Category: Classrooms

What really is innovative teaching?

There is a lot of myth about innovative new teaching approaches in innovative classroom spaces using innovative technology. As you may have gathered, the overuse of the word innovative in the previous sentence is suggestive of a degree of ‘fun-poking’ at anyone proclaiming to have an innovative teaching approach just because they use technology or a physical space that looks more like the bridge of the starship Enterprise than a lecture room. (That includes poking fun at the author of this blog by the way who has always rather fancied being a starship Captain as it happens).

For a start in terms of conceptual goals for a teacher, for teaching – not that much has really changed despite all the ‘innovative’ hype. The goals of teaching, of learning, that many lecturers had in 1980 or before are pretty much the same goals that we have now. The pressure to deliver those goals, mostly external, are of course greater. Life is not made easier when a Secretary of State refers to the ‘lamentable state of teaching in universities’ before the inevitable publication of another paper that’s supposed to be green but looked very white to me when I printed it off.

Of course, some of the tools (the props a teacher uses) to achieve the goals should be different today and they certainly provide new and exciting ways to present, collect and make use of information and to support harnessing the collective knowledge of a group. They also provide new options for engaging both small and large groups with information, ideas and concepts.

So much of the innovation is really about dwhat different tools might now be used in a classroom to help deliver the goals teachers have had for a long time. I am not sure there are very many new innovative teaching methods as such, are you?

Why it can be hard to stop lecturing so much

So the current demands on university teaching are a pretty all order. What makes it such a tall order to move to new, allegedly innovative ways of teaching that avoid @chalk and talk overkill’?

For a start, classes are large, students often don’t want to be that active or engage (it is less effort to just sit and listen, or browse the web or whatsApp), many of us are familiar with a lecture (during which I’ll throw out questions that no one wants to answer) + tutorial (rearrange yourselves to work in groups, “oh Lord I have to move and talk to other people, this is a pain”….) approach, because that is what we experienced when we learned at the feet of our university sage.

Then, you have the louder student voices, that can have a disproportionate impact, who will proclaim that being made to work in groups and not be lectured to is being cheated out of real teaching. (They need help). Students also complain a lot about assessment of course – here they may have a point, we’ll see.

Does that all sound a bit gloomy?

Mentimeter

I saw this tool being used during a presentation for the first time last week. It is basically a polling tool, a little like Polleverywhere, however I saw it being used in a slightly different way to how I have seen Polleverywhere used.

As participants entered single words in response to a question from the presenter, a Wordle representing the audience’s collective opinion was generated dynamically on the room presentation screen.

Fund out about Mentimeter here.

Innovative Classrooms

There is a lot of talk about innovative classrooms. What is an innovative classroom? Many would think it was inevitably a classroom filled full of complex IT with screens everywhere. Well actually we think an innovative classroom is one that presents no barriers to a teacher and helps them to do their job the way they want to do it.

This of course makes the assumption that the majority of academic staff have a plan for how to get their students to learn through a mixture of presenting them wth information and giving them space and time to practice authentic tasks, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups, using that information and potentially other information that they gather themselves.

All too often academic staff do seem to us to have such a plan.

Unfortunately all too often the state of the classroom they have to teach in, and especially the furniture and the IT, put up barriers to make it hard for them.

In Class Polling

I am old enough to remember the large suitcases full of little devices that were handed out to students who could then use them to vote in class in response to questions posed by the lecturer taking the class. The cumulative class responses could be magically displayed at the front on the big screen.

These days there are handy web based systems like Polleverywhere that can be used in place of the clickers. relying on the student’s own smart devices, polls authored in polleverywhere can be downloaded as aPowerpoint slide for use in class. Alternatively the poll can be delivered fully online hosted by Polleverywhere. A third more recently developed way to use Polleverywhere is to wrap it up with the use of Twitter. The poll can be tweeted to a twitter stream and respondents can answer by tweeting.

And, to top it all, Polleverywhere is free to use for class sizes up to 30.

In class voting can be an integral component of a SMART teaching strategy. Find out more at polleverywhere.com

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.

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.

 

 

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.