EDTECH 501: Learning Reflections

I felt that this class was very valuable to me overall. Most of the topics we covered were not entirely new to me--in fact, many of the ideas in the assignments I submitted have been recurring topics in my teaching life for many years. However, while I was aware that there were many online resources for teaching, I had never really taken the time to find out more about them, or even try to use them for myself. This class made me both aware of their existence, and gave me the opportunity to experiment with many of them.

Overall, I believe that the Google+ experience was the best part of the course. I have taught online classes using several different platforms, but I found that creating opportunities for student interaction was clunky at best, depending primarily on standard discussion boards. Most students in my classes feel that discussion board interactions are too forced, and they are not overly thrilled with having to read through their classmates' posts to reply. While there is a real learning curve for Google+, once the learner has discovered all of the nooks and crannies there, interaction is much more fluid and life-like. The fact that Hangouts is built-in also makes it much easier to interact in real time.

I also like the Blogger platform as a way of sharing individual thoughts. I like how easy it is to share the posts with only specific groups of people, without having to make the posts completely public.

As for the non-Google tools we used, I tried many that didn't actually get used for an assignment for the class. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different tools--especially trying to find an alternative to Xtranormal. While I felt that I learned a lot from the time I spent experimenting, it sometimes meant that I didn't have the time to actually complete the assignment, so some of the assignments I actually submitted were probably not as good as they could have been if I had used only one tool from the start. I am aware that the due dates were not strict for the class itself, but I was teaching a full load of classes (five!) at the same time, and I felt that it was better to keep moving along than to get stuck somewhere and get behind.

Moving forward, I am sure that many of the things I learned in this class will be incorporated into classes that I design and/or teach in the future. In some cases, it may be simply creating videos to explain a specific idea to students. In most cases, though, I am more likely to have my students use these tools as part of a learning process.

I also feel that I benefited from seeing other students' creations for the class. Because of time constraints on my part, I'm afraid that I focused mainly on those submitted by my small group members, but I did try to view other students' posts as my time permitted, although I certainly did not reply to everything I read and watched. I am a strong believer in the idea that we learn more from our peers than we do from our teachers, and this class was well designed to that end.

School Evaluation Summary

As stated in the summary itself, I completed the survey primarily on my own experiences with the college. However, I did meet with several people in the school's administration to get answers to things I really wasn't aware of.

I think the most surprising part of completing this assignment was the enthusiasm I received from the administrators that I met with. There is a definite three-way divide at the university between administration, the school's IT department, and the faculty body, and I think that the divide is so engrained in the school's culture that we don't even think about how much more we could accomplish if we worked together more often. It was good to know that there was genuine interest both in helping me complete the survey, as well as getting feedback so that they can look at what improvements we can make in the future.

As a whole, I think the school does a good job of putting the students' needs first, to make sure that resources, faculty, and staff are available to help them meet whatever goal they have set for themselves. That said, I think there is still much more we could do in terms of using technology to help with that goal.

The links to my files are below:

School Evaluation

Maturity Benchmarks Survey

I have tried to set the sharing settings so that readers can add comments directly to the files, and comments are very welcome.

Kim

Technology Use Planning Overview

Start with defining technology use planning--how would you describe it?

Technology use planning is a formal recognition of the fact that technology is a required component of education in today’s society, and that the technology must be readily available to everyone in order to be effective.

The plan should include at least basic ideas about what kinds of hardware and infrastructure will be included, but also what software the users will need, and how many users are likely to use the technology. Security issues--especially the storage of sensitive student data--must also be included in the plan, along with policies on who has access to that data and how the data is accessed.

How might the new National Educational Technology Plan 2010 be an effective and powerful resource for technology use planning?

Our education system is going through a huge transformation now. Past educational models focused on reading books and memorizing facts, and a person’s education was measured by how much they remembered of those facts. Today's education system is being transformed by the fact that many (if not most) students have ready access to these facts in the palm of their hand, with a shift toward focusing on how to use those facts to generate new ideas.

This concept is repeated multiple times in the NETP2010. In essence, the old, traditional concept of individual memory is quickly transforming into that of a collective memory, where members of the Internet society can share information with each other easily and quickly, even over large distances, then use that information to generate new ideas. Students (and teachers) who do not have Internet access are left out of the ability to take advantage of that collective memory.

