Technology & Wrapping Up the Semester

Post date: Dec 14, 2015 12:36:21 AM

Blog Post for Week 16 – Dec. 13

How has technology changed the way we teach, as well as how we wrap up our courses each fall and spring?

(A blog post with a slight digression for my son, whose birthday comes right before Finals in the Fall)

I remember the early days of teaching, when I bought several small tubs to transport papers back and forth from college to home, where I did the bulk of my grading.

Tests were done in class on paper.

Essays were turned in on paper—and later, in a little paper folder, with drafts and sources.

Worksheets were done outside of class as homework, and others were done inside of class: all were on paper.

Informal daily writing for my Intro to Lit class was done on paper. Actually, it still is; however, I did a little experiment with iPads this semester and let them use several apps to record their responses to that day’s reading.

All of that paper added up! No doubt, the problems I am having with my back and shoulder may have a connection to lugging all of that paper around campus and back and forth to my home office. However, it also took a lot of organization to get all of those print jobs done at the right time and then lug them around campus from building to building.

At that point, I needed the following things to survive through Finals: several large tubs with lids, many red pens, a calculator, a stapler, some large brown accordion style folders for sorting individual class work, lots of diet Pepsi and a large surface like my dining room table. This was during the 1980s, 1990s, and into the early 2000s.

I remember having my children help: after I graded a test for my Intro to Literature class, they would recheck my math and make sure their bleary eyed mother had not added up the numbers wrong, cheating a student of precious points.

My son’s birthday is today—Sunday, Dec. 13—right before finals and probably just about the worst time for a teacher/parent to plan a child’s birthday party. For years, we negotiated: “If you wait until Finals are over, I will give you an even cooler birthday party!” Jon was a good kid and usually waited.

One year, we went to Little Caesar’s Pizza, inside our local K-Mart, for his party. As I recall, that was the first time he asked for boys AND GIRLS to be included, after having several years of only boys at his party. He got a fish and I think we killed it a few weeks later, due to the water temperature in the fish tank. Before its demise, however, it consumed several goldfish.

It didn’t help that one of my best friends, Darla, gave about the best birthday parties ever, and my son and her son were great friends—as was my daughter and her daughter. So, they knew that birthday parties could be quite wonderful, with themes, decorations, great cakes and snacks, and games. I remember one of my daughter’s birthdays when she was a teen: we got food and beverages and I think there were some games, before they planned to watch some movies. Then, one of the girls noticed some books on my book case for my Pregnancy Prevention job down in Des Moines, and the party sort of turned into a book club meeting about romantic relationships, with girls flipping through my books and sharing their juicy finds. Fortunately, Mikki’s birthday is in mid-April, so no need for top level negotiations with her!

Flash forward a decade. I taught my first class in a computer classroom in the fall of 1998. I still recall the cheap thrill of walking out of the classroom, with my student’s journal posts saved to a small hard floppy disk! Wow! Unfortunately, this was years before the introduction of the internet into our classrooms…we had 25 hand-me-down Mac computers from John Deere and begged for a classroom and basic software. A handful of brave teachers offered to pilot classes in the classroom and we were off into the great unknown, as writing teacher pioneers!

A year later, we persuaded our head of CIS to give us some internet access, but he balked at linking our Macs to the PCs on the network. Instead, we got five new PCs at the back of the room with the internet: at that point in time, our campus library had just three workstations reserved for the internet, with several more dedicated to specific databases. (Note: 31 computers in a typical classroom produces a lot of heat as well as a lot of cords and cables).

In those early days students generally wrote out their essays by hand and brought their spiral notebooks into the classroom, using class work time to type up their essays. I will never forget the excitement of those early semesters using computers. Students loved the sound of the printer: one young man came up and with his essay, freshly printed, and said, “I haven’t read it yet, but I think it’s pretty good!” As you might imagine, I smiled and encouraged him to give it a quick read before he turned it in.

Another day, a girl asked me very earnestly, “Is it cheating to use spell check?” I assured her that this was a great idea. Many years later, after I got married to Mike, I came home rather upset because a student had turned in an essay to “Cherie Dragon” and claimed that spell check told him to do it! As I looked at the rest of the essay, I wondered how he had missed a dozen other errors on page one.

Now, students’ have changed their writing process altogether; we talk about the assignment, going over the handouts and grading slip and maybe looking at a student sample. I provide them with a model outline and visual map done in Inspiration. They look at their materials and few of them write down much for notes before they start typing away….the more successful ones soon discover that starting with my model outline makes sure that they do not forget to include required elements. However, they can be curiously indifferent to revising, other than fixing some of the more obvious mechanical errors.

While I’ve been teaching with computers for 17 years, I’m still amazed at how it has transformed not only how I teach but what I teach and the resources I use. It was the emergence of the World Wide Web that made the difference: being able to show students a short video clip from YouTube or a Wikipedia entry on a famous author, demonstrating how to use a citation tool or how to find sources in the campus library databases, and having a course management system and email was extremely useful.

Next week--part 2

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

Last updated December 13, 2015

Happy Birthday, Jon!