Blogging with Students

A new semester and finally a new post! This semester I am blogging with my students. They are second year students taking a Child Development course, and we'll be using the blog to explore topics like childhood obesity, concussion in children's sports, and kids and Facebook in more detail.

 Some rights reserved by Jim Belford

I spent several hours exploring which blogging platform to use. I finally settled on posterous because it seemed easiest - students could email their posts in, and I would moderate. The layout is clear and uncluttered, and I created a main blog to feed all of the student group blogs into, and then embedded the main page into Moodle.

It hasn't been all smooth sailing. There have been a few technical difficulties and posterous seems to be changing their user interface at the moment. There are logistical challenges to making blogging easy for nearly 40 students with mixed technical experience. However I love the potential for using blogging as a way for students to learn, publish and share.

We would love to get comments on our class blog from anyone interested in child development!

Why I like Diigo

I used to keep track - rather lackadaisically - of useful weblinks using Delicious. But I am now totally sold on Diigo instead - and I imported all of my Delicious saves and tags. I have the Diigo bookmarklet in my Chrome browser that makes it easy to save and highlight, share, tag or comment on webpages as I browse. It's so easy to use that I'm keeping track of useful links and documents in a much more systematic fashion than before. I installed another bookmarklet in Safari on my iPad and can do the same from there.

With a Diigo Teacher account you can create and manage student groups. This could turn into a collaborative class or small group project where you have students maintain a set of annotated bookmarks on a single topic or theme. I also joined some groups that looked like useful sources for sharing weblinks related to topics that I'm interested in, and you can choose to receive a daily update notifying you of the groups' new saved links. As with Delicious, Diigo has a "Friending" function that allows you to connect with other users. It's also possible to post directly to a blog from within Diigo - I haven't tried that yet, but there are a host of similar useful tools that one could explore.

Diigo is a great productivity tool. It makes saving information fast and easy, giving you more time to read, reflect, use, share, and create. Try it.

Using lap-top computers for note-taking in class

A small minority of my students use laptop computers to take notes - perhaps 4 to 8 in a class of 35. As long as the computers are not an annoying distraction to others, our departmental policy is to leave it up to students to decide how to take notes. Most students with laptops sit on the periphery of the room in order to be close to a power supply. The actual typing does not seem to be a distraction to the rest of the class.

Most of the time, I have no idea whether students on laptops are taking notes or buying something on ebay. I can only tell from their facial expressions if they are engrossed in something other than notetaking. Last week I had the rather disheartening experience of realizing that about two/thirds of the laptop-users were at that moment clearly amused and interested in something on their screens that had nothing to do with what we were discussing in class.

Should I care that students are watching Youtube, catching up on Facebook, or watching video games in class? Is this extension of multitasking into the cyber world any worse than whispering, fidgeting or falling asleep?

Clearly, if this is distracting to other students it is a problem. But what about the students who are missing class because they are online? Should we ban laptop computers to save students from themselves? Should we change our teaching to accommodate what appears to be a shrinking attention span in the face of multiple potential distractions?

I don't know the answers to these questions. I have seen laptop computers used well in class. I have also seen them aid and abet distractible students. I know that classes need to be interesting to engage and hold students' attention. But I recognize that human brains are wired to seek novelty. Technology provides unlimited potential for distraction. The majority of students still use paper and pens to take notes - I wonder if there are systematic differences in note-taking between laptop-users and paper-and-pen users.

These observations raise many fundamental questions about how students learn, the role of technology inside the classroom itself, the best way to deliver course content, and the responsibilities of students, faculty and institutions.

Empirical research on the use of laptops for note-taking during lectures suggests that open laptops during class are related to poorer grades. There are several possible reasons for this: open laptops encourage multitasking and time "away" from class; typing notes is less effective than note-taking by hand in learning or memory-encoding; handwritten notes are better than typed notes for studying; students who use laptops are using less effective academic strategies, etc. We need more research; the technology is not going away. How do you deal with these technological issues in your class?

