Entries Tagged with “powerpoint”

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.

— Beth Pollard, History

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. 

— Beth Pollard, History

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.

— Hong-Chang Liang, Chemistry

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.”

— Hong-Chang Liang, Chemistry

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.

— Hong-Chang Liang, Chemistry

Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms.

One of the things I notice in my time teaching in ENS 280 is that students in large lecture courses—I teach two 500 student intro to psych classes—can become relatively passive in their learning pretty quickly. And so what I’ve tried to do is leverage the tools in the classroom as a way to engage them more during class to help them be more active in their learning. I guess the overall goal is to move them away from a situation where they are simply transcribing notes off a PowerPoint slide and more thinking about what we’re talking about, maybe going over some examples with them, that sort of thing, to help them engage more with the content.

— Mark Laumakis, Psychology

Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms.

One of the things I try to do in these large student enrollment classrooms is first, try to earn an audience. They’re not science majors, I’ve got to get them interested in the topic. So one of the things I do is every piece of equipment that’s in the room—I use it. Not in a pattern, but irregularly so you never know each day exactly what’s going to happen. The message is coherent, but the media change throughout in a pattern that doesn’t reproduce from day to day.

The way I choose the equipment really depends on the topics. First, what equipment is in the room, I have learned how to use it—some of them have been new to me. Once I know they exist, now I’m looking for the best thing available. Let’s take hurricanes as an example. I find this geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory, here they have real imagery of the insides of a hurricane. Well, what does it take to run them? It takes a PC, then I use a PC. I try to find the best visuals I can in a topic, and some of them are restricted to only one kind of equipment, and that determines the pattern. The material determines the delivery mode.

Everybody’s used to PowerPoint. We familiar now hearing the lectures of “Death by PowerPoint”—you got to do something different, be a bit original, try to find pieces of equipment or things that they’re not used to. I try to show imagery that’s new to hold their attention. If it’s the same old things they already know, then they’ll tend to walk out of the class, to be blunt. They’re anonymous in a large lecture hall, you’ve got to hold their interest and you’ve got to do that by doing things that are new and different for them. The trick is finding those things that are on the topic, because remember, they’re only to accentuate and get across the material.

Finding resources really is the biggest trick. Not so much that they’re scarce these days, but there’s so darn much. So I’ll look at things, like I subscribe to Science and Nature, and I see what they recommend each week. I listen very carefully to some of my colleagues; I listen to Eric Frost, and other people who are on top of a lot of these topics, and I pick up tips from them. And you just kind of have the radar out at all times trying to sense where something might be interesting, give it a quick look, see if it brings something into the classroom that will capture interest and help further understanding.

— Pat Abbott, Geology

How have you integrated the technology into your teaching?

I store my lectures (as PowerPoint presentation) on the Bb server, so that I am able to access my teaching material wherever I might be or wherever my class might be scheduled. I also provide access to readings online (particularly those not available in the library) and am able to review some of them onscreen via the Bb site. I create online image review sheets that students can access to review lectures and prepare for exams and that I can use in classroom review sessions. And I review the syllabus almost daily via the Bb site at the start of class and point out new announcements posted on the Bb site.

— William Barnes, Art