The NETP2010 stresses the need for an infrastructure and technology support that provide reliable access to technology--for students and teachers alike--to encourage full-time learning. This access also needs to be designed for 24/7 use, because the plan acknowledges that a lot of learning takes place outside the classroom.

I believe that this plan can help those at the administrative level of education systems, including both K-12 and higher ed, to understand both how technology should be integrated into the learning system, and why it is critical that we do so.

Do you agree with See about tech use plans needing to be short, not long term?

I agree in part. In a way, technology planning is like driving a car. You need to pay the most attention to the things that are closest to you, and adapt as the traffic around you changes in the here and now. However, you also need to look down the road, so that you have time to plan and prepare for things that are still in the future.

The idea of short-term planning revolves around the fact that technology does change quickly in unpredictable ways. A ten-year plan that relies on one kind of technology may be untenable after only three or four years into the plan, simply because of the shifting nature of technology dunes.

That said, I believe that some amount of long-term planning is desirable, and that it can be effective if done correctly. Some aspects of technology have remained constant--like the need to be able to identify users and allocate resources--and it is reasonable to predict that those aspects are likely to be relevant for an indefinite period of time to come.

An example is the assignment of usernames in a network, which has been a tricky issue since networks were born. The concept of using a person’s name looks good up front, since it is easier to remember a name than a random number. However, as the number of users increases, so does the likelihood of having more than one user with the same name. While network strategies can find ways around this (by including a middle initial, for example), if users are used to one specific system, it can be confusing when elements of the system don’t meet expectations. While no username system is perfect, a long-term plan that takes into account how users will be identified in the future without confusion is better than a short-term plan that looks only at the current user base.

Another example is the need for data storage, for all users of the system. Teachers and students need access to a secure location where the data they create can be stored, and some kind of backup plan should be in place to ensure that data is not lost. We know that data storage needs are likely to grow, so we need to plan for growth.

Long-term planning should include the ability to shift focus as part of the plan, while committing to stay on track with the focus of ensuring that technology will always be available at the same time.

What do you think about his comment that "effective technology plans focus on applications, not technology?" Do you agree/disagree?

In the ideal world, I would agree with this statement. To continue with the car analogy, a traffic system should be designed with the main goal of getting drivers from point A to point B as efficiently as possible, regardless of the vehicle they are driving now or in the future.

In the real world, this is hard to implement just because every piece of technology works a little differently, and users have to know how to use the technology before they can drive it to their destination.

While graphic user interface systems have certainly made devices more user-friendly and uniform, I have found that “uniformity” is in the eye of the beholder. A child who has grown up with technology can easily adapt to its different forms without blinking an eye, because their goal is the desired end result, and they understand that an icon is just an icon, and a menu is just a menu. For many adults, learning to use technology is a goal in and of itself, and if they don’t know how to use the technology, they can’t really see a path to the end result. They may not be able to recognize that Internet Explorer and Safari serve the same purpose, for example, or be able to find options in menus that are arranged differently from what they are used to using.

In my own world, my 18-year-old son can easily switch between Windows 7, Windows 8, Ubuntu, Mac OS, iOS, and Android because he is more aware of the similarities between the different user interfaces than he is of the differences. My husband, on the other hand, moans when he has to learn yet another version of Windows or Microsoft Office, and he has only figured out how to do basic things on his Android phone. While he does understand that a GUI is a GUI, he is much more likely to see the differences between the interfaces, and to see those differences as obstacles to his desired end result.

What experiences have you had with technology use planning and what have you seen for outcomes (both good and bad?)

I have been teaching adults how to use technology for a substantial part of my adult life, and while I have never been directly involved in determining a technology plan, I have certainly experienced its effects. The technology goals for our school are determined primarily by and for administration, and providing technology for use in the classes often takes a backseat to what administration believes is needed at that time.

