New term, new opportunities!

Tablet Pedagogy posts are back from a well-deserved holiday hiatus! Today is the first day of the semester at Fresno State, and instruction begins next Tuesday.

This semester, I'm taking a leap and tablet teaching all three of my courses (Genetics, which I've taught twice before as tablet instruction-based courses; Evolution; Applied Bioethics)! This effort will reach over 150 students on campus, and I'm excited about applying what I've learned in new situations.

To make things even more interesting, I've taken on the additional goal of teaching Genetics using open-access educational resources to offset the cost of the tablet purchase!

Finally, I've been selected to lead a group of colleagues from across the California State University system to help them redesign their genetics courses with technology!

In all, I'm really looking forward to sharing with you, over the course of the semester, many topics, including best practices for:

• Incorporating open-access resources
• Moving toward a bring-your-own-device model for class redesign with mobile technology

Thanks for following along!

Bowen & Bloom: Skepticism & Surfing

I attended my second José Bowen http://teachingnaked.com teaching workshop at Fresno State on Friday. During consultation days - just after the end of instruction and just before finals - might have been a nontraditional time to hold such an event, but as I'm already thinking about New Year's Resolutions related to my spring courses, I figured I'd attend to get more inspiration. Here are my top three take-home messages from the workshop:

Teach students how to:

• Deal with failure (view it as an opportunity to grow, not as a setback)
• Change one's mind
• Be skeptical

Although I've used ed tech to address all of these, today I'll focus on skepticism, which others (e.g. Bloom) might refer to as critically analyzing, evaluating, or critiquing. Part of Bowen's workshop involved the participants viewing class from the student point of view (which is increasingly more important to actively attempt, the older I get…).

Step one: create a learning objective. Mine was for genetics:
"Explain the difference(s) between sister chromatids and chromosomes" (a perennial source of trepidation among the undergrad biologist set).

Step two: Bowen then suggested that each of us employ our devices (laptops, phones, tablets) as a student would: to search for key terms. The goal: find one example of good content and bad content. I chose to do a YouTube search of "chromatid vs chromosome." Having just been informed that students won't watch more than five minutes of video (if that), I was pleased to note that the top hit was only 5:03 long, so I watched the video. I'll use it as an example of the not-so-good content (predominantly because of some misleading definitions provided in the video):

https://youtu.be/Jd2uMAsDfPg

As Bowen has told us (repeatedly), one of our (faculty) most important jobs in the digital era is to help students assess the quality of free content available on the internet. To be successful, we must be able to learn new things and to adapt quickly in the marketplace. Thus, our protégés must be comfortable not only navigating the sheer volume of data available but also be able to discern the quality of the information (hence Bowen's new term to replace "professor": "cognitive coach").

Step three: Realize that, regardless of the discipline, your students will search for and encounter material that is just as poor on their own while studying for your class.

So, now that I'm armed with a video that:

• is the top YouTube hit on a likely search phrase for this objective
• is relatively brief
• attempts (but fails) to explain a critical and basic concept in my field

how will I incorporate this realization & content into a web-enabled class? I've done this before (but not with this specific video):

Step four: Ask students (either in class or before class, if you don't have internet access in the classroom for all students) to search for pertinent content (either web page or video) and share the URL (perhaps via collaborative Google Doc, or via class poll via Socrative or todaysmeet.com, for example). Read/watch a few content entries with the class, asking them to try to catch errors (this works even better if you're looking at content that you, the instructor, created!) Foster class discussion on such discipline-indepenedent topics as:

• What was missing?
• What was blatantly incorrect?
• Where could an alternative explanation/point of view been added?

End with a brief summary of the purpose of the exercise. Hopefully you can conclude that, among other things:

Not everything you read/watch on the internet is true

Being skeptical is incredibly important! (thus, of course, I should also admit: don't just take my word for it!)

Finally, I should continue to give credit to Bowen (and to Bloom) for inspiring this post. As Bowen alluded, there's a great benefit in this approach for the faculty as well: if you get students to go onto the internet to find relevant digital content, and then if the class evaluates the content, they're helping you find some potentially really outstanding material that you can leverage the next time you teach the course!

