Technology Inside & Outside the Classroom

I have already had several conversations with my new colleagues at VSU concerning technology in- and outside of the classroom. It's a good idea for instructors to have a policy about technology use in the classroom. In particular, I'm thinking a lot about a super section that I will be teaching this fall. It is a sophomore level course on teaching and learning with a maximum of 160 students. Right now about 60 students have enrolled. This will be the largest class I have taught face-to-face.

One suggestion for a large class is having a "laptop section" of the room... But my personal philosophy of technology in the classroom is that it's everywhere and unavoidable. I don't mind if students have their phones or laptops out in class. I see it as their personal responsibility to pay attention in class and I can't distinguish appropriate vs. inappropriate use. If they can have technology out in class and still do well on the assessments, then great. But what about other students that may be distracted by inapropriate use? I see it as their personal responsibility to move or confront this distraction.

One of my colleagues that has been teaching at VSU a long time pointed out that not all students have smartphones and technology at home. Our readings of Gray et al. (2012) made me feel at ease because most instructors surveyed expected students to access technology at school; I agree with this! I feel that I can use technology-based assessments and web 2.0 activities in my class because the technology is at least available at school.

The finding that I did not find reasonable in the study was the fact that a majority of instructors expected students to spend 11 to 20 hours on online assessments over the period of several weeks. I appreciate what Vanessa does in this class, in which she offers different tools and options and has several assignments due in a short period of time. The only way for us to get comfortable with the tools is to practice! For example, I now feel that four blog posts a week is reasonable because I feel more comfortable with the tool.

I do expect there to be a learning curve with my students when offering social media assignments. The same colleague I mentioned earlier stated that her students are online all the time, but do not know how to attach a file to an email. That is because attaching a file to an email is not necessarily part of being social on the Internet. I suggested that maybe having a background in Web 1.0 is actually part of being digital natives... This quote from our reading illustrates this nicely: "While there is no questioning the scale of young people’s engagement with the internet in general, evidence suggests that engagement is biased towards consumption rather than production... it seems they are not strongly inclined to take advantage of using them" (Crook, 2012, p.65).

I think the approach I want to take for this large class is surveying my students heavily during the first week (using Google forms). I want to know what their Internet usage is like. I want to know what tools they like to use already. Because of this EME6414 class, I'm now comfortable using many different social media tools and feel like I could quickly come up with assessments based on the students preferences. In my syllabus I will just write that there will be online assignments that will vary depending on student preferences. That should cover me… What do you think?

Crook, C. (2012). The ‘digital native’ in context: tensions associated with importing
     Web 2.0 practices into the school setting. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1),    
     63-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577946

Gray, K., Waycott, J., Clerehan, R., Hamilton, M., Richardson, J., Sheard, J., &      
     Thompson, C. (2012). Worth it? Findings from a study of how academics assess
     students’ Web 2.0 activities. Research in Learning Technology, 20(16153).
     http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0/16153