Shrimp and Grits

It’s an unfortunate reality in education that if you want to use modern technology to teach, you’re quite likely going to be on your own. You can get some help from grants - if they’re available. You might be able to get some technology from all-too-eager textbook publishers, but these come with a price. Your students will likely foot the bill, and if you live in an economically depressed area areas like I do, your students can’t afford it.

So what do you do if you want to use technology, but you’re on a limited budget. You can’t, for instance, shell out the cash for a Sympodium. (Especially if the funds come out of your own pocket!) If you’re willing to put in a little effort, though, you can bring some modern technology into your classroom with relatively little cost. That’s what I’ve been doing this semester with my (used, but new to me) tablet PC.

At the beginning of the semester, I decided that I’d purchase a Tablet PC for classroom use. Since I was unable to get one through the school, I decided to scour Ebay for a used model. My choices were between a Toshiba PortegeM200 and a Thinkpad X40. Since the Toshiba was cheaper and sported a higher-resolution display, I went with the Toshiba. At the time, the Ebay price for a Toshiba M200 was around $500. I added another $100 to max out the memory so the system will run its fastest. Since I was due for a laptop upgrade anyway, this wasn’t such a bad cost to absorb. The problem was - that was about all the cost I could absorb. (Education salary, you see. )

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PZ Myers describes a study published in Science correlating courses in high school with success in college-level biology, chemistry, and physics courses. As you might expect, success in college chemistry increases when you take high school chemistry, success in college biology increases when you take high school biology, and success in college physics increases when you take high school physics.

However, a high school course in one science doesn’t translate to better grades in a different science. That’s unfortunate, but didn’t really surprise me. Many high school level science courses cover a lot of topics in a small amount of detail and don’t focus on connections between the sciences or the overall scientific method.

However, there appears to be one high school subject that increases success in all three of the studied college sciences, and that’s … math! This is unsurprising to me. As someone who’s taught freshman chemistry full-time for seven years (has it really been that long?), I’ve noticed that students who are proficient with math almost always succeed in freshman chemistry, and those who really struggle with math rarely succeed. As I’ve said to other teachers:

Give me a student who knows basic math, and I can teach her chemistry. But don’t expect me to teach her basic math and chemistry in one semester.

That said, I think this study isn’t all that useful unless the researchers had some way to control for the effects of self-selection bias on the results. In our state, at least, these high school science and advanced math courses examined are optional, and only students who demonstrate high aptitude in math and science already (which would probably translate to success in college science) and who are on the college prep track take them.

In my last Teaching Professor post, I talked about podcasting, and how I didn’t really feel I could use podcasts to benefit my students. In this post, I’m going to talk about a different session - one with things that I did feel I could use to help both my students and myself out.

Ricky Cox and Jamie Rogers (from Murray State) hosted a session on the uses of Tablet PCs in the classroom. A Tablet PC is a laptop with a built-in digitizer in its screen- on which you can write with the included pen.

This tablet looks much like a regular laptop, but it’s more than meets the eye.

You can fold the screen over the keyboard and write on the tablet’s screen almost like you’d write on a sheet of paper.

Cox and Rogers used their time to demonstrate several technologies and techniques that they felt added value to the classroom experience - even if only one tablet were available. A few applications I thought sounded interesting were:

• Improved, more interactive class sessions
• Complete, accurate sets of lecture notes available online shortly after each class.
• Virtual office hours

I’ve never been a big fan of Powerpoint (or other presentation tools like it). It’s great for making, well, presentations. In the classroom, though, I’ve mostly seen Powerpoint abused. I’ve seen instructors fly through difficult material because it was all on slides, and (sometimes) students had copies of the slides. I’ve seen instructors read slides at students while they slept - and so on. I’m partial to black/white boards for the classroom, because they force you to slow down some (so students can keep up), and because they remove the “rails” that Powerpoint keeps you on during a class.

Of course, the black/white boards have disadvantages, too. A major one has to do with note-taking. Students will quite often write things incorrectly into their notebooks - especially if the concept you’re going over is new to them. I’d almost go as far as saying that mangled chemical equations and equilibrium calculations are the norm in student notebooks. With Powerpoint at least, you know the parts typed onto the slide are correct.

