Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

iPods, clickers, blogs, wikis, Turnitin...each of these technologies has the potential to engage students and help them learn. The challenge is to effectively integrate them into your course, so that their learning potential is realized and the learning goals are not overshadowed by the “glamour” of the technology. The trick is to know when technology is a viable enhancement and how to adapt your course so the technology is used well and improves learning and teaching. As faculty, we face myriad instructional challenges in our courses, and technology seems like it should help, but does it? Asking the same questions using clickers that students normally do not answer verbally may produce the same results. Using blogs should help us increase class participation, but only if the blog is integrated and the assignment encourages student reactions. iPods may spark student interest in conducting research, but if the assignment is not tied to learning outcomes, the iPod becomes just another gadget. Turnitin should reduce the time we spend trying to determine whether students’ work is their own. Would it be more effective if students used the tool to check their own work before turning in the assignment? Students turn to Wikipedia as a primary source, but what if we used Wikipedia as a tool to help students evaluate resources?

In this session, participants will learn about different ways to integrate technology as a means for improving an instructional approach. We will talk about instructional applications for iPods, item response pads, blogs, wikis, and Turnitin software as: a) a way of capitalizing on students’ current use and comfort with technology, b) engaging students in the learning process, and c) helping technology live up to its learning enhancement potential.