Social Media in Uni. Teaching

Exploring the effective use of social media in university education.

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Reflect, then choose what to use!

There are many reasons why instructors are drawn towards using new technology in their teaching...

it's shiny, it's new! it's fancy! Let me try it!

it seems like everyone's picking up on this... I don't want to be a dinosaur... I better do it too

My students are from an alien world, I better pick up on their alien techniques.

allows you to communicate more effectively with my students

is really going to help them achieve the learning objectives you set out for them

is going to help prepare students for assessment

is going to allow students to share their work with each other/ learn from each other/ share ideas/ debate ideas/ etc.

allows you to track their participation

allows your students more creativity in their assessments

saves time/ saves paper/ saves hassle

and on and on... Those sound better!  If you take the time to reflect on your reasons for using certain technologies, you can make better choices as to which ones to incorporate into your classroom. After all, you can't (and shouldn't!) choose them all.  Even the most technologically inclined student is likely to be overwhelmed by a class blog,  a class wikiversity project, in-class polls, participation tweets, and online discussion boards.  Select one or two resources that suit your teaching style, your subject matter, and your class size, use them often (so students get used to it) and use them well.  If you have identified learning objectives for your course topics, ensure that your use of technology helps students meet them.  Use technology to complement your teaching style, and ensure that both you and your students benefit from the addition of the technology.  

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New Age Study Groups

Do you have one of those epic study stories, where you just conquered the material and became one with the course? When discussing study habits of undergraduates, I immediately think of hunkering down with my best friend in a cave (might-as-well-have-been) at school.  We happily hashed out what the professor would think was most important, practiced explaining tough concepts to each other, fixed each others' diagrams, and subsequently aced the heck out of the exam. 

But it wasn't really always like that. First of all, I didn't make many friends within my department until 3rd year - that bestie included.  Studying up until that year consisted of my head in a book at the kitchen table, one hand scribbling madly and the other fueling my 15 hour study days with peanut butter and raisin covered apple slices (weird?).  There might be more highlighted on the textbook page than not, and "key definitions" I intended to put on cue cards would end up as giant piles of long-form notes in cue card shapes.  That doesn't sound so bad, I suppose, but how much more successful would I have been with a study group?  Or even if not more successful, how much more engaged with the material would I be? How much less anxious would I feel knowing that I had reached consensus with other students about what was important?

Enter: Social Media

Other than the handful of students that immediately join science club in first year, how do new students find a good study group?  In my early years, it was often announced to us "Don't have a study group? Make a study group!", or "Come chat with me in office hours, I'm all alone....".  Although in theory these are fine ideas, I rarely did turn to my neighbour and ask to be study friends and I, like my 900 classmates, wasn't ready to plunge into hanging out with the professor in office hours. Study groups are one area where social media can fill in a gap where traditional methods alone don't work for the majority of students.

Taylor Bell, a Google Student Ambassador at Boise State University, certainly knows how to use social media to study.  He uses a combination of Youtube and Google+.  There are thousands of educational videos on Google, and Taylor assembled a selection of relevant math solutions into a play list to aid his studying. Pretty awesome.  But Taylor takes it to the next level by making a hangout with his classmates in Google+.  Admittedly, I haven't ventured into the Google+ world yet, but this sounds awesome.  The students can help each other out when they are online and available in their own class "hangout", and you can even set it so that the rest of your Google+ world doesn't intervene when you're in study mode (when combined with the all-important self-control). 

This sounds amazing for online classes, but also for a jumping off point for any class. The "hangout" aspect of Google+ sounds hard to beat, but certainly facebook groups and OWL forums can be used with the same intention. 

In fact, I did attempt to set up an OWL forum study group in which students must ask a new question if they answer someone else's, but it didn't catch on as much as I would have liked.  I can't say why it didn't work better, but I wonder if students prefer to have this sort of 'casual' study discussion in a 'casual' forum, and OWL just doesn't offer that casual vibe. 

Lesson learned: the venue matters.

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Who's twitter-teaching?

I've selected four very innovative, but totally different, ways of using twitter in teaching, both in and out of the classroom.  Have a look and think about how you could adapt these in your teaching. 

