Tidbits from Small Teaching

Posted on by zakrzewskit

Jim Lang shared small, powerful changes you can make in your teaching that are grounded in learning sciences during a lunch and workshop (in person and virtual) on November 16th at Wentworth. Access a recording of the “Small Teaching Workshop” and take a brief feedback survey to share your feedback and ideas for future topics and speakers.

Retrieval Practices help students practice retrieving information which improves memory skills (p.21):

  • Ask questions about material covered already
  • Give frequent, low-stakes quizzes
  • Close class by asking students to write down the most important concept from that day and one question or confusion
  • Use your syllabus to redirect students to previous course content through quizzes or oral questions and discussion.
  • Tell them what the research says about the value of quizzing and retrieval practice and about your decision to use it.

Connecting Practices “A simple way of understanding how to build comprehension in our students would be that it consists of helping them forge rich, interconnected networks of knowledge – ones that enable each existing piece of information in our content area to connect with lots of other information, concepts, and ideas”…“we want to facilitate the process of students making connections.” (p.97)

  • Assess student’s current state of knowledge
  • Ask students what they’d like to learn over the course of the semester, 3 questions
  • Engage students with concepts maps and the minute thesis
  • Provide a framework that facilitate connections

Motivating The deepest learning happens when the learner cares about the learning itself…the extent to which the learning or subject seems important to the learner and will lead to a positive outcome. (p.169).

  • Consider emotions as a force to give students frequent motivational boosts, capture their attention
  • Infuse learning with a sense of purpose, connect learning with making the world a better place
  • Foster social relationships and community that play an essential role in motivation
  • Show your passion for your subject, it’s contagious, tell great stories
  • Connect with students through casual conversation and paying attention to students

Quick Connection Activities for Small Teaching

A Peek into Augmented Reality

Posted on by zakrzewskit

(image source: https://blog.teamviewer.com/will-augmented-reality-transform-work/)

In technology today, we are seeing more and more developments with Virtual Reality. Although the technology has been around for decades, the digital progress has lately seen more commercial success, especially with the Oculus and Playstation VR, or even with our mobile devices placed into a headset. VR takes us entirely to different worlds, enabling us to interact with those environments, and has been a prominent success in gaming and simulation scenarios.

But what’s even more fascinating is the development of “Augmented Reality”, or AR. Augmented Reality is a way for us to stay in the environment we’re in but interact with virtual objects within that environment. Pokémon Go is popular example of AR, where we are able to locate and capture Pokémons via the GPS and camera in our phone. We may be sitting in our living room and watch a bouncing Charmander on our coffee table while looking through our mobile device.  — You may also be familiar with the controversial Google Glass, an AR device that was in development that would act much like our mobile phone but through a pair of glasses, allowing us to see GPS coordinates, swipe through the weather forecast, messages, etc. as we go throughout our day. Now it is redesigning itself to be utilized in businesses, especially in manufacturing.

But what else does AR do and how can it benefit education? I recently attended a few online webinars on AR and watched how it can be incorporated with video conferencing and higher education. Zoom, the popular online video conferencing software, has teamed up with Meta, an AR company that produces headsets and software. Through video conferencing and wearing the headset, you are able to display and show the meeting attendees virtual objects that have been created. During the webinar, the presenter had a virtual shelf of objects created where he could reach in and pull out an individual object and display it on his desk:

One object was a floor plan created in another software program. As he placed the virtual floor plan on his desk, he was able to look into the model closer at objects, rotate it, etc. This could be a fantastic use for architecture education:

 

AR can also provide huge opportunities for medical students, construction majors, designers, computer science majors, and many other areas of education. It also acts an as great tool in the workplace, especially in meetings where you can virtually pull up objects and documents to present to a team you may be video chatting with miles away.

Although still pricey, ranging from a few hundred dollars to over a thousand for higher end models, the more development and progress this technology makes, we may see prices significantly going down in the future, much like the virtual reality headsets that have now become more affordable.

