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Ed Webb

9 Ways Online Teaching Should be Different from Face-to-Face | Cult of Pedagogy - 0 views

www.cultofpedagogy.com/9-ways-online-teaching

education tools technology internet resources teaching online onlineeducation

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Resist the temptation to dive right into curriculum at the start of the school year. Things will go more smoothly if you devote the early weeks to building community so students feel connected. Social emotional skills can be woven in during this time. On top of that, students need practice with whatever digital tools you’ll be using. So focus your lessons on those things, intertwining the two when possible. 
  • Online instruction is made up largely of asynchronous instruction, which students can access at any time. This is ideal, because requiring attendance for synchronous instruction puts some students at an immediate disadvantage if they don’t have the same access to technology, reliable internet, or a flexible home schedule. 
  • you’re likely to offer “face-to-face” or synchronous opportunities at some point, and one way to make them happen more easily is to have students meet in small groups. While it’s nearly impossible to arrange for 30 students to attend a meeting at once, assigning four students to meet is much more manageable.
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  • What works best, Kitchen says, is to keep direct instruction—things like brief video lectures and readings—in asynchronous form, using checks for understanding like embedded questions or exit slips.  You can then use synchronous meetings for more interactive, engaging work. “If we want students showing up, if we want them to know that this is worth their time,” Kitchen explains, “it really needs to be something active and engaging for them. Any time they can work with the material, categorize it, organize it, share further thoughts on it, have a discussion, all of those are great things to do in small groups.” 
  • The Jigsaw method, where students form expert groups on a particular chunk of content, then teach that content to other students. Discussion strategies adapted for virtual settingsUsing best practices for cooperative learning Visible Thinking routinesGamestorming and other business related protocols adapted for education, where students take on the role of customers/stakeholders
  • What really holds leverage for the students? What has endurance? What knowledge is essential?What knowledge and skills do students need to have before they move to the next grade level or the next class?What practices can be emphasized that transfer across many content areas?  Skills like analyzing, constructing arguments, building a strong knowledge base through texts, and speaking can all be taught through many different subjects. What tools can serve multiple purposes? Teaching students to use something like Padlet gives them opportunities to use audio, drawing, writing, and video. Non-digital tools can also work: Students can use things they find around the house, like toilet paper rolls, to fulfill other assignments, and then submit their work with a photo.
  • Online instruction is not conducive to covering large amounts of content, so you have to choose wisely, teaching the most important things at a slower pace.
  • Provide instructions in a consistent location and at a consistent time. This advice was already given for parents, but it’s worth repeating here through the lens of instructional design: Set up lessons so that students know where to find instructions every time. Make instructions explicit. Read and re-read to make sure these are as clear as possible. Make dogfooding your lessons a regular practice to root out problem areas.Offer multimodal instructions. If possible, provide both written and video instructions for assignments, so students can choose the format that works best for them. You might also offer a synchronous weekly or daily meeting; what’s great about doing these online is that even if you teach several sections of the same class per day, students are no longer restricted to class times and can attend whatever meeting works best for them.
  • put the emphasis on formative feedback as students work through assignments and tasks, rather than simply grading them at the end. 
  • In online learning, Kitchen says, “There are so many ways that students can cheat, so if we’re giving them just the traditional quiz or test, it’s really easy for them to be able to just look up that information.” A great solution to this problem is to have students create things.
  • For assessment, use a detailed rubric that highlights the learning goals the end product will demonstrate. A single-point rubric works well for this.To help students discover tools to work with, this list of tools is organized by the type of product each one creates. Another great source of ideas is the Teacher’s Guide to Tech.When developing the assignment, rather than focusing on the end product, start by getting clear on what you want students to DO with that product.
  • Clear and consistent communicationCreating explicit and consistent rituals and routinesUsing research-based instructional strategiesDetermining whether to use digital or non-digital tools for an assignment A focus on authentic learning, where authentic products are created and students have voice and choice in assignments
Pat Pehlman