Dr. Margaret Rubega's students are now addicted to tweeting about bird behaviour as they see it. Check Andrew Revkin's article On Birds, Twitter, and Teaching. 

Here's what I love:

1. The students get to immediately connect what they see (bird behaviour) to class material. Students are thinking about your class when they're not physically in class or working on a paper for class, and that's a win.

2. It sounds really fun. Can you imagine the students saying to their friends "Ugh, I have to tweet about this bird I just saw pretending it has a broken wing"? Me neither.

3. This seems way easier to manage as an instructor than managing and displaying tweets in class. An assignment like this would be a good place to start with using twitter in your teaching. 

Dr. Mark Sample uses twitter in a lot if interesting ways. For example, check out his students' live tweets as they watch Blade Runner or how they share their definitions of aliens.

Here's what I love

1. For this class, students were required to watch the movie on their own time. Tweeting gives them this great opportunity to share ideas in even though they're watching it wherever and whenever. I imagine the resulting discussion is much more fruitful when the class does meet again, given that they've already been sharing bullet point ideas.

2. It's an interesting way to gauge student understanding and perceptions. If you ask the class to define something, you certainly will get an idea of what the handful of outspoken students think.  However, those who don't respond for a variety of reasons in traditional discussions certainly have valuable opinions as well.

Dr. Monica Rankin's use of twitter in history class to add to discussion.

Here's what I love:

1. Student participation is much greater, and those who may not be inclined to put their hand up still share their opinions. 

2. Many more opinions are able to be shared than would be in a traditional discussion.

I think if you decided to go a similar route, you would really need to follow this model every (or most) weeks in order for students to get comfortable with the system.  It wouldn't fit with every style of class or tutorial but those that do require a lot of discussion could benefit from a similar model. 

Dr. Daisy Pignetti's uses twitter in a number of ways, but one I particularly like is her use in both distance ed and in class settings as a way to get students to share ideas about readings before the real discussion begins.

Here's what I love:

1. It's simple.

2. It encourages students to be prepared for discussion (actually DO readings). I would think the motivation comes not only from having to make comments or questions before class starts (which some instructors may already require in hardcopy) but the fact that your entire class can see what you wrote. There's some accountability and more incentive to have an original idea. 

3. It seems very effective as a community building tool in her distance ed courses. Cool idea.

Four well-executed ideas. What else have you seen?

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Blogging for B's

Blogs have fantastic potential for use by instructors as learning aids for their students, or as new creative ways for students to submit assignments. Have a look (and a listen!):

Alex Ruthman makes very effective use of his Oakland University Music Listening Blog.  What a wonderful resource for his students to have the music linked right to the blog entry, with well executed prompting questions. 

Here's what I love:

1. Everything in one place. This is one of the greatest assets of an instructor blog. Not so long ago I took the History of Rock and Roll at Western, and spent a lot of time flipping through notes while listening to the mixed CD, trying to figure out what I was supposed to get out of it.  Although that course certainly was a favourite of mine, I can see how the ease of checking out a Listening Blog like this one would really drive home to the students what the important points are, according to your own instructor, and not according to a textbook.

2. Students can ask questions right when they have them.  By any other format, students may forget, or not feel like bothering themselves or the instructor by asking them a question about a song they listened to a week ago.  There's an immediacy to listening to music, where you might feel inspired to make a comment right then, and this way you can do so.

3. It's fun. Or maybe the course just is. But you better believe I'm listening to classical music right now!

The challenge - copyright.

How could you use this in your class? Post and comment or ask questions about relevant news articles? Post informative videos?

Next is an example from Beth Hundey's first year geography class (shameless - that's me!).  I asked the students to create and submit a Photo Reflection Portfolio. The contents of this portfolio included four pictures of different geographical features.  With each picture they included a description of the feature and the various processes involved in creating such a feature.  The students were then on the lookout for features that interested them (clouds, animal adaptations, mass movements, vegetation patterns, evidence of glaciation, etc etc!) and had to spend time connecting what they see in the world around them, including on campus, to what they learned in class.  They enjoyed the chance to get creative, and some students added mood music or did extra coding to make their site just how they wanted it, or added biographies about their new lives as amateur geographers. This was a nice break from the weekly labs for the students, the TAs, and me, and the results were all enjoyable to read. Judging by the quality of work between the labs and this assignment, I could tell that the students overall put more of an effort into this activity, maybe because it was interest driven.  If I were to do this again, I would make a class blog and link all of the student blogs to it so they could easily see each others' pictures. 

