PennEduTech

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

Julie Nishimura Jensen, faculty member in Classical Studies Department and Director of the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Classical Studies in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, is using a wiki in her Blackboard site to streamline the scheduling of advising sessions and office hours. She says,

I have to say that I’m really loving my wiki office hours sign-ups. It has made my life so much easier – no more back-and-forthing to figure out times for everyone; I just post time slots and they sign up. My students seem to like it too; I worried that it would make things too formal – I like the option of people being able to drop by – but it’s much more efficient for them to know for sure that they will have some face time. I think it could be really useful for other people too!

How to Create a Wiki in Blackboard
Before you can add the wiki tool to areas of your Blackboard course site, you first need to configure it. Go to the Course Tools area in the Control Panel and click on Configure Wiki. You’ll see lots of options for authoring and editing permissions and access dates. Choose which best suits your needs, click OK, and then add it to your course site as you would any other tool.

To highlight its functional significance for Advising Meetings and make it easy to find, Julie added it right to her navigation menu.

If you’d like help making changes to your Blackboard site, send an email to the Penn Blackboard Support.

What other ways can you envision wikis streamlining your teaching practice?

Penn Libraries recently announced a cool new way to explore the image collection at the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library. Here is a Michelangelo Slideshow I made in a few seconds – click the blue arrow at top to start. The CoolIris 3D software may require a plug-in download. You can create a rich browsing experience for images that you choose to include.

To make this show, I started at the image collection page, chose Michelangelo from the Artist box at right and narrowed my search to records with digital images. You can make slideshows for a particular class session and email your students the link, or use PennTags to collect them for later use. The collection also has more than 100,000 high-resolution images you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. I also foresee uses in conference presentations.

At a recent meeting about technology support for SAS students, several student pointed out that they would like to see their instructors make better use of the Grade Center function in Blackboard.  In particular, they were urging their instructors to use the Grade Center to track all graded assignments – not just mid-term or final exams.  By having a complete picture of how they’re doing in the course, they’ll know if they need to get help or make adjustments to how they approach their coursework.

The Grade Center in Blackboard is a very versatile tool for recording and communicating grades, but it can be a little intimidating to instructors because there are so many options.  A good place to start is the Blackboard Quick Start guide, which offers an overview of the key functionality and brief summaries of how to perform common tasks.

On December 1, 2008 Penn Library courseware support specialists will be offering a workshop for faculty on how to use the Grade Center.  See http://wic.library.upenn.edu/workshops/#SBBG for details.

Or contact the instructional support staff for your School for help in learning how to use the gradebook effectively.  SAS faculty can contact instructional-support@sas.upenn.edu

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Cathy Turner, Associate Director, Center for Teaching and Learning.

I want to draw everyone’s attention to a recent Almanac article that Zack Lesser, an Assistant Professor in the English Department, wrote about how he chose to use technology in the classroom. Dr. Lesser calls on all of us to think first about why we would use technology before we get excited about the “bells and whistles.” It is also fantastic that this essay is about successful use of technology in a Shakespeare class and worth reading for how he transformed his class.

He also discusses his experiences in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Teaching with Technology Seminar.  These seminars are discussion groups aimed exclusively at faculty where they can discuss why they use technology in their classes.  There are people on hand who help with questions about how to use the technology but the real focus is how technology can benefit student learning. These events are a useful place to send faculty who are interested in using technology or who want to use technology more effectively to engage students. I would advocate sending any faculty who use PowerPoint to the upcoming event on PowerPoint (Monday October 20 from 2:00-3:30 in the seminar room of the Weigle Information Commons). I used to malign PowerPoint but after the conversation with Drs. Mike Kaplan (Biology) and Jay McInerny (Classical Studies) I have come to see how it can be a great tool for engaging students (rather than letting them sleep in the dark while the slides pass by).

Audience Response Systems, or “clickers”, are an increasingly popular way to get students in large lecture courses engaged both with the material and with their fellow students.  More than a dozen courses across the University are using clickers this semester, with 10 courses and more than 1500 students using them in SAS alone.

Clicker and Receiver

These clickers allow students to vote on a multiple-choice question that the instructor displays on the screen, and then see the histogram of the voting results and, optionally, the correct answer .  We have standardized on clickers from TurningTechnologies.com, which provides free software for instructors to insert questions into PowerPoint presentations on either a PC or a Mac.  Students can buy the clickers next to the textbook for their course in the Penn Bookstore for $40, and sell it back like a used textbook at the end of the term – unless they want to keep it to use in future courses, which is becoming more and more likely.  SAS Computing loans instructors the receiver for the semester.

Instructors have found a variety of ways to use these clickers effectively.  Some use them to gauge student understanding of a topic and determine how much time they need to spend on it during class.  Others use it to have students answer a difficult question, or one where there are likely to be a variety of responses, and then discuss the answer with their neighbor and vote again before the correct answer is revealed.  Students’ responses can be completely anonymous, or the instructor can set it up to have the students register their clicker number in Blackboard and then have each student’s response to the questions recorded so that their scores can be uploaded to the Blackboard Grade Center.  Many instructors take a middle ground between these two approaches, having the students register their clickers, but only recording whether or not a student voted at all – not grading the actual responses.  All of these approaches seem to keep students from “zoning out” in the middle of a large lecture, and instead stay engaged throughout the 50 or 80 minutes.  They also ensure that every student’s opinion is counted, so that students in the front of the room aren’t given more attention than students toward the back, and they also avoid the peer pressure of voting with the largest group when hands are raised.

If you’re interested in learning more about this technology, please see the SAS Computing page on Using Clickers in the Classroom or the Weigle Information Commons page on Clickers – Personal Response Systems.  There’s a seminar on November 5, 2008 at the WIC where you can learn more about clickers and try them out – click here for information and registration.  We’ve also recorded a short video of two instructors discussing their use of clickers in the classroom – it’s available here.  Please just get in touch with the contacts listed on the SAS Computing page or the WIC page if you’d like more information.