A beginner's look at Zotero

I was alerted to the potential of Zotero after reading a positive review in a blog post on tech tools at Inside Higher Ed. Zotero is a tool that allows you to amass and organize a bibliography, drop citations into your documents in preformatted styles like APA, MLA, etc., generate reference lists, and share your library collections and those belonging to other people with similar interests.

Zotero lives in your browser and is synced to the web-based version. It sounded like a useful tool - one that would do away with the mind-numbing slog of putting citations and references in proper format if nothing else - I was immediately interested in whether students would gravitate to it for this purpose. So I set out to learn how to use it.

The first thing I learned is that Zotero is designed for Firefox or Safari and doesn't work with Internet Explorer. There is also a stand-alone version that has a Chrome plug-in which made my happy as Chrome is my favourite browser. I downloaded both to have a look.

Let's look at Zotero using the Firefox extension. After you have downloaded Zotero (and Firefox 4 if you don't have the current version) there is an icon in your Firefox navigation bar that lets you add something to your Zotero library with one click if the item is a book (i.e. you are browsing in Amazon etc) or a publication with available bibliographic information. If you are searching for articles from a database like PsycINFO from within your library's gated access, you can even add a folder of search results in one click if Zotero has a site translator that works with your database search engine (it doesn't for Capilano University's search engine).

You can also add items manually. It's good if the items have a doi because then you only have to enter that manually and all of the other bibliographic information is added automatically. You can add whatever you want manually but the automatic entry is only possible for items that Zotero recognizes as books, articles, etc.

You can tag your library items, add notes, and attach pdfs and screenshots. Once an item is in your library you can leave it unfiled or you can organize your library into collections and save items into one or more of these. You can also share your collection with others and view the collections that other people and groups have shared. Zotero also has a good search function that allows you to quickly search through the items in your library.

Zotero creates a bibliography or reference list automatically in a number of styles such as APA or MLA. In the test run I did using about 10 library items, the references appeared in perfect APA style except for one item which had the article title wrongly capitalized in the original - Zotero does not appear to correctly identify these types of mistakes so manually checking of the resulting list is still required. It is however, better than similar Reference lists I've seen generated by MS Word or EbscoHost. It appears from the discussion forums at Zotero.org that these glitches are being fixed, but I am not a big fan of having to correct something manually unless there is a large net gain in the overall amount of time I have saved.

Zotero also has an add-in for MS Word that automatically cites authors in your library in correct - in this case  APA - format. It seems to assume you want the citation to be inside parentheses so anything outside parentheses would have to be done manually or corrected.

So the big question is would I use Zotero? I'm not sure. It is obviously a useful tool, but its greatest utility will require commitment and a preference for using it over or as well as other tools. I use delicious to bookmark websites that look useful but that I don't frequently access, or to save items for students. It tends to be where I save bookmarks that have some potential to be useful for a while. I use Twitter to capture websites that have some immediate use or appeal. So I probably won't use Zotero merely to archive information from the web because I already have tools that are quick and easy.

Zotero could be useful to me as a professional development tool - keeping track of books and articles that I am interested in reading. But there are probably faster ways to do this - I could save them in an Amazon search without having to go the extra step and putting them into Zotero.

The greatest potential of Zotero would seem to be saving and managing items that are being used in research and writing. However having vast numbers of items means that organizing them into collection would be critical because it would take too long to look through them or to remember what's in there otherwise. Plus I'm more likely to do a current search of available books and articles when I need then, rather than rely on a library that may not have been kept current. I do like the generation of References and if I were doing a lot of scholarly writing this would be useful. The interface is easy enough - it looks like iTunes.