There's one more idea that I want to share that a participant of the seminar and I were discussing.  Rather than have students each make a blog, it would be great to have an entire class blog. There's a number of ways that you could set this up, but one way would be to make a tumblr account just for your class.  Give the information to all of your students. You could, for example, have them post and comment on relevant news item each week.  If you agreed upon a posting schedule ahead of time, students groups could be responsible for posting relevant news during a particular week and moderating the comments. In the end, you would have a record of the news that was important to your class all in one place, with appropriate multimedia links. 

There are many other examples in which instructors and students are required to make blogs, a quick google search would reveal them. For other ideas, many of the groups dealing with Social Media Scenarios (recorded in the first five posts of this blog) utilized blogs in their proposed solutions. 

What other uses can you think of?

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If you're interested in using twitter in the classroom, check out this video, The Twitter Experiment, featuring the use of twitter in Dr. Rankin's History class at UT Dallas.  Directed, edited and filmed by Kim Smith.

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Sites that might jive with your university teaching

The options for using social media in the classroom certainly are vast. Here are a few select sites that can be used to augment your traditional class design. Students are using many of these sites anyway, consider using them to your advantage!

One note I will make is that with most of these social media sites, your life will be made much easier if you communicate to your students that they need to include one unique, mutually agreed upon phrase in the title of their post (or as a hashtag in twitter) to make them easily searchable.

twitter - See post below for more information

youtube - An important hub for silly cats and daring people, but also for education! Students can submit videos for assessment, or instructors can post interesting/ relevant explanatory videos on the OWL site or their own blog. 

screencast - The password protected alternative to youtube

polleverywhere - The one that allows you to text/ use the web to make polls in real time on a powerpoint slide. And seriously - who texted the word "crotch"? I was going to stage something mildly inappropriate as a demonstration of the downside of this social media technique, but forgot, so that was a real help. 

camtasia - Sorry folks - it's a trial only- I made my video from today in the trial period. Let me know if you know a free alternative!

pinterest - I didn't talk about this in interest of time, but pinterest can be used as a learning tool as well. I'm not sure it's as widely applicable as the others, but perhaps you can think of a way to use it? I've seen it used as a way to "collect" art of different moods or styles. I will post the link soon!

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Huh? What? Meet you on the TweetDeck?

There may have been a few things I mentioned in the social media seminar that flew by first-time-twitterers (Yes, it's a term). Most of twitter flies by me too, but I can attempt to catch you up to speed with at least the few tools and terms I mentioned today.

You might not be able to pinpoint where you first heard about twitter. I think I notice it most often on the news or in the media rather than anywhere else, because these days, anyone with a hashtag and an opinion can end up weighing in on the evening news.  Remember, a #hashtag is a searchable term in twitter, and is just the good old pound sign followed by key words, with no spaces. These are useful if you use twitter in teaching because you can pick your own hashtag like we did today and search for all of your students' tweets. Try searching for #uwotsc in the search toolbar of twitter, and it should bring up the tweets from today.

The TweetDeck (pictured above!) is one of a number of applications (although this one is made by twitter itself) that allow for more streamlined viewing of your tweets. Check it out in the picture - the column on the right is my regular timeline - I would probably remove this column if I was teaching so that if a friend compliments my halloween costume it doesn't distract from the lecture.  The middle column I added is a search column - it only displays tweets that include #uwotsc. How cool is that? The left column is mentions - those of you who wrote directly to my @twittername ended up here! If I were teaching I would probably make them all search terms but there are lots of other options too.

And, if you're getting advanced...

I also briefly mentioned archiving tweets - this is to help manage your tweets. With any sized class, the amount of tweets you get could pile up pretty quickly! One of the best reference I have seen for archiving and assessing tweets that I have found is Practical Advice for Teaching With Twitter by Mark Sample. He discusses tools like The Archivist which keep track of tweets of a certain hashtag.  Mac users like me will have to look elsewhere.

