Teaching two sections is new; in early December I pointed out that all the stats sections were full for the upcoming semester and that, perhaps rather than wasting my skills teaching Psych 101 (which I am not that great at in the first place), we should open another stats section.  They were skeptical, but decided to give a late night (8:15-10:15) section a try to see if it “made”.  (Administrator talk for had enough enrollments to be worth the cost of offering.)

HAH.  Not only did it make, but it’s full.  FULL.  24 students willing to come to class until after 10pm 2 days a week.  Whodathunkit.  So now, for this semester, I get to do every lecture twice in a row.  I think I’m going to need a lot more water.

Of course since this worked out so well, I’ll probably be stuck teaching 2 back to back sections forever…

Seriously, can we add that last one to every election.  I would be SO MUCH HAPPIER if there were a “None of the above” choice…

Last week they had a test. Before the semester started I put up the schedule and it hasn’t changed. They were required to read and acknowledge and take a short quiz on the syllabus, so they can’t say they haven’t seen it. And the syllabus also stated clearly that there were no make-up tests.

I sent out a reminder on thursday (I was at a conference and had forgotten earlier, but frankly it shouldn’t be necessary). Since then I have had half a dozen emails from students saying they forgot and weren’t able to get to campus to take the test on time. Now, I sympathize to some extent; department policy FORCES me to do on-campus proctored tests, which kind of defeats the point of an online class. Nonetheless this was told to them upfront and this was their THIRD TEST. They know the drill.

When I was an undergrad I would start the semester off by putting everything that was due onto one calendar for the semester. Apparently I was exceptionally organized, since it’s clear very few of my student did the same.

The peak was today, when one sent me an email asking if he could still take the test. He admitted that he forgot (which I appreciate) instead of making up a generic dead relative in Mexico (got that one as well, but no response when I asked who), and then whined for 3 back and forth email exchanges to try to get me to let him take the test. I told him that I couldn’t make exceptions. His response was to ask if there was extra credit. (Also mentioned in the syllabus, with the answer being “No”.)

Anyway, I am betting a LOT of them hate me right now. I don’t care. If they complain to my chair, I will tell her the truth; that I refuse to allow them to get away with this type of irresponsible behavior. Their bosses certainly won’t. If she thinks I should, well then that is all for me teaching psych 101. It’s hard enough to read their abysmal writing in the discussion board postings; I will not willingly coddle them to that extent.

1. They are male (in my class of 24 I have 3 men)
2. They are technologically incompetent, so I have to keep resetting things in blackboard for them
3. They are whiners who CONSTANTLY complain about every little thing, even the truly unimportant things

In the past when I was handing back homework each class I would get to know their names.  By this point in the semester I pretty much had it down.

Not this semester.  I not only don’t know them yet, I can’t imagine how I will learn them.  The repetition isn’t there.

Attendance, the iphone app, has a feature that allows you to take a picture and attach it to the name.  However 1st generation ipads don’t HAVE cameras and I don’t have an iphone.  I could take the pictures on my android phone, but then linking them up would be difficult.

I did find a few references to ways to learn names, some of which had a LOT of different ideas.  I’m going to put them here both for your reference and mine.  I need to come back to this before next semester.

• Learning Student Names (27 different suggestions)
• Successful Academic chimed in with 18, some repeats
• 14 more from the University of Virginia
• 15 more from the TEFL folks
• 23 more from University of Nebraska – Lincoln

I may eventually put this into a single doc and see which ones appear most often and which ones are unique, but that should be enough to get started.

I have 2 big issues with some of these ideas so far, however.  First, many are not paperless, thereby defeating the point.  Second, many are VERY time-consuming as far as class time.  For example, many of the UNL suggestions will teach the STUDENTS each others names as well as teaching them to you.  At the cost of probably an entire class period.  That would definitely require some pre-planning.

One of the biggest efforts this semester has been to reduce the amount of paper involved in my teaching.  That has had some mixed results so far.

