Open Thread Wednesday!

When talking about teaching with social media or using other technology in the classroom… heaven forbid, showing a youtube video as part of a lecture, I have the “mean teacher” in my head, wagging a finger at me. I generally ignore her. However, I’d like to hear what you all have to say about “edu-tainment.” What is wrong with edutainment, as long as it has the “edu”? Is “cation” inherently better than “tainment”? What is wrong with skipping the ruler-across-the-knuckes in favor of something more engaging (or fun)? If there is a fine line, where is it?

Folks-

I have two questions for the group this week:

First, what do you do about students who claim to have no computer access outside of class? I am having students submit all their papers to me digitally in an effort to start my teaching career as paper free as possible and a few students have commented about their lack of access at home. I’ve forwarded them to the multiple computer labs on our campus as a remedy, but I am wondering if there is anything else I can do?

Second, as discussed by a few of us on Twitter this morning, what are your suggestions for in class group work? I’d like to inject some energy into my Comp I course and group work, so far, has worked adequately but I’d love to hear others’ suggestions about doing it.

Thanks!

William, I’ll second Nels’ comments. I’ve had students say they didn’t have access to computers and such, and I’ll direct them to the multiple computer labs on campus, the public library, or will even suggest they talk to a friend about using that person’s computer. Some students will still grumble about the “lack of access” (by which they mean they don’t have a dedicated computer in their room/home), but that’s another issue. I have found that even in the current age of what we expect to be high computer literacy that many students don’t know how to use the computers. Since I almost always teach in a computer lab, this surprises me. But since we have access to computers during classtime, I do spend time teaching “computers” throughout a semester. (I teach composition.)

Your second question–about group activities–is the focus of an upcoming ProfHacker post. So, stay tuned!

Well, she’s the type who is disappointed when students can find all of their articles as full text on line and don’t have to set foot in the library. You know, the “can’t be good for you unless it hurts a little bit” mentality. I tend to want to make getting into new territory (rhetorical analysis) as easy as possible by using media that students already know and understand.. not starting with a challenging article, for example. How about an episode of Heroes, or a part of Ratatoulli instead? Or, looking at rhetorical moves in social media or on blogs to start out with.. we’ll move on to Foucault later!

As an instructor perpetually (precariously) on one-year appointments, I do worry a little bit about how such folks might view some uses of technology, which they might not understand, or otherwise disagree with. Clearly the mean teacher doesn’t know she’s talking about.

First, I also second Nils’ comments…just had someone say to me yesterday that they had limited internet access so they wanted me to print out assignment sheets for them. Not sure how I feel about this as an excuse, as we also have multiple labs for students on our campus. I put a clause in my syllabus that computer and internet use are expected in my courses and that lack of access (including “I don’t know my username” and “I forgot my password”) is the student’s responsibility to remedy, considering that at our school there are several computer labs for them to use so that financial issues should never bar a student from accessing technology.

Second, I would be curious to hear how others handle use of student email. I have been requiring students to use their university email account so I can look them up in a directory, and because “pretty_princess@yahoo.com” is not necessarily the moniker they want to present in a professional context to people evaluating them. There are some limitations to university email obviously. I’d like to see a column that addressed this issue in more detail and also discussed managing student expectations related to email (eg, getting an immediate reply when the email is sent at 1 am on a saturday).

I teach Composition as well. We are in the labs on Fridays to work on their current paper and I have been telling them to email me drafts at that time and so far few have taken advantage of this. I also spend a little bit of time, once in awhile, “teaching” computer skills to my classes, especially in regards to backing up files (I showed them how cheap flash drives are and also plugged Dropbox, backing up to Google Docs, etc).

This discussion has been very helpful for me; it has given me ideas for my policies on this matter for future classes. Thanks everyone!

I am wondering what the best way might be to remedy what I’m seeing with my Composition students at a community college. I have a frightening number in Composition II who lack the basic grammar and organization skills they should have learned in Composition I (not to mention in high school, middle school, elementary school, and so on). As I ponder this, it seems that these students really don’t see the value in learning how to structure their thoughts through language. Therefore whatever they’ve learned about grammar, paragraph and sentence structure, etc., goes into a junk file in their short-term memory for each English course they take, only to be wiped out before the next course begins. Skill-building is next to impossible because the foundations have been demolished.

In my teaching time at a 4 year university, I’d focus on the course objectives, directing students to look up more basic issues in their handbooks. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to work for this crowd–it’s looking more and more like I’m going to have to put higher order objectives aside so that I can go back and do basic sentence-level work.

I know that this is a larger systemic question, but why am I finding myself having to re-teach what students should have learned in 3rd grade instead of helping them to refine an established skill set? And what can I do about this? How much remediation should I be doing, and how much should I make the students responsible for in their own time outside the classroom? What has worked for others?

Tria, I am dealing with the same issues in my 101 sections. We are beginning a few weeks on grammar next Monday and I am going to give them group work, take home assignments, and other refreshers. For our first paper due on Friday I have been going over mechanics and various details about writing research papers (paragraph structure, outlines, works cited, etc) and I agree many students seem to keep it in short term memory long enough to pass but then it vanishes.