Happy Tweeting!

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Scenario 5: Online study venue

Professor B’s first year class in your field did worse than expected on the midterm, especially the short answers. Professor B is desperate to find some way to help her students learn how to study big concepts and connections between concepts rather than to memorize trivial facts.  She always tells students that the best way to practice for these questions is to practice explaining concepts to others, but the students don’t seem to follow her advice.  She expects the students don’t know each other well enough to form study groups.  Help her to design an online ‘venue’ for students to ask and answer practice questions of their peers. Include strategies for encouraging students to use this resource in your design.

I don't seem to have the response from the lone group that tackled this scenario, but their ideas were great, involving OWL forums for students to interact with eachother and ask questions. A TA would be assigned to the forum to make sure the students are in fact feeding each other correct information.  Wikiversity would be used to summarize main material points and would be a class effort.

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Scenario 4: Large Class + Many Presentations = No Fun?

Professor LeBlanc has a greater enrollment than usual in his first year class in your field.  Usually, he is able to have pairs of student give a presentation about a topic of their choice in front of the class, but it seems impossible to schedule so many students without taking up too much lecture time. Without giving up his assignment all together (he likes the creativity that students bring to presentations and the chance to learn from peers), help Professor LeBlanc design an alternative format that’s more fitting for a larger class.

Here are some interesting solutions:

Mystery group, mystery title

Using screencast

students can video record their presentation and post to screencast for the rest of the class to view

in Blog format, students will be required to comment on a set # of the posted presentations

play short video/ some clips in class.

Cons of using social media that are addressed here:

not an in-class distraction

screencast deals with privacy issues

requires participation by all students

Cons not addressed

technical knowledge needed (different skill sets)

format issues

Assessment:

mark participation (comments)

mark video on established criteria

feedback

Mystery Group 2:

uses blogging

students to make blog about presentation topic.

a three-minute summary in class may be in order

students will complete their blogs by the mid-point

students will post a 2nd blog, referencing 3 of their fellow students' blogs

Questions aimed at motivating discussion and directing subsequent lectures will be encouraged.

Cons addressed:

outside class

password protected

Cons not addressed:

Also seems overly complex, why not larger groups?

difficult/ labour intensive, harder to moderate

Assessment

assessment of understanding blog to blog

assessment of comprehension/ participation in 2nd blog

Mystery Group 3:

Using Tumblr

Save time

Can see the presentation more than once

Cons that are addressed:

anxiety reduced

Cons that are not addressed

technical problems

Thoughts: Great ideas! I love the idea of having the students comment (and therefore watch) a certain number of videos. This way they still get to see some videos but do not have to sit through hours of presentations (or videos for that matter) in class.  Replacing with blogging is definitely a more manageable creative outlet than having 50+ 10 minute presentations! It's a good point about group size, but there are certainly limits to those as well. 

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Scenario 3: Lab/ Design Synthesis

You are a teaching assistant for an upper year class with many lab and design components.  The instructor has asked you to design a project in which the students synthesize all of the data, photos, videos, etc. they’ve collected in the field component throughout the course into a well-organized report/ document.  Design an outline for the project in which the students use social media instead of a hard copy.

Here are a couple of groups' ideas:

1. LaBlog

using tumblr and youtube

multiple entry format (post over time, removes work overload)

one encompassing post at the end of the course, and one introductory/ exploratory post at the beginning of the course (both for structure)

have students record video for the end product of the lab and also for any failure that occurs during the setup/ experiment.

how to include equations? > latex, picture, touchscreen.

and I believe this one is also for this scenario, correct me if I'm wrong

2. Video Portfolio

Using screencast

produce short animated lecture combining all of their works, with the end of the animation being transport to a poster. 

Addressing the cons associated with social media

privacy protected through password

Which cons are not addressed?

students are required to learn software independently

3. Mystery title

Have students design a blog (tumblr, wordpress, etc) with the following considerations:

specific number of pictures/ videos

flow of information

specific length

structure, ease of use

single entry

Allows for a more natural approach to reporting - writing on a blog feels more free form and might encourage  creative interpretations and descriptions of results. 