Moodle 2.3 Gets New Course Interface, Improved File Management -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...-improved-file-management.aspx

moodle

shared by Pat Pehlman on 20 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Moodle's developers have formally released version 2.3
  • major enhancements to the course interface and file management.
  • major new features" in nine different areas: file usability, repository, course pages, assignments, books, quizzes, SCORM, workshops, and update notifications
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • interfaces with a variety of services, including Google Docs, Dropbox,
  • A new grading method called "marking guide," which allows instructors to enter comments on each criterion;
  • Drag and drop of files onto course pages to add them as resources;
Ed Webb

Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance - Wired Ca... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...25541

social networking socialnetworking generations facebook education students attention

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 10 - Cached
  • no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance
  • The trouble with social media is it stunts the development of social skills. Now we learn that time spent on social media does not damage GPA, which implies it's benign. What a tragedy. And precisely the mistaken impression that social development stunting craves.
  • The study in question focused only on first-year students, and traditional ones at that. (A read through of the study revealed the sample included mostly 18- and 19-year-olds and a few (3%) 20-29-year-olds).
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  • Such a broad generalization based on one narrowly defined study, along with the suggestion that college students should be unconcerned about how much time they spend on SNS, is, at best, naive and, at worst, irresponsible.
  • Will there soon be a study determining that partying had no effect on grades, despite "how often students used them or how many they used"?
Ed Webb

Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...07mind.html

learning cognition neuroscience education testing psychology

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
  • The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
  • Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. “With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”
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  • An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.
  • “The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”
  • cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
  • “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.
  • “Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”
  • The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,”
Ed Webb

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy - 0 views

www.wired.com/...st_thompson

writing literacy education technology web2.0

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09 - Cached
  • The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
  • The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.
Ed Webb

Please do a bad job of putting your courses online - Rebecca Barrett-Fox - 0 views

anygoodthing.com/...of-putting-your-courses-online

education technology internet edtech onlineeducation

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Please do a bad job of putting your courses online
  • For my colleagues who are now being instructed to put some or all of the remainder of their semester online, now is a time to do a poor job of it. You are NOT building an online class. You are NOT teaching students who can be expected to be ready to learn online. And, most importantly, your class is NOT the highest priority of their OR your life right now. Release yourself from high expectations right now, because that’s the best way to help your students learn.
  • Remember the following as you move online: Your students know less about technology than you think. Many of them know less than you. Yes, even if they are digital natives and younger than you. They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They need to reserve it for things more important than online lectures. Students who did not sign up for an online course have no obligation to have a computer, high speed wifi, a printer/scanner, or a camera. Do not even survey them to ask if they have it. Even if they do, they are not required to tell you this. And if they do now, that doesn’t mean that they will when something breaks and they can’t afford to fix it because they just lost their job at the ski resort or off-campus bookstore. Students will be sharing their technology with other household members. They may have LESS time to do their schoolwork, not more.
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  • Social isolation contributes to mental health problems. Social isolation contributes to domestic violence.
  • Do not require synchronous work. Students should not need to show up at a specific time for anything. REFUSE to do any synchronous work.
  • Do not record lectures unless you need to. (This is fundamentally different from designing an online course, where recorded information is, I think, really important.) They will be a low priority for students, and they take up a lot of resources on your end and on theirs. You have already built a rapport with them, and they don’t need to hear your voice to remember that.
  • Do record lectures if you need to. When information cannot be learned otherwise, include a lecture. Your university already some kind of tech to record lectures. DO NOT simply record in PowerPoint as the audio quality is low. While many people recommend lectures of only 5 minutes, I find that my students really do listen to longer lectures. Still, remember that your students will be frequently interrupted in their listening, so a good rule is 1 concept per lecture. So, rather than a lecture on ALL of, say, gender inequality in your Intro to Soc course, deliver 5 minutes on pay inequity (or 15 minutes or 20 minutes, if that’s what you need) and then a separate lecture on #MeToo and yet another on domestic violence. Closed caption them using the video recording software your university provides. Note that YouTube also generates closed captions [edited to add: they are not ADA compliant, though]. If you don’t have to include images, skip the video recording and do a podcast instead.
  • Editing is a waste of your time right now.
  • Listen for them asking for help. They may be anxious. They may be tired. Many students are returning to their parents’ home where they may not be welcome. Others will be at home with partners who are violent. School has been a safe place for them, and now it’s not available to them. Your class may matter to them a lot when they are able to focus on it, but it may not matter much now, in contrast to all the other things they have to deal with. Don’t let that hurt your feelings, and don’t hold it against them in future semesters or when they come back to ask for a letter of recommendation.
  • Allow every exam or quiz to be taken at least twice, and tell students that this means that if there is a tech problem on the first attempt, the second attempt is their chance to correct it. This will save you from the work of resetting tests or quizzes when the internet fails or some other tech problem happens. And since it can be very hard to discern when such failures are really failures or students trying to win a second attempt at a quiz or test, you avoid having to deal with cheaters.
  • Do NOT require students to use online proctoring or force them to have themselves recorded during exams or quizzes. This is a fundamental violation of their privacy, and they did NOT sign up for that when they enrolled in your course.
  • Circumvent the need for proctoring by making every exam open-notes, open-book, and open-internet. The best way to avoid them taking tests together or sharing answers is to use a large test bank.
  • Remind them of due dates. It might feel like handholding, but be honest: Don’t you appreciate the text reminder from your dentist that you have an appointment tomorrow? Your LMS has an announcement system that allows you to write an announcement now and post it later.
  • Make everything self-grading if you can (yes, multiple choice and T/F on quizzes and tests) or low-stakes (completed/not completed).
  • Don’t do too much. Right now, your students don’t need it. They need time to do the other things they need to do.
  • Make all work due on the same day and time for the rest of the semester. I recommend Sunday night at 11:59 pm.
  • This advice is very different from that which I would share if you were designing an online course. I hope it’s helpful, and for those of you moving your courses online, I hope it helps you understand the labor that is required in building an online course a bit better.
Ed Webb