Keynote and Projecting off the Ipad

1. Keynote does NOT seamlessly open Powerpoint files and project them.  If you have animation, custom fonts or other quirky things in your powerpoint keynote chokes.  There are workarounds, the most important one to me so far being that I used a program to split all my animations into separate slides so that keynote can more easily handle them.  This involves some reviewing and modifying of the presentations on my side.
2. Keynote also screws up some of the size and spacing of text on slides and ends up requiring some massaging to make things look correct.  I kind of expected this, but it still irritated me.
3. Once I made these modifications I was able to project reasonably well off the Ipad.  The major remaining issue is that sometimes there is a delay between when I swipe to go to the next slide and when the screen actually changes.  So far that has been under 8 seconds, so I can mostly talk over it, but it remains less than perfect.

I recently got a Mac Mini and am in the process of getting it set up and files moved over.  I plan to spend some time this weekend moving things into Keynote on the Mac first, then save and move to the Ipad in the hopes of getting rid of the remaining lag.

Entering most assignments into Blackboard

On the one hand I LOVE not having to carry homework or problems or labs back and forth to class.  On the flip side, whenever you put technology into the picture you start to get random problems.  Blackboard is anything but seamless.

• Intermittent issues with blackboard assignments, where for whatever reason it seems that a student has already started work on an assignment but can’t access it.  I have to reset the assignment for the student, which while not difficult can still result in delays.
• Because students are answering the labs but NOT putting in the data, I can’t always tell if a mistake is a misreading or a data entry error.  I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I like to be able to point them in the right direction.
• Online systems require very specific input specifications, and 7.8% is not the same as 7.8 or .78 or 0.78, etc.  I am noting those as I go for correction for next semester, but for now I have to check every problem to look for those kinds of things being marked incorrect when the student got it right but didn’t match the format that the system expected.
• The online homework system (separate from the LMS) has had some timezone issues, and students who waited for the last minute to do their homework have found themselves cut off when they thought they had more time.  Something to be aware of when using hard stop times.

I have yet to test using polleverywhere.com to get in-class answers.  I need to do some planning for that and haven’t yet had the chance.

The first paper isn’t due for a couple more weeks, so it will be a bit longer before I can assess how well grading those online will work.

The biggest advice I can offer on this type of transition is to keep a list of the problems that come up.  Some things (like changing the valid answers to an online question) will have to wait until I set up next semester.  (Blackboard won’t let you change things like that after students have started the assignment.)  My hope is that by next semester I can work out some of the kinks and make teaching with less paper a seamless exercise.

For this semester, however, I’ve come across not one but TWO different ways to do this without dedicated hardware.

Poll Everywhere: You create the poll and students can text, twitter and web.  You can then display the real-time results in your powerpoint presentation.  Questions can be either multiple choice or open text entry.  The product is simple to use, easy to set up, and has a free version for educators with class-sizes up to 32 students.

There are a number of options that can be set up for a question, including things like how many times a given device can answer the poll and which of the response channels can be used.  You also can moderate the text for open-answer questions in order to make sure that they are relevant.

This company is more established and the web-site more polished.  They already have a pricing model and have been used for some exceptionally large projects, so the system is likely to be dependable.  However I see a couple of problems.

First, texts can cost students money and telling them to get out their phone and send me a text means their phones are out and they could spend the rest of class texting everyone else.  I could work around this by having them use the web interface instead and NOT use the text interface.

Second, to really get the power of this one you need to add the poll to your slides, which means you need to know exactly when and where the question will be in the presentation.  That will require some thought and planning on my part.

Having said that, poll everywhere is flexible about a number of things.  A simple example is multiple choice questions – the instructor can specify the number of response categories to be used (starting with as few as 2) making the process look sleeker.  Also, by putting the question and answer choices on the screen it is much easier to follow what was going on if you review the polls later.

Socrative:  Socrative is a newer product (still in Alpha according to their site).  It has a couple more options for the type of question you ask as well as a couple of pre-defined quizzes (such as the exit ticket that asks students what they learned today and what they need to learn next time).  Students enter their results through a web page and the results are displayed to the teacher’s web page.

You could debate whether this is a good or bad thing, but with socrative the teacher just chooses the TYPE of question and asks the question verbally.  The students then answer using either the web or their mobile device.  That allows for a more ad-hoc style of interaction with the students.

There is also a 2nd layer of voting available for short answer questions.  If you ask students a short answer question (which, in the case of my stats class, would be the answer to a problem), you can then ask the class to VOTE on the answers received as opposed to just displaying them.  This, to me, has potential for helping students learn by forcing discussions of what went wrong.

