Part Two--How Technology Has Changed the Way we Teach

Post date: Dec 19, 2015 2:48:30 AM

Blog Post for December 18, 2015

A few thoughts on teaching online, using Course Management Systems, grading online, and the value of using essay tests to assess whether students really know the content.

Back in 1998, I began to use a website called Nicenet.org for a simple discussion board and announcements around then: it is still going strong, as I recently discovered. “Since January, 1998 a total of 2,714,756 users have used the ICA” (ICA is their term for Internet Classroom Assistant). This was my first experience using discussion boards, posting announcements and reminders, and relying on a website to deliver instruction.

In 2000, I returned to Higher Education as a grad student at the University of Northern Iowa in their Educational Technology program and began to use WebCT and take classes online. About the same time, I went to some workshops on teaching online before I began to teach online courses for the Marshalltown Center (and others) for Buena Vista University: up until then, I had been teaching courses for Buena Vista over the ICN system (two way audio and video linking classrooms around the state) and originating from Hawkeye's ICN room.

In the early 2000s my college adopted WebCT and I developed my first online class for Hawkeye: a practical business writing class called Applied Writing. A couple of years later, I turned it over to my friend Linda and developed Comp. 2 online, which I have now taught for 12 years or more. We switched to Blackboard, then to Angel and most recently to Canvas. In addition, I used a few publisher specific course management systems as well, including one called PageOut.

At the same time, our pilot with that first computer classroom went well, and soon we had computer classrooms spread all over campus: today it would seem odd to teach a writing class in any other setting. We began to get teaching stations installed in our classrooms, with access to the internet, a projector and screen for power point, showing videos, or other visuals. Some rooms got a Smart Board and a Sympodium Teaching Station.

As we incorporated more technology, my work load switched from paper to online. Worksheets and tests were done online: essays were submitted online as well, so my grading also began to shift as well. I wasn’t dragging home multiple tubs of paper anymore.

I began teaching a course for our Education students in 2007 on using technology in the classroom; we used Google Docs/Google Drive as well as several other Google products. I began developing surveys using Google Forms and loved how it organized results and dumped them into a spreadsheet. I developed one of my first websites on Google Sites for the small literary society I had joined (ruthsuckow.org) and loved it. Later, I used Google Sites to develop a Web quest template for my students.

In the meantime, by 2005 or 2006, the convenience of using drop boxes began to feel more natural and most writing teachers began to have all work turned in electronically, while some continued to prefer paper submissions. Services like Smarthinking became available—this was online tutoring available 24/7. Need a paper reviewed, need help figuring out math formulas, or need help with your chemistry homework? Students got a free account and were able to access lots of services.

Other teachers got excited by Turnitin, a service that checked student papers for plagiarism and gave teachers the ability to put students into groups for peer review online. Citation tools appeared; I found the first one shortly after getting out of grad school in 2003. It was called The Citation Machine and it was amazing: I showed it to my class, developed a handout for it, and posted it on my open faculty website, not really thinking about the fact that it would show up in a Google search.

When word of mouth led to too many students trying to use the Citation Machine one spring near the end of the semester, it crashed the server. Some of those students did a Google search and found my handout—and contacted me, begging me to put the website back online! Fortunately, a helpful young grad student also contacted me and told me to send my students to Knightcite, a brand new citation tool he had helped to develop. We still use it.

It became more important to organize documents using folders, to talk about file names, and to teach students how to make sure that we could grade their work (susies summary.doc became susies summary w Cherie.doc, for example to show that I had graded it). By now, students all had official college email addresses and a network folder to save work. They were using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel in their classes, and library databases were now becoming available on the web.

Netbooks became cool: soon lots of us were taking our small, ultra-light laptops around campus. They didn’t have a hard drive or a CD/DVD drive but they were little work horses. I was the Secretary of our Teachers’ Association and used it to take notes.

Around 2008/2009 the first iPhones were showing up on campus and proved to be disruptive technology, as some of us played with them during meetings. A Dean once looked at me and tried to be stern: “Cherie—are you with us?” I had gotten stressed and turned on the app for the Koi pond, which featured soothing, Zen-like music. A year later, I had my first iPad and it was Geek love. Then I got the second iPad and passed on my first one to my husband: later, I got a third iPad and the first iPad went to my daughter and the second to my husband.

I enjoyed using the iPads in the classroom, and decided we needed to get a cart for our Education students in the spring of 2012. With the help of another dear friend, and tech savvy teacher, Lavonne, we got our first cart full of iPads and then got a crash course in learning to use the Configurator. We picked out apps, mostly free, but spent less than $10 per IPad for a few paid apps, using Apple’s VPP program. We were the IPad Mamas on campus: later, we got badly needed technical support from a Full Time CIS employee trained to work with Macs.

Students enjoyed using the iPad apps to plan their Thematic Units, and we began hearing of more and more schools going to the One to One program, where all students and teachers get a device—a laptop, tablet, or iPad. Students began bringing all sorts of devices to my other classes—laptops, android tablets, netbooks, and iPads.

Midterm and Finals changed dramatically over the course of those years: again, I brought home very few physical papers to grade and did the majority of my grading online, either on Google docs or on the current CMS. I have yet to find a good online grade book and frequently downloaded scores from Angel to Excel to do final clean up and calculate grades. My all-time favorite grading experience would have to be with Google Docs for my Education students, using the Insert Comments feature, and I regret that I could not have done that for all of my classes.

Two of the classes I teach use tests to assess knowledge, as opposed to writing papers, and over the years I have worked hard to construct test questions that will assess students and not frustrate them. I try to use a variety of question formats and keep coming back to one simple truth: as a writing teacher, I much prefer short essay questions, because I can tell in the space of a paragraph whether or not that student has read the material, grasped the key ideas of a reading we discussed, or can articulate what he or she gained from the course. For all of the excitement of “the computer scores the test” with matching, multiple choice, and other objective question formats, I still find the essay question my best tool.

Having embraced more than my fair share of Education buzz words, such as “flip the classroom,” I enjoyed using my iPad app Educreations to record a series of videos for two different courses. Students then viewed those videos to review the material from the text and other sources. I went over writing assignments as well as comment on the annotated chapter notes for my Education class. Response was fairly positive: students loved getting the time to work in class but sometimes complained about having to take their time to watch the videos! I got smarter and started to incorporate test questions that could only be answered if students had viewed the videos.

In all of the ways that technology has changed the way we teach, assess, manage course content, and navigate through the material week by week, I cannot say that it has “saved us time,” as we erroneously once hoped. Instead, increasingly, I spend many hours a week at a computer either at work or home, evenings and weekends. Unfortunately, our new CMS makes it easy to add up those hours, and I was astonished to see that I had spent over 1100 hours over the past semester building five class websites, and then grading work on them. Doing the math, dividing those hours by 18 weeks, since I began work around the first of August, I spent about 61 hours a week on Canvas. No wonder I’m tired and my shoulder aches!

As I wrap up the Fall semester, and realize that I have just one more “Finals week” make it through before retirement, I can only speculate about the way that technology will continue to evolve in Higher Education. However, one thing is clear: I do not anticipate lugging home two tubs of essays, tests, and homework to grade in late April and early May of 2016!

Last Updated 12/18/2015