Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms. What factors contributed to your choosing that approach?

One of the things I wanted to do in this class—this class is a perfect course for trying to model students’ history activity for about the first third of the class. Then, share with the class the responsibility of doing that kind of activity together for the middle third. And then to pass it over to the students in the final third. So I thought it would be great to use the tech to facilitate those transitions.

So the first one-third of the class I heavily emphasized use of careful PowerPoint in order to guide students through the process of the ideas they were encountering. But also, two of the assignments for the students were going to be to create PowerPoints of their own. So I was very aware, in the case of my own PowerPoints that they would be modeling on what I did. So I felt I was having a test every time we met. So I was very careful with placement of images, conveying of information, citation of sources that were showing up on the PowerPoint, making sure there was continuity but not too much information on any given slide. I worked hard on the modeling of the PowerPoint.

I also worked hard on using the video opportunities in the classroom. I would use the Smart Board in the middle of the tech classroom to create viewing questions for the students to be thinking about while they were watching clips on the two large screens and so, during, and even after the viewing of clips, I could the go to the Smart Board and write out the brainstorm that the students had in response to the questions they were thinking about as they did the viewings. That was kind of nice use of the video and the Smart Board simultaneously. And then of course you can save what’s on the Smart Board so the students can refer to it later.

Another aspect of what I used the SC for was for student presentation. Part of the 400W class is teaching the students how to be historians. And an important part of being a historian is sharing what you’ve learned, what you’re researching, with a community of other scholars. So, they learned how to give presentations modeled on the ones I had been doing. But I wanted them to have a degree of comfort, not feeling that they had to stand in front of the class in an artificial sort of way. So I used the [Apple] Remote Desktop in the SC to allow the students to present from their desk so that they could clip through a PowerPoint and have a more comfortable feel to their presentation, more like a seminar format.

On top of the more formal presentation aspects, my giving PowerPoints, their giving PowerPoints, their using [Apple] Remote Desktop from the seats, I tried to incorporate the materials, the use of the technology in a seamless fashion, to avoid the bells and whistles.

Students are so good at using myspace.com. They know how to make websites, they probably know how to use PowerPoint better than I do. When I started grad school we didn’t even have email. When they were in junior high, they had email. So they know how to use a lot of this better than I do. So I’m not going to wow them with my use of the technology. What instead I try to do is wow them with the use of that technology to teach history, and to learn history.

What data, observations, or feedback from students have you received regarding your approach?

I always encourage them to have the laptops open on the table in front of them. I love that “deer-in-the-headlights” look when you ask them “Well, what was that reading about?” And the reading is on an article database, or it’s on electronic course reserve. And they just stare at you and wonder, “Is this a performance? Am I supposed to perform now?”

After about two weeks of saying “You got a computer in front of you. Look up the reading, look up the answer. You have these resources, you have the tools, you have the technology—literally.” They really got into that, using the technology in a dialogic fashion during class meetings.

So it wasn’t a question of “Did the students bring the readings?,” or “Are they doing the research?,” because they could do it right there in class while discussions were going on. And I think it allowed more types of learners to succeed in the classroom—the tech, that is. Students who perform well and think on the spot tend to be the ones who rise to the top in the classroom environment. But a situation like this allowed students to think in the classroom environment, to use the resources there in front of them in order to answer questions and to engage the process of being a historian.

Describe changes or improvements you have considered to further refine your approach.

Another way I tried to use the tech to teach history in particular was the jigsaw method, that I know is popular among Ed Tech folk, and I tried to import that into the teaching of history.

In the 400W class, it’s all about historiography. Historiography is how historians have dealt with a topic. And so I wanted to use the resources in the tech classroom to show students how to find out how historians have dealt with a particular topic. How did I do that? All the students would sit at tables, roughly five students to a table. And I would give each table the name of a historian. Once they learned the name of the historian they were going to research, each student had a different task to understand who that historian was. One student was supposed to perform a PAC and a WorldCat search using Library databases to find out books that this scholar had written. Another student’s responsibility was to use article databases like JSTOR and EBSCO and ProQuest to find articles that historian had written. A third student had to go online and use what’s called a cited reference search, and, use that database to find out all of the times that author’s work had been cited by other scholars. And then another student at the table had two responsibilities, one to do a broad Google search of the author to see more popular coverage of this person, but also the great disparity between popular Google searches and academic searches; and that student’s job was also to be the recorder for the group.

What I would do was after each table had explored a given historian, those tables had to share their findings. First with one another, to get a sense of who this historian was, but then with the rest of the class. So, in an hour-long activity, students learned how to apply what they learned about how to be a historian, namely in terms of research. They had to talk about what their findings meant, in terms of who is this historian and what do they add to the topic. And then they had to share those findings with the other tables in the room.

So they got to learn about their own historian and share it with others, but the historians that other tables were exploring. And then we could talk as a group about what each of these historians were adding to the larger topic. In my class, it was witchcraft—that’s kind of a sexy topic (I think [it] is fun, anyway).

But I think that process of seeing how historians do history, and how historians research history, how that history gets published, and then how you can use that published history in order to talk about a field. I think that’s a valuable part of doing historiography, and it’s something that only being in a tech classroom could make happen. You can’t have that kind of hands-on experience when you’re in the average classroom. Maybe the prof, if they’re in a Smart Classroom, can walk through the process and show the students how to do it, but it’s not the same thing as the students buying into the process, and taking a role in constructing this historian’s record and sharing that record with others. Because I think there was some real payoff in using the tech in the room for the students. 

Did you encounter any problems implementing your approach? If so, how did you resolve them?

Now, there was a problem with this as well—I’m sure you want to know the problems. One of the things I found in this class—I’ve taught the class before, I taught 400W twice, this historian’s craft course—when I taught the class in the past, I was frustrated with students’ skills with research. The students were supposed to write a book review, and consult two other professional reviews of the book in order to write their own. But I would have students, even though they had been to a library research session, even though they came to meet with me, who couldn’t do the basic skill of finding a book review of another book.

The same thing with the research: I would have students write their historiography paper and they could only maybe find a couple of books and a couple of articles. It was a long, drawn-out process. It was me meeting with each student trying to facilitate their research.

Now, I had signaled that as a problem, the students didn’t fundamentally know how to do the research they needed to do to understand what history and historiography were, so I was trying to figure how this room could help do that. Now, the problem I ended up with at the end of the class that I did not expect is that students who took this course could find so much more research then they had been able to in the past because they had had that hands-on work, because we had focused so much, both through my modeling of showing them how to do searches, and through their in-class work of doing searches. They knew so well how to do that they were able to produce more research than they knew how to process. And this was truly a problem I had not expected.

So when I teach this class in the future, I’m going to have to work more on the integration of what they’re learning because of the tech with what they’re supposed to be learning in terms of content. So in the past when I taught the class, maybe a student could find two book reviews, if I helped them. This last time I taught the class students found 10 book reviews, and weren’t particularly good at sorting out what was useful and what was not. Same thing with their final papers, their final large research projects, where they tried to do the historiography of a particular topic. In the past, maybe they’d have 15 sources, in this course they had 50, and the problem became how did they work with the volume of materials they were able to generate.

Now, I would much prefer to have the problem I have now, than the problem I had in the past. Using the tech to get past the research problem by modeling it in class allowed me to now work on what historians do, which is the processing of the information now that they know it.