Having said that, socrative lacks a number of features present in poll everywhere.  If you create a multiple choice item, for example, it has 5 answers *period*, and you have to give them to the students verbally.  There aren’t any customization options right now.

You also have to go to the web site to display the results.  That can mean switching out of your presentation to a browser and then back again.

One of the interesting differences between the two products is that socrative is being developed by educators, while poll everywhere is really driven by a polling model.  That doesn’t mean it won’t work for education, but that isn’t their only or even primary audience.  That will impact the direction they take their development.

UPDATE: Both companies have educators at their core and in the highest levels of management.  Poll Everywhere has done a good job of spreading their technology into other audience response situations, but per their representative in the comments they are still devoted to their educational users.

The good news is that, at the scale I am currently at, both are free.  I plan to test both this semester and try to figure out which is likely to work better for my students.

Regardless, either one offers a way for students who are either intimidated speaking up or who are afraid of embarrassing themselves by getting the answer wrong to participate, and for me to get a feel for how well the students are understanding the material.  This is useful.

* I always giggle a little at the idea of using clickers with students, since in my mind a clicker is what you use to train your dog.  While there are some similarities, they aren’t nearly as strong as you might think.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

1. Lecture Notes:  I am now downloading my slides to my ipad and converting them into keynote.  The good is that this process is painless.  The bad is that keynote only shows the slide and the lecture notes on the same screen if you are using it to project.  The room is able to accommodate that, so I bought a $29.00 VGA adapter and will now use the ipad to project.
2. In-class Problems: After further consideration, I am putting the in-class problems into Blackboard.  Students will enter the answers before they leave each class.  I will then go over the problem at the beginning of the NEXT class so that they can go through their work and figure out what went wrong. 
3. Papers:  Our blackboard is integrated with SafeAssign, Blackboard’s answer to TurnItIn.  Students will be turning their papers in using that tool, then the tool reviews them for plagiarism.  I am then going to attempt to implement a grading program* to help make it all faster.  I’ve found several so far, many of which are for word 2003 or earlier.  The ones that aren’t so far are:
1. Annotate for Word – There is a free version I am testing, although already looking at it I am leaning toward buying it. $45
2. eMarking Assistant – also a Word plug-in. Less expensive at $20, but only a 30 day trial.  The demo made it look far less intuitive.
3. Essay Grader – slightly different idea – this one records your comments and creates a separate document.  Not really what I wanted.
4. Labs: I am going to go with putting the answer fields into blackboard.  By creating those forms I am able to grade those efforts online.
5. Homework: Already online.
6. Tests: Right now these will be the only paper items.  They need to show their work, and I have yet to find a tool that can make that work.
7. Articles:  The students have to turn in the articles they are using for their papers in advance.  (I have had all too many of them over the years call me the night before the paper was due because they couldn’t find what they were looking for.  It makes me angry.)  This item counts as homework and consists of a media article (something from the paper or an online source – they almost always go online) as well as the research study that goes with it.  My current thought is that I could have them put in the LINK to the media article and upload the study or have them print the media article to a PDF and upload both.  Undecided right now.

If you are keeping count, that is $74 out of pocket (plus the cost of the ipad, of course, but I bought that for other reasons).  I will, of course, be taking that as a deduction on my taxes this year.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Pointers to other software that might help me grade better?

There are things that make a lecturer more or less effective.  The following picture (click on it to get to the original paper) provides a way of telling if you are being effective as a lecturer and, by extension, how to increase the effective traits while decreasing the ineffective traits in your lectures.

Here’s 7 tips to making sure your lecture’s are productive for your students and painless for all involved.

1. Be a good storyteller.  Your students rarely have the same level of intrinsic interest in the topic that you have.  Some will only be there because it’s required, some won’t have realized what your course was about when they signed up, and a few thought it sounded interesting but are more interested in the hottie they saw while on their way to class.  Your lecture, therefore, needs to tell a good story.  It has a beginning, a middle and an end.  It has something that anyone can relate to, whether that is the topic itself or the examples you provide.  You use vocal modulation, pace and tone to make the story compelling.  If I can do it with statistics, you can do it with anything.
2. Don’t just repeat the book/reading. Enhance it.  Bring it to life.  Enrich it.  Focus on bringing concrete (current) examples, the latest research and a bit of humor to the topic.  For example, in my statistics class I have to explain Correlation.  I can say “correlation does not equal causation” over and over, but I get a LOT further with a simple scatterplot.  (If all you do is repeat the book, some of them won’t bother to read it.)
   

