Digital vs Analogue: Top digi tools with analogue equivalents

Mentimeter cards against humanity

Everyone loves mentimeter right? You can get interaction from all 300 of your students by asking them to vote on a concept checking question. It’s great, you make sure they are awake, you see if they are listening and you can guide you class around the general understanding of the room. What is not to like?

Well… there has been a snowstorm and there is no electricity, the internet is dead and the Grinch came along and stole christm everyone’s phones. Now what? How will I ever know if all my students are awake? Fear not we have the answer. I piece of paper with 4 colours on it. Red for answer a), blue for answer b) and so on. Simple. I mean you won’t be able to see on account of the snowstorm, lack of electricity and the resulting darkness but you get the gist.

Post-It on a Padlet

Dr Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry were revolutionary men without whom the world would be a very different place. No workplace would function effectively without those little yellow notes stuck to a computer screen to remind you to but milk on the way home. These men are heroes! What is more, without them and their revolutionary sticky notes how would a person cope when lightning strikes the server room leaving you with no internet to present your truly amazing in-class brainstorming session through Padlet? Enter John J Loud and his ball point pen and you have your lesson back on track!

Both the Padlet and the Post-It are ways of running an active learning class, check out Padlet in HE 101 for more ideas and features and post-it note pedagogy for some hints and tricks. In some cases, if you want students to share digital content like videos or journal articles, Padlet and its functions are necessary however if all you want is students to write concise comments and share them – why not the humble post-it? Plus they look cool on your Instagram feed (whatever that it).

When Trello was young it was a chalk board!

Many of the technologies we use today grew out of a need to streamline processes and make them more mobile and more accessible to a scattered population. Generally speaking, these tools were developed for business not education as that is where the best cost/benefit ratio lies but that does not stop them being useful to education. There is a great case study on IMPLEMnT about using Trello (a project management tool for those unfamiliar) to manage PBL teaching and it is brilliant, especially for longer term projects but there is also a certain administrative burden with it. So if you are new to PBL and want a simple solution to manage the task distribution while you concentrate on other things put yourself into an episode of Mad Men, pour self a vodka martini and write out those roles on the whiteboard.

Answers on a post card please

We have all been there, having spent ages creating a google form (other survey tools are available) to collect information from your cohort about their opinions on medical ethics and where certain practices sit and on a moral scale of Mary Poppins to Philip Green.

Then the unthinkable happens and the heatwave that has been gripping the country for the last 2 months finally takes its toll and the sprinkler systems come on knocking out all the electricity and all you are left with is 300 students... There is nothing for it other than to get them to put the proverbial answers on a post card and collect your information that way.

On a slightly less flippant note there is a moral here and that is twofold.

1. Don’t rely entirely on the internet, no-one ever looked silly for having a plan B.
2. 95% of the digital education tools we use now have an analogue equivalent and if you are stepping in to active learning and don’t want the added hassle of learning a new technology as well, don’t. Make it work the old-fashioned way and once you have that sorted then you can tech it up!