End of semester wrap up
SO, My schedule has not allowed me the opportunity to write to this blog as nearly as often as I would like. The semester has completed and I look to see that my last post was 6 weeks ago!! Wow, Sorry!
SO, the last 6 weeks have been really good, actually! After working through hardware and connectivity issues and the occassional PC crash, With DyKnow’s Help I hope we have the problem licked (They think the crashes were casued by an outdated .NET file, which we will upgrade over break. Total number of Crashes = 10 out of 23 Tablets being used in 48 lectures, so 1104 chances to crash. We had 10, less than 1%.
The overall result, given the early frequency (7 times in the first 7 weeks) of crashes is that for some students, they no longer trusted the device to keep their notes, so they started using the tablet only to interact with me, and not as their primary note taking tool. This created a some disconnection in the clasroom, because I would assign a problem to be submitted to me via DyKnow and they would first get it in their notebook, solve it there, then write in the answer on the dyKNow panel, so I would often not see their work or thought processes. The Assessing team of Guy and Kyle are fantastic. They are studying the interaction of students with the technology and the effectiveness of their interaction to make them more competant, and confident in their learning. Their end -of - semester evaluation has, according to them, generated lots of data that we all can use to help make this work. exit interviews with students suggest that even those who did not take advantage of the technology either in class or out of class like the idea of having it available for students (A security blanket?) I will be participating in a NITLE web-conference in February as we ll as a DePauw University Symposium and the HP Conference in San Diego in March to talk about my experiences with this technology this semester. Additionally Guy, Kyle and I will be presenting at the 2009 SOTL Academy, May 18-19, 2009, at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.All indications are that I WILL be teaching with Tablets next semester.
One thing that I did not use is the Monitor program on DyKnow. It takes a lot of time and the wireless connection made it impossibly slow to interact using the Monitor function. Also, so much of teaching is interaction and I found that Monitor actually created a barrier to interaction. I called it my “puppet master approach”. I would stand behind a podium and watch only my onitor screen, I did not actually walk around and engage in dialog with students as they were working problems I assigned. This was very UNsatisfying for myself and for my students. That barrier, I think, is NOT conducive to learning. I had much more positive engagement when I was walking around moving to students rather than standing behind a podium, away from them.
More later, and sooner, I promise!
General Postings, People | Andrew French | 
December 16, 2008 11:42 am
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