How to Turn Your Syllabus into an Infographic - The Visual Communication Guy - 0 views

thevisualcommunicationguy.com/...r-syllabus-into-an-infographic

syllabi education design infographic access

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jul 20 - Cached
  • If you’re ever going to turn a syllabus into an infographic, you must, MUST reduce the amount of text you are using. There are, of course, important things you’ll want and must include, but you can’t think of this document as ten pages of paragraphs. Strip down to only the essential information, with a bit of added info where you  think some flare or excitement is needed. Remember: your students are smart people. They can understand documents quickly without a bunch of extra fluff, so remove all the unnecessary stuff.
  • Remember to only use pictures that you either created yourself (own the copyright) or that you found through creative commons or public domain websites. Don’t use ugly clipart or images that you don’t have permission to use. A great place to find free icons? Flaticon.com.
  • try drawing it out on sketch paper first. While this will seem like an annoying task for most people, trust me when I say that it will save you a lot of time in the long run
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  • If there is anything on your syllabus that can be quantified (like percentages for grades or assignments), consider making bar graphs or pie charts to visually represent it. This is helpful, too, so students can visually understand, very quickly, how much weight is given to each project.
  • Once you’ve determined the sections, it’s easier to think about what relates to what and how you might organize your syllabus in a way that makes sense for your students.
  • Remember to reduce as much text as possible and supplement what you write with an image. Consider using the images of your required textbooks, for example, and use icons and graphics that relate to each section.
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Don’t get so caught up in designing a cool infographic about your course that you forget to include information about accessibility, Title IX, academic dishonesty, and other related information. I might recommend not going too fancy on the institution-wide policies. You might still keep that in paragraph form, just so that there is no way to misinterpret what your institution wants you to say.
Ed Webb

