“Get out your iPad”

And other things I hope to never say in my classroom

Putting technology into the classroom can be a daunting experience. From my years working with faculty who want to do this it usually goes something like this.

Them: I want to try and incorporate more technology into my classroom
Me: What ideas do you have?
Them: Well I saw someone use a tool called [insert any “new” web 2.0 tool here] and I think I want them to have to use that for an assignment.
Me: What is the assignment?
Them: [Insert any regular boring activity]

This is not in any way shape or form an example of incorporating technology into the classroom, but in my old position, faculty were the end all be all of what happens in the classroom and I was just there to teach them how to use whatever tool it is that they wanted to use.

Image credit to @adambellow

While I always applauded their efforts to include the new technology tool, what I found was that this current generation of college students are not coming to us with the 21st century skills that K12 is just now claiming to be teaching. They are coming with limited skills when it comes to using technology for educational purposes and so therefore are just annoyed when they have to learn a new tool to do an assignment that (and I can’t argue with them here) could meet the same outcomes with an old, traditional method.

Incorporating technology fully means that it is a complete part of the classroom experience, not just something that you get out to do a certain assignment. This is hard to accomplish when we are not dealing with at 1:1 scenario, but many classrooms and colleges are at this point and are still not fully incorporating the technology. I am lucky to be in a situation now where I am not only the instructor for the courses I will be incorporating technology into, but I am also the Director of Education for the school as well as the classroom designer. I have unique opportunity here to share that I hope people from each individual area will be able to take something away from.

Here is how I envision my classroom working on a day to day basis and what tools will help accomplish this:

Reading — All books for students will be digital and delivered via whispercast through Amazon. Students will be encouraged to highlight, make notes and share with the class. When asked to “open their books” students will automatically navigate to the Kindle app on their iPad.

Tentative desk arrangement for the new classroom

Note-taking — While I will not ban traditional writing tools, I will encourage them to take notes on the iPad, or if using paper notes, take a picture and store them in their Evernote. All classes will be given a brief introduction to Evernote and use it in group work and organization or resources.

Group Work — Because I will be using the flipped classroom model for my classes, students will often be working on homework during class time, and often in groups. Group work will occur around movable HDTV screens where students can share their findings with the rest of their group my mirroring their iPads through Apple TV to the HDTV. All the furniture will be on wheels and can be rearranged at any time. I will use AirParrot for some more advanced sharing capabilities as well.

Discussions, Course Content, etc. — We use a app called EmpoweredU that is a mobile based LMS that uses Canvas to create and organize content, and then pushes that content out to a user friendly app that makes consuming the content easy. All information related to the course itself will be tied directly to the iPad. The app allows for other ways to interact besides traditional typing such as voice and video responses.

Engagement — More than anything I want my students to be engaged in the classroom and to just feel as if the technology is a part of the classroom and their learning. Some other ideas I have for engagement are:

  • Daily polls to see if students understood the materials from the class/evening before, most likely using Socrative
  • Aggregating tweets made the students to our class hashtag
  • Having students share on a regular basis by mirroring their screens to the main projector

All of these ideas and more will be detailed out as I get closer to class time and as classes are in session. Any ideas out there on how to incorporate technology seamlessly are welcome!