Are You Smarter Than A Smartphone?

Students, Computers and Learning - Making the Connection was released by the OECD back in September 2015. Here's a rather lengthy quote from the Foreword section (shortened and emphasis added):

The report provides a first-of-its-kind internationally comparative analysis of the digital skills that students have acquired, and of the learning environments designed to develop these skills. This analysis shows that the reality in our schools lags considerably behind the promise of technology...And even where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.

...And perhaps the most disappointing finding of the report is that technology is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students....

One interpretation of all this is that building deep, conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking requires intensive teacher-student interactions, and technology sometimes distracts from this valuable human engagement. Another interpretation is that we have not yet become good enough at the kind of pedagogies that make the most of technology; that adding 21st-century technologies to 20th-century teaching practices will just dilute the effectiveness of teaching. If students use smartphones to copy and paste prefabricated answers to questions, it is unlikely to help them to become smarter. If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.

Hmm, something to think about. (found on Hack Education by Audrey Watters)

The Gameful Classroom

GradeCraft by the University of Michigan is a learning management system designed to support personalized 'gameful' courses - read more about it over at Wired Campus. The basic idea is to mimic learning as a video game where students chart their own path through the course material and mistakes don't come with any real consequences - you can simply start over and repeat the level.

The Ed-Tech Holiday Gift Guide

Just in case...here are some ed-tech and geography-themed gift ideas, some of which may actually be usable for teaching and learning:

• Are your students bored with your flipped classroom? Impress them with 360 degree videos (example) using the Ricoh Theta series that they can watch on Facebook.
• Turn any smartphone into an infrared camera with the Seek Compact or Compact XR and keep it charged.
• Or, use the visible spectrum better with the Creative Mobile Kit.
• Bored with your lectures, online classes or MOOCs? Experience them as virtual reality (oh...the irony) with the Samsung Gear VR. 
• A 3-D printer for every student? Why not with the M3D Micro!
• A computer for every student? Why not with the Kano or the Raspberry Pi Zero (for $5).
• A drone for every student? Why not with the Axis Wallet Drone!
• There must be some use for this in the classroom or lab: The Drop scale and app.
• For the map geek: Circle Maps or Below The Boat.
• Design your own map-based clothing or accessories @ Monochome.
• Design your own map-based wall art @ Woodcut Maps.

Still not sure? You can always Adopt-A-Glacier via the National Snow and Ice Data Center. One of my favs, Qori Kalis Glacier in Peru, is available.

Qori Kalis Glacier (June 2015)

Teens, Social Media & Technology

The Teens, Social Media & Technology Overview 2015 by the Pew Research Center is fascinating, especially since most of the results are further stratified by gender, race, income, and other factors (see table below).

And once you are done reading that, how about the Millenials and Political News report (also by the Pew Research Center). One thing seems clear: our students get their new from Facebook (see chart below).

Story Mapping with ThingLink

This week is Geography Awareness Week and ThingLink is an easy way to make a story map: just upload a picture and 'map it' by adding tags and links to multimedia. Here's a simple example: GPS Survey of the Quelccaya Ice Cap.

ThingLink is basically a simpler (and commercial) version of StoryMap for Images, the tool behind the awesome 'map' of the The Garden Of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch which is featured prominently in this year's First-Year Read The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans De Waal.

Claim Your Domain!

And control your digital identity and digital citizenship!

• Problem: students and faculty lose control of their digital work once they upload it to the commercial LMS or E-Portfolio systems.
• Solution: claim your domain and put yourself in-control of your own digital academic or professional portfolio.
• Example: carstenbraun.us

And the institution can (and should) facilitate that by creating a Domains of One's Own initiative for students, faculty, and staff.

That's the short version of Audrey Watters new book Claim Your Domain - And Own Your Online Presence. This is a good and quick read, but you can also skim the Clif Notes version on her blog at The Web We Need to Give Students.

The End of Public Education?

Forget PLATO (no, not our PLATO), MOOCs, Sal Khan, iTunes U, or SNHU - this may be the end of public education: Knewton (if it works).

"We think of it like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile." (Jose Ferreira, CEO Knewton, 13 October 2015/NPR)

Read more about Knewton and the history of automated 'adaptive' learning here: The Algorithmic Future of Education (Audrey Watters, 22 October 2015).

http://hackeducation.com/2015/10/22/robot-tutors/

How do you annotate?

