Course Integration of Learning Objectives, Technology Tools & Strategies

Educational Technology Series: Topic Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Educational Technology Series
Part 4:
Course Integration of Learning Objectives, Technology Tools & Strategies

Overview

Keeping in mind the theoretical frameworks and pedagogical models previously discussed in this JITT series, strategies for effectively selecting technology to support learning objectives, and the tech ecosystem at the university, following are suggestions of tools and strategies that instructors use to enhance student learning. These activities and tools may need to be modified depending on the situational factors of your own course, such as discipline, level, format of course, student characteristics, and learning objectives. 

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Teaching Context

Active Learning 

Active Learning is an approach to teaching which involves actively engaging the students with the course material through educational activities such as discussions, physical movement, role playing, and problem solving. Active Learning Classrooms (ACL) are classrooms intentionally designed to support this more engaging approach to teaching and may often incorporate multiple writing surfaces, the ability to move the chairs and tables around, and enhanced technology. Active learning may also support external and internal student motivation by clearly demonstrating application of the class content in real-life situations which are relevant to the students. 

Tools and strategies teachers employ to create a more engaging and active instructional environment: 

• Incorporate anonymous polling and Q&A, and foster interactive large class meetings with platforms such as PollEverywhere, Mentimeter, and Slido. For fully online courses, utilize Zoom polling. 
• Integrate the iClicker App for large lecture classrooms as a way to break up content-heavy material and to encourage students to stay alert and engaged with the material. 
• Break up video content into shorter chunks and quiz students along the way with PlayPosit, an interactive video lesson platform which turns passive content into an active experience. 
• Use Desmos to explore and model different math functions and everyday math functionalities such as exploring annually compounded interest (i.e. retirement accounts). Have students follow the instructor in hands-on problem sets while exploring the platform, and then ask students to solve problem sets in groups immediately following the example sets. 
• Use real data from actual websites to download and manipulate with data analysis tools such as Excel or R for Data Analysis. 
• Use students’ Smartphones or mobile phones to take a virtual-reality tour of a cultural or historic site (Miller, 2022) or visit Google Arts & Culture, Google Maps, and interactive museum tours. 
• Utilize social media, such as Twitter, as a place for students to post their reflections (Miller, 2022) or to interact with the course content in real life. For example, Bruff (2019) highlights an ornithology² course where students took pictures of birds they saw out in their daily lives, posted and made comments, and used a hashtag specific to the course to make searching efficient (pp. 59-64). Other instructors have used Twitter to engage with authors that students had read in class (p. 88-89) or livetweet a reading, where students posted comments, reactions, and questions on Twitter as they read through a text (pp. 64-68). 
• Integrate H5P activities into online content to support student interaction and content comprehension. Read about creating H5P content in Canvas. 
• Employ games such as Kahoot!, Quizlet, and even Virtual (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) platforms to encourage active engagement with the learning material, while also increasing student motivation through gamified learning. 
• Spin the wheel of names to randomly call on students or select different questions, choose from a gallery of pre-made topic wheels or customize your own wheels based on your target concept. 
• Ask students to collaboratively annotate documents synchronously using Google Docs or 
• Hypothes.is. Similarly, use Perusall to engage students through online social annotation activities. 

*For fully remote courses, check out Encourage active learning online for more resources. 

Effective Feedback 

Providing students with timely, forward-thinking, and effective feedback in an ongoing manner is essential to support student learning. There are many ways to provide feedback and these methods may depend on the discipline, teacher preferences, or situational factors. 

Tools and strategies teachers leverage to provide effective formative and summative feedback to their students: 