BYOD^2: Building Your Own Digital BYOD Course

I just jogged past Best Buy, and it was closed! But, I'm sure that in a few hours it will see the hustle and bustle of other retailers. In particular, I suspect that a lot of purchases today will involve mobile technology. For this reason only, I give thanks for Black Friday!

Some of you who follow this blog, I know, have been wondering how easily you can adopt mobile tech classroom approaches that I enjoy, and give thanks for, because of my institution's priorities (institutional buy-in on providing the infrastructure, professional development, and funding for tablet pedagogy). In past, I've suggested that my renewed focus would be on making it more clear how I think similar approaches could be deployed at other institutions. I'll start today with the basic elements of Building Your Own Digital "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) course (that's right: BYOD BYOD!)

Difficult decisions

I believe that the most difficult balance for an institution to strike in making academic IT decisions regarding student programs is inclusiveness vs. cost. My school ponied up some serious cash to help students purchase one of three tablets (with three operating system choices) and also allowed students who already owned a tablet to use it, as long as it met specified minimum requirements. We might have received some incentives had we elected to work with a single tablet vendor. Ultimately, it was more inclusive to let students have a hand in deciding what tablet brand they would purchase. The cost? Sustainability. We are faced with a difficult decision now: how/whether to keep subsidizing student tablet purchases? If we have a student population where many students don't own a tablet (much less a laptop, or perhaps even a smartphone), what's the bigger picture about the future of our program?

Have we yet achieved BYOD parity?

To understand whether our students have smartphones, our institutions should certainly ask them! Meanwhile, we can turn to the Pew Research Center "U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015" report (all screen shots below from this report) for three general insights into recent smartphone trends that we need to keep in mind:

1. A majority of adults own smartphones; most are dependent on their smartphone for internet access

2. Faculty should be careful about demands on student data usage if your campus doesn't provide free wi-fi access for data 

3. Although more minorities than whites own smartphones, numbers dip for low-earners and for those in rural areas

Moving forward

If I moved to a new institution and wanted to keep using Tablet Pedagogy, what would I do before classes start?

Step one: before deciding, I would survey my class to find out how many students have regular access to mobile tech (laptops, tablets, smartphones). Do some soul-searching and decide whether you can get non-tech students some loaner devices, or whether you're comfortable forming student groups around the students who do bring mobile tech to class. Check with your institution to see if you have "loaner" devices (our library has a laptop loan program, for example)

Step two: assess institutional infrastructure. If your institution has wireless internet I would inquire with my IT staff about the ability of the network in your classroom to support the simultaneous connection of the number of students you have

Step three: Decide whether you will be form-agnostic (e.g. allow laptops and smartphones also)

My opinion? Go device-agnostic. Those students who are out today picking up new tech on Black Friday? Let them use it in class. This is how we can develop and support BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) digital pedagogy and bring new methods of engaging students, connecting them to course material, to each other, and to society.

Step four: acquiring your own tech. If your classroom doesn't have one, get your campus to invest in at least one portable digital projector (and any necessary cables/adapters to connect to your device). Ideally? A projector for each student group (if you use student groups, want them to present content they create/curate with other groups, and if you have enough projectable surfaces in your classroom). Think also about investing in technology that your students will be bringing. Are you an iOS lover? Pick up an Android tablet, too, so that you can check out the student experience on that OS.

Step five: if the students and the campus are ready for it, then prepare your syllabus - paying particular attention in this case to establishing any minimum system requirements (e.g. screen size, operating system version, amount of memory) and apps that students should have installed before class. My biggest piece of advice here? Make all of these elements "Suggested" (not "Required") materials, unless you know you have strong backing from your administration. Related: decide whether you're going all-in with mobile tech, or if you'll also allow some students to opt out and go old school (hand-raising, paper, poster boards, etc.)

Step six: build in extra time the first several days of class for deliberately practicing workflows and for doing tech support for students.

Step seven: find a friend. Identify a colleague who shares the same willingness to try new things in the classroom (and ideally also who is tech-savvy!) Book some time to practice: one of you plays teacher, the other student. This is critical for seeing both sides of the digital interaction using whatever apps you employ (e.g. Socrative, Google Classroom).

Step eight: make a backup plan for dealing with unanticipated tech issues!

What are your main concerns about going solo with digital pedagogy at your school? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts!