Ashley G. Thomas

Teaching wirelessly in class

All too often classrooms are designed with a ‘front’ or main teaching wall. Associated with this is usually a lectern with and networked computer at which it is so tempting for the tutor to stand, protected from their audience and with their back carefully protected by having a wall behind them.

All joking aside how often have you seen that happen – how often do you do it yourself?

Wouldn’t it be more fun, more interesting to be free of the lectern and have a device in your hands with your materials on, be they slides or websites or an app, and just move around the room confident that whatever you are showing or doing on your device can be seen by everyone in the room on the main display screen? You can do that using Reflector as described briefly in a previous post.

Watch some videos about how staff are teaching wirelessly with tablets.

It’s a brave thing to try if you’ve never done it before and like all things new what you needs to be planned carefully. But if you try I think you will find some useful benefits for you teaching in class.

Use Padlet for Topic Summaries

I saw a great use of Padlet by an academic in the sciences last week which seems to have really gone down well with their students.

They decided to summarise a key biochemical process on a Padlet wall using a mixture of media on the wall to illustrate different points. Several students commented how they found it more interesting to explore the Padlet to discover the key points about the process.

It strikes me this is an appraoch that is simple and could be used for any subject area.

Mobile devices – to give or not to give

Smart devices, (mobile phones or tablets) certainly do support a number of in class engagement approaches. However before we can start to exploit these wonderful tools in teaching, do we need to ensure that every student in a class has a smart device and further, does it need to be the same device in everyone,s bag or pocket?

I would argue no, for a number of reasons. First high percentages of students now have at least one smart device of their own. Second there are excellent web services, that can be used to support for example in class brainstorming on virtual writing walls or in class polling, that are completely device agnostic. In addition the same web services can be used on laptops which many students will have in addition to a smart device or indeed, instead of a smart device.

It is also worth questioning whether for such engagement activities each and every person actually needs to have a device. So long as there is one smart device or laptop per group of say 5 students this is sufficient as some of the best in class engagement approaches come from exploiting the dynamics of group output. As well as the above, students can get quite irritated if, in addition to their own personal devices they have to remember to bring in n institutional device as well.

Of course there may be some circumstances where it may make sense for all,students to have the same device, possibly pre-configured in some way. For example this may be appropriate on a specific course where particular software of device specific apps are integral to the subject and/or learning strategy.

Generally however institutions and departments should think twice, and then a third time, before abandoning the wealth of equipment students bring with them before going to the great expense of providing devices.

Educreations

Educreations is a unique interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool that’s simple, powerful, and fun to use. Annotate, animate, and narrate nearly any type of content as you explain any concept. Teachers can create short instructional videos and share them instantly with students, or ask students to show what they know and help friends learn something new.

You can try it for free and produce some great output. Paying for the full version (not that much) gives the full set of features.

Find out more at: https://www.educreations.com/faq/

Teaching in class with a mobile device

For so long now, whether we are about to speak to a classroom full of students or give a presentation at a conference or a meeting, we have gone armed with our slides on a memory stick or maybe on our laptop, so that they can be projected onto a room display screen.

If like me, you are a tablet user for most of the working day, wouldn’t it be easier, nicer even, to be able to walk in to a room with whatever you want to show – slides, video, web page etc – accessible on your tablet (or indeed phone) and just send whatever is on the screen of that to the main room display?

Well it would be easier for me, for a variety of reasons. For one thing I wouldn’t have to lug around my laptop, which I don’t very often now anyway. Also using the tablet just seems that much more spontaneous and opens up for use to me a range of presentation options that go beyond Powerpoint or Keynote. Check out Educreations for a neat way to create presentations on your iPAD that you can then deliver in a quite interactive way, provided of course that you can push the tablet display to the main screen in the room.

So, what’s stopping me from doing this all the time? Generally it’s the lack of any simple way of mirroring the display on my devices with the main room display. I can do it easily at home on my TV with both Apple and android devices but not currently in most lecture halls, seminar rooms or meeting venues.

However, things might just be about to change with a neat software solution called Reflector 2 that facilitates the mirroring of mobile devices to main display screens via any computer linked to the room data projector. Reflector has been around a while but universities seem to have been a bit slow to exploit it. However there are no major security or network barriers to its use. So, if you would like to mirror the screen on your mobile device to a classroom display, go nag your network and security team for help. It is possible to do and not at all expensive. And the icing on the cake is that your students can also, with your approval, mirror the contents of their tablet screen to the classroom display as well.

Using Padlet with a Large Class

This short video describes a very simple and straightforward use of Padlet to help to shape a classroom session with a large group of students. Take al ook and see if it is an approach that could work in your context – either with large or small group.

What’s in a Chair?

I guess the answer is ‘usually a bottom’ but bottoms are not what I’m writing about here, though they are probably significant because of course chairs are generally very important to us humans on a daily basis.

Chairs are of course also very important in classrooms.

Traditional classrooms tend to have tables and chairs – the tables are usually 600mm x 600mm and the chairs, well, they will vary but will often be pretty basic and not unlike chairs you might find in a doctor’s waiting room or possibly in someone’s kitchen.

These days however, with an emphasis on flexibility (or I prefer adaptability) in classrooms, you will more frequently encounter chairs that are on wheels and have a built in ‘pull-across’ table or tablet. Are these types of chairs useful?

Certainly they do allow you to re-configure a classroom full of students quite quickly (in theory), one minute in rows, then in a big semi-circle round the sides of the room and then in small groups. Or you coudl even get them to wheel themselves out int ot he corridor, close the classroom door and get some peace and quiet:-)

However these chair do throw up issues. These range from the difficulties sometimes encountered in sitting down in one, (without careering across the room) through to the ‘mess’ that a room can look in when you first arrive to an empty (of people) classroom. Academic staff often remark on the shock of coming to a room and finding the chairs totally all over the place. They complain that students all huddle in one corner of a room and that it therefore takes time to arrange your class into nice neat rows.

That of course leads me to the key point – don’t have chairs on wheels in a classroom (without proper tables) if you mainly want regular rows of students in front of you. Do however, have them if you want to facilitate small group work and hopefully collaborative learning activities. If you can cope with their downsides, they really do help to get group work going in between periods of teacher talk.

Partnership with Students

Partnership is key to the effectiveness of what happens in a university classroom. Partnership between teachers and students. The students need to understand why a teacher might choose to use a particular curriculum delivery approach, whether the approach uses technology extensively or not.

Without that partnership and understanding of the role played by both sides, it is highly likely that either the teacher or at least some of the students will be disappointed. That partnership component is especially important when a teacher uses techniques that are different to those the students experience regularly.

Using technology in different ways in a classroom (e.g. to get students to participate with their own internet enabled devices) is one common situation where things can go wrong, if the students have not been prepared for what is going to happen and why its going to happen that way.

People

The most important tools within a physical classroom are the people in it, the teachers and the students. Ultimately their attitudes, enthusiasm and desire are what will make something useful happen during a class.

It is fair to say that traditionally a teaching session would be led by a teacher and to some extent that should still be true today. However clearly there is a drive to engage students more, not just so that they are more attentive in class and respond when asked a question but so that they play a more co-creational role in learning.

One of the big changes that many teachers or lectures face is that shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.