Teaching with Technology

Using Polling and Smartphones to Keep Students Engaged

Anyone teaching a class or giving a presentation faces a fundamental challenge. You want to make the most of every minute you have with your students, but it’s been proven that we can only retain about 20 minutes of content in our short-term memory before we have to reflect on it in order to move it to our long-term memory or it will be lost. Add to this the violently condensed attention span of the general population and anyone hoping to provide a content-rich education in the time slots of traditional classes faces an uphill battle.

John Orlando, PhD October 4, 2010

Integrating Social Media into Online Education

Many people take it on faith that online education must be run through a learning management system (LMS) like Blackboard, Angel, etc. Those systems were originally designed to allow faculty to move their courses online without having to learn HTML coding. They provided all of the tools needed to deliver an online course in one package.

John Orlando, PhD September 8, 2010

Save Time and Teach Better with Screencasting

It is critical to spend time training your students how to properly use the systems you’ve adopted into your teaching repertoire. A common fallacy is to believe that because students today are “digital natives”—meaning that they grew up with technology—they are good at using any technology. I’ve found that students’ understanding of technology is narrow and deep. They are very adept at text messaging and navigating Facebook, but they are not versed in using blogs, wikis, document sharing systems, and the like.

John Orlando, PhD August 18, 2010

Unleashing Innovation: The Structured Network Approach

This is a true story. Professor “Jones” decides to experiment with a blog in his class. It takes him about 10 minutes to set up a free site using Blogger. He then watches students engage in lively discussions of case studies outside of class, and tweaks the blog as experience teaches him how best to use the system.

John Orlando, PhD July 26, 2010

Why You Should be Using Social Bookmarking Tools

Still storing your bookmarks on your browser? That is soooooooooo 2007. It’s time to get with the program and start using social bookmarking. Social bookmarking

John Orlando, PhD July 14, 2010

Prezi: A Better Way of Doing Presentations

Most people assume that any presentation must be accompanied by a PowerPoint. Many conferences even tell presenters that they must submit their PowerPoint slides before the show–assuming that presenters will use PowerPoint just as they assume that presenters will be wearing shoes. Yet we’ve all seen terrible PowerPoints that detract from the presentation, so much so that we’ve coined the term “PowerPoint induced sleep.”

John Orlando, PhD June 30, 2010

Blogging to Improve Student Learning: Tips and Tools for Getting Started

Most universities press their faculty to add technology to their classroom by adopting the Learning Management System—Blackboard, Moodle, etc. This is a mistake. Faculty often end up spending hours learning the system and loading the same content that they use in the classroom, and finish wondering if the benefit was worth the effort.

John Orlando, PhD June 7, 2010

Wikipedia in the Classroom: Tips for Effective Use

Most academics consider Wikipedia the enemy and so forbid their students from using Wikipedia for research. But here’s a secret that they don’t want you to know—we all use Wikipedia, including those academics.

John Orlando, PhD May 26, 2010

Using VoiceThread to Build Student Engagement

Online educators have long known that asynchronous discussion is deeper than face-to-face discussion due to the increased thought time and the “democratization” of the classroom. But one major disadvantage of traditional online discussion is that it is separate from the lecture.

John Orlando, PhD May 12, 2010

Blogs: An Asynchronous Learning Trend

Alex Halavais, assistant professor of communication and graduate director of informatics at the University at Buffalo, has incorporated blogs in his courses to encourage students to think beyond a single course, to integrate their learning across the curriculum, and to provide opportunities for feedback as students’ work evolves. Halavais has written a chapter on this topic for the forthcoming book International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (Kluwer Academic Publishers). Online Classroom recently spoke with Halavais the evolving pedagogical uses of blogs.

Rob Kelly July 10, 2008

Teaching with Technology

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