   These two things have WHAT to do with one another?

3. Use the slides as a structure, not a script.  We laugh at the guy at a conference who just reads his slides, but I’ve seen my share of intelligent instructors do the same thing.  It’s boring to sit through for you, and just as boring for your students.  Use the slides to provide a structure for both you and your students, and as a mechanism for bringing in value-add multimedia (charts, images, TED talks, whatever).  Use the Notes section of the slides to provide yourself with the discussion questions you want to use, practice problems, answers to said problems and notes on information you want to make sure you include.  COROLLARY:  You don’t HAVE to use slides. I never saw a single Powerpoint in my graduate program.  Instructors assigned us readings, then walked in and talked (sometimes off an outline, sometimes not) about the readings and asked extensive discussion questions to get us thinking about how the readings fit into the broader context of the field.
4. If your topic is technical, use slides and let the students print them before class. This one occasionally is debated, but teaching statistics I’ve found it invaluable.  The last thing I want is students writing down formula’s incorrectly or spending all their time taking dictation.  I want them listening, processing, asking questions and engaging with me.  By giving them the notes, they can write down the things that will make those notes more meaningful to them.  COROLLARY:  They should still be NOTES.  Your slides should be an outline* of the topic, not a paper on it.
5. Have a common thread through your lecture.  This could mean a common example or a common problem to be solved.  It helps a lot if this thread is accessible to your students, since they will anchor all the concepts you are discussing to that thread, and will remember an accessible thread better.  Keep coming back to that thread.  To you, it will seem repetitive.  To them, it will provide a structure and a tool for them to later remember the material.  (I keep toying with the idea of restructuring my entire stats class around a zombie apocalypse.  Maybe someday.)
6. Don’t do all the talking.  Listening alone is never the best learning tool.  Students need to experiment, discuss, and apply what they are learning.  Rather than doing an entire problem on the board, have them do it themselves first.  Rather than talking, ask them questions about how they understood the material.  This breaks up the lecture and allows them to process the information.  Make sure you have one meaty discussion question every 10-20 minutes.  The following image is from a larger paper that talks about how group size impacts questioning techniques and how you, therefore, need to adjust the type of questions you ask.    
7. Review your material the day before class.  Once you have designed your lectures, developed your slides if you plan to use them, integrated it all with your reading list and assignments, and otherwise put it all together, you still aren’t done.  At least 1 day before you teach a particular class, review your notes and the timing of any exercises.  This will make it fresh in your mind and help the class run seamlessly.  Whether true or not, many students mix up a disorganized lecture style with a lack of subject matter expertise in the instructor.  You should strive to have a plan and then remind yourself of the details of that plan in advance.  (By doing it a day in advance you have the chance to make any changes for a particular section.  You will find over time that sections learn at different paces and learn best with different types of exercises.  I can use that information to quickly customize or to choose specific exercises that I will use.)

BONUS: If you will be using a white board, remember that students can’t hear you if you speak to the board.  Practice turning back around before you speak, using good diction and projecting your voice strongly.  I can’t get away from using the board to do problems, but I learned quickly to stop writing numbers and turn around if a student asks a substantive question.

Your lecture is not a static thing.  You’ll never deliver it the same twice, and your first semester you will often leave class thinking “well, that didn’t work.”  Keep a piece of paper handy AS YOU LECTURE and make notes about things that don’t flow well, are missing, are ill-explained, or that you need to not forget.  Then spend a bit of time once a week during the semester integrating those things into the lectures just completed so that NEXT semester you won’t be writing down the same things.

The first and best book I read on teaching is called Tools for Teaching.  The author has made the chapter on delivering a lecture available online (as well as a few others), and I suggest you take a few minutes to read through it.  It has some great suggestions for those who aren’t comfortable with the public-speaking aspects of teaching.  Keep in mind, however, that this is from the 1993 edition of the book, meaning it far predates many of the technological tools we now have at our disposal.