Offering Seminar Courses Remotely | Educatus - 0 views

words.usask.ca/...ering-seminar-courses-remotely

education tools technology internet

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 20 - Cached
  • In an online environment, seminars will work best if they occur asynchronously in the discussion boards in an LMS
  • The 4 key elements for a seminar that need to be replicated during remote instruction include: A prompt or text(s) that the student considers independently in advance Guiding questions that require analysis, synthesize and/or evaluation of ideas The opportunity to share personal thinking with a group Ideas being developed, rejected, and refined over time based on everyone’s contributions
  • Students need specific guidance and support for how to develop, reject, and refine ideas appropriately in your course.  If you want students to share well, consider requiring an initial post where you and students introduce yourselves and share a picture. Describe your expectations for norms in how everyone will behave online Provide a lot of initial feedback about the quality of posting.  Consider giving samples of good and bad posts, and remember to clarify your marking criteria. Focus your expectations on the quality of comments, and set maximums for the amount you expect to reduce your marking load and keep the discussions high quality. Someone will need to moderate the discussion. That includes posting the initial threads, reading what everyone posts all weeks and commenting to keep the discussion flowing.  Likely, the same person (you or a TA) will also be grading and providing private feedback to each student. Consider making the moderation of a discussion an assignment in your course. You can moderate the first few weeks to demonstrate what you want, and groups of students can moderate other weeks. It can increase engagement if done well, and definitely decreases your work load.
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  • Teach everyone to mute when not speaking, and turn off their cameras if they have bandwidth issues. Use the chat so people can agree and add ideas as other people are speaking, and teach people to raise their hands or add emoticons in the participants window to help you know who wants to speak next
Ed Webb

CRITICAL AI: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as Chat... - 1 views

criticalai.org/...-some-next-steps-for-educators

AI education opinion internet analysis pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jan 23 - Cached
  • In the long run, we believe, teachers need to help students develop a critical awareness of generative machine models: how they work; why their content is often biased, false, or simplistic; and what their social, intellectual, and environmental implications might be. But that kind of preparation takes time, not least because journalism on this topic is often clickbait-driven, and “AI” discourse tends to be jargony, hype-laden, and conflated with science fiction.
  • Make explicit that the goal of writing is neither a product nor a grade but, rather, a process that empowers critical thinking
  • Students are more likely to misuse text generators if they trust them too much. The term “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) has become a marketing tool for hyping products. For all their impressiveness, these systems are not intelligent in the conventional sense of that term. They are elaborate statistical models that rely on mass troves of data—which has often been scraped indiscriminately from the web and used without knowledge or consent.
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  • LLMs usually cannot do a good job of explaining how a particular passage from a longer text illuminates the whole of that longer text. Moreover, ChatGPT’s outputs on comparison and contrast are often superficial. Typically the system breaks down a task of logical comparison into bite-size pieces, conveys shallow information about each of those pieces, and then formulaically “compares” and “contrasts” in a noticeably superficial or repetitive way. 
  • In-class writing, whether digital or handwritten, may have downsides for students with anxiety and disabilities
  • ChatGPT can produce outputs that take the form of  “brainstorms,” outlines, and drafts. It can also provide commentary in the style of peer review or self-analysis. Nonetheless, students would need to coordinate multiple submissions of automated work in order to complete this type of assignment with a text generator.  
  • No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. 
  • LLMs often mimic the harmful prejudices, misconceptions, and biases found in data scraped from the internet
  • Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Given that social media and the internet are full of bogus accounts using synthetic text, alerting students to the intrinsic problems of such writing could be beneficial. (See the “ChatGPT/LLM Errors Tracker,” maintained by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.)
  • Since ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content, it seems like a poor foundation for building students’ skills and may circumvent their independent thinking.
  • Good journalism on language models is surprisingly hard to find since the technology is so new and the hype is ubiquitous. Here are a few reliable short pieces.     “ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now” edited by Susan Dagostino, Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2023  “University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?” by Katyanna Quach, The Register, December 27, 2022  “How to spot AI-generated text” by Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2022  The Road to AI We Can Trust, Substack by Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher who writes frequently and lucidly about the topic. See also Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s Language Generator Has No Idea What It’s Talking About” (2020).
  • “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, March 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, doi: 10.1145/3442188. A blog post summarizing and discussing the above essay derived from a Critical AI @ Rutgers workshop on the essay: summarizes key arguments, reprises discussion, and includes links to video-recorded presentations by digital humanist Katherine Bode (ANU) and computer scientist and NLP researcher Matthew Stone (Rutgers).
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