With a tablet, you get the best of both worlds. You get the structure that using slides provides, but you also get the freedom to modify them on-the-fly. You could do this with Powerpoint and a blackboard, but with the tablet you can save copies of whatever you write on the tablet screen and distribute the notes online to your students afterwards. So, the students get an accurate set of notes - even if you use complex equations or drawings!^*** (This might sound familiar to those of you who use smartboards or sympodiums - the software that comes with most tablets is similar in operation to the sympodium software and has many of the same capabilities. Also, the tablet’s a whole lot cheaper, and can be taken back to the office!)

The ability to write out complex formulas and equations using a pen instead of things like chemdraw and equation editor - combined with the ability to give students copies of exactly what went on in class was enough to sell me on trying a tablet for my classes.^**** So far, it saves me a tremendous amount of time - even outside the classroom. It’s easy, for instance, to provide complete problem solutions for tests and homework - like this simple example from my introductory class (shrunk a bit for this post):

I could type something similar in an equation editor, and lay out the simple drawing with a word processor’s drawing tools. It’d look a bit neater, but it’d take me more than twice as long to get a solution out to students. I prefer to give quick feedback on practice sets and quizzes, and being able to write out solutions directly into my computer helps me post them fast. So far, that pleases my summer students, and it saves me a lot of time.

Cox and Rogers also mentioned using the tablet to host so-called “virtual office hours” - using a software package called Elluminate. Elluminate allows you to share a virtual whiteboard with other people over the net, along with text messages, voice chat, etc. I’ve experimented with virtual office hours in the past - back when IRC and ICQ were the only real-time messaging software out there. It didn’t work too well then, given the limitations of text-only communication. Elluminate solves some of those problems by adding voice chat and an interactive whiteboard, but at the cost of using a high-bandwidth CPU-intensive Java client that the students have to run to access your virtual hours. I can see how this might work well for a university campus, where fast computers and high-speed internet access are the norm, but most of my students (I teach at a technical/community college) use older computers and dial-up internet access. So unless my school starts giving out free computers and high speed internet access, I don’t see virtual office hours in my future.

All in all, the Cox/Rogers session was a good one to attend. I’d seen tablet PC technology before, but it was prohibitively expensive and little software support was out there. Now that the tablet has matured somewhat, going to the session and seeing the demonstration helped me see that it was a rather useful technology for a science teacher like me.

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^***One questioner actually asked the presenters if having these notes caused decreased class attendance and decreased grades. They said it didn’t seem to. I’d tend to agree, since those people who tend to skip class at the slightest excuse would skip even if they didn’t have an accurate set of class notes!

^****That’s not just a figure of speech. Shortly after the conference, I spent some of my own money on a (used) Toshiba M200 tablet from Ebay. That’s the one you see in the pictures above!

The second day of the Teaching Professor Conference was the “big day”. Too many sessions, and too little time to visit most of them.

The first session I was able to attend on Saturday was a session on podcasting - presented by Dave Yearwood of the University of North Dakota. The concept is pretty simple. A podcast is basically an audio (and/or video) feed that you can download from somewhere on the ‘net, slap onto your portable music player, and listen to … wherever. So why not use it for educational purposes? Apple, who wants to get an iPod into the hands of every man, woman, child, dog, and cat in the world, will even help out setting it up.

I see some potential in this. With very little effort, instructors could record and distribute lectures for students to use to prepare for tests. (More visual instructors might prefer to distribute digital video.) Of course, we’ve done this sort of thing for years with audio and video tape - but the digital formats are at least a lot less hassle for creator and listener alike.

Yearwood mentioned several things to consider before using podcasts:

1. What’s the point of the podcast?
2. What should a student get out of it?
3. How do you keep students interested?

All of these are valid questions, I think. If the purpose of distributing a recorded lecture is to help students study or to help students who missed a lecture catch up, then I’d not expect to see much gain from putting recorded lectures out there. (I would not be surprised to see a detrimental effect caused by students skipping class!) Should the podcasts cover core course content or be optional material?

Yearwood pointed out a few things about presentation. One was that the simplest ways to record audio (like mikes built into most laptops) result in poor quality audio. It’s difficult to get students to listen to poor quality audio. I agree with that, since I can’t stand listening to bad audio, either.