*I had this awful grad seminar that required me to learn mind mapping in order to take notes.  The instructor spent the entire session lecturing, working off a set of lecture notes (no slides) that were, I kid you not, typed on an actual typewriter and yellowed beyond belief.  He would ramble, wandering around the topic in a way that linear-little-me couldn’t follow.  I finally took to mind mapping his lectures in order to get some type of notes down.  Turns out it didn’t matter, since the paper we had to do (1 for the entire semester) could have been on nearly anything on the topic and passed.  Don’t be that guy.

From a pedagogical/andragogical perspective, your course must have some learning objectives.  These may be provided if the course is a standard offering, or you may need to determine what they are.  Regardless, your first step should always be to define what you want your students to come away from the course knowing and.or able to do.  From there you can begin to ask yourself some key questions that will define what the rest of the course will look like.  Questions like:

1. How many students are you going to have in this class?  You can spend a lot more time grading assignments from a class of 10 than from a class of 100.  Discussions flow differently in larger classrooms and you might need to incorporate technology like clickers or Poll Everywhere to make the class interactive.
2. Will the course have a lab or discussion sections?  Large courses often use discussion sections for more interactivity, while labs are designed to be hands on.  Even if you don’t have a separate time, you may find integrating those types of structures into a course useful, assuming it supports your learning objectives.
3. How many courses are you teaching?  Multiple sections of the same courses or all different courses?  Teaching multiple sections of the same course can be easier, in that you will have less to prepare.  However I’ve found my own thinking enhanced by teaching different courses at the same time, resulting in better descriptions and examples for both.  Regardless, you need to plan your time accordingly.
4. Will you have teaching assistants?  TAs are NOT slave labor.  It is part of your job to teach them how to teach.  So while you can ask them to do a lot of the “drudge” work of teaching, such as grading papers and tests, you will need to teach them what to look for and spot check their work throughout the semester.  Plan to spend quite a bit of time overseeing their work and helping them do a good job.
5. Are there materials already created that you can use or will everything need to be created from scratch?  For example most textbooks will come with a slide pack, but the slides are often ugly and don’t explain the material well.  I found for both of my classes that I had to create my own materials that included more multimedia, more visuals and more interactive examples.  Don’t be afraid to search the internet for good ideas on exercises you can use with your students.  (Don’t forget to give the original author credit.)
6. Is there a single book that meets most of your learning objectives?  If not, can you meet the objectives with a couple of less-expensive books?  What about using e-reserves from your library to either supplement or, in the case of grad seminars, replace a textbook?  (Keep in mind what constitutes fair use if you use this approach.  You are usually safe if you are using a single chapter from a particular book for teaching purposes, but you should check with your department and library on whether there are any limitations in place at your institution.)  If you are teaching at a community college, are there open source textbooks that can be used to save the students some money?
7. How may tests do you plan to give?  Undergraduate students prefer more assessment opportunities covering smaller chunks of material, while graduate students prefer a few bigger (deeper) assignments.  How heavily weighted in the course grade will those tests be?  Are they the primary means of assessment or just one of many?  I give 5 tests in my stats class.  I give them on paper and grade them by hand because I am better able to provide feedback to the students that way.  But those tests are worth only 40% of the total class grade.  I have other assignments that make up the rest of the course grade.
8. How many assignments (homework, papers, lab activities) do you plan to give and how will you manage reviewing them?  I have been actively working to reduce this part of my work load.  Homework is done using an online system,  and lab answers will be typed into web-forms rather than handed in on paper.  This lets the computer grade some of the questions and I only have to worry about the short answer questions.  Papers are still manual, but I am working on implementing an electronic feedback process that I’ll detail later this summer.
9. How much lecturing do you plan to do?  How are you going to organize that time, keep the students’attention and ensure that they are understanding what you said?  I do a lot of lecture in my stats class because the students find the book confusing, but I do it with lots of breaks for questions, partial problem exercises, and bad jokes to find out who is still listening.  I use Powerpoint as a projector operating system by which I put up videos, animations and visual aids to help the students understand the words coming out of my mouth.  Lecturing isn’t necessarily bad, but you do need to plan for it and make it more interactive (see note on clickers and such above).
10. What can you do for yourself in advance that will make your semester easier?  The better you plan out your course, the less stressful your semester will be.  My goal is to have both of my courses completely ready to go by the first day of classes so that I just need to execute during the semester.  So I am organizing all my notes now, testing my iPad with a projector, and otherwise attempting to make sure that there will be no surprises.

