I’m not sure I’ve ever said this out loud, but ReadWriteWeb is my absolute favorite blog in all the blogosphere, and has been since they began covering all things technology-related in 2003 or so—it’s the emphasis on critical thinking and analysis rather than knee-jerk “first!” responses to news and events that makes me respect them so.
Recently, my most favorite RWW author (Audrey Watters) asked educators for input via Twitter: what’s the tech tool you’re most excited to take into the classroom with you this fall?. Audrey is collecting responses for use in an upcoming RWW story, so between now and August 15th feel free to help her out.
However, I’m interested in your answers as well. No, I don’t aim to write a similar story as Audrey, but I do wonder about the different answers based on the different audiences. Audrey’s readership comes from the already highly-technologically-inclined, often found on Twitter. The ProfHacker audience in the CHE is not necesarily so. In fact, I think it is safe to say that the majority of the ProfHacker readership is not on Twitter and is more technology-curious than technology-embedded (or invested).
So, I’d like to hear from you as well. In the comments, please let us know what’s the tech tool you’re most excited to take into the classroom with you this fall? (anything hardware or software “counts,” and I’ll even accept analog technologies as valid answers)
Hopefully, given your responses and Audrey’s own article from (predominantly) her own audience, there will be some interesting food for thought on the state of technology in higher ed.
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28 Responses to Reader Poll: Tech Tool You’re Most Excited to Take into the Classroom
guerson - August 10, 2010 at 3:10 pm
I’ll be trying clickers for the first time this coming year and I’m very excited to see how it works. I’ll be teaching first-year world history class and I think the clicker will be useful to gather class reponses and initiate conversations in class. I hope it works!
erictho - August 10, 2010 at 3:12 pm
coloured chalk! Seriously — it’s the best tool for language teaching. You can visually distinguish stems from endings, etc. to help the students see the patterns in the morphology.
erictho - August 10, 2010 at 3:12 pm
(PS — chalk = “hardware”)
drgunn - August 10, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Seems like she could get a few ideas from your earlier posts: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Using-Mendeley-for-Research/25627/http://chronicle.com/blogPost/One-Week-One-Tool-/25972/Just to give two recent examples…
jmeloni - August 10, 2010 at 3:29 pm
@erictho I support chalk as a technology!
jmeloni - August 10, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I’m afraid my own responses are fairly mundane – I’m excited (as usual) to have my students blog, and at a new school where there’s not as much (if any) of a culture of blogging in the classroom. In another class (at another school) we’re going to do something with maps, but I’m not sure what. But probably Google API-related.
peril - August 10, 2010 at 3:43 pm
As a student I’ll be using the standard Cirus Ponies Notebook, Taska, Word/Pages, Concentrate, and Zoterho. However, this semester I will be testing out iHomework and its iPhone/iPad companion apps.For my other functons I will continue to rely on iTeach, Mental Case classroom, Jing, iAnnotate, and various whiteboard apps. I will be testing out collecting files via dropbox (gets papers right from students to my iPad) web sumbmit- details.
deannamascle - August 10, 2010 at 4:16 pm
I’m going to use blogging and microblogging this semester and am pretty excited about using it to teach audience/genre awareness as well as keeping class connected
drnels - August 10, 2010 at 5:20 pm
I’m excited about having a wiki in at least one class (if not two) and the Pecha Kucha presentations that students will be doing on the last day of one class.
erictho - August 10, 2010 at 5:52 pm
and in case my chalk comment was too flip, I am also keen on using a Moodle site for all my classes, including my language classes, primarily to distribute handouts, etc. (our budget doesn’t stretch to photocopies for classes).
aeonelpis - August 10, 2010 at 5:59 pm
I’m revisiting having students use a wiki for a collaborative note-taking assignment. I’ve tried them before, but they ended up not working out as well as the discussion fora in our LMS. I think this new objective might help the wiki have function for us.
proftucker - August 10, 2010 at 8:36 pm
I’m going to try individualized exams. The questions live in a mySQL database. PHP scripts I’m writing myself will prepare a randomized exam (and answer key) for each student, write that out to a .tex file and LaTeX will take over and generate nice PDFs for exam papers & answer keys. I’m sure there is an open source / commercial solution (any suggestions?!), but its fun to get messy with code sometimes. I would have to write up four different versions of the exam anyhow (to cover off back-to-back classes/sections writing on different days). This also solves the cramped classroom problem. My guess is the bottleneck in the process won’t be the PHP code, but getting the actual printing done!
derekbruff - August 10, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I’m really looking forward to implementing a collaborative timeline in my history of cryptography course, as detailed by ProfHacker’s own Brian Croxall.