I suspect students may use Zotero as an aid to formatting citations and references in styles such as MLA or APA. However as a tool merely to create proper bibliographic formatting - I think it would be too much trouble. Students with lots of writing to do would probably find Zotero useful for organizing their bibliographies and for helping them get citations and references correctly formatted. A big benefit to using Zotero is that it should increase the correct attribution of sources - something that is becoming increasingly lost in our copy-and-paste culture.

The changing educational landscape

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article called Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century by Jeffrey R. Young. Young shows that students nowadays may expect that professors will upload their lectures and other course content to the web so that students can view them at their convenience, thereby making actual attendance in classes obsolete. He further points out that the technology exists to allow prospective students to bypass traditional college or university courses completely; by picking and choosing from the many excellent free online offerings, today's student can educate themselves. Young cites evidence that students' deepest learning takes place outside the classroom anyway - in the ancillary moments of education found in internships, research opportunities and the like.


I found this piece thought-provoking in many ways. 


I don't upload my lectures for students in my face-to-face classes. One reason for this is that I tend to use PowerPoint slides with minimal information on them as I lecture - they act more as visual prompts, with keywords. Much of the "good stuff" - the discussion, dialogue, conversation -  about the lecture material does not appear on the slides. Furthermore, I often edit or change as I go along. So uploading the slides may well be inaccurate - it would certainly be incomplete. I also believe that working through the material in class with an expert and other students is a valuable experience that does not get replicated by reading the slides on one's own.


The question here is whether or not professors in face-to-face classes should also try to deliver the class online for students who don't come to class. If this were possible, then students would rightly question the value of coming to classes at all. But it isn't possible - nor is it within the expertise or job description of most professors teaching face-to-face classes. Rather than replicating face-to face classes online, professors should use technology to support their classroom work. Alternatively, students can take online classes where the professor's role is rather different - more the guide on the side than the sage on the stage.


Young questions whether the sage on the stage model of pedagogy should be used at all. A valid question. My first reaction was that Young's suggestion that education outside the classroom is the most meaningful sounds a lot like my experience at graduate school. I had a few formal courses, most in esoteric areas of psychology that I had no experience or burning interest in, but my education outside the classroom was immense, far-reaching, and profound. It was self-driven, collaborative, and engrossing. Rather than abolish classes, why can't we bring more of these experiences into the classroom?


Could students direct their own learning through selection of online materials without the need for a professor and become well-educated in the process? Of course they could, given sufficient interest, time and self-discipline. Would this be equivalent in some sense to traditional education? Probably not. If I suddenly decided to become an engineer, chemist, or archaeologist it would probably take me years of trying to sift through the online world to find the focus, material, and depth that traditional education could provide. In the real world, only the retired and the independently wealthy could probably pursue that kind of education to the level of expertise needed to work in their chosen field.


Young questions the role of instructors in education. There is a great deal of research on the benefits of a constructivist model of online learning - students learn better when they collaborate with other students and their instructor, and when the instructor is fully engaged in the process. Students in online courses who are left to fend for themselves without instructor guidance flounder. The rates of student attrition in such courses far outpace those in face-to-face classes. Most of my students work many hours a week and simply don't have time to become fully independent learners; many are straight out of high school and lack time management skills and self-discipline. For them, college instructors are more than just curators of material. We give content and context but we also guide and mentor students in the process of learning, and evaluate the outcome so that students and others in the wider community can give recognition to the learning. 


The affordances of technology have changed the educational landscape. Young's article raises some excellent questions about how we should navigate this new world.

Pedagogical uses of VoiceThread

If you are new to Voicethread , I put together this brief presentation of examples. Your comments are welcome!



Go here for more examples of Voicethread in education.

The role of lectures in e-learning

One of the best ways to kill an online course is to try to replicate a lecture-based f2f course. Imagine the students in that online class - in isolation, watching online lectures and taking notes, writing papers and exams. No interaction, no collaboration, no sharing, no community, no instructor presence - a set of possibilities not explored or realized.

