Category Archives: Teaching

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assessment, Teaching, troubleshooting

checklist of Turning Technology Cloud woes

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We use clickers with an LMS – namely Blackboard (9.1.110082.0).

  • When you use an LMS, you need to register your online Turning Technology account with your school email address and indicate that you are either an instructor or a student.
  • Once registered as a student you can not start the TurningPoint Cloud program.  So, if you have to use clickers for a class – and you have to run the software because you are a TA, you will need to use a non-university email to register as an instructor. You won’t be able to sync anything like your roster, because the email address isn’t associated with your LMS.
  • No explanation has been giving for why allowing students to run the program is such a bad thing.
  • Once registered as an instructor, you can not register a clicker.
  • The instructions for how to use your license code that come in the box with a new clicker, contain instructions that are for students that do not use an LMS.  Following them can result in needing Turning Technologies’s support people to assist.
  • Courses that have rosters of more than 400 people cannot successfully connect with the Turning Technologies server without experiencing a time out. This goes for downloading the participant list and also for uploading grades. Turning Technologies currently is manually delivering the participant lists to our instructors via a support account that has been entered into those classes as a TA or Instructor. They are working on this and need to fix it. Fixed by software update from company. On the other hand, maybe not.  they are blaming our Blackboard “trafficking” on server time out issues.
  • Courses with large enrollments also getting server errors when attempting to start responseware. Fixed by software update from company. ??
  • During the first two days of class, students were receiving messages when trying to register saying that the code was invalid – but this was only because their server was over welmed. Apparently it was actually taking the license.  If a student tried again later, they would get a this code has already been used error.
  • Due to the tightening of security on the turningpoint system, session files and participant lists can no longer just be shared with another person by dragging it out of the folder and attaching to an email or shared drive space. (Note course coordinators!) These files must now be exported with a password that you then share with whomever you want to be able to open the file.
  • Also note previous post: https://you.stonybrook.edu/jadams/2014/08/26/turningpoint-cloud-is-damaged-and-cant-be-opened-you-should-move-it-to-the-trash/
  • There is no longer a  lookup device IDs for students who have registered in the Cloud only.  I used to use the Device ID lookup tool quite often to assist with Lost and Found devices.
  • Using RemotePoll for remote clicker sessions (we use it mostly for courses where we have more students than we can fit into one room. In this case we would stream the video into a second room and setup remote poll so that the students in the overflow room can still participate with the clickers), is now only between two windows machines over direct IP.  It used to have to be on a windows box in the remote room, but could be mac on the presenter machine.

I will update this as issues are resolved. Our classes started on 8/25/14.

andragogy, assessment, events, pedagogy, Teaching

Stony Brook University’s first local Summer Institute

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Faculty using low tech response cubes during a presentation

Faculty using low tech response cubes during a presentation

Attending the Summer Institute here on campus this week, primarily in the role of technology support and as a representative of TLT, was a really great experience.  There were many informative presentations given to prime the participating faculty for the workshop work that they would be diving into, including one given by Jennifer Frederick from Yale University’s Center for Scientific Teaching. The possibly confusing point here, is that while these Summer Institute sessions are all aimed at the departments involved in STEM education, and so therefore you are addressing a room filled with Biologists, Physicists, Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, Chemists, Engineers, etc….  “scientific teaching’ is not about teaching science, but rather teaching using effective methods that have been proven using scientific methodology.

It makes a lot of sense. These are primarily researchers. Don’t stand in front of them and tell them what they are doing wrong in the classroom and how to change it.  Show them what years of data have  to say about different aspects and strategies in teaching. Show them where they can find out data about the schools that their students are coming from (a great reason to hold these events at an individual institution or region is how you can really drill down to local issues – did you know that no schools in the Bronx even offer Physics in high school? (other than a charter school that doesn’t count because the students that go to that school don’t actually live in the Bronx)).

As soon as studies and data started to be presented to the faculty participating, I could feel them losing up and the defences coming down.  They became more comfortable and realized that they were home among their peers.

Structure of the Summer Institutes

Participants:

  • Engage in teaching and learning through interactive presentations, mini-seminars, group work, and discussions
  • Work in small groups to develop instructional materials for a general topic area
  • Design and adapt instructional materials that integrate active learning, assessment, and diversity and that have clear learning goals
  • Present and revise instructional materials based on fellow participants’ review and feedback

Three tenets of scientific teaching were explored everyday.

