When Chemists Attack

In my last Teaching Professor post, I talked about podcasting, and how I didn’t really feel I could use podcasts to benefit my students. In this post, I’m going to talk about a different session – one with things that I did feel I could use to help both my students and myself out.

Ricky Cox and Jamie Rogers (from Murray State) hosted a session on the uses of Tablet PCs in the classroom. A Tablet PC is a laptop with a built-in digitizer in its screen- on which you can write with the included pen.

This tablet looks much like a regular laptop, but it’s more than meets the eye.

You can fold the screen over the keyboard and write on the tablet’s screen almost like you’d write on a sheet of paper.

Cox and Rogers used their time to demonstrate several technologies and techniques that they felt added value to the classroom experience – even if only one tablet were available. A few applications I thought sounded interesting were:

• Improved, more interactive class sessions
• Complete, accurate sets of lecture notes available online shortly after each class.
• Virtual office hours

I’ve never been a big fan of Powerpoint (or other presentation tools like it). It’s great for making, well, presentations. In the classroom, though, I’ve mostly seen Powerpoint abused. I’ve seen instructors fly through difficult material because it was all on slides, and (sometimes) students had copies of the slides. I’ve seen instructors read slides at students while they slept – and so on. I’m partial to black/white boards for the classroom, because they force you to slow down some (so students can keep up), and because they remove the “rails” that Powerpoint keeps you on during a class.

Of course, the black/white boards have disadvantages, too. A major one has to do with note-taking. Students will quite often write things incorrectly into their notebooks – especially if the concept you’re going over is new to them. I’d almost go as far as saying that mangled chemical equations and equilibrium calculations are the norm in student notebooks. With Powerpoint at least, you know the parts typed onto the slide are correct.

With a tablet, you get the best of both worlds. You get the structure that using slides provides, but you also get the freedom to modify them on-the-fly. You could do this with Powerpoint and a blackboard, but with the tablet you can save copies of whatever you write on the tablet screen and distribute the notes online to your students afterwards. So, the students get an accurate set of notes – even if you use complex equations or drawings!^*** (This might sound familiar to those of you who use smartboards or sympodiums – the software that comes with most tablets is similar in operation to the sympodium software and has many of the same capabilities. Also, the tablet’s a whole lot cheaper, and can be taken back to the office!)

The ability to write out complex formulas and equations using a pen instead of things like chemdraw and equation editor – combined with the ability to give students copies of exactly what went on in class was enough to sell me on trying a tablet for my classes.^**** So far, it saves me a tremendous amount of time – even outside the classroom. It’s easy, for instance, to provide complete problem solutions for tests and homework – like this simple example from my introductory class (shrunk a bit for this post):

I could type something similar in an equation editor, and lay out the simple drawing with a word processor’s drawing tools. It’d look a bit neater, but it’d take me more than twice as long to get a solution out to students. I prefer to give quick feedback on practice sets and quizzes, and being able to write out solutions directly into my computer helps me post them fast. So far, that pleases my summer students, and it saves me a lot of time.

Cox and Rogers also mentioned using the tablet to host so-called “virtual office hours” – using a software package called Elluminate. Elluminate allows you to share a virtual whiteboard with other people over the net, along with text messages, voice chat, etc. I’ve experimented with virtual office hours in the past – back when IRC and ICQ were the only real-time messaging software out there. It didn’t work too well then, given the limitations of text-only communication. Elluminate solves some of those problems by adding voice chat and an interactive whiteboard, but at the cost of using a high-bandwidth CPU-intensive Java client that the students have to run to access your virtual hours. I can see how this might work well for a university campus, where fast computers and high-speed internet access are the norm, but most of my students (I teach at a technical/community college) use older computers and dial-up internet access. So unless my school starts giving out free computers and high speed internet access, I don’t see virtual office hours in my future.

All in all, the Cox/Rogers session was a good one to attend. I’d seen tablet PC technology before, but it was prohibitively expensive and little software support was out there. Now that the tablet has matured somewhat, going to the session and seeing the demonstration helped me see that it was a rather useful technology for a science teacher like me.

^***One questioner actually asked the presenters if having these notes caused decreased class attendance and decreased grades. They said it didn’t seem to. I’d tend to agree, since those people who tend to skip class at the slightest excuse would skip even if they didn’t have an accurate set of class notes!

^****That’s not just a figure of speech. Shortly after the conference, I spent some of my own money on a (used) Toshiba M200 tablet from Ebay. That’s the one you see in the pictures above!

The second day of the Teaching Professor Conference was the “big day”. Too many sessions, and too little time to visit most of them.

The first session I was able to attend on Saturday was a session on podcasting – presented by Dave Yearwood of the University of North Dakota. The concept is pretty simple. A podcast is basically an audio (and/or video) feed that you can download from somewhere on the ‘net, slap onto your portable music player, and listen to … wherever. So why not use it for educational purposes? Apple, who wants to get an iPod into the hands of every man, woman, child, dog, and cat in the world, will even help out setting it up.

I see some potential in this. With very little effort, instructors could record and distribute lectures for students to use to prepare for tests. (More visual instructors might prefer to distribute digital video.) Of course, we’ve done this sort of thing for years with audio and video tape – but the digital formats are at least a lot less hassle for creator and listener alike.

Yearwood mentioned several things to consider before using podcasts:

1. What’s the point of the podcast?
2. What should a student get out of it?
3. How do you keep students interested?

All of these are valid questions, I think. If the purpose of distributing a recorded lecture is to help students study or to help students who missed a lecture catch up, then I’d not expect to see much gain from putting recorded lectures out there. (I would not be surprised to see a detrimental effect caused by students skipping class!) Should the podcasts cover core course content or be optional material?

Yearwood pointed out a few things about presentation. One was that the simplest ways to record audio (like mikes built into most laptops) result in poor quality audio. It’s difficult to get students to listen to poor quality audio. I agree with that, since I can’t stand listening to bad audio, either.

There’s also the time factor. Even if the audio quality is top notch, how many students would actually download and listen to an entire lecture – or something of comparable length – on their own time? More than 15 minutes or so, and nobody will listen. (Me, I’d say that time should be closer to five minutes, but …) Even fifteen minutes of talking might be too much, so Yearwood suggests spicing the podcast up with incidental music.

Yearwood (too) briefly mentioned some tools that instructors might use to create quality podcasts – audacity got a mention, and it’s freely available. (I have that installed on my laptop – it’s a nice audio recorder/editor.)

Up until the end of Yearwood’s presentation, I was largely undecided on whether or not I thought I could work podcasting into my courses. It seems like a lot of work, and might require some costly tools that I probably couldn’t easily get through my school. Plus, the benefits hadn’t been clearly demonstrated – would providing podcasts be in some way better than – say – having non-audio supplemental material available on a course web site for students?

What, I think, finally steered me away from using my very limited spare time to experiment with podcasting as an educational tool was the last few minutes of the presentation – where we listened to a podcast for students. The audio quality was quite good. There was incidental music, too. But I’ll be darned if I could figure out what that podcast was supposed to teach me. It just wasn’t … engaging. And if I can’t get engaged by podcasts, I doubt that I’ll be able to create podcasts that engage my students.

In my next post,. I’ll talk about a technology demonstrated at the conference that I will use.