About a year ago, the technology department at the university where I work decided to start replacing desktop computers used in student computer labs (most of which are used for computer classes) with virtual desktop devices instead. There was a small pilot study that a few people experimented with, and once the bugs were worked out, they replaced the computers in one of the labs in the next phase. When that was successful, they went to a nearly complete commitment to providing virtual desktops in all classroom labs, as well as to replace many of the administrative computers. That roll out proved to be disastrous, because they did not plan for the number of users on the server side of the virtual network. The server crashed completely at least once a day for several weeks in a row, and even when it was working, the virtual desktops were so slow that it was frustrating to try to accomplish anything at all. They had also completely gotten rid of the old equipment, so we couldn’t just go back to the previous setup.

This was only an inconvenience for most classes, since very few classes at the school rely on technology on a daily basis, and teachers had to help students find alternate ways to complete assignments that did depend on computers. For the computer classes that I teach, though, it was disastrous. We had to figure out how to share the labs that were still functional (because they had not yet gone virtual), and I frequently found myself ending class early after using my personal laptop to demonstrate the current assignment, so that students could go find equipment to use in other parts of the campus.

The worst part of this was that the school administration was completely oblivious to the problems we were having in the classrooms. The virtual rollout was completely successful in the administrative part of the network because there were so many fewer users, Even when they did finally become aware of the severity of the problems, there was little they could do except authorize whatever expenses they could make available toward fixing the problems.

The campus is now almost completely virtual, with only a smattering of desktop computers around campus. For the most part, this has been successful after the disasters of its beginning, but there are still many people on campus who distrust it and who discourage students from using it.

I would like to think that our IT department has learned from those mistakes, but I don’t really think it has. The disaster of the virtual desktops was by far the most catastrophic example of poor planning, but it is not the only one we have had in the dozen or so years I’ve been teaching them. Most instructors have decided that we cannot count on campus technology to be available 100% of the time, and very few of us go into a classroom to teach without a plan B that does not depend on technology.

Digital Inequality

Here is my VoiceThread video on Digital Inequality:



The problem of digital inequality is not really that new to me. I have been teaching computer classes for more than a decade, and during that time, I have known students who simply could not afford to buy a computer to use at home. The problem seems to be shifting now, to a point where students are more likely to have a "computer" at home, but more and more students are choosing to rely on smart phones instead of desktop or laptop computers, with the same result that they have to come to campus to do their work for classes that require the use of a computer.

Access to technology is not an overwhelming problem, though. A bigger problem in my classes is the fact that there is a wide disparity in previous experience using computers. I do have a few students every quarter who have not used computers very much in the past. In some cases, it may be because the student is from a third-world country, and they never had any opportunity to learn how to use them before coming to the United States to attend college. In other cases, it may be an older student who has simply never had a computer because they didn't need one. Yet another set of students are people who do not like computers, and who want to have as little to do with them as possible.

Alongside these students, often in the same classroom, I have students who can't remember a time when they didn't have a computer, and who are extremely comfortable learning new skills in the class.

This range of background knowledge causes many problems, and since I teach computer education classes geared toward non-computer majors, I see it in most of my classes. On top of that, we have to fit an entire semester into ten weeks' time, so it's not always possible to slow down and let everyone catch up.

In my computer applications classes, the disparity of experience is very obvious. The students who are less experienced with computers feel very stressed with each new assignment because of the amount of work required. For these students, the textbook assignments and projects can take an extraordinary amount of time to complete, because they often need to repeat steps or review the material to get the correct results. The more experienced students don't always need the same introduction to the material that the less experienced students need, and this leads to boredom on their part.

I have considered creating videos to replace the in-class presentations, but this would be an extreme time commitment on my part, and there is no evidence that the students would actually take advantage of them. We did actually use a textbook at one point that included online demonstration videos, but to the best of my knowledge, none of the students ever used them. Less experienced students would have the challenge of finding the videos to start with, and more experienced students wouldn't believe they had the time to view them.

The solution I am presenting here may be the best solution to the problem. The less experienced students would have more time to devote to learning the skills before using them in the textbook assignment, and the more experienced students would be able to skip over the introductory material and focus on learning the new skills. All students would still take the same exams on the material, to verify that they are in fact learning the same skills.

Kim Weiss

P.S. For the record, I am not really happy with the quality of the VoiceThread video. I am much more comfortable using PowerPoint to create narrated videos, but I understand that part of the goal of this class is to learn to use new technology. It would be very cool if Google would add a tool to Google docs that allows users to export a slideshow created in Google Docs directly to YouTube.

