Technology: Can It Help You?

Some Strategies for Getting Technology to Work for You

As we teach our students to think about how they approach a learning situation, we, as educators, need to think about how we construct our teaching and learning environment.

Usually, we design a course based on assumptions about how students might best learn the content.

These assumptions are based on a combination of factors, ranging from how the instructor learned or was taught this content to what worked best in the past with similar content and similar student populations.

When we introduce technology into our course design, we're no longer able to harken back to how we were taught, nor can we rely on what worked in the past to tell us what we can do now.

But what we do have, when we work with technology, is a wide range of opportunities to try something new. Fortunately, we also have some feedback from previous students that will help with our new course design.

What follows are some suggestions for using technology to help improve the learning experience for you and your students.

Student Perspectives
Recently, 881 students at Portland State University completed survey questionnaires to identify the technology most often used to present information in their classes and to assess how the technology enhanced or interfered with the learning of course material---from the student perspective.

The most frequent negative comments did not fault the technology, but rather how the technology was used. Comments, for instance, frequently referred to the quality of materials displayed on electronic slides, the pace of slide presentations, and the accessibility of the electronic slides after the class session ended.

The students also reported that their professors put too much information on their presentation slides and then moved to the next one too quickly. They commented that their instructors seemed to feel that they had put so much time into preparing each slide that they believed the students had to see every single one. Using slides in this manner, they felt, detracts from some of spontaneity of a course as well as from meeting the needs of the particular class.

Students praised professors for posting syllabus and class notes on the course homepage, and positive comments about convenience of access abounded.

Conversely, negative student comments described instructors who did not have enough class time to complete all of their electronic presentation slides and told students to access them on the Web---and held students responsible for that material.

These slides---originally intended to support lecture materials---were not explained in class. Instead, they became material that students would be tested on, without clear explanation.

Many students commented on the amount of time that it took their instructors to set up the electronic equipment at the beginning of the class. They felt the instructor either should have arrived before the class to set it up, or should have been more adept at doing so quickly. Students resented the "set-up time" because it took away from classroom learning time.

Finally, students commented about faculty becoming so dependent upon their prepared electronic presentations that they were at a loss for how to proceed without the technology when it failed. We were told that, when this happened, some professors would either cancel class or tell the students they did not know how to proceed with the lecture without their prepared electronic support.

What Are Techno-CATs?
Angelo and Cross (1993) brought the concept of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) into our instructional planning.

CATs are strategies that instructors can employ to obtain formative feedback about how much and how well students are learning a specific concept or module. CATs are used to assess student learning, not to assess teaching. The completion of a simple CAT is both a learning experience for the student and a way for an instructor to gather information.

CATs are most often collected on paper, and they are usually anonymous and ungraded.

Techno-CATs (a term coined by Devorah Lieberman and Tom Creed) are a means to electronically collect formative information about student learning. This process is an out-of-class data collection tool, which allows more in-class time to cover course content.

Techno-CATs can be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous Techno-CATs provide a way for students to give information to the professor while the professor is concurrently receiving the information. With asynchronous Techno-CATs, the students transmit feedback when the professor isn't present. The professor can then access the information later.

The following are three examples of Techno-CATs that you can easily adapt to your own classes.

Overhead small group feedback is low-tech and easily used in classes between 20 and 200. At the beginning of the class period, students are clustered in small groups; each group is given one overhead acetate.

Students are asked to confer with each other for 10 minutes and tell each other what the muddiest point was during the previous class period or in the reading (the instructor should give the specific instruction). They should answer each other's questions. They then record one question on the overhead that no one in the group could answer. After 10 minutes, the instructor collects the overheads and looks through them. A pattern of questions tends to emerge and is centered on a few themes. The next 10 minutes are used to display the overheads and discuss each of the questions. This techno-CAT begins the class with students focused on the subject at hand, encourages interaction, and gives the instructor feedback on unclear material.

At a numbers of institutions, students are now required to have an institution-sponsored E-mail account. If you ask the students to send E-mail feedback to you about the "muddiest point" from class that day, it will force them to give you reflective feedback independently. You can identify clusters that emerge in what they did not understand and respond either by a group E-mail to the class or wait and do it verbally in the next class period.

Threaded conversation is a third techno-CAT that relies on the capability that many software programs have for interaction on a common Internet page.

Students are assigned a common reading---a textbook chapter or an article, for instance---and are required to post one question about the reading to the homepage before the class. They can see each other's questions but do not need to respond. The instructor can see all the questions that the students have about the reading and can address them in class.

The week following this class period, each student is required to respond electronically on the same homepage to at least one of the electronic questions about the readings posted by fellow classmates before the class period. Students are not graded on their pre-class electronic question or their post-class electronically threaded discussion, but they are required to do one of each.

This techno-CAT gives the instructor information on what was not understood and forces students to synthesize and think critically about the reading.

Conclusion
The underlying principle of this article is that the technologies integrated into our courses and curricula should add value, not merely be an "add-on." Technology must serve as an additional teaching strategy that is appealing to both professors and students and truly serves the goal of achieving traditional, as well as previously unimagined, student learning outcomes.