There’s also the time factor. Even if the audio quality is top notch, how many students would actually download and listen to an entire lecture - or something of comparable length - on their own time? More than 15 minutes or so, and nobody will listen. (Me, I’d say that time should be closer to five minutes, but …) Even fifteen minutes of talking might be too much, so Yearwood suggests spicing the podcast up with incidental music.

Yearwood (too) briefly mentioned some tools that instructors might use to create quality podcasts - audacity got a mention, and it’s freely available. (I have that installed on my laptop - it’s a nice audio recorder/editor.)

Up until the end of Yearwood’s presentation, I was largely undecided on whether or not I thought I could work podcasting into my courses. It seems like a lot of work, and might require some costly tools that I probably couldn’t easily get through my school. Plus, the benefits hadn’t been clearly demonstrated - would providing podcasts be in some way better than - say - having non-audio supplemental material available on a course web site for students?

What, I think, finally steered me away from using my very limited spare time to experiment with podcasting as an educational tool was the last few minutes of the presentation - where we listened to a podcast for students. The audio quality was quite good. There was incidental music, too. But I’ll be darned if I could figure out what that podcast was supposed to teach me. It just wasn’t … engaging. And if I can’t get engaged by podcasts, I doubt that I’ll be able to create podcasts that engage my students.

In my next post,. I’ll talk about a technology demonstrated at the conference that I will use.

The usual Friday features are on hold again this week, since I’m off to the Teaching Professor Conference in Atlanta.

The first day here was a bit rushed - since our college’s group left South Carolina and left for Atlanta at 6:30 in the morning and had some pre-conference sessions to attend at 9 AM. It’s a good thing that traffic wasn’t that bad coming out of the airport!

Today’s big session was the pre-conference session given by Chris Anson from NC State. It was about a topic that nearly all of us would agree deserves more time in the classroom, but that a lot of us struggle to find time to add: writing.

Anson made the point that we should often treat writing assignments not as a tool to teach writing, but as a tool to get students to think about class topics and organize their thoughts. I agree with that point, but I find myself unable to implement many writing assignments in some of my classes due to a few factors:

• Time. Instructors who teach labs usually have more hours actually in the classroom than other instructors. This leaves less time for reading student work and grading outside of class.
• I spend a lot of time in my lower level course teaching basic math skills like unit conversions, and there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to write about converting centimeters to meters.

That said, I do intend to add more of a writing aspect to my courses. I’ve set up a blog for my courses, and students will be required - as part of their grade - to leave a few sentences worth of commentary after each class on whatever class topic I’ve posted about. They’ll also be able to ask questions of me and each other via the blog comments. (I admit that getting students to answer each other’s questions in a public forum might be an uphill battle!)

The class blog can also serve as a way for the students to interact with each other outside of class. Our college consists entirely of commuters - many from rural areas who drive half an hour or more to get to class. These students find it very difficult to get together outside of class, with the result that students don’t have much opportunity to help out other students. Perhaps this will improve student-student communication.

The best way to assess these online writing assignments will also be something I’ll have to think about for a few days. Since the purpose of these assignments won’t be to teach writing itself, I shouldn’t have to worry about grading grammar and spelling. I should only be looking at the ideas.

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On an almost completely unrelated note, here are some views of Atlanta from the hotel window:

Day

Night

(Click to enlarge)

By now, you’ve probably seen this example of student “reasoning” on the internet somewhere.

I don’t believe that one was actual student work. Clever and amusing, but not real.

Real examples of bizarre student work look more like what you’re about to see. This is one student’s “scratch work” - for which he presumably intends to obtain some sort of partial credit. This is all of his scratch work from the entire test.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of grading. How many points do you think this student’s effort is worth? (You can probably guess how good this student’s actual answers were.)

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Just so you know, I didn’t mistakenly give a chemistry lab exam to a second grader. I do teach only adults in my classes.

And no, there were no questions that related to butterflies, dogs, or pigs.

There’s an article up on CNN about a new fad for cheaters - cheating via iPod.

Some students use iPod-compatible voice recorders to record test answers in advance and them play them back, 16-year-old Mountain View junior Damir Bazdar said.

