How learning with technology is like being on Jury Service.

I am a bit behind with my blog posts – my sincere apologies. Curriculum review, Christmas and deadlines. However, I am currently on jury service and find myself in an over warm, unventilated room with a lot of people and nothing to do so I thought I would write you a blog post about it, related to learning technology of course. I have come up with a few similarities between jury service and implementing learning technologies.

• You only have internet on your phone – how can you ever survive the day!

Well for your students, this is probably the norm. They experience most of their life through a hand-held device so embrace it. Be like them. Look for technologies that are mobile friendly, this way your students can work on the bus or while on jury service! Discussion boards are pretty mobile friendly and a good way of getting students to interact. The native Blackboard ones, hideous as they are, will give you the most reliability but other tools like Piazza also have mobile apps. 

 

Podcasts and short videos are also a good way of providing pre-learning information. Anything under 15 minutes and preferably downloadable (for the underground) would be great. You can make these yourself on Panopto or you can direct your students to online sources like TED talks, YouTube or BoB. It is worth being mindful of time as anything that cannot be downloaded will mean using mobile data or being somewhere with Wi-Fi which restricts the places in which students can interact with the content.

• You have no idea what you are doing.

There is an expectation that you will do something. Activate your classroom? Flip it? Digitise it? However, the instructions about how to do it, when to do it and how long it will take are very vague. We can only apologise for this, but things change all the time.

That is not very helpful when you are expected to do something (beware shameless self-promotion). This is why we developed the IMPLEMnT project. It is a community-based tool which collects different technologies and shows their potential uses. It also has a collection of user case studies that allow the community to share practice around what works and what doesn’t. My next project may be to design something similar for the jury service. IMPLEMnT is currently undergoing some upgrades so it not fully functional but we absolutely welcome comments at this stage!

• It’s so boring…. No, it is really interesting…. Oh dear I am so conflicted!

That’s the thing about jury service it could be so interesting, you could learn so much but in reality, you have better things to do and it just gets in the way. Digital learning is like that – you might like to, it might be cool but where are you going to find the time. Not to mention the fact that you have no idea what you are doing. In answer to this I offer my learned friend the long-term view. Many of the reasons people like me advocate for digital is because in the long run it will save you time. Switching that essay to an online peer assessment may be tough the first time around but next time – think of how much less marking you will have to do.

Creating that pre-learning content will take me days!!! Possibly – but once you have done it… you can re-use it as many times as you like. Of course, this is where the likeness to jury service fails. I am not sure there is a long-term benefit (other than lasting damage to my sanity), although I am in a room with no internet catching up on my writing which is a bonus!

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!