It’s an exciting age to be a part of in education with this growing technology and see specifically where Augmented Reality can take us to new levels in our workplace and classroom!

More links to explore with AR and education/workplace:

 

Plagiarism Detection in Code

Posted on by cookel

As an institution, Wentworth has invested it tools to detect plagiarism in written assignments. We have Turnitin and SafeAssign integrated into Blackboard to both assist students in learning proper citation techniques as well as to detect possible plagiarism. But what about other types of assignment? In computer science, coding assignments are hard to evaluate. Programs may use the same lines to perform a particular task, consequently the tools we have for writing, do not work.

Researcher at Stanford University have developed MOSS (short for Measure of Software Similarity) to assist instructors in determining whether students have plagiarized code. The system does not detect plagiarism, because the system does not detect whether attribution is included in the code, it just measures how similar the code is in the submitted sample is to other code that has been submitted. In this respect, it is not different from the tools we use for detecting plagiarism in writing.

For more information on how MOSS works, see this article on using MOSS to detect cheating in programming assignments.

If you are interested in using MOSS, you need to register for an account and obtain the submission script. More information is available on the MOSS web page.

Welcome Jessica Matson!

Posted on by zakrzewskit

Jessica Matson Academic TechnologistJoin LIT in welcoming Jessica Matson to the Wentworth community! Jessica brings deep technical skills to her role as an Academic Technologist. She’ll support faculty in the adoption of the learning management system and academic technologies that promote best practices and student oriented teaching strategies. At Harvard Business School and Berklee College of Music, Jessica’s customer service orientation shined through in her support and training of faculty and students in building digital literacy with various academic technology tools. Jessica holds a BM in Film Scoring from Berklee College of Music and is a Tenor Saxophone Principle.

Why use a Tablet to teach? The whiteboard works just fine.

Posted on by fratturar

“There are many challenges in higher education environments, particularly engineering education in a multicultural society. Some of these include the effective communication of difficult mathematical concepts maintaining students’ attention span, the difficulties of catering for individual student needs in a large classroom environment, different paces of student learning, and lack of fluency in written English just to name a few.” (Ravishankar, Ladouceur, Eaton, Ambikairajah, 2014)

These issues have profoundly affected the way engineering faculty have taught. To achieve the best results, innovative pedagogical design and technology have stepped in to support this new shift.

One big advantage is – Mirroring – a feature that lets you display everything that is on a tablet to the big screen. Whether an instructor is presenting in PowerPoint, switching to a video on YouTube, using Google Maps, or annotating over a PDF, they need it all to project.

Why Use Tablets to Teach?

Tablets hit the sweet spot between a computer and a piece of paper — the reason it’s catching on so quickly in the classroom is instructors no longer have to move between a computer screen and printed documents; an iPad/tablet takes care of both.

Tablets are mobile. Instructors can lecture from notes anywhere in the classroom, and refer to course readings held in one hand. Tablets remove the barriers. For example, when reading lesson plans, taking notes on presentations, or engaging course materials, holding the tablet like a piece of paper opens up the classroom and changes the dynamic of the classroom.

Tablets keep notes organized in one place. Things that are typically printed — grading forms, lesson plans, course readings — can be viewed and annotated on the tablet.  Documents are easily shared with the swipe of a finger. Students can access what was taught the day before with the touch of a button. Faculty can take attendance and keep track of grades quickly and easily on the iPad/tablet

Tablets also support digital conversations. For example, using Twitter to promote discussion in class. Tablets make it easy to type a tweet to students using your class hashtag.

Tablets allow you to grade anywhere – on the bus or train. Creating handwritten feedback is immediately shareable.

Tablets also support streaming video and image projection.  You can show class videos, presentations, or images right from your iPad/tablet. Tablets can use polling and clicker technology and whiteboard projection. A single tablet has the potential to replace a suite of technologies and is perfect for classrooms with little technology support.

(Teaching with Tablets. By: HEDGE, STEPHANIE, Education Digest, 0013127X, Feb2013, Vol. 78, Issue 6)