We discussed a number of apps you can use with your students.  Examples included:

1. Educreations:  short videos can be made explaining a concept.  It works like a white board where you can draw and explain a concept, save it and you will be sent a link to your video.
2. Explain Everything:  another app to create short videos.  It allows you to import from evernote, dropbox and your photos from your ipad.  Many math professors have students use Explain Everything as a way for students to explain how they solved homework problems.
3. Evernote:  a place to store notes, photos etc. that can be annotated and organized into notebooks.
4. Data collection apps:  specific examples include carbon footprint app, biodiversity apps, tides app
5. Discipline specific apps:  heart rate (records your heart rate if you place your finger over the camera lens of your smart phone); 4D Anatomy (images of heart and human body from multiple angles)
6. iBooks Author:  allows you to create an interactive “textbook” with 3D images, interactive images, and the ability for students to highlight text

Some TWT FIG members expressed their discussion boards never received too much activity or the responses were a few words and did not reflect true student engagement with each other as well as the course content.  Two FIG members showed us their discussion boards and shared how they use discussion board for their classes.  Some of the ways included:

1. as a way to get students to read.  Students are asked to read and then write a response based on what they read as well as respond to another student.
2. as a means to have students apply what they have learned to real life situations. By doing so, this makes learning more meaningful to students.
3. watch a short video followed by either a question or a reflection.
4. for writing assignments, a discussion board can be used to have students practice writing, write and gather their thoughts and prepare for a final assignment

All the discussion boards that were shown worked well because they have very specific prompts.  Students knew what they were expected to write about, the length of the response and time frame to complete the posts.

At our first meeting, we discussed the article “Flipped Class Trends:  A Survey of College Faculty”, a special report from Faculty Focus. Between our discussion and the KCTL survey you completed, below is a list of items participants are interested in exploring:

1. hear about how colleagues are using technology in their classroom
2. how technology can be incorporated into all classes, not just hybrid or online classes
3. interactive video lectures and how they can be used to have students come to class with some background knowledge or as a way for students to reexamine difficult concepts
4. the use of apps
5. use of itunes, crash course, Khan Academy
6. Ensuring equal access

These items will be the basis for our discussion for our future meetings.  The schedule of meeting dates is:

October 28

November 11

December 2

All meetings begin at 3:00 in M391.

Flipped-Classroom-Trends_FF-Report-2015

Here is another interesting article about academic cell phone use published in the Journal of College Science Teaching.  Happy reading!

Student Impressions of Academic Cell Phone Use in the Classroom