This suggests to me that some of these classes might have other problems than iPods. How did these kids got “the answers” to record?

Others download crib notes onto the music players and hide them in the “lyrics” text files.

This is actually somewhat clever. It’s the twenty-first century equivalent to hiding notes as formulas in programmable calculators - a practice which goes back at least twenty years.

The solution to this particular problem is pretty obvious, though. As we do with cell phones, we simply disallow the use of iPods during tests. In most classes, the iPod would have any legitimate use during a test! Of course, some students are not happy with such policies:

Kelsey Nelson, a 17-year-old senior at the school, said she used to listen to music after completing her tests — something she can no longer do since the ban. Still, she said, the ban has not stopped some students from using the devices.

To that I’d simply say … Kelsey, blame the students who decided to use their iPods to cheat. Were it not for them, you could still listen to your music. Of course, the school could modify the policy to state that iPods were allowed after a test had been turned in.

“You can just thread the earbud up your sleeve and then hold it to your ear like you’re resting your head on your hand,” Nelson said. “I think you should still be able to use iPods. People who are going to cheat are still going to cheat, with or without them.”

Sure, some people are going to cheat no matter what^***. Banning iPods during testing, though, has two points:

1. To make it a little more difficult to cheat. There are a substantial number of people out there who would be tempted to cheat instead of study if cheating was very easy to do. Those are the ones we are trying to prevent from cheating. The hard-core cheaters … well, those we just have to catch and get rid of^****.
2. To make it easier to bust cheaters who try to hide their cheating devices. All we’ve gotta do with a no-iPods policy in place is show that the cheater had an iPod out during a test. Otherwise, it’s much more hassle to get a cheating accusation to stick - since it would require us to find out exactly how the student hid the information on the iPod.

Despite iPods being all the rage, here at the college the old ways of cheating seem to be the most common ways. Notes written on a desk or body part, small pieces of paper pushed up the sleeve, a strategically placed scrap of notes on the floor … all of these are still in common use. Even formulas in calculators pop up occasionally - though this seems a little less common these days. Most of my students view their TI-99 calculator much like someone of my generation would have viewed a slide rule. (I can’t tell you how many students I’ve had to teach to do simple math functions on their TI!) I guess the iPods and cell phones are easier to use!

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^***These folks almost always have terrible grades - at least in college where I encounter them.^****Sound harsh? The hard-core cheaters often brag about it to other students, lowering the morale of the entire class.

One of the many hats I wear here at the college is that of student adviser. On the surface, it seems a simple task; look at the student’s courses and make sure they stay on track for their major. But it’s less easy than it looks.

A colleague of mine was advising a student recently. I overheard, since all of the science department offices are clustered right next to one another. This student had declared nursing as a major, and had just finished our remedial English and math courses - making him ready to move on to introductory algebra and freshman composition and some freshman-level college courses.

To qualify for admission into the nursing program^***, however, this student still needs to take a four semester sequence of introductory anatomy, college anatomy, physiology, and microbiology. There’s a small wrinkle; he’s attempted the introductory anatomy course one time already and had to drop because he wasn’t doing well. One more poor grade would drop him into academic probation.

So, this student is looking at no fewer that eight semesters until he can graduate with an associate’s degree in nursing and become an R.N. It’s going to be a long road for this student. For many in similar situations, it is an impossible road. Most students who drop out of our simplest anatomy course for academic reasons do not make it into the nursing program, and fewer still actually make it through.

Still, though, everyone deserves their shot. This is one of the students that you put into his courses, warn him that his performance in these introductory courses will determine if he gets into nursing or not, and suggest that there are other programs - like surgical technology^**** - that he could get into and land a hospital job in year or so. And if he’s still gung-ho on nursing, you point out places - like the tutoring center - that will increase his chances of making it through his upcoming science classes.

So, my colleague starts figuring out what courses this student needed, and the student drops his bombshell. He wasn’t really interested in being a nurse. He was going to go to medical school and be a doctor. The nursing degree, he said, was just something to do until he became a doctor.

