Teaching with Technology 2017, Day Three

The final day of this year's conference ended with more great presentations, primarily developed by faculty.

In Flipping the Classroom Successfully with Technology, Jonathan Velazquez, American University of Puerto Rico, reminded us that aviation combines multiple disciplines. We should look more carefully at the interdisciplinarity of our majors to see where we can connect thoughts across curricula.

He pointed out the importance of letting students know why the are preparing content for a class, and that pre-class preparation would probably be focused on the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy.   The preparation is essentially the ticket to the class, no matter what the evidence of the preparation looks like - answer a question, bring your own question, take a side in a controversial issue.  Students without tickets can be in class, catching up on the preparation without able to participate in the class activities.

Toni Weiss from Tulane discussed Interactive Strategies for Engaging Large and Small Classes Alike.  She showed off doceri, illustrated clicker question without clickers (close your eyes and raise your hand when your choice is called), but to me most interesting was the One Question One Response activity she uses after a test where a question proved too difficult.  The class gets the question again and they can work together to resolve it, without additional resources. The more students agree on the proposed answer the better the final grade, but it means that people can disagree with a better answer and lobby for it.

However, one of her points troubled me - the statement that a day of activity would allow her to then lecture full-steam ahead, as if the activity was really just a way for students to accept the lecture. This thought appears opposite of Bowen's statement that we no longer need to or should be content-focused but learning focused.

The final session for me covered Moblab:  Experiential Learning Using Decision-Making Experimental Games. Christy Spivey from University of Texas Arlington introduced us to this web-based software that allows Economics and Business courses to work through simulations, something we tried as well.  What I found fascinating was my emotional and physical response to this kind of investment gaming.