Active Learning (or Teaching)
Diversity
Assessment

Common activity teaching techniques that were demonstrated and then used in the faculty presentations included:

Think – Pair – Share
Student Response Systems (traditional clickers and low tech response cubes)
POE (Predict Observe Explain)
Demonstrations

IMHO the event went very well and CESAME did a great job bring it to SBU.  I hope everyone involved was happy with the outcomes and that the participants feel a bit revitalized the next time they are stepping into a classroom.

assessment, Teaching

Low Tech Clickers

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Here is a draft of a low tech clicker I am bring to the Summer Institute on Undergraduate STEM Education the week of July 7th.

draft of low tech clicker

draft of low tech clicker

When assembled, the students will have a cube that allows them  to chose from 6 possible answers.  The instructor in the room can easily see where the students are at by quickly scanning the colors being displayed.  It is also possible to show student confidence by encouraging them to hold them high if they are very confident and lower if less so.

grades, Teaching

Turningpoint Clicker grading issue

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Clickers are used to gain student involvement in even the largest classrooms. At Stony Brook University, a lot of our instructors will assign points to the students  whether they get the question right or not. Sometimes the same amount of points, sometimes not – and sometimes those grades make it to the grade book and sometimes, they only measure whether the students were responsive enough to merit attendance for the day.

So what does it mean if the results manager shows a 0 in the situation where the instructor gives points whether the students got the answers wrong or not? First, make sure that the instructor marked something as correct.  If most students have a grade of some sort – but one or two students have zeros across the board, this isn’t likely the issue. You can double check that something was marked as correct, by going to the Turningpoint Manage tab selecting a session, and clicking Edit Session.

example of the edit session window

example of the edit session window

In the above picture you can see that answer 1 is marked correct and that both incorrect and correct answers would get a value of 1. So this doesn’t account for the 0 in the results manager or grade book.

The next thing that could be wrong, could be that the student unwittingly was in “Send Message” mode, rather than just in the regular polling mode. To find out if this is the case, go to Manage tab, then while having a session highlighted, click the Reports button.

 

where to find the Session Log report

where to find the Session Log report

Then for the type of report, choose “Session Log.”  Here is where Turningpoint keeps messages that were sent to you when polls were open.  You can see below, someone did in fact send “Hi.”

Session Log from Turningpoint

Session Log from Turningpoint

However, you can also see that two students were sending in what they thought were answers to the polls.  If these students have zeros – you now know why.

3d, Teaching

3D Curation for your Class

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Are there objects that you want your students to closely observe from all sides, that you can’t easily just let them hold – maybe due to rarity, fragileness, general access issues… but that you personally have access to? Are there objects that would be better understood with that access, either from a 3d video model or a 3d printed model?  Accomplishing this type of project and putting these objects within reach of your students is probably easier than you imagine.

Watch this video and let your brain percolate.  Though this video shows the process from a desktop machine, the 123d Catch software can be run from a common ipad or iphone as well.

 

Let us know if you want some help with this kind of project!

Teaching

VoiceThread Curious?

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Stony Brook University has access to a large collection of lessons at Lynda.com. I was looking inside their offerings today, and found some information about VoiceThread. VoiceThread allows one to upload a presentation, and then gives group access to leave texts comments, whiteboard/markup annotations and also audible comments. VoiceThread is often mentioned as a great supplemental tool for online teaching and active learning – so I thought I would share a link to the video here:

Screen Shot 2014-04-17 at 10.49.20 AM

Student Discussions with VoiceThread

 

(if you aren’t a SBU member, you can follow this link: http://www.lynda.com/Business-Elearning-tutorials/Teacher-Tips/141465-2.html – otherwise, click on the picture above.)

This particular video is part of a series of teaching with technology videos that have been strung together under the series title: Teacher Tips with Aaron Quigley. You will find that the series includes other useful topic including:

  • Flipping Your Classroom
  • Using Evernote in the Classroom
  • Understanding the Common Core
  • iPad for Educators Basics
  • Using Prezi in the Classroom
  • Blogging in the Classroom

and many more.

 

andragogy, Teaching

Flipping your class

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When considering whether to flip your class, consider this: No one says you have to flip every single lecture. In fact, it’s probably easier inside your department politically if you just flip a couple of lessons.

Can you think of a few homework activities, that through the semesters, your students have always found especially challenging? Maybe those lessons should be the ones you flip. That way they can complete the assignments within a group in the classroom and with you and/or your TAs right there to help out.

There are some other advantages to only flipping a few classes as well. Throwing in a few flipped classes now and again will keep things fresher for the students. Having change-ups like this is more likely to create situations where the students are successfully learning in your class. Remember, humans learn when active, alert and practicing… not by sitting behind a desk and falling asleep.