Faculty Using Technology

Spotlight on Instructional Technology: How Can Online Collaboration Tools Enhance Teaching?

Online collaboration tools, such as Google Apps, are revolutionizing workplace productivity and teamwork. These technologies also provide tremendous opportunities to enhance teaching, learning, and course management. Because keeping up with the evolution of new instructional technologies can be challenging, CRLT has posted some new resources focused on U-M teachers who are successfully integrating these tools into their courses: 
  • CRLT's webpage on online collaboration tools features short videos, descriptions, and examples of U-M instructors teaching effectively with these technologies.
  • Similarly, CRLT's Occasional Paper No. 31 (pdf), describes how various online collaboration tools can address common teaching challenges across course types and disciplines. Additionally, it provides recommendations on how to implement these instructional technologies easily, effectively, and efficiently.

And here are several other resources we provide to support your effective use of instructional technologies:  Read more »

Submitted by tbraun on Tue, 11/27/2012 - 10:42am
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Managing a Large Course Using Google Apps

A short video describing these teaching strategies can be seen here.

Jeff Ringenberg, School of Engineering, teaches Engineering 101 which has 675 students and an instructional team of approximately 25 GSIs, graders, etc. Due to the scale of the course, Ringenberg has employed a variety of Google Apps efficiently manage this large number of students and instructors.

ENGIN101 uses Google Docs to (1) create and update course policies for the instructional team, and (2) create and edit instructions for student projects and labs. The ability to collaborate asynchronously on the same document has been a particularly useful feature so GSIs can create the instructions, but Ringenberg can give feedback.

ENGIN101 uses Google Spreadsheets to track grading. Multiple users can edit the spreadsheet simultaneously, which minimizes the time and file management required for data entry. The spreadsheet for this courses has multiple tabs, one for each assignment, which are referenced by the master gradesheet to calculate the students' final grades. In addition, Ringenberg has written numerous formulas that allow for question-by-question analysis of students' performance on assignments. Read more »

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Crowdsourcing Learning: Students Collaboratively Analyze and Annotate Course Materials

A short video describing this teaching strategy can be seen here.

Benjamin Paloff, LSA-Slavic Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature, teaches a comparative literature course where students learn to identify structural components of poetry, such as rhythm and rhyme, that influence the reader's interpretation of the poem's meaning. Students often struggle to extract these elements, so Paloff makes the concepts more concrete using highly visual examples and practice. Using SiteMaker, a customized webpage and database creation tool, students collaboratively edit webpages to build a library of annotations of poems.  Paloff provides tailored feedback on students' annotations to facilitate revisions.  Students can select any poem and view its annotations for a number of literary elements. Consequently, the library created by students serves as the basis for class discussions of the literary elements and interpretations of the course material.  Read more »

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Coordinating Multiple GSIs Using a Course Wiki

A short video describing this teaching strategy can be seen here.

James Morrow,  Political Science, teaches a large introductory lecture course that employs a team of GSIs who lead weekly discussion sessions of 20-30 students on assigned readings and lecture content. Training GSIs and coordinating teaching across sections can be challenging in large courses. Likewise, maintaining and sharing institutional memory of successful and unsuccessful teaching practices is difficult, especially given rapid turnover of GSIs across terms.

Consequently, Morrow used the wiki within CTools to collect and archive effective instructional materials and lesson plans for GSI discussion sections. Weekly course meetings with GSIs can include group reflections on instructional practices and updates of wiki content. GSIs in physics have used a similar approach to document and share common student problems and effective teaching practices within and across terms in gateway lab courses. 

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Holding Virtual Office Hours via Google+ Hangouts

A short video describing this teaching strategy can be seen here.

Joe Bull, Biomedical Engineering, teaches an “oldschool, chalk and blackboard” lecture course, introducing biomechanics to 95 sophomores. The course emphasizes quantitative problem-solving techniques to help students learn to think like biomedical engineers. Many students use office hours as a critical support mechanism. During a term with demanding travel obligations, Bull did not want to decrease his accessibility to students or the quality of student-instructor interactions. Thus, on several occasions, he used Google+ Hangouts to hold virtual office hours from another continent.

First, Bull added his students to a Google+ “circle,” a private group within this social networking application. Circle members can share documents and create and join hangouts of up to ten participants. A Hangout enables video and audio web conferencing, as well as text-based chat, and it also allows participants to share screens and files. Consequently, Bull could create a Hangout and hold office hours at the usual times with any students who wished to join online. Read more »

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