emmadw - August 11, 2010 at 8:20 am
I’ll be interested in how the Pecha Kucha presentations go, drnels! Are you going to do some yourself as a demo (in which case, what are you going to do with the rest of the allocated class time?)I’m not sure – I’d like to really get to grips with Mendeley & get the students to use it; but not quite sure at the moment (we don’t start for another few weeks yet)
sselisker - August 11, 2010 at 10:16 am
The DH tools I’m most excited about these days are free websites that give students extra help in an online environment that’s fun and interactive. It’s not a terribly popular approach these days, maybe because it’s “so 10 years ago” but was also never really implemented all that well (and was never available for free, as far as I can tell). These two sites come from the University of Virginia (full disclosure, I worked on the latter):For Better For Verse (http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu) teaches about how to scan poems in a fun, interactive environment.The second, Little Red Schoolhouse Online (http://redschoolhouse.org) is in progress and promises to be a full basic university writing curriculum served up as 20-minute, 5-page interactive lessons. Both tools are, I think, a great place to send self-directed and enthusiastic students who want to learn a bit more, on websites that strive to feel slightly more like Facebook games than textbooks…
phdeviate - August 11, 2010 at 11:20 am
I feel like I’m aiming to be a profhacker pet, but I’m really getting excited about the idea of using Anthologize to have students prepare a writing portfolio. Considering the emphasis I place on drafts and revision, I think I’m going to have to look more closely at WordPress versioning before going ahead with the idea. And all of this is pursuant to the tech people at $newschool getting back to me and letting me know if they’ll even give me space for a WP install! (It’s a Blackboard school…) (Also, am I the only one who remembers when WP meant WordPerfect? Just sayin’…)
maydove - August 11, 2010 at 11:22 am
Has anybody experimented with augmented reality in courses, especially visually-based ones?
matt_l - August 11, 2010 at 11:59 am
This is going to sound totally mundane, especially compared to Anothologize, the blogs, and all the web writing tools, but…I’m going to use the checklist feature in D2L to breakdown the weekly reading assignments for my students instead of writing that info on the chalkboard every day.
dgiberson - August 11, 2010 at 12:13 pm
I’m going to have my students use Jing to create mini-presentations that will teach as much of the class as possible. Active learning for them; more time at the beach for me :-)
danquigs - August 11, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Just a note of caution on the chalk as technology…yes, but don’t put it in the same room as other technology…like computers. Our IT put in computers and data projection set ups in some of our rooms with chalk boards. Chalk dust and computer mother boards do not like each other!Quig
csgirl - August 11, 2010 at 1:47 pm
A new Linux server
tee_bee - August 11, 2010 at 2:10 pm
New technology for me: Moodle. Not perfect, but some things, like the forums, look promising for posting very short response papers.In with the new, and out with the old: the old is Powerpoint. It makes me lazy, students sleepy, and even now, most slides are as ugly as homemade sin. Buh bye. (Great for posting charts and pictures, of course.)
honore - August 11, 2010 at 5:38 pm
my plastic fantastic laser light for waking up students in the back of the classroom during evening classes, when class is exiting the room.
vivid - August 11, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Definitely the iPad! I tried itmin summer school to take class notes via Evernote and for PDFs. It was pretty easy to conduct class using iPad and my electronic teaching materials. It wasn’t always seamless but it was pretty good, and itmhelped cut down on the paper shuffle.
mposner - August 11, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I also love using colored chalk to draw intricate mechanisms and structures in my biology classes. I plan to continue using a wiki for collaborative projects and course blogs for sharing information found outside of class. I will be using our LMS Angel to collect and grade papers electronically for the first time this semester, and may have students take short quizzes on Angel outside of class so that we can save more time for discussion in class. And I am using Tungle.me for the first time to schedule office hours.Much of this may change next semester as I plan to buy an iPad later in the year. Then I cannot wait to grade student papers using iAnnotate through my Dropbox account.
pandian - August 12, 2010 at 1:47 pm
I’ll be continuing an experiment I started two years ago with my “Anthropology of Media” undergraduate lecture course, in which students will be asked to do all of their coursework online, not only via a course blog, but also through a course website which we have designed. Here, each student will be taught to use basic tools on Dreamweaver to create their own individual webpage where they present the results of their class research, not only for the instructors but also for anyone who searches online for the topic they’ve been working on. It worked great the first time! I’d be glad to share details of the website…
tellio - August 13, 2010 at 12:25 am
I just got all shivery excited about the new WordPress plug-in called Anthologize. Google it. Even though it is still in alpha it automates turning blog posts into pdf’s, rtf’s or epubs. This is the first tool I have gotten this excited about since twitter.
george_h_williams - August 13, 2010 at 5:52 pm
@tellio: You might be interested in the post Julie wrote about Anthologize: “One Week, One Tool: Anthologize.”