Charlotte Ure

Incorporating Technology in the Classroom

Description

Technology can be used to enhance the classroom experience for many students. Through technological advancements, there are many potential uses for technologies in the educational setting. These technologies range from the use of multimedia in the classroom itself, over homepages for the class, to hybrid, or online classes. When technology integration is thoughtful, it can motivate students, and students can take charge of their own learning. However, as exciting as the use of new technology is, I believe that it should be used as a tool for teaching, not as an end to itself. Therefore it should always be in alignment with the course goals.

Artifacts

Reflection

Technology is used in a classroom setting to assist the educator communicating with students and vice versa. It can help students to interact with their peers, and enhance students' learning experience in various ways. I believe that it is important that educators are aware of the technologies available to aid their teaching. However, they should also know about the negative impacts of using certain types of technology in the classroom. At the Teaching Institute in May 2016, Dr. Jeff Grabill emphasized, that technology should only be used in the classroom if it enhances the students' learning experience. As an example, an instructor should not force students to buy expensive I-Clickers only to use them to take attendance. As an instructor, I aim to be inclusive, and therefore I don't want to make the college experience for students more expensive than it already is. A free option is Everypoll, that is accessible via phone.

Throughout my time as a graduate teaching assistant at Michigan State University, I have used various technologies in my different classrooms. I will highlight some of the the positive effects that I noticed, as well as some of the downsides below.

Calculators. Should calculators be used in undergraduate mathematic courses like Calculus? This controverse question does not have a good answer, since there are advanges and disadvantages to the use of calculators. The positive effects include the ability to pose more realistic problems or to concentrate on the concepts, instead of the numbers. Unfortunately calculators can also have negative effects on the classroom atmosphere. For once students need to buy a calculator, which might exceed their budget. Additionally students sometimes loose the ability to gauge if their answer to a problem is realistic.

WebWork. The department of Mathematics at Michigan State University uses the online homework system WebWork for various undergraduate couses. One of the obvious advantages of WebWork in comparison to traditional homework is, that the students receive instant feedback. Another advantage of WebWork is the economy of time. The instructor doesn't need to spend time grading the students' homework and can concentrate on other parts of the instruction. One of the issues of WebWork that became very apparent to me is that students get trained that only the answer to the problem is important. WebWork doesn't have the ability to grade their work. Therefore students for example don't learn how to use correct notation.

Desire2Learn (D2L). I used D2L, an instructional technology service for various courses. When teaching MTH 299 in the Fall 2015, my students took weekly online quizzes on D2L. I also made notes and solutions to previous quizzes and exams available to students via D2L. One of my favorite features of D2L is a grading system. This system made it possible, that students could easily keep track of their standing in class throughout the semester. Often students realize too late that they are struggling in class, and don't keep good records of their own grades.

LaTeX & Dropbox. LaTeX is a free document preparation system, that is widely used in academia. Once learned, it enhances the typesetting of formulaes greatly. In my class MTH 299, students had to hand in weekly homeworks, typed in LaTeX. They handed in their code, as well as their finished document via Dropbox in D2L. For many students it was a challenge to learn LaTeX in the beginning. But I strongly believe, that it will be benificial to them in the long run. For me as a grader it was also beneficial, because it was a lot easier to grade the typed homework compared to handwritten papers.

Hybrid-course with Zoom office hours. In Summer 2016 I instructed a different version of Calculus 1, MTH 132. I met my students only once a week for three and half hours, off-campus, in Birmingham. I made most of the course materials available to the students via D2L. The students watched videos online, filled out notes, and I checked their notes in class. It was an amazing experience for me to be able to concentrate on the applications and not merely on the theory in class. One of the downsides of this summer course was, that it was extremely challenging for the students. They needed to be motivated enough to work on their own every day. For a course, that normaly takes an entire semester, we only met seven times in person. However, I understand that for students with a busy schedule, this class was an amazing opportunity to finish Calculus 1 quickly. During this course I used Zoom for office hours. Zoom is a free video conference service. Since my class was off-campus, most students couldn't come to office hours in person. This way they could log in, talk to me and share their screen with me, without coming to campus. I think that this was a great way to communicate with my students, that was made necessary by the physical distance.

Of course there are many more possibilities to use technology for effective teaching. I am looking forward to learn of them throughout my career. I will always consider the advantages and disadvantages of encorporating that particular technology in my classroom. Based on these consideration I will then make a descision about the implementation.




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