Cons addressed:

accessibility: students should have access to public PCs

Privacy: passwords - anonymous blogs where only the prof knows

Comfort - can write in whatever they are comfortable with and "copy" it over.

Great ideas! I know it was a bit of a stretch making video in some of your classes, but these uses for video are so widely applicable! Very interesting ideas. And yes, accessibility certainly is an issue that we didn't talk about, but free sites that are available on the web should be accessible to all.

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Scenario 2: Revamped reflection writing

You are teaching an upper year class for the second time. Last year, you had the students write weekly reading reflections, but the students did not seem to build on their knowledge from week to week. Redesign the reflection writing assessment for this year in a way that will encourage students to engage more with the material and to build their personal interests in the course using social media.

Here are two ideas to get the students more engaged:

1. Group 3:

Post one log entry per week and each entry must link to past material and personal interests.

Establish guidelines will be produced such as content requirements, length, etc.

Sometimes the professor will propose a question to guide the students

Cons associated with social media that are addressed:

privacy

students may attempt to copy others

Cons which are not addressed

It is hard to engage an uninterested student

How to assess?

whether it is written weekly

whether all components are included.

2. Building Blogs

 Students must write their weekly reading responses as posts (on sakai?), which includes links to prior posts, other students' posts, and external sources. Encourage the students to comment on each other's blogs.

Addressing the cons of using social media:

Privacy: password-protected blog, where only the class members have access

Impropriety: students may post indecorously

Weaknesses, cons not addressed:

Time management: moderating the blog would likely take a lot of time

Grading: It may be difficult to set up a reasonable grading rubric

Assessment

Grades can be given for each blog post. High grades are given to students who coherently link their post to other posts (which assesses their engagement with others and their own previous thoughts).

Great ideas to both of these groups! Blogs are really journals, and that has a different feel than a hard copy that literally leaves your hands.  The likelihood of skimming your old hardcopy reflections is very low, but perhaps with a blog, students will be more likely to remember what they wrote before by skimming over it again. You are right that moderating posts can take some time, but if you're someone who already finds that you make a lot of comments to students, perhaps it's not much more time. You would certainly want to consider that when agreeing upon TA hours.

Can you imagine if during your undergrad you could write back to your TA when they gave you comments? A bit scary but also fantastic.  Again, cool ideas.

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Scenario 1: A creative replacement for a skeletal muscle lab

The instructor of the first year course you TA noticed her students seem to be bored and creatively unchallenged with her standard (and slightly repetitive) weekly laboratory assignments. Design for her a new, creative assessment, incorporating social media, to replace the lab surrounding next week's topic, the skeletal muscle system

Here are two groups' interesting solutions:

1. Interaction of skeletal muscles in every day activities

Photo reflections assignment (for a kinesiology class)

assign students a general "area" of the body and ask them to post a photo of that area in use, describing the muscles involved in the activity and how they interact

e.g. someone may post a photo of a hockey player and describe the interactions of the leg muscles as that person skates. Someone else may choose a soccer player kicking a ball, or a ballet dancer.

this allows students to relate the assignment to their own interests and allows them to view different activities and muscle involvement in them, even in the same region (e.g. legs)

Cons of using social media that are addressed:

outside of class so not distracting in class

accessibility - can use computers in the library

inappropriate language - being graded and not anonymous

privacy - password protected.

Cons that are not addressed:

class size - could be a lot of marking.

2. Social Media and the MS System

Using a blog website (like tumblr) for group assignments in which students have to start a blog on an assigned topic and moderate the comments. Students also have to comment on at least two other group blogs. 

Cons of using social media that are addressed:

focused idea - topics pre-assigned

privacy can be protected

Cons that are not addressed:

plagiarism?

more time consuming to create

How will you assess students?

Content posted is correct (quality)

participation in own blog as well as others (quantity)

My own thoughts: Two really great ideas! I think students would really enjoy both of these creative projects and seeing what their peers come up with.  Extra incentive if you know your classmates will see it too!

Some extra things to sort out with blogging projects are: How do you logistically keep track of whose blog/ comments are whose? How do you assess someone's ability to moderate if no one chooses to comment on their particular blog? Will you need a central 'venue' for all of the blogs to be linked from?