Annotating things - be that texts, images, videos, etc. - can be a rich and useful learning activity that promotes critical thing and active engagement with whatever is being annotated. In other words: it is a useful learning strategy. Here is a selection of useful tech-tools:

• Video Annotation Tools: VidBolt, VideoANT, or SocialBook. Adeline Koh has a nice article on using VidBolt in the classroom over on ProfHacker.
• Film Annotation with SocialBook - read about it here on ProfHacker.
• Text / Website / Collaborative Annotation Tools: Hypothes.is, nb, Annotation Studio, eComma, Axiom, Diigo, Classroom Salon, or Lacuna Stories.

Lot's of choices here...try Annotation Studio (MIT) or VideoANT (University of Minnesota) to get started. Or consider the opinions discussed in the article and comments by Lee Skallerup Bessette over on ProfHacker and read about Hypothes.is in Nature (3 December 2015).

Update (14 January 2016): Maha Bali has a nice comparison of Hypothes.is vs. Diigo over on ProfHacker.

Map Your Searches!

Okay, so far we have mapped books, paintings, stories, rivers, green degrees, data, caves, snowy winters, refugees, concepts, minds, Mars, gun deaths, poverty, and more.

How about mapping your Google Searches?

Trailblazer, an extension for Chrome, does just that - it keeps track and maps your search history. In other words: it provides you with digital breadcrumbs to find your way back home! Read more about it and ways to include it in your teaching over on ProfHacker.

Noticing Tools STEM Pack

Here's another suite of fun and educational apps for the iPad: Noticing Tools by the New York Hall of Science, for example Playground Physics. Read more over at Co.DESIGN or risk $9.99 to try them out!

Tinybop Apps

Tinybop Apps are interactive 'playscapes' for curious people of every age. The app design and interactive visualizations are simply incredible. Choose from:

• The Human Body
• Plants
• Homes
• Simple Machines
• The Earth (my favorite)
• Robot Factory
• The Everything Machine (review on Co.DESIGN)

Unfortunately they are only available for iOS...sorry Android folks.

Storytelling with...

There are many great tools and apps out there for digital storytelling - here is a selection that you may find useful:

1. Storytelling with Maps - for example Boston Snow 2015, The Garden of Earthly Delights, or The Connecticut River Higher Education Greenway.
2. Storytelling with Videos and movies - for example you can create your own animated video with Plotagon, annotate a movie (or book) with SocialBook, or annotate a video with VidBolt.
3. Storytelling with Apps - for example Connection - Hollywood Storytelling meets Critical Thinking.
4. Storytelling with Infographics - for example using Easel.ly, Canva, or Infogr.am.
5. Storytelling with Comic Strips, Church Signs, Memes, or Cartoons.

http://www.khoslaventures.com/the-unbreakable-laws-of-storytelling

Bloomin' Apps

Kathy Schrock's Guide To Everything has a nice section called Bloomin' Apps where she compiles and reviews apps for iPad, Android, Google, Windows, and Web 2.0 that support the different levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, including:

1. Understanding Bloom
2. Remembering Bloom
3. Applying Bloom

If that's not enough for you...have a look at the Teaching Professor Tips app (available for iOS and Android) that delivers a useful teaching tip daily to your smart phone or tablet.

Even more ridiculous: let's turn college life and academic success into a game - consider the Ball State Achievements app (reviewed here by Wired Campus).

Better Online Pedagogy

Here are two options to become a better online educator:

1. You could yourself take an online class, perhaps on The Flipped Classroom, Teaching with Twitter, or Learning Online - all you need is a few hundred spare $$$, perhaps using an IPI or SoTL Grant?
2. Or, you could just read a book, for example the new Teaching Online A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice by Erin Dolan. Before you buy, consider this review or swing-by and take a look at my copy.

For a more critical view of online education and education technology in-general consider the essays The Golden Lasso of Education Technology or Is It Time to Give Up on Computers in Schools? by Audrey Watters. Or, read her book The Monsters of Education Technology.

http://paleofuture.com/blog/2011/8/24/the-push-button-school-of-tomorrow-1958.html

Mapping Bonobos

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates by Frans de Waal is a great read as-is, but you can also 'read' the book in space as an interactive story map. So, click around and explore the places, links, connections, websites, videos, and more!

Want more? How about Atlas Obscura's Guide to Literary Road Trips.

Story Maps are ways to present information in a geographic context, or, more simply: to tell your story using interactive maps, for example The Connecticut River Higher Education Greenway.

Making story maps is actually quite easy and we will be offering a series of story mapping workshops later this semester. Or, swing-by and we can chat about how this spatial technology could be useful for your teaching, research, or other activities.