In the back of your mind you should always be balancing the techniques used with the amount of time you have available to work on the course.  If you have no TAs and 300 students, you shouldn’t assign multiple papers and may be better off with multiple choice tests*.  If, on the other hand, you have a small graduate seminar you may NEVER give an actual in-class test.  (I’ve actually been asked about one of my assignments because the person doing the syllabus review thought it might take up an awful lot of my time.  It does, but the student learning that comes out of the assignment is sufficient to make it worthwhile.  I compensate by using computer graded homework for much of the day-to-day work.)

One last thing:  remember that it gets easier.  The first semester is always the hardest, as you change, adapt, tweak and otherwise fix up your course.  You will find places you need to add material, other places you need to subtract it.  You will find assignments that just don’t work, and others that work so well you want to further build on them.  This is normal. Just as your students are learning, so are you.  Take it all in stride and keep your sense of humor.

*A multiple choice test doesn’t HAVE to be a cakewalk.  How easy or hard it is depends on the questions asked.  The worst grade I got in graduate school was in a statistics class with 4 tests, 10 multiple choice questions each.  Each question required solving a problem and choosing a response that explained the outcome you got from the problem.  They were by no means trivial problems, and frankly I am a REALLY good test-taker.  However the grade I got (B+, so not actually bad) reflected what I knew and understood quite accurately.  It takes longer to write these kinds of questions, but they can be just as rigorous if well done.

I got through about half of the class (which ends up being a couple hundred double-sided pages) when it occurred to me that this was ridiculous.  I mean, this is 2011.  I own an Ipad (1st gen).  Why was I printing this stuff out so that I could carry it to class every week so that I would have the slides and notes in front of me when I could just carry the ipad instead? (The room has a computer and projector, but I use the notes section of my slides to hold things like practice problems, solutions, and notes to myself on things I want to make sure I explicitly mention, so I want that information with me and right there during class.

This led to thought two:  what do I need to do to not have to carry huge packages of paper back and forth.  The class involves 2 papers* (turnitin, here we come), 5 test, 1 in-class problem per lecture and 10 labs.  The tests I want on paper; I give students partial credit for the tests if they make a math error but otherwise follow through correctly.  (5 times 0 is ZERO people, not 5).  The in-class problems I want them to do on paper, but those should only be a single sheet per student, so that isn’t overwhelming.  Pedagogically the point of those is to also give them feedback on problems done the same way as the tests, done immediately after learning the material.

That leaves the labs and  I need to brainstorm on that one.  The point of these labs is to teach students to use SPSS to solve statistical problems.  Personally I think this is a waste of their time and mine.  Maybe 5 out of 20 will ever use it again, and most of those will be in the research methods class.  Then they will all forget it until the 1 out of that 5 actually gets to graduate school.  The labs were written by another faculty member and are the most dumb down way to earn a credit hour I have ever seen.  They don’t actually TEACH the tool itself OR anything about statistics.  I’m thinking I may move the answer sheets online and call it good.  I will still have to grade the short answer sections, but can do it much quicker online.

Regardless, I will be documenting this process and the new tools I adopt as I work through moving to a less paper-intensive process for both me and the students.  I will need to integrate this with my entire process, so it will also mean moving the lovely paper to do list onto the ipad and integrating it into my life better.  (Right now I mostly play games and read books on it, which makes it a seriously overpriced ereader or toy.)  My focus for now will be strictly on my teaching work; the day job and the rest of my life is going to be excluded until I get teaching sorted out.  (David Allen is screaming in frustration somewhere…)

* Yes, I assign not one but TWO papers to my stats students.  They have to find an article in the mainstream media that talks about a study, then find the study, then write a paper comparing the two and showing me they understood both the study and how it differs from the media coverage.  Surprising as it sounds, it’s one of their favorite assignments.