Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms.

In terms of using the technology in ENS 280, the 500 student classroom, for the more traditional aspects of the lecture what I would do is—and let me briefly describe the setup of that room, of ENS 280, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. The way it’s set up is that there are two projection boards where the PowerPoint slides could go on, on either side of the front of the auditorium. And then in the middle is another board where I could use the overhead projector to project whatever I wanted to write on that overhead.

And, the way I use the [technology in ENS 280] to its advantage is that in the PowerPoint slides what I would do is I would show PowerPoint slides of pre-made slides with key concepts and I would use the Smart Sympodium, which is a pen that allows me to write over these PowerPoint slides and I would highlight key points and write key concepts, [and] make sure that the students understand what the key concepts are in each of the slides.

And instead of moving on to the next slide—because I think the danger in using PowerPoint is that a lot of times speakers go a little too fast for the audience when they use PowerPoint—so instead of immediately going to the next PowerPoint slide, what I would do is I would walk over to the overhead projector and write down other key concepts, that I didn’t have the space to write down on the PowerPoint, and that allows the students to catch up in writing down their notes, and also to feel, to give them a little breather in having the time to process all the information. Because a lot of times in a chemistry lecture, the information that’s being given out is very dense and it needs time for the students to be able to process that, and so that’s the approach that I’ve been using, that I felt has been helpful for the students.

What factors contributed to your choosing that approach?

What has influenced me to use the technology in the way I’ve been using it is the fact that I’ve been moving from teaching upper division courses to lower division courses. Right now, I’m teaching general chemistry I, the first semester chemistry course for a lot of science majors here at SDSU.

One of the reasons that I’ve been going towards this approach is that I’ve been finding that students are not as interested in what we talk about in class if there are not visual aids to help them understand. I think—understanding and learning and interest kind of go [hand in hand]. It’s hard to say what’s the chicken and what’s the egg and you know, what came first, but I think they’re all rolled into one.

The way that I’ve been using these visual technologies is to try and increase the students’ interest, because I found that especially in lower division courses, students are just not that interested. They think of chemistry as a course that they have to take, but they want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. By inserting these visual aids I found that student interest has increased quite a bit in learning chemistry, because it helps them to see how it relates to their everyday lives more.

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

I do use the technologies to try and instill the idea that this is relevant to their futures, whether or not they become chemists. For example, a lot of the animations or the video clips that I show involve cases of real life chemistry at work. For example, in the segment about ideal gases that students have a lot of trouble with, what I would do is go through a calculation with them—one of those traditional calculations that students get bored with—and then after going through the calculations, I would show them a video clip.

For example, one of the video clips I would show them is of an air bag deploying, and I would tell them this is what you just calculated, you just calculated how much of the compound it would take for the air bag to deploy properly. And students become interested when they see that, or, you know, especially in this time and age, I don’t really want to glorify explosions, but students love seeing explosions. And so once in a while, I would do a calculation showing how an explosion occurs, and then show them a video clip of an explosion. Last semester, I had students yelling “oh, show it again, show it again!” They were very interested in that type of animation.

Have you told colleagues or others about your approach? What interest/reaction have you received?

My response to the accusation that this is a gimmick is that I think people who say that are not addressing the needs of students. They’re relating to how students were maybe back when they were students, or maybe back when they first started teaching. But things have changed so much technologically in the last few decades and we really need to—you know, one of our roles as educators is to address how students learn these days, and how students learn in the future, not look back and say “well, back in my day, we did it that way, and that’s the way it should always be.”

How does the feedback you've received match up with your observations and/or expectations for the impact and success of your approach?

I think the way I’ve been gathering data, I have to admit, hasn’t been very rigorous. It’s been for my own teaching evaluations and from talking with a lot of the students. So, from anecdotal evidence, I haven’t rigorously gone out and conducted polls that would hold up in a journal. But, you know, from my own perspective, I felt that it was very obvious that students needed more than the traditional lecture to spur their interest in learning chemistry. It was very obvious that even the good students who were doing well in the class were bored a lot of the times.

The first time I taught Chem 200 in ENS 280, so Chem 200 is general chemistry I in this 500 student ENS 280 classroom, I taught it the traditional way—I used PowerPoints—but I mostly used PowerPoints and that was about it. And you know, maybe I wrote down a few things on the overheads, too.

What I found is that students, by and large, when they finished with the class at the end of the semester, they knew technically how to do what they were supposed to do, but they couldn’t care less about chemistry. They were bored out of their minds, because they hadn’t taken enough chemistry or other science courses to see the big picture of why it was necessary for them to learn all this minutiae.

The lecture, the traditional lecture format made it very hard to impress upon them that we’re learning “this right now” because of “this big picture.” And I think being able to insert these video clips and animations really does help them see the big picture better and see the relevance to their everyday lives much better.