Teaching with Tech

Across the country students and educators are making their final back-to-school preparations. Next weekend is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and if they aren’t open already, schools will be welcoming students back soon.

The college freshman we’ll be welcoming to school this fall were born the same year that Mosaic launched the browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. They are the Millennial Generation – comfortable with new technologies, close to their parents, active on social media, and willing to share a great deal of personal information publically.

Some colleagues of mine at the University of Oregon recently completed a study into the mindset of Millennial’s who work in professional settings. They surveyed young public relations professionals who were born after 1982, asking them to respond to several ethical quandaries related to decisions they may need to make at work. This project on Millennials in the workplace also provides some fascinating input into the mindset of  Millennials in general.

Students today see information as extraordinarily valuable. They appear to believe that there is always a right answer and with enough information they can solve any problem. Furthermore, autonomy is highly valued but they want consistent feedback on their work. Believing that their voice is respected and valued in work situations plays a major role in job satisfaction.

These traits have left some older generations bemoaning the sense of “entitlement” they observe in members of the Millennial Generation, but I prefer to view this as a desire of collaborate.

When I teach courses to Millennials, I take a few minutes on the first day of class to ask students what their skills are, what they hope to learn, and how they prefer to communicate. Using the free tool Survey Monkey, students are able to make anonymous suggestions regarding the structure and content of the class. I go into each term with a general outline of what needs to be conveyed through the class and what the students need to take away from the experience, but there is still a great deal of flexibility in how the information is presented and how we structure the class environment.

The survey process usually takes less than 10 minutes. We then have a brief group discussion on interests and learning styles and I later revise and update the class syllabus based on the survey responses and discussion. In less than half an hour, I set the tone for the entire term. Instead of going in the first day, handing around a finalized syllabus and laying out the class rules, my students have an opportunity to help develop their learning experience.

I’ve seen this quote attributed to a number of different people and it’s one of my favorites: “If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.” We can fight the traits that make the upcoming generation unique and try to force them to fit existing structures, or we can embrace the characteristics that many Millennials exhibit and find ways for students to use them to best advantage.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

 Steve Jobs

Although a contentious figure in education for his staunch opposition to teacher’s unions, educators can learn a lot from former Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs. The news that Jobs was stepping down from his position as the head of the most profitable company in the world  set the Internet buzzing – I found out about the announcement on Twitter about half an hour after Jobs sent his letter of resignation to the Apple board.

It would be fascinating to talk to one of Steve Jobs early teachers. He has a reputation for being difficult, contentious and a rule-breaker. Employees who have worked for Jobs report that he often interrupts people, frequently misses meetings, and has trouble fulfilling commitments. Jobs is also creative, innovative, driven, persistent and wildly successful.

For many years, Apple’s slogan was “Think Different.” Brigham Young University professor Jeff Dyer, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School and Hal Gregersen of INSEAD spent six years studying the way innovators think and he found that Apple’s slogan was right, they do think differently.

The authors conducted a six-year study, during which they surveyed 3,000 creative executives and conducted an additional 500 individual interviews. The findings, published in their 2009 book The Innovator’s DNA, found that innovative executives exhibited five “discovery skills” that distinguished them from the crowd. These skills are:

Associating – the process of making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, topics or problems.

Questioning – the ability to ask questions that go beyond the norm and challenge the status quo.

Observing – being able to closely observe details, particularly of people’s behavior.

Experimenting – innovators are not only willing to experiment, they do it constantly and are passionate about exploring the world.

Networking – but not the traditional networking where you make connections with others in your industry. New ideas come from meeting very smart people who have little in common, but from whom you can learn new things.

Interestingly, young children exhibit these skills in spades. Kids are naturally inquisitive – in fact, in the last 24 hours my toddler has asked me “why cats have tails,” “how the sun shines,” “why the car makes noise,” and “if we can get a shark as a pet.”

My son isn’t looking for the right answer to these questions. He wants to talk about the topics, consider the possibilities of various answers, and maybe figure out a few possible answers of his own. I’m worried that I only have a few more years before the interest in creating an answer is replaced by a drive to find the right answer.

Highly innovative adults had often been raised in environments where inquisitiveness was encouraged. Many of the participants who showed highly innovative tendencies had been students at Montessori schools where they were encouraged to investigate topics that interested them outside of a strict curriculum.

In most classrooms the teacher asks the questions and students struggle to find the right answers. Let’s work towards shifting that paradigm so that kids ask the questions and teachers help guide them to develop their own answers, many of which could be acceptable.

This is a highly idealized view of education, but the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of high-stakes testing that a step or two toward open-ended questioning and unguided brainstorming could have enormous benefits for the future of innovation in this country.

I got my first cell phone in 2000 when I started college. The were still relatively new at the time, but it made sense to purchase a basic cellular phone to avoid the long distance cost of using landline. This original phone was good for one thing, making phone calls. Ironically, I almost never use my current phone (an iPhone 3G) to make calls.

The mobile phone has come a long way since the first call was made from a handheld device in 1973 by Martin Cooper, a researcher at Motorola. A fun trivia fact: this original call was made to Cooper’s rival, Joel S. Engel who worked at Bell Labs. So, even at the start of cell phones, people were being bothered by calls they’d rather not pick up.

