nifty and free tools for improving student collaboration and learning

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NIFTY AND FREE TOOLS FOR IMPROVING STUDENT COLLABORATION AND LEARNING S. Jane Fritz Faculty Technology Conference May 14, 2012

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Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning. S. Jane Fritz Faculty Technology Conference May 14, 2012. Motivation. Move from SAGE ON THE STAGE to GUIDE ON THE SIDE ( Ben Schneiderman - U. Maryland). Challenge. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

NIFTY AND FREE TOOLS FOR IMPROVING STUDENT COLLABORATION AND LEARNING

S. Jane Fritz

Faculty Technology Conference

May 14, 2012

Page 2: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

MOTIVATION

Move from SAGE ON THE STAGEtoGUIDE ON THE SIDE( Ben Schneiderman- U. Maryland)

Page 3: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

CHALLENGE

Technology can be isolating- how can we utilize it more effectively to engage students and encourage interactive learning?

How can we design Learning Environments in which students are challenged to question, discuss, collaborate and share their insights with one another?

Many attempts: Clickers Blackboard threads and discussions “Flipped classroom” Etc…

Page 4: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

OVERVIEW OF NEW AND NIFTY TOOLS Piazza – Stanford University

Graduate Engineering Student – Pooja Nath Sankar Gathering place for students to ask, answer, and explore

24/7, under the guidance of their instructors

Classroom Salon - Carnegie Mellon University Collaboration between English and Computer Science

Departments. ( David Kaufer and Ananda Gunawardena ) Tool that is useful for discussing e-documents Combines documents, collaboration, annotation, people,

and analytics, all on one place Encourages “digital commenting” and highlighting

Dropbox- single location to store and retrieve documents, photos, etc.

Page 5: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

INTRODUCTION TO PIAZZA

Piazza – public square for “meeting and discussion”; a place where people come together to share ideas and knowledge

Started as a homework help and discussion group, which encourages students to collaborate and answer one another’s questions

Instructors can be active participants, or passive observers, offering support, confirmation (“good answer”) and direction as needed.

One of it’s objectives is to provide quick responses to student questions, concerns or inquiries.

Page 6: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

BEGINNING PIAZZA - DEMO https://piazza.com/uci (Student quad) www.piazza.com http://piazza.com/profs

Posts: Notes – announcements Questions – expect response Poll

“Sandbox” Demo:http://piazza.com/sandbox/warm#spring2011/piazzatutorial

Sample interactive “class”:http://piazza.com/class#spring2012/tech12/0

Page 7: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

PIAZZA – ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

http://piazza.com/help.html http://piazza.com/features http://piazza.com/story.html http://blog.piazza.com/ http://piazza.com/news.html

Questions or feedback Contact [email protected]

or call or 1-800-818-4124.

Page 8: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

OVERVIEW OF CLASSROOM SALON

A salon is a meeting place; in this case it is an interactive forum around a common interest

Classroom Salon – called “Facebook for Learning”

Classroom salon makes assignments more “social”

Classroom Salon integrates documents and discussion (unlike some course management systems where documents are in one folder and discussions are in another location.

Can be used to collectively edit documents Can be used in conjunction with Blackboard

Page 9: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

HOW TO USE CLASSROOM SALON

Create a salon and invite the students to join Create or upload a document and add it to your

repository (My Documents) Add questions or tags to the document and

share Invite students to join the discussion, add

comments, etc… Encourage students to “highlight” – major

themes, areas that are not clear, etc… “Dashboard” facilitates managing users and

documents

Page 10: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

CLASSROOM SALON ANALYTICS

Understanding what a student or group is doing within a document: Isolate the response of a single student- focus on one at a

time Compare a student’s comments to your annotations Measure student participation Show where there is an overlap among a group of students Follow “breadcrumbs” – highlighted areas either in response

to a question or as something not well understood. (Darker highlighting indicates greater number of responses )

Use “most helpful” to see influence of one student on another

Measure distribution of comments, most interesting paragraph, most puzzling, etc..

Page 11: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

BEGINNING CLASSROOM SALON http://www.classroomsalon.org

Videos: Salon in Social Media –transforming the classroom Writing, commenting, and web 2.0

Step 1: Login, go to Quick Start ==> My profile and upload picture       Change/update profile information anytime.

o Step 2: Create a Sample Salon       Quick Start ==> Start a Salon       Enter name, make it public, private (and change or repurpose this salon anytime)

o Step 3: Salon combines (context + interpretation) of an activity to make it more efficient for management and analytics. Then as students interact with the document, it produces activity analytics.     