• Comment and Suggest edits directly in a student document using GoogleDocs for longer or more complex writing assignments. Similarly, use Track Changes and Comments in Microsoft Word to provide feedback on students’ written work. 
• Record short personalized video emails to optimize for quality and engaging forms to provide students with feedback. 
• Use Canvas or Aggie Video to create brief recorded video feedback. Canvas also supports embedding videos from AggieVideo or YouTube. 
• Use Flip to provide students quick and short video feedback using fun and customized videos (or to have them practice presentational skills in a fun video environment). 
• Leverage Canvas to efficiently and effectively provide students with feedback, specifically through annotating, SpeedGrader, and the comment library. This practice can be utilized in almost all disciplines, however it may be more applicable to disciplines with writing assignments. Find more tips on SpeedGrader. 
• Create a course blog using a site such as WordPress and provide frequent instructor and peer review feedback over the course of the academic term. Comment on certain posts and ideas in class which may help “one student directly and other students indirectly as they reflect their own blog comments” (Bruff, 2019, p. 32). 
• Formalize your feedback and make communicating more efficient by including a rubric directly within an Assignment on Canvas. 
• Draw on automatic speech recognition tools such as iSpraak to provide language learners immediate and automatic feedback on their pronunciation. 
• Provide voice over feedback while screen sharing with your students using a tool such as ScreenPal. 
• Utilize ChatGPT as a supplemental tool to provide feedback on student work, such as expanding the instructor perspective on different types of detailed and useful feedback. 
• Use a tool such as VoiceThread to receive multimedia input from students and provide multimedia feedback, such as audio annotations overlaid on images or video. 
• Leverage Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) platforms such as Grammarly to assist and save instructors time in providing feedback, while also acting as a formative assessment tool. Learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of AWEs. Sudowrite is a similar AI-platform for writing assistance, although not specific to feedback.   

Grading and Assessment 

Assessment allows instructors to systematically collect and analyze student work to help support and improve their learning. Assessments can be graded or ungraded, as well as summative or formative. Assessing students frequently and in low-stakes ways helps instructors to better understand if they’re students are learning the target material and respond accordingly to help support students before they engage in more high-stakes summative assessments such as exams or final projects. 

Tools and strategies instructors use to assess and grade their student work: 

• Utilize Gradescope to streamline your grading and feedback processes. Get started using Gradescope. 
• Get a deeper look into the best practices and basic mechanics of Gradescope and how to use the tool for efficiently grading paper exams.
• Learn how to adapt paper-based exams or assignments for online delivery with Gradescope. 
• Use TurnItIn to detect plagiarism, as well as facilitate a conversation about the concept of originality, original production, and discourse communities. It should be noted that this tool may create stress for some students, and some instructors may consider disabling it. 
• Embed rubrics directly into Canvas assignments, as a way to provide clarity to students regarding assignment expectations, as well as to make for more efficient and transparent grading. 
• Instructors can also ask students to engage in online Peer Feedback Rubrics, where students review the grading criteria for an assignment and apply it to their peers’ work as a reflective peer review exercise. This exercise also presents opportunities to check for student understanding of material and allows students to see the grading criteria in advance. 
• Use a shared, collaborative Google Doc for the students and instructor to build a rubric together. 
• Play the Quizlet Checkpoint game in a live class, engaging learners to practice target vocabulary in a fun, low-stakes way, while allowing the instructor to gain an understanding of the students’ current mastery of the target concepts. As a bonus, this activity also supports motivation for students who are driven by competition or game-based learning. Students of all disciplines may benefit from playing fast-paced, low-stakes quiz style games on their mobile devices. 
• Develop a course-specific hashtag for Twitter (or social media) assignments to quickly find the relevant posts and grade accordingly. 

*Many of the tools mentioned in the sections Effective Feedback and Grading and Assessment may have overlap which efficiently allows instructors to assess, provide feedback, and grade within the same tool. 

Inclusive Teaching 

Creating an inclusive learning environment for students requires instructors to employ pedagogical practices which acknowledge and include students from various backgrounds, experiences, and identities. Including this type of awareness and inclusivity in one’s teaching practice can “help ensure all students have equal opportunities to thrive” (Center for Educational Effectiveness, 2022, Inclusive Practice Series). Inclusive teaching can encompass but is not limited to ensuring the course materials are accessible, teaching culturally and linguistically and diverse students, and creating supportive and safe learning environments for critical conversations. 

Tools and strategies that instructors employ to help make their teaching practice more inclusive: 

• (Anonymously) survey your students about a variety of topics so you can learn what your students might need to be successful in your course. Anonymous surveys can be employed on Canvas, Google Forms, or Qualtrics. 
• Learn more details on teaching with equity and inclusion, such as types of questions to ask in anonymous surveys. 
• Make your content on Canvas accessible by utilizing the Accessibility Checker and adding Alt Text to your content-essential images. 
• Utilize SensusAccess to make PDFs and text documents more accessible, for example, to allow screen readers to easily read through a document. 
• Consider the use of eBooks which can sometimes be a cheaper option for students