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Should Professors Be Required To Teach With Tech?
An anonymous reader writes "Are professors who don't update their teaching methods like doctors who fail to keep up with the latest ways to treat disease? Or are professors better off teaching old-school? From the article: 'It is tough to measure how many professors teach with technology or try other techniques the report recommends, such as group activities and hands-on exercises. (Technology isn't the only way to improve teaching, of course, and some argue that it can hinder it.) Though most colleges can point to several cutting-edge teaching experiments on their campuses, a recent national assessment called the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement suggests that old-school instruction remains the norm. Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using 'clickers,' or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly — course-management systems — focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades.'"
It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
Well, to optimise it further, he just could give you the title and the page of the text book and save everyone to make and display power point slides. Unfortunately, most students are too lazy or too stupid to learn on their own and need someone to do the song and the dance going with the lesson. In the end, it doesn't really matter of the dance is writing on a chalk board or putting everyone to sleep with power point slides, the technology used has nothing to do with the learning success.
I would go so far to say, that someone who can't teach without technology gimmicks is a bad teacher. All the best teachers I met, didn't need it, although some of them liked to used it.
Depends on what is being written. If you're just putting up notes for the students to copy, then sure; if you are using the board for interaction, powerpoint may not be the way to go. Using powerpoint puts you on rails, so to speak. You have to do things in the order that they come up in the slides, rather than letting ideas unfold naturally. When you write stuff down by hand, you can do it in any order. Ideally you will be able to do both (having both a blackboard and projector) but many modern University classrooms are set up such that deploying the projector means covering up the only blackboard in the room. Moreover, if you forgo writing things down on the board (due to not having a blackboard) and simply talk about important ideas, many students will not bother to remember those things because they have come to expect what is on the powerpoint is all they need to know (or are unfamiliar with how to determine what is important information out of a speech).
I've found that when lecturers choose to write by hand rather than use PowerPoint, it helps keep the pace at a level where one can fully absorb the information.
Although it's not an inherent problem of the technology, having long, complex equations on pre-made slides does make it all too easy even for very good lecturers to skip over pieces of explanation or leave the students concentrating on one part and therefore missing another. When the professor is limited to handwriting speed (and also a sequential structure) they tend to do a much better job of explaining each part as it is written.
I teach math at a decent university, and I could teach a semester's worth of material in one class using PowerPoint. Nobody would learn anything, of course. But speaking as a math teacher, it's really easy to go far too fast using things like PowerPoint.
I teach with a lot of the techniques they're talking about (group activities, hands-on exercises), but I really don't want to use presentation software like PowerPoint. I'm willing to bet a lot that a student that has written down a couple of examples from the board is better off than one who has seen the same example projected on a screen.
Finally, the technology the article mentions include blogs, videoconferencing, and "clickers". I've avoided clickers mostly by teaching in small classes, but I can see their use as instant feedback. But blogs? Do my calculus students really want to read a blog I write?
Note: if your teacher is using chalk in a room equipped with a large whiteboard, it may be a good time to double check their technological competence.
Note: if your teacher is using chalk in a room equipped with a large whiteboard, it may be a good time to double check their technological competence.
Does technological competency (which in /. means "computer gadget competency") matter if the subject is statistics, calculus, physics, or even algorithm analysis or theory of automata?
Shit, even in Computer Science/Software Engineering, I wouldn't care if my professor hasn't programmed in, say, the latest JEE stack or what not. For subjects like distributed computing, algorithms, or networks, it really doesn't matter.
Gimme a good old' school professor with chalk dust all over his head any day of the week!
*Whoosh*