Does that mean that online lectures have no place in e-learning? I think not. While I would never want to have a whole course consisting solely of online lectures, used judiciously, online lectures can be extremely useful. I would broaden what I think of as a lecture to include the more general category of presentations given by experts in their particular field, who are excellent, engaging speakers, talking about topics directly related to the course material.

Hearing and watching someone speak about a topic can bring it to life - witness the many TED.com presentations that do a wonderful job of describing, evaluating, and synthesizing material. Some examples that I have included in my psychology courses are Phil Zimbardo's talk on the potential of ordinary people to commit evil acts,  or Martin Seligman's presentation about the potential of positive psychology. A 20-minute presentation (plus a complete transcript) by an accomplished speaker who is an expert in his/her field can open up a world of possibilities to students.

A couple of good sources for online university lectures are Academic Earth and Lecture Fox - both of these offer lectures or entire courses from a number of top universities such as Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, UBC, Oxford, MIT and so on. You could easily incorporate snippets or pieces of lectures - most include transcripts as well.

I use online lecture/presentations as the starting point for online discussion. For example, when we cover social psychology, students read in our course textbook about Phil Zimbardo's famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment - a prison simulation using undergraduate subjects who played the roles of guards and prisoners. They then watch Zimbardo's recent TED presentation in which he shows how conformity to group norms and institutionalized expectations can create situations that encourage behaviours such as the prisoner abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison by US soldiers. This provides the basis for an online discussion in which small groups of students apply what they have learned to analyzing the psychological basis for conformity and its consequences in other historical instances, and the situational and personal factors that promote nonconformity.

Used wisely, online presentations are a winning combination of technology in the service of pedagogical goals. What are your success stories?

Instructors as learners

Instructors who are new to online teaching face a steep learning curve as they grapple with the challenges of presenting material effectively using technology, engaging with students, guiding students through online work, and evaluating the outcomes. Penn State University has a helpful online Self-Assessment Tool for Online Teaching Preparedness. Many institutions offer help from instructional designers and other educational professionals in preparing faculty to teach online. As online learning grows, the number of faculty able to teach this way will also need to grow. Many of us over a certain age have no experience with this form of learning, yet we may be faced with having to incorporate online elements into existing courses or even teach fully online.

One of the most helpful things a new online instructor can do is experience what it's like to be an online learner.  Designing such a course would obviously depend on the nature of online learning the instructor is going to do. At my institution we offer several blended courses that deliver about 50% of the course online and the remainder in the classroom, plus the odd fully online course. We use Moodle as our LMS, but instructors are free to go outside Moodle to deliver course content or communicate with students as they see fit.

What online learning experiences would best prepare a new online instructor for teaching? While there is a plethora of emerging technologies that online instructors can employ in their courses, there is a smaller set of experiences that most courses with an online component will require of students:

• engaging with course content online in written, audio, video or other formats
• communicating and engaging in discussion with other students and the instructor
• collaborating with other students
• completing online quizzes
• uploading assignments
• troubleshooting technological problems
• managing time independently
• having regular access to the internet

I would suggest offering a Moodle course incorporating these components to new online instructors as a professional development activity - perhaps for a few hours a week over 4 weeks preferably with a cohort of at least 4 or 5 participants and an experienced facilitator. One of the side benefits to this of course, would be the instant peer group and online community for the new instructors.

Last year I was a participant in an Instructional Skills Workshop Online offered through Royal Roads University. It offered some of these experiences and also provided participants an opportunity to practice online facilitation skills as they guided their colleagues through discussion activities. The course reinforced for me the importance of well-timed, careful communication from the facilitator - not enough and you feel adrift, not timely or relevant and you feel unheard. I also really got the challenges of asynchronous discussion - you do end up waiting for people to post and potentially feeling like your time is being wasted. And the absence of verbal cues and body language was a good reminder to try to build in some substitutes in my communication with students.

What are the other online experiences that would help instructors?

