitter in the classroom?

Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Throughout my calculus discussion twice a week, I definitely see the difference in my quality of questioning of the students whether or not I prepare the lesson well ahead of time or I go off a generic lesson plan for the day. I think my students learn more on these days when I prepare questions for my students as well as an introduction to the topic.

Upon reflection of my questioning with my students, I notice that I go very quickly, wanting my students to come to conclusions faster than they are (or rightly should), mainly because I am time limited and the class is set up into groups where I need to circulate and facilitate understanding. If I stay too long at one group, another group can get stuck and not progress through the day's investigation. I'm not sure what to do about this because the students are supposed to be getting through the entire worksheet each class period, but if I allow for more processing time the students may not get to the topics they must cover that day. I believe this is a common problem in all classrooms which must teach to a test, or follow strict guidelines.

I'm going to have an informal midterm ICES (Instructor & Course Evaluation System) form so that I can see what the students want changed before the end of the semester, when the formal ICES forms are distributed. I will be only teaching this course at the University for this semester since I will be student teaching next semester, so it is valuable that I do this ahead of time, too

What questions do you think I should include in this evaluation form?

First Day of Observations

Today was the first day of being in my new classroom for the semester. It was very eventful day to say the least. Many challenges ahead.

I promise I will blog soon. I want to talk about differentiated assessment in conjunction with differentiated instruction. In the mean time, I want to point you in the direction of this blog post: http://realteachingmeansreallearning.blogspot.com/2011/09/differentiated-assessment.html