Page 12: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

BEGINNING CLASSROOM SALON- CONTINUED  Here is an example:

 (a) Unlike courses/activities you develop in a CMS, Salon activities are easily shareable.

  Join this salon:http://classroomsalon.org/redirect/redirect.aspx?action=viewSalon&id=1098

 (b) Click on this activity link and perform some tasks.http://www.classroomsalon.org/redirect/redirect.aspx?action=annotateDocument&id=13395

           (i) when you see something interesting, highlight, make a comment, choose a tag           (ii) In the crowd sourcing exercise, choose 2-3 problems, highlight and provide your answer

 (iii) Do whatever other activities you'd like to perform.

Page 13: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

BEGINNING CLASSROOM SALON- CONTINUED

 (c) Now here is where we benefit from "collective intelligence"      Click on this link to see everyone else in the world who didthe same activity. http://www.classroomsalon.org/redirect/redirect.aspx?action=viewDocument&id=13395

     (i) You can click on any highlighted section and see all thepeople who contributed     (ii) Click on "My Hotspots" to see who else overlaps with your work. Do they agree with you? or disagree? What can you learn from them?    (iii) go to "Tags" and filter annotations by tags. Forexample, if the instructor used "confusing" as a tag, you will know immediately which part of the assignment is confusing or difficult.

Page 14: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

SHARING FILES AND DOCUMENTS

Step 4: [Sharing with others] So just as I shared the link to My Salon and activity, you can invite others to join your salon and complete youractivity.

Using document manager, you can add tags and questions, set access times for activities (must complete by this date, can view everyone's work after this date etc..)

Page 15: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

CLASSROOM SALON MODES Step 5: [Modes of Operations] Salon has 3 modes of

operations for each activity/document     1.  Annotation/participation ---> in this mode users are only able to participate in the activity by selecting, commenting, choosing tags andresponding to questions

     2.  View mode ---> this mode is social. It shows collective work of everyone. Using various filters, you can discover many things

     3.  Dashboard  ---> This mode shows interesting analytics of everyone's work. This mode can be locked from the view of students

Page 16: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

DEMO

 You can access all 3 modes for this activity       http://www.classroomsalon.org/redirect/redirect.aspx?action=viewDocument&id=13395

 Click Menu and then switch from one mode to another

Page 17: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

EXPORT DATA Step 6: (Export Data) The most interesting part

of Salon is the ability to export Data for you to analyze.

For example, you can export an excel file of student work using       Menu --> Site Menu --> Export Comments

This file can be parsed in multiple ways to produce grades for students or to find course analytics.You can create a file called questions.txt that was generated from a comment file.       [This would be an example of how many questions were generated by students as a result of salon]     

Page 18: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

CUSTOMIZATION

Step 7: (Customization) For many user and institutions, it is important to customize the UI (User Interface) to match the tasks. Here is an example of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee building a custom UI to make it easier for students to access their activities.       http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/UWM/       You may want to join the salon:http://classroomsalon.org/redirect/redirect.aspx?action=viewSalon&id=876       if you want to see the activities.

Page 19: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

SUGGESTED USE

   Suppose you have an e-textbook that students are reading, but in the process they are using tags to tell the instructor where they are having trouble. Instructor can use this information to tailor his/her lectures. Much better way to deliver instructions.

  Since each salon, activity/document is a link, we encourage each individual/organization to build their own custom UI's (or use existing CMS) using embedded salon links (or use salon as is).

Page 20: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

CLASSROOM SALON SUMMARY Salon is simple, provides opportunities for

innovative instructional design (using annotations, comments, tags and questions), customized UI's, provides many levels of social features (reply to comments, join discussions, follow experts....) all without losing context ofconversation or activity. 

Salon's export data facility provides innovativeorganizations to build their own analytics engines. We encourage you to build web based analytics modules and share with other salon users.

Enjoy Salon. Send us feedback. We will build the core. You build the content, instructional design.

Page 21: Nifty and Free Tools for Improving Student Collaboration and learning

CLASSROOM SALON RESOURCES

www.classroomsalon.org http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/

ClassroomSalonGettingStarted.pdf ( Getting Started Manual)

Email to [email protected]

Related Articles: http://campustechnology.com/articles/

2011/05/16/carnegie-mellons-classroom-salon-encourages-collaborative-critique.aspx