Early this week, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results from their most recent survey on the ways American’s use emerging technologies. Apparently, American’s are not only using mobile phones more than ever before, but we’re also using them for a wider range of tasks. You can read the full report here, but below are a couple of facts that I found particularly interesting:

• About 83% of American adults (18 and older) currently own and use a mobile phone. According to a 2009 survey, 75% of teens (age 12-17) own and use a mobile phone. The data regarding teen cell usage is two years old – it’s likely those numbers are even higher today.

• Mobile phones are information sources for people on the go. Half of all adult cell owners (51%) had used their phone at least once to get information they needed right away.

• Ever pretended to be on the phone to avoid a conversation? You’re not along – 13% of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them.

• One third of American adults (35%) own a smartphone of some kind. About 90% of these smartphone users take pictures and sends texts using their phones and eight in ten use their phone to go online or send photos or videos to others.

• About half of all cell phone owners who are active on social networking sites use their phone to access sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Despite some pretty extensive searching, I wasn’t able to find hard numbers on the percentage of schools that currently ban cell phones, but a 2010 survey shows that about a quarter of U.S. teens attend a school that forbids having a cell phone at all times and more than 60% attend a school were they are not allowed to have a cell phone in class.

I understand the frustration teachers feel when they are speaking to students who are staring down at their laps texting away or browsing the web. I’ll sometimes lecture to classes of 200+ students and it’s tough when it’s obvious that members of the audience are ignoring the work that I spent hours preparing. It’s even more difficult when I know I’ll be judged based on my students’ performance on upcoming exams.

However, I have also seen students in large lectures engage in vibrant backchannel presentations using the Twitter app on their mobile phone. I’ve sent students on a QR Code scavenger hunt where mobile phones allowed me to bring learning outside of the classroom. I’ve texted homework reminders and class announcements and I know at least a few students watch required videos on their mobile devices.

Cells phones can be distractions, but they can also be valuable learning tools and they aren’t going away any time soon. Instead of fighting the inevitable increase in mobile device use among students, let’s embrace the possibilities that these tools offer in education.

Although students are traditionally assessed based on their written work, I try to challenge my students to provide evidence of their progress in a variety of different ways. The undergraduate students I teach are often headed toward careers as professional communicators, so learning how to express themselves verbally and visually is just as important as knowing how to communicate well in writing.

One of the challenges of assessing public speaking skills is finding ways to keep other students engaged while their peers are speaking. I teach in a computer lab, so students are constantly tempted by the various entertainment possibilities available through the Web.

Last week, I surprised students with an “ambush” presentation, designed to require students to think on their feet. I downloaded questions from the interview portion of past Miss America pageants, eliminated all questions that were only applicable to women, and printed them on little slips of paper. Students picked a question at random and had two minutes to present an answer.

Since I had no team of celebrity judges to score the responses, I asked the students to assess one another to determine who would be crowned the winner of this class activity. Using the free, online survey tool Survey Monkey, I created a tool for students to “grade” one another anonymously.

Students were emailed links to a Survey Monkey document that listed all the students in the class. Under each student I listed four assessment criteria: poise, content, persuasiveness, and creativity. Students could then anonymously rate each speaker on their performance. At the end of the exercise, the students submitted the Survey Monkey page and their answers were immediately tabulated by the program.

By requiring students to participate in the assessment process, they were motivated to practice active listening skills throughout the exercise. Also, by using Survey Monkey I was able to determine the third, second and first runners up quickly and objectively. Within five minutes, the class was able to crown their choice as that day’s top presenter.

How do you facilitate peer assessment? Has anyone else used a free or low-cost survey tool in the classroom? How did you use it and why?

With more than 1.5 billion Web sites, 400 million Facebook users, 5.5 million Twitterers, and over 100 million blogs, it can be difficult to stand out in cyberspace. While there are a multitude of tips, tricks, tools and tags that can help attract search engine traffic to a site, the process of search engine optimization is complex and multifaceted.

Last week I had two hours to share SEO basics with a classroom full of communications students. Rather than attempting a full-scale PowerPoint assault, I devised an in-class activity that would show students some of the basics of SEO implementation, but also show them the power of building relationships and earning links.

I spent about 20 minutes at the start of class giving a simple overview of what SEO is and how it works. I went over the Google Formula, keywords, tagging, headlines, and off-page factors that lead to high search rankings, then the class was put to work.

The students, each of whom have developed a blog as part of their class projects, were tasked with writing a blog post about the fantastic new (fictional) cleaning solution Flooneed produced by Bipowk Inc. “Floneed” and “Biopowk” were chosen because Google searches of the words returned only one or two results. Students were instructed to include a disclaimer (provided as a jpeg) stating that Flooneed and Biopowk were nonsense words and that the posts were written for an in-class exercise on Search Engine Optimization.

A week later we did some sample Google, Yahoo and Bing searches to see how the different blogs stacked up. Students who had Twittered about the post, or commented on another blog and linked back, shot to the top on all the sample Flooneed searches. Posts that had a specific focus, such as using Flooneed to get out tough dirt and grass stains on a sports related blog or as a heavy-duty kitchen cleaner for a food and cooking focused blog, ranked highly when we brainstormed reasons why people might search for a cleaning product and used Google AdWords to check out hot search terms.

How do you teach SEO skills? I’d like to find a good resource sheet that I could hand out to students in the future giving them a quick guide to SEO basics. Any suggestions?