EDTECH Challenges

I believe that the biggest challenge for me right now is being in the center of the shift from lecture-based classroom models to an online, technology-based model.

For this assignment, I read the 2013 Higher Ed version of the NMC Horizon Report. I currently teach college classes, so I felt the content in that file was more relevant than the K-12 Report.

Two of the trends in that report stood out to me:
#5: The role of educators continues to change due to the vast resources that are accessible to students via the Internet.

#6: Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.

I think that these two trends move hand-in-hand: we can't have one without the other. The Internet resources that are available to students now are a form of online learning, and online learning cannot happen without these resources.

A few years ago, in an introduction that I have most students write during the first week of the quarter, one of my students said something to the effect that he did not understand what the point of school is, since everything anyone wants to know is readily available on the Internet. This statement had an effect on me because it represents the heart of how education is changing. Today's students don't need to learn facts--facts about anything they might be interested in are as close as the palm of their hand. Instead, today's students need to learn how those facts can be molded together to create new ideas--something that they won't be able to find using Google or Wikipedia.

In short, the process of education is going through an evolutionary change right now. This is not a deliberate change. No student or teacher (or even administrator) is pushing to make these changes happen. Instead, it seems to be an shift brought about by how the general populace is now exposed to a wider bank of information than they ever have been at any other point in history.

When I look at the students sitting in my classrooms today, I am truly puzzled about why many of them choose to come to class. They show no interest in participating in the activities I am leading them through, preferring instead to work more-or-less independently, and occasionally popping up their heads to make a quick comment or observation. Many of those students would be better off taking the online version of the class, so they could fit the class into their schedule, instead of trying to fit their schedule into my class. There are typically a few students who are genuinely interested in learning the material in each class, and those students do prove that the classroom environment is still a valid model for some students, but those students seem to be fewer from one quarter to the next.

About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to specialize more in developing online content that could be used in the classes we teach, so I started looking into what I could do to learn this skill. While I probably could have found online training materials to work through on my own, I also know myself well enough to know that unless there is a strong external motivation (like meeting someone else's deadlines), I would keep putting off learning the skills.

I already have one Master's degree (in French Linguistics), but I felt that a second Master's in Educational Technology would help both me and my students. It's only been a few weeks since I started this new journey, and I have already learned new skills that I can put to use immediately in my current classes. I am truly looking forward to the rest of what is to come.

Here is the video I created. I hope you enjoy it.

EDTECH Research

Technology in the Classroom

While the use of personal technology like smart phones, MP3 players, and tablets has led to an increased comfort level with technology in all parts of modern American society, the ubiquity of this technology also poses challenges. Today, it is not uncommon to see couples having dinner in a nice restaurant, but spending most of the time looking at their phone instead of talking to each other. Many shoppers wander up and down aisles talking to someone who isn’t actually present and discussing what would normally be considered private topics like the details of their most recent surgery or current gossip about friends. Some churches resort to blocking cell phone signals during the service to prevent pop songs and beeps from phones that have not been turned off. In the business world, employees will often interrupt a conversation with a customer to read a text message on their phone, and managers struggle trying to have a productive group meeting when most of the participants are reading Facebook updates on their tablets instead of paying attention to the discussion at hand.

This attitude that a user can use personal tech whenever they want to without regard for the situation or people around them extends into the educational environment as well. In a K-12 environment, many schools ban electronic devices completely, if not effectively. In a college environment, policies that forbid the use of personal technology (including phones, computers, tablets, and any other device that a student can bring with them to a classroom) are widespread, but rarely followed. It can be difficult for a professor who is trying to present information to a large group of students when it is obvious that most of the students are paying no attention at all to the lecture. Thirty years ago, it was not uncommon for students to sleep through lectures or to doodle instead of paying attention, but those activities rarely affected the students sitting near them. Today, though, if a student chooses to watch a YouTube video during class or play a Facebook game, other students behind and next to him may get engrossed in watching the activity as well. The leakage of music from the headphones of an MP3 player or the buzzing of a device notifying the user of an incoming message lead to further distractions for those students who really do want to pay attention and participate in the classroom discussion. Bugeja (2007) from my bibliography gives specific steps that some professors take to reduce access to technology during class, with the implication that this control has improved the students' ability to do well in the classes. However, I believe that for today's college students, a complete ban on personal tech in the classroom is impractical for most classes.

