Senseless and fit

While it may be impossible to accurately measure just how fast new education apps are coming online, it's pretty hard to ignore that they are: the number of options just to integrate with Canvas can be overwhelming, and the learning curve associated with any new app addition makes keeping up with this wave somewhat intimidating. If you are going to consider using mobile apps for your class, there are a few elements to consider Apps with options : Does the app work across a variety of platforms? We don't know whether our students have smartphones, or what operating system they might be running, so it may be best to find apps that also work as browser extensions, or are supported across a variety of hardware. Barriers to access : If our learning curve is steep, imagine our students: apps can be intuitive, but you may wish to evaluate how much class time will be dedicated to ensuring everyone can make equal use of the tool. Likewise, as with other e-learning tools, cost i...

Social media  refers to various technologies and tools that facilitate collaborative knowledge development, so it's hard to relegate to comfortable, clear roles within a classroom. Most of us are quite aware of the growing body of research on multitasking--rather, on our inability to actually do that, and the risks that come with allowing or encouraging device use in classrooms .  Here's the thing, though: our students are comfortable with social media. PEW updates the demographic breakdown of social media use  every year, and while it might be tempting to argue that some students are less native to this technology, the numbers show otherwise. If we can leverage social media to our advantage in educational settings, shouldn't we?  So: how do we balance the risks (distraction, disorganization) with the benefits (collaboration, constructed learning)?  YouTube Especially in our fields, social video platforms like YouTube offer the opportunity to cre...

In 2017, I hope that I don't have to explain what blogs are--and this is one of their strengths for instruction. Most students are familiar with blogs or microblogs (platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, especially), and have some vision of the goals of such writing. Given our course and the larger Humanities emphasis on personal growth, blogs can be highly useful within both composition and literature classrooms. They can-- Encourage students to share their own critical thinking notes on primary literature Promote collaborative learning through commentary on other students' contributions Track development toward learning outcomes, providing a chronological document of student growth Encourage student community and mutual support (Thomas 2017), especially when writing itself is one of the primary challenge Give students valuable experience in basic website management, a skill increasingly necessary for online communication Encourage students to consider target audiences a...

Podcasts are much like oral blogs: they're delivered via audio medium rather than written. This has several advantages in terms of meeting learning styles needs and encouraging students to translate their thinking for an alternate sensory input. Many of our students are familiar with podcasts like Serial and RadioLab , but most will be daunted by the idea of using unfamiliar hard- and software technologies to produce their own. Podcasts, though, have high potential for classroom oriented on writing outcomes, as they can-- Encourage the authenticity of student voices Promote collaborative learning through the production process Explore multi-linear narrative and multimedia text creation Give students valuable experience in technology literacy, especially in the wide array of tools available on their mobile devices Help students consider target audiences and writing goals in real contexts--catching a theme here?  Unlike blogs and wikis, podcasts are enough work to produce t...

Of our three collaborative tools, this might be the least daunting to interface with an existing Canvas course: you can do this within the Canvas course shell itself by allowing students to alter Content pages . Simply change the edit privileges to "Teachers and Students"-- The advantage that wikis have over blogs or podcasts is the ability to track group member contributions. In Canvas, instructors can view the history of each page in the course , with each change attached to a user name. Other wiki platforms allow for more anonymity, so investigating those can perhaps encourage a more cohesive group product; personally, I prefer knowing who did what so as to avoid the potential pitfall in one student carrying the load. Wikis are perhaps the most useful took for user-generated content sharing . In a literature or composition classroom, they can-- Develop rigorous research practices Promote collaborative learning through diplomatically navigating shared document cr...

More tools to try! I've used Blogger before, for a personal blog when I was first teaching--but I haven't developed a webpage on the platform. My plan: track my preparation steps for the portfolio in the blogging format, and finalize a single webpage that synthesizes what I've done. This makes sense for sharing my work with my colleagues, as I can share the single page and link to blog entries for more detail as needed. I decided to move here rather than keeping all my development materials in StoryMapJS/ThingLink for several reasons-- Like slide formats, I think my story map was getting out of hand even at this stage: there was so much clicking that I think I would have lost readers. Since I'm moving to ThingLink, this would be even more challenging, as I lose the linear flow of a slide format.  Using a basic webpage like this one will allow me to build a hypertext evaluation document including an embedded StoryMap or ThingLink and any other tools, so I can still ...