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Create Turning Account here

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You need to create an account if you are an instructor using clickers.

If you are a student buying a new clicker – the box should contain a code so that there is no charge to create an account.

If you are a student and have an existing registered clicker and are registered for the fall 2014 semester – you will be receiving a code via e-mail at your stonybrook.edu account. This code will get you a account and a year of responseware free. Do not pay for an account.

This is the link to sign-up for a new turningpoint account:

http://account.turningtechnologies.com/

 

assessment, grades, tutorial

Clicker registration changing

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This Fall, Turning Technologies is changing their software to a cloud based registration system.  This doesn’t change it’s functionality for it’s use in the classroom or class preparation, and the software is already available online here:

turningpoint cloud image

 

 

As an instructor, be sure to create a turning account that is an “Instructor” account.
We are still using Turningpoint 5 till the end of the Summer II session, and therefore do not have the new building block for the cloud version installed on Blackboard. (Getting a roster/uploading grades will not work in TurningPoint Cloud till the Fall semester.) Just tried – and you can get your roster from the new software with the current production server of Blackboard.

 

The only difference in functionality is that we are allowing the use of ResponseWare for iOS/Android/web. This will allow students to use their smart device or laptop instead of a physical clicker — if you allow it. There are things to consider beforehand; like whether you want them using their devices in the classroom, the fact that they can poll in from remote locations (with assistance from a student in the class feeding them info), possible saturation of our wireless infrastructure and possible lack of cell service penetration.

 

Call me if you have any questions and here is a video showing how to download the new software and create your cloud account:

 

tutorial

iPads and Office – a friday feature exploration

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So – truth be told, I’ve pretty much stopped using Microsoft Office for a while now. This makes me a great person to try a new install though right?

What have I been using?  Well, I will preface this by saying that I am an old school Macintosh user. That being said, I have used OpenOffice, the iWorks Suite (Keynote, Numbers and Pages) and more recently the Google Docs apps.

Google Docs

Google Docs

Some people still want MSOffice though. They even want it on their iPads. The question that I got recently, was whether or not the Office365 that we had as part of our Stony Brook campuswide MS agreement could get you access to the iPad apps.  My answer was no – but I’m going to upgrade my machine today and make sure this is true.

So first I’m going to go to the software area of the it.stonybrook.edu page. Note I’m doing this on my desktop machine, not the ipad. I see a link about Office 365 which doesn’t say anything about the Word, Powerpoint or Excel. I’m going to create an account anyway – the drive space looks interesting/useful. The login page is here: https://stonybrook365-my.sharepoint.com/

Use your campus e-mail. For me that’s jennifer.adams@stonybrook.edu and hit enter.

A small Authentication Required window drops down.  Don’t use your NetID, but use your e-mail address again, and your NetID password.

Now that I have started up the Office 365 account online on my desktop, I want to see if this login info will work on the ipad. I’m going to Microsoft Word for iPad in the App Store and downloading the app. The app is just something that says… hey get Office 365 and login here – not much of an app, but we have a login now – let’s try it. I get this screen:

 

ipad app login

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m going to pick “organizational account”.  Login with my e-mail and NetID password.. and I get something that prompts me to buy Office 365 Home (boo) or “View for Free”. Trying ‘View for Free” opens up the Word application. Trying to create a new document confirms that this isn’t going to work. I can only read files, not create or edit files.

Interestingly enough, back on the desktop, there is an option to create a new file in OneDrive and clicking on this takes me to Word Online…. and I can see the new document I just made back on the iPad and open it (but not edit it). hum.  Seems odd.

So – the end result is that if you get your free SBU Office365 account setup and download the Word for iPad app, you can connect together your OneDrive cloud storage, which gives your access to a full cloud based Word application on your desktop, but only a reader on your iPad. To me this = fail. At least you know what you are getting now. Including the cloud versions of Word, Excel PowerPoint, OneNote and Excel survey, which weren’t mentioned on the original SBU page as being included for the desktop. ***  

*** read the comments for a work around involving using the iphone app, rather than the ipad app.

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.

andragogy, assessment, grades, tests

Google Forms as a virtual clicker

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Students could use laptops, ipod touches, or smart phones in class to respond to questions from the instructor. If you keep the “poll” or quiz open, you can also collect answers asynchronously for online/flipped learning. The answers are dumped to a spreadsheet, so you have all the data for assessment, attendance and participation.

poll seen from iphone

poll seen from iphone

events

Innovation + Disruption Symposium Keynote, plus additional talks

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Skip to around 9 minutes in to hear Clayton Christensen’s keynote. It is definitely the story of those who pay no attention to history are doomed to repeat it, with great storytelling analogies involving the steel and automotive industries. I was particularly interested in the bit about how the only companies to survive the industry disruption were those who set up a silo operation whose task it was to take down and control the main companies interests. (edX anyone?)

Also some interesting points about the significance of our Alumni and how so few things we do for students contribute to their ultimate support of our brand. (And how those things that do matter are not given any consideration in any meaningful way.)

Around 2 hours 20 minutes in, is a talk by Karen Harpp which has a very interesting description of the engagement of alumni and the current students for a particular class on the development of the atomic bomb. This included face to face and video conference interaction with the alumni. She also discusses a nice project that went over the course of several weeks where students did roleplay on twitter.

Screen Shot 2014-05-07 at 1.24.57 PM

how alumni participated during the course

In between the Keynote and the talk about the innovative course talk, was a panel of college presidents, which I found to be rather disingenuous. I couldn’t help but think that these people got their positions because of their ability to talk and represent themselves well, not necessarily because they were actually suited to be candidly talking about disruption happening in higher education.

 

Emerging Tech for a Changing Edu

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