My colleague, sounding a bit surprised by the student’s revelation, suggests that the student might want to change his major to one of our degrees meant for college transfer. Most of the courses required to get an associate’s in nursing are specific to the program - and not accepted for credit at a university. At this point that the student becomes defensive and accuses my colleague of “being negative”. Apparently, the student doesn’t want to hear that the path they’ve chosen might not be the best way to reach his goal.

So what can you do with a student like this? Not a lot, I’m afraid. It makes me sad. This student sees us as an adversary - an obstacle they must jump over to reach his goal. That view will hurt him every time he steps into a classroom, and may very well contribute to his goals remaining forever out of reach.

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^***Our school has an open-door policy. Essentially, anyone who wants to come out here can come. Individual programs do have entry requirements, though. Even so there are usually multiple ways to get into a program. For nursing, students who don’t score high enough on the SAT can earn their way into the program by completing their required biology and math courses. After they have proven themselves, they’ll be accepted to the program.

^****Surgical technology doesn’t pay as well as nursing, but it requires only a single anatomy course. Students who can’t handle the anatomy and microbiology requirements for nursing can often succesd in this program.

Take a look at this graph, showing college enrollment (in thousands of students) from the 1970s through 2005.

Source data: US Census Bureau

The red curve is what you probably expected. College enrollment increases fairly steadily with time. (The sharp dip in the late 70s is an artifact of changing the method of counting students).

But there’s a wrinkle. The red curve counts only undergraduates at four-year colleges. The blue curve shows the situation in America’s two-year colleges: community colleges, junior colleges, and technical colleges. Enrollment in our two-year colleges is flat, and has been so since the early 1990s. Before 1990, two-year college enrollment grew along with four-year enrollment.

Is the conventional wisdom that you need at least a bachelor’s degree to get any kind of worthwhile job now so entrenched that nobody thinks to go to a two-year school anymore?

Since I teach at a two-year school, the flat enrollment figures concern me. I worry that students who are perfectly capable of getting a two-year degree and a good job^*** are being siphoned off by four-year schools - who then proceed to chew many of them up and spit them out without either a degree or useful job skills.

So, why are two-year college numbers so flat? Your thoughts?

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^***Who do you think has better job prospects? A new registered nurse with an associate’s degree in nursing, or someone who has just gotten their bachelor of arts in English?

Students love multiple choice questions. I typically have several types of questions on my
chemistry tests. If I tell my students that there will be only, say, fifteen multiple choice questions on the upcoming test, I will almost always have several students frown and ask for more.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to give in and just give a multiple choice test like these students want. After all, multiple choice questions are the easiest kind of test question to grade, and I don’t have any assistants to grade papers for me.^*** But I don’t give in. The reason? Because students almost always perform more poorly on multiple choice questions than they do on “harder” question types.

Why?

Some students will tell me that they like multiple choice questions because the right answer is already on the paper, and it’s easier to find the answer in a list than it is to figure the answer out. This might actually be part of the reason that students do so poorly on multiple choice tests: They don’t think that they have to figure anything out, and they expect multiple choice questions to be like this:

These charged particles are normally found inside the nucleus of atoms.
A) birds
B) cheeseburgers
C) oranges
D) orangutans
E) protons

… where the right answer is immediately obvious, even if you don’t know a darned thing about chemistry or the nuclear model of the atom. Instead, they get questions more like this:

These charged particles are normally found inside the nucleus of an atom.
A) borons
B) electrons
C) neutrons
D) photons
E) protons

This is still an easy question, but some students will miss it. These same students are able to draw a picture of and describe the basic details of the nuclear model of the atom in a later (not multiple choice) question on the same test! My conclusion is that the student misses the multiple choice question because he simply doesn’t expect to have to think about it.

I see the same thing with multiple choice questions that involve a calculation. If the same problem is presented as a multiple choice question and as a problem where they have to write their answer in a blank, the students will miss the multiple choice problem more often. They will try to do the multiple choice problem directly on their calculators (despite scratch paper being available), while they will usually write down the steps of the problem where they have to put their own answer in a blank.

In summary, if any students are reading this - don’t ask for more multiple choice questions! They’re not really “easier” than any other kind of question, and they’re more likely to bring your grade down!

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^***Well, except for this assistant. But you don’t want her grading your paper!