NITLE Meeting Presentation

The NITLE Meeting at DePauw last weekend was a great opportunity. We were able to present our foray into the arena with a talk,  a self-narrated version I recorded is below. we also got to talk with representatives from a  few colleges who are just beginning the process of exploring tablet use in the classroom, including Yale, Monmouth, to name two.  I am hopeful that we will be able to help folks, by either this blog and the resources posted herein, or by being invited to visit and talk with folks, demonstrate what we have done and collaborating with folks to see if this is right for them.

tabletteachingnitle

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occassional PC crash,  With DyKnow’s Help I hope we have the problem licked (They think the crashes were casued by an outdated .NET file, which we will upgrade over break.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!

Kyle and Guy

I must say that working with the Education Department on the assessment piece of this project has been one of the unexpected joys of this summer!!  Kyle Shanton and Guy Cox have been about as supportive and excited about this project as I am!  They have worked tirelessly on an absolutely fabulous assessment plan and for that I an eternally grateful.  Thanks Guy and Kyle!!!  You are really fun to work with!!

So, it has been our observation that assessments of teaching with technology are carried out by the invested faculty/teacher.  They want it to succeed and work hard to make it so, so there is virtually no writing about these sorts of projects “failing”.  Kyle, Guy, and I were increasingly concerned that these studies, by their assessment plans (Professor doing the teaching and the assessment) are potentially biased.  So, we are taking a different approach.  Guy and Kyle will be doing all the assessments without me knowing any outcomes until the end of the academic year.  Below is our assessment plan.  IRB approval has been applied for, waiting for their comments.

1) Online Pre-course assessment to all students (modified from a Comfort with Technology survey and a Learning goals survey developed by Jason Long and Keely Roen at Penn State University)

2) 2×2 Study using “Comfort with Technology” and “previous performance in chemistry” as the variables

3) Half the class gets tablets to use in class, all get DyKnow access from their home computer tio review and write notes.  So the technology in class verses control is measurable, as separate from using technology outside of class.

4) Bimonthly surveying of students and interviews of individual students

5) “Exit interviews” for all students who choose to drop.

6) End of semester interview and assessment of perceived acheivement of learning goals (which will be correlated to their actual performance on key questions on Final exam)

7) This is a blind study,  I will not know who is being interviewed, which of the four groups each student is assigned to, I will not know if students are using DyKnow after class or not.  I will not know who is or isn’t completing their assessments.  Nor am I completely invested in this technology, just curious, and excited, by the possibility of this new way to engage with students.

Kinda cool!!  Weird me getting excited about the scholarship of teaching, not just Hypervalent Iodine Chemistry. . .