Pr. Erica Morin on Cell phones

In-Class Research Activities with Cell Phones

Cell phone use during class time is infuriating. Our students struggle to disconnect from their phones for even 50-75 minutes. (I am guilty, too. I check my iPhone at least 500 times a day.) But cell phones are absolutely forbidden in my class. I have an incredibly strict NO PHONE ZONE policy. My syllabus reads, verbatim, “If I see, hear, or sense a cell phone during class time, the entire class gets a pop quiz immediately.” This policy has proven incredibly effective. Students are terrified of having a pop quiz and loath to incite the ire of all their classmates. Over the entire semester, I maybe give 1-2 quizzes across all my course sections, and I have never given more than one pop quiz to the same class. The lesson is learned the first time.

But I am not immune to arguments on the other side of the spectrum. Rather than enforcing “no phone zones,” some educational experts suggest embracing cell phones as valuable learning tools that put the entire Internet at students’ fingertips.[1] Smart phones have become so pervasive and ubiquitous, it might be easier and more beneficial to integrate such devices into the classroom, instead of fighting the “inevitable.”[2]  Additionally, our students are growing more and more accustomed to (read: dependent upon) using technology, so they are comfortable with that learning platform.[3] Especially at larger institutions, like Texas Tech and Purdue, where I previously taught, mobile devices can be integrated into classroom participation and virtual discussions with programs like Socrative, Polls Everywhere, and HotSpot.[4] For larger classrooms where participation can be challenging, these apps allow students to ask and answer questions, offer feedback, and, generally, get involved, from the palm their hand. These apps are less necessary at Westfield State, perhaps, given our smaller class sizes, but they offer a glimpse at the educational possibilities of mobile devices.

I am not completely sold on the idea of cell phone use in the classroom for a number of reasons, however. First, I think they pose an enormous potential for distraction, even when very closely monitored. It only takes one text message or Tweet or Yak or Facebook notification to completely derail a student’s focus. The temptation to do other things often outweighs the ability of the instructor to maintain productive engagement within the specified activity. Second, I do not like the idea of our students further retreating into their cell phones and virtual worlds. Mobile devices and technology in the classroom should not be a substitute for them making eye contact, opening up their mouths, and speaking to each other. 

I feel like I am already noticing a decline in conversational confidence and interpersonal skills among millennial students.[5] I am inclined to blame this trend, at least in part, on the never-ending ability of our students to interact virtually and anonymously via the Internet and Social Media. I want my students to talk, out loud, to one another, on a daily basis, so technology will never replace verbal discussion for me. Lastly, although smart phones are incredibly common, they are not universal. I do not want to marginalize lower-income and non-traditional students because they do not have or want the latest mobile device. As a result, I am wary of creating an assignment that “requires” a smart phone. In the past, I have brought my own smart phone, tablet, and laptop to the class, and encouraged students with multiple devices to share with their classmates and it has never been an issue. Or, as you will see below, you can ask the groups to designate one “researcher” in order to limit them to one phone per group. (Also, the other implicit hesitation underlying all this is the fact that the Wifi rarely works in my classroom, so actually connecting to the Internet may be a concern.)

With all that said, I am trying. I have created a few activities for my upper-level history courses that include the use of cell phones. Each activity is highly-structured and closely monitored, in order to keep students on track. I have experienced wonderful success with these activities, and I intend to repeat them, with a bit of tinkering, of course. I follow a simple formula. I have a Tuesday/Thursday schedule for my upper-level courses in which I generally give a lecture introducing and explain the content on Tuesday, and then we have a discussion and/or activity on Thursday. For these cell phone activities, students engage in a group discussion based on preassigned readings and then break out into small groups to research a specific topic related to the readings. Students use their smart phones or tablets as personal research tools. I will provide a few examples of how I use this format with several topics and an assessment of the results.

Course: U.S. Environmental History

Topic: National Park creation

This discussion falls chronologically near the Progressive Era and the growth of conservation and preservation ideas with Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. Students read an article[6] explaining the early rationale for national park creation, i.e. American desire to distinguish ourselves from Europe by highlighting our rich natural history and minimizing our short cultural history, as well as promoting natural beauty as a unifying source of national pride in the post-Civil War years. The article focuses on how the parks’ founders and greatest supporters highlighted the beauty and uniqueness of places like Yellowstone and Yosemite when they advocated for protection. We discuss the early national parks and how they correspond to cultural values and perceptions of beauty, including wild open spaces and spectacular natural features.  Then I explain how preservation priorities changed in the 20th century. As scientific knowledge of ecosystems grew, some natural areas were set aside for biological diversity and unique species or features, rather than conventional ideas of natural beauty. Then I break the class (25-40) into groups of 2-4 students. I distribute the name of a national park to each group.  I instruct them to look up the national park on their devices. On an accompanying worksheet, they need to identify the park location, describe the appearance, important natural features, and determine, to the best of their abilities, why it was protected. Some of the National Park examples given to the student groups are the Everglades, Petrified Forest, Guadalupe Mountains, Redwoods, Arches, Theodore Roosevelt, Kenai Fjords, Dry Tortugas, Death Valley, Saguaro, Joshua Tree, Congaree, and several more. While a few of these parks correspond to the original aesthetic, but most were preserved for aspects that were/are not considered traditionally beautiful, but offer unique biological, geological, archaeological, or ecological benefits. After students have researched each of their national parks and reached a conclusion about their reason for protection, we go around the room and share our findings.