This problem has two potential solutions, but neither is exclusive of the other.

One solution: Embrace the use of personal technology in the classroom. Encourage students to use their device to record lectures or to share the material being discussed in class. Develop activities that require the use of technology during class time, like scavenger hunts, online discussion boards, etc.

Another solution: Have students understand the appropriate use of personal technology in various public places (stores, class, meetings, restaurants).

In my own classroom, I am likely to use both of these solutions. However, for the sake of creating an  assignment for the class, I am opting to focus on the etiquette of personal technology. I believe it is useful for students (and the general populace) to know that there is a time and a place for everything, including the use of personal technology. While guidelines for using personal tech in public locations are changing with the technology itself, the overall concept of being aware of how personal tech affects how we interact with people around us and physically present is an important one. I believe that students should at least be aware of how their use of technology affects others in the classroom.

My assignment document is posted at WeissK_AnnotatedBib

RSS in Education

Using RSS Feeds in Education

One of the classes that I regularly teach at my university is a freshman-level Computer Concepts class. This class poses several challenges for me:

• The students have a wide range of knowledge about computers, from those who have problems understanding how to use a mouse to occasional students who have A+/Net+ certification and who have decided to take the class as an "easy" elective. This makes it difficult to find activities that can engage everyone in the class without leaving anyone behind.
• It is designed as a general education class, required by many different majors in the university, and as a result, many students are there simply because it is a required course, with no real interest in the topics we cover. It can be challenging to find activities that will engage everyone in the class.
• Our university has a focus on trying to improve the reading and writing skills of students, and this class lends itself to that kind of activity well. I typically ask students to write one short paper (1-2 pages) each week on a current topic of interest to them in the field of computers and technology, in addition to a variety of other activities.

While I have used RSS extensively in the past, I have gradually moved away from it in preference to Twitter. For myself, I find that Twitter is useful because it gives me very short messages that come straight to my phone. I don't have to remember to open a specific site to view the information, and I can use embedded links in the tweets to open the complete story if I want to read it.

This assignment in RSS feeds made me realize that RSS is still alive and well (despite my neglect ;-) ), and that it is relatively user-friendly as a Web plug-in.

I have a new quarter starting up this Monday, and I intend to use the assignment outlined in the attached video for those classes this quarter. I think that allowing students to choose articles that they find interesting personally will help accommodate the range of understanding and interests that are in the class, and using an RSS feed can help the students find articles they are interested in more quickly.

As a final note, my university does use APA as the standard format for research papers. Having students provide the reference with each of their papers will help prepare the students to use APA in other, more formal research papers.

Elements of Educational Technology

The article "The Meanings of Educational Technology" was interesting to read. I found that it described many things I had already understood about the use of technology in education.

The one thing that stood out to me the most is related to the fact that this article was written in 2004--almost a decade ago. It seems to me that the practice and use of technology in education should have evolved more in the last ten years, as more teachers and schools have adopted technology as learning tools rather than teaching tools.

Ten years ago, few students used cell phones, and tablets like the iPad did not exist. Google was primarily a search engine challenging Yahoo!, and social networking was mostly limited to listservs, RSS feeds and personal blogs. The interactivity of Web 2.0 technology was in its infancy, in the form of MySpace. The word "technology" typically referred only to personal computers and PDAs, and very few PDAs were Internet-enabled.

That said, despite the age of the document, its writers were very forward-thinking in that the concepts outlined in the document are still valid, even with today's wide array of software and hardware technology.

Welcome!

Hello, everyone!

My name is Kim, and I live in Louisville, Kentucky.

I have been using computers since I was in my high school's Computer Science club in the 1970's--before personal computers existed. While I majored in French in college and in my first round of grad school, I turned to computers when I could not find a job teaching French. I now teach in the Computer Science department of a private university.

I taught French as a Distance Education course (by snail mail!) for several years while in grad school, and now I teach and design online courses in Computer Education courses--mostly Microsoft Office, but also database design and HTML. My department is in the process of putting several degree programs entirely online, so I am doing this degree to help with that. I am also very interested in learning new ways to incorporate technology into the concepts classes that I am responsible for.