Teaching with Technology: Some
Resources & Inspiration
This is a collection of a few
online resources, blog posts, and articles to help you think about ways you
might integrate technology into the classroom.
From Blackboard to Sakai
As of June 2012, Duke will be
making the transition from Blackboard to Sakai.
Sakai is an open-source collaborative learning environment. Learn more about Sakai at Duke here.
A Few Words about Blogs
Incorporating a blog into your
classroom extends the class discussion beyond the seminar and provides a medium
for student writing that is more collaborative than individual reading
responses or papers. It can also serve as the central online “hub” for your
class, a space for your syllabus, assignments, and other handouts (an
alternative to Sakai). You might
consider creating a central class blog, or requiring students to all create
their own blogs for the class as projects.
If you choose to integrate a blog into your English 26, you need to make
sure you:
·
Clearly set
out the requirements for the blog: how many posts do you expect? Do you have a
length requirement? A distribution
requirement (e.g. posts should respond to a certain number of texts or should
be spread out across a certain number of weeks)? Will you require responses to other students’
posts?
·
How will you
evaluate the blog? Take a look at these
resources for ideas on how to assess blog posts and one idea about how to encourage students to “audit” their own blog
contributions.
·
Don’t assume
that all students know how to use a blog.
Clearly explain how to set up an account on the blogging platform you
have chosen, how to write and edit posts, how to comment on others’ posts,
etc. (And make sure YOU know how to use
it – students will get frustrated if you don’t
give them the instructions they need.)
·
Decide
whether you want your blog to be public or not.
You might want to discuss this with your students. Some blogging platforms easily allow you to
password-protect your blog so only members can view it. If you (and your students) are happy with a
public blog, make sure you have control over who can post to the blog
(including comments) to prevent spam.
Blog Resources and Articles:
-
Duke CIT: Ideas for Using Course Blogs (Note that Duke will facilitate a
WordPress blog for your class using your NetID)
-
Great Post on “Integrating, Evaluating, and Managing
Blogging in the Classroom” by Julie
Meloni
-
Tools for Managing Multiple Class Blogs
-
A collection of ProfHacker articles on
blogging
-
Blogging Pedagogy – pedagogy and English studies from the
University of Texas
Example Duke English 26/English 90 Blogs
-
English 26: Villains by Necessity? The
Literature of Evil (Astrid
Giugni)
-
English 26: Vampires, Monsters, Humans (Anna Gibson)
-
English
26: Weird Science (Britt
Rusert)
-
English 90AS (Reading Genres) (Joseph Harris)
-
Overview of Daniel Foster’s use of “virtual
notebooks” for his Theater Studies 101 class
In the Classroom: Laptops or No
Laptops?
Are you happy to allow students
to use laptops in the classroom?
Professors have mixed (and usually quite strong!) views on this
issue. Paul Thagard (Philosophy,
Computer Science – University of Waterloo) enforces a laptop ban, but Cathy Davidson argues that we need to design courses that allow
for effective “computer learning” so we can make laptops useful in the classroom. (Click on links for their arguments.) If you choose to allow laptops, you might
want to take a look at this article on developing a digital etiquette policy.
Online Collaboration
There are many tools out there
for collaborating on documents. One of
the most popular ones is GoogleDocs,
which allows multiple users to edit a document.
See this article for ideas about how to use GoogleDocs in the
classroom. Another resource you might
consider is NowComment, which allows for group annotation of texts,
which could facilitate collective close reading in conversation, either in
class using laptops or in groups/collectively outside of class. See this
video for an overview of how
NowComment works.
Wikis
Another take on the class website
is a collaborative class wiki. A wiki is
basically a web page that multiple users can edit. There is a wiki function in Sakai that you
might consider using as part of your course, or you could choose from a number
of online wiki platforms (e.g. WikiSpaces,
SpringNote).
Take a look at this article for inspiration: Wikis in the Classroom: Three Ways to
Increase Student Collaboration, John
Orlando.
Wikipedia might not be a source
you want your students citing, but what about having them contribute to a
Wikipedia page? Here’s an article about using Wikipedia in the
classroom.
Really interested in the
wiki-world? Take a look at the Wikipedia Teaching Fellowship. The
WikiProjects listed under “courses” might give you some inspiration.
Duke Resources (CIT and Duke
Library)
The Duke Center
for Instructional Technology is there to
help with the many technical resources you might want to incorporate into your
class. See this post
for a few resource ideas, and for more information about CIT.
If you’re interested in guiding
students to the best online (and offline) resources for your course, the
library can help you integrate resources into your course, for instance with
customized Research Guides. Take a look here and here at ways in which the library can help you
integrate resources into your course.
More Inspiration
Take a look at these web sites
for articles, blog posts, and discussion boards about using technology in the
classroom (these are also good resources for other areas of pedagogy and/or
digital humanities):
·
Profhacker
(“Tips about teaching, technology, and productivity” from The Chronicle of
Higher Education – a fantastic resource)
·
Digital Humanities in the Classroom (from digitalhumanities.org)
·
Faculty
Focus topic on Teaching with Technology
·
Inside Higher Ed: Technology
·
HASTAC (tag:
pedagogy) and (group: pedagogy)
These more specific articles and
posts might give you some ideas:
·
Examples of how others are using technology
in teaching at Duke (from CIT)
·
“Showing, Not Telling” (Caro Pinto, Yale) – teaching students
about primary sources using Prezi (a fantastic presentation tool) and Omeka
·
“Lab Day!”
(Lisa M. Lane): one idea about how to get students using computers in the
classroom
·
Twitter in
the Literature Classroom? Here are two
articles, one from Tim Hetland, Washington State and one from ProfHacker
with some ideas.
·
Mapping Novels with Google Earth
·
Sound in the Classroom: Using Music the Inspire Student Thinking (ProfHacker); Using Sound in the Classroom
(Kristin Post); Integrating
Digital Audio Composition into Humanities Courses (ProfHacker)
·
Consider
sending “follow-up” emails to students after class. (For examples, see Ashon Crawley’s “WS/SW Follow-Up”
emails posted on his Facebook page under “Notes”)
List of Tools
·
Wordle – visually representing texts through
word frequency (word clouds)
·
PollEverywhere – Instant text
messaging feedback
·
Prezi – an alternative to PowerPoint – dynamic web-based
presentations that “zoom” around
·
Omeka – open-source web-publishing platform
·
FreeSound – creative commons sound
archive
Blog Platforms
·
Edublogs
·
Blogger
·
Tumblr
·
Edmodo
Anna
Gibson
Duke
University