Becoming Doctor Jones » Technology

Teaching & Technology

becomingdoctorjones — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:57:32 +0000

My brilliant cousin, Nate Gandomi, who studies (broadly) education and technology at Berkeley, just wrote a thoughtful post about a book called The E-Learning and Social Networking Handbook. My comment to his post is below:

“The hype that follows the emergence of new technologies assumes a smooth transition between entertainment and education.” . . . this quote summarizes the frustration I have felt when trying to integrate technology in the classroom. I’ve sat through workshops on everything from Google Maps to Dipity to Mind Maps to Second LIfe, all of which inspired me to try something new in class . . . until I tried to create a lesson plan of my own, at which point I’d just feel stumped. I’m not trying to say that integrating technology into the classroom cannot be both fun and educational, but I do think it takes *a lot* of creativity and effort on the instructor’s part. Also, teachers can’t simply find a YouTube video to show once in a while — they have to carefully choose which technologies they bring into the classroom based on their goals for the course.

I was also very struck by the phrase “access to information does not equate knowledge.” I remember showing my students on-line bibliography tools, as in, “isn’t it great? You never have to memorize the format of citations!” I would assume that I could then skip discussing how to make a bibliography in class–surely the students could figure it out for themselves. Of course, most of the students did not make a correctly formatted bibliography (probably at least half did not make one at all). More importantly, they did not understand the purpose of citing sources.

Meta-Blog!

becomingdoctorjones — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:09:17 +0000

Here’s the video of the blog talk I gave with my husband a few weeks ago now. Josh’s talk (“Blogging 101″) is relevant if you are thinking about starting any kind of blog, my talk is more specifically about Becoming Doctor Jones and academic blogging.

I am so grateful to John Jones (no relation!) for doing such a great job on the videos.

Annotation Minus Paper

becomingdoctorjones — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:16:26 +0000

I’ve always been a huge fan of the “Reviewing” toolbar in Microsoft Word, which allows one to make marginal comments in documents. I grade using this tool and I love it. I don’t have to worry about messy handwriting, and I can type faster than I can write–which means I give my students more comments. Bonus: they can read them. I have long since given up receiving paper copies of student work.

While researching for my dissertation, I can comment on Word documents and highlight important points, but until today I wasn’t able to annotate .pdf files. Then I learned about the PDF XChange Viewer, which is a free program that lets one underline, draw pictures, and attach “sticky notes” all over a .pdf.

Academics may not be the worst paper wasters in our nation, but we’ve got to come close. In my book–or rather, my blog, taking notes while avoiding printing = awesome.