Fun with word clouds

Word clouds are very fun - I created this one at tagxedo with my blog as the word generator. Let your creativity run wild - you can change the words, colours, shapes, fonts, layout . . . .

A great tool for creating visual impact!

Going mobile

When Going Mobile was released by The Who 40 years ago this year, telephones were - if I remember correctly - hardwired into the wall, with no functionality beyond dialing and speaking. Although the party line allowed you to meet online with at least one other person . . . .

I want to talk about the use of mobile technology in education, or mLearning. Our students have embraced mobile technology. The Chronicle of Higher Education states that over half of all college students accessed the internet using a smartphone or a tablet like the iPad in 2010. Only 2 years before, this number was only 10% of students. They are using mobile devices not just to telephone, but to connect with others via text and on social media websites, to access materials on the web, and to interact with a huge variety of apps.


Institutions will be forced to respond to the growing demand for easy mobile access to their offerings. This means not just reading the university's website on a smartphone, but finding and registering in courses, and interacting with course components that are web-based. Students in distance education taking hybrid or fully online courses will become increasingly likely to use mobile devices to post comments to online discussions, access course materials, etc. Indeed, students may well use mobile technology exclusively. It's hard to envision students continuing to lug laptop computers around unless they need them specifically - so much of what they use laptops for has now become available on smartphones and tablets.


Online instructors and those with web-based course components are under pressure to understand how mobile technology can be used in order to make informed decisions about how that might affect they way they present material to students and interact with them.  Not only the format of course material may change. The way educators do their jobs will also likely change as more of them adopt mobile technology. Even adding a few simple apps can change the way educators manage their professional lives.


Instructors in the classroom can also incorporate mobile technology. For example, if your institution does not supply clickers, you can use mobile (and web) technology to create an audience response system. Use something like Poll Everywhere to display a question from your classroom computer to your overhead screen and give students the option to respond using text messaging, email, the web or Twitter. Poll response are displayed in real time.


Students from less advantaged places on earth will also find increased access to educational opportunities through digital media accessed by mobile devices that are cheaper and more portable than desktop computers.


So, the growing use of mobile technology poses several challenges for educators:

• get familiar with it and understand how students are using it - our students may be literally anywhere
• consider how mLearning might be incorporated into our courses
• contribute to the scholarly debate concerning mLearning other educational technologies
• conduct empirical research on the use and efficacy of mobile technology in education and use evidence-based practices wherever possible

For a recent review of many of these issues see Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training (2009) edited by Mohamed Ally.


Currently we are in a transitional state - mLearning is here and burgeoning, and scholarly research on how to best use it is a field that will grow with it. How are using mobile technology in education?

Using narrated PowerPoint slides to create videos for youtube

Sometimes I want to create a resource for students that exists outside of the LMS. In this case, I had  material on research methods and statistics in psychology that I wanted to make available to online students. This can be a pretty dry topic, so rather than giving them something to read, I wanted to combine visuals with narration.

I used PowerPoint 2010 to create a slide show, and then used Record Slide Show (under the Slide Show tab) to add narration. This is an easy way to add narration - basically, plug in a mic and speak. PowerPoint saves the slide timings, and you can change the narration for individual slides if you make a mistake.

If you plan to upload your slide show to youtube, be aware that youtube only permits 15-minute videos. In my experience, the youtube video can be a little longer than a 15-minute PP slide show, so give yourself some leeway: create PP slide shows that are about 13 minutes in length (i.e., if you have a longer PP show, divide it into Part 1, Part 2, etc).

Use PowerPoint to create a video of your slide show that can then be uploaded to youtube. Click Save and Send in PP and then Create Video. This takes some time so plan to create the video when you have plenty of time for this part. Once the video has been created, sign in to youtube, upload the video with title, tags, etc., and you're good to go. Your youtube videos can be public or private, so you can control who your audience is. You also have the option to embed your youtube videos in a blog, Moodle, etc.