Course: U.S. Constitutional History

Topic: The Bill of Rights in Modern Cases

This course covers the formation and evolution of the United States Constitution. This particular activity occurs late in the semester after students have thoroughly covered the historical background of the Bill of Rights and are prepared to discuss current Supreme Court cases related to these rights. Students are divided into partners or groups of three and given a piece of paper with a constitutionally-protected right written on it. (These rights are more specific than simply “freedom of speech.” They are better classified as “elaborated rights.”  For example, it is difficult to say freedom of speech without specifically listing or explaining what that means in terms of more specific rights. Some of the “elaborated rights” protected under freedom of speech are protest speech in opposition to the government,  obscenity and pornography, symbolic speech like flag burning,  and recently,  political speech in the form of campaign donations, to name just a few examples.) So each student group receives an “elaborated right,” then they are assigned to find an example of a recent Supreme Court decision that interpreted this right. The small groups use their phones or other devices to look up cases and complete a worksheet which lists the case name, case events, case decision, and contribution to our understanding of the right. Each pair shares the cases with the class and I create a cumulative list of current cases.

Course: Gender and the Environment

Topic: Hyper-masculinity in Advertisements Displaying Nature

This interdisciplinary course explores male and female interactions and representations related to the natural environment in U.S. history and incorporating global examples. Over the course of the semester, students examine the many, many ways in which nature is infused with gender connotations and/or connected to gendered values and attributes. Very frequently, the environment is feminized, especially in relation to “mother nature,” the language of conquest, and who cares about protecting nature. Conversely, representations of men in/and nature are often hyper-masculinized. Advertising is an especially rich source for examining this dichotomy. Many advertisements featuring men and nature are comically, stereotypically, shamelessly masculine. In this activity, students are split into pairs. They are instructed to find the best example of an advertisement (print or video) that combines nature and a representation of masculinity. Students share links to their findings on a previously-used online forum, like Blackboard Discussion or Google Docs. The results are informative, hilarious, and appalling. (My favorites are Dr. Pepper Ten,[7] Old Spice,[8] and various reality TV shows, like Ax Men, Mudcats, or Man vs. Wild.)

Assessment

I believe this simple formula can be incorporated into a wide range of courses. Basically, the instructor just needs to develop a specific topic of inquiry that is relevant for their curriculum. If students are provided with context, clear instructions, and a final deliverable to ensure accountability, they will be able to use their mobile devices for a productive classroom assignment. At the same time, the instructor must be vigilant. I have no patience for tomfoolery.  The students have a task to complete and I monitor their progress closely.  At the end, each group must share their findings with the class. If I catch any non-assignment activity, the quiz rule still stands (which students are informed of in advance).

In part, I think the success of these activities is because I am so strict with phones for 99% of the class. My students are accustomed to absolutely no cell phones. Ever. For any reason. End of story.

Therefore, when they are allowed to use their phones, it is a fun and exciting activity. They know that I trust them and most want to have this same opportunity or activity again in the future. As a result, engagement is high, noncompliance is almost nonexistent, and outcomes are awesome.

For me, though, the distraction and temptation of cell phones far outweighs the daily classroom value. I will not be adopting a “run what you brung” approach anytime soon.[9] But I do think that mobile devices can be valuable for limited classroom activities in highly structured settings with pre-existing rules.

Assistant Professor Erica Morin, History Department

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[1] http://www.nea.org/tools/56274.htm

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/do-cell-phones-belong-in-the-classroom/257325/

[3] http://www.emergingedtech.com/2012/05/embracing-the-cell-phone-in-the-classroom-with-text-messaging-assignments/

[4] http://www.teachhub.com/how-use-cell-phones-learning-tools

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-losing-social-skills-2012-3

[6] www.historical-geography.net/volume_35_2007/figueiredo.pdf

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zza3GqEL5B0

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-XRzDt_bvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLTIowBF0kE

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jGzvusnRU8