Switching platforms

Due to its minimal spam management, I will soon be moving this blog from its Blogger platform to a WordPress platform. Plus, WordPress has a lot more flexibility and features.

Technology humanizing the classroom

I had heard of Khan Academy as an example of open content, but hadn't familiarized myself with it. Then I downloaded the iPad app and watched this video. And loved it.

Here are some highlights:

• The counterintuitive benefit of flipping the classroom is that it humanizes the learning experience. Rather than a whole class of students having to sit still and attentive (in a traditional lecture,) prohibited from interacting with those around them, students are instead interacting with each other and the teacher in the classroom.
• Customary education isn't concerned with mastery, only passing. It penalizes experimentation and failure. Flipped classrooms have the potential to change this, encouraging and empowering students to fully master the material by experimenting, at their own pace, and learning from failure.
• Rather than using student to teacher ratio as a benchmark, why not use student to valuable human time with the teacher ratio as the appropriate educational benchmark?

Interestingly, I paused and rewound the video several times to write this post about it before I noticed the transcription below the video that allows you to go directly to a specific point in the presentation. (I had been viewing the talk full screen.)

• The advantage of video learning is that you can pause and rewind to go back over topics until you grasp them. To do this while a person is instructing you is embarrassing, no matter how kind and patient the instructor is.

How can we utilize video and online learning at the college level, to increase interaction among students and faculty, and flip our classrooms?

How students use technology

I'm on a spring break mission trip with nine students and one other adviser to Chicago to study firsthand interfaith relations. I may (or may not) reflect on the interfaith mission in my personal blog. Here, I would like to chronicle how we're using technology, especially how the students are using it on their own.

• One of the students has given up Facebook for Lent, and has lamented that more than once.
• On the bus and on the train, texting takes place.
• Someone had a compass app on their smart phone to tell us which way to go when the bus dropped us off a few blocks from the stop.
• Map apps were helpful in finding our way around a new city, and a very large one at that.
• A student brought his laptop so he could finish a paper that was due on Friday.
• The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has a mobile site and a mobile app that helped us plan our day travels.
• Google image search was used to show pictures of a tamarind tree while we tried dried tamarind pods for the first time.
• A girl used her phone to record our rehearsal when we were spontaneously asked to join the choir. She then shared it with several of us through multi-media text messages.
• Phone cameras were used a lot to take pictures of the town and the team. The pictures will eventually make it to Facebook.
• Using the Chromebook I brought, I was able to see pictures of the ball my daughters went to yesterday, pics they had uploaded to Facebook.
• I'm using that same Chromebook to post these observations to Blogger, utilizing the church where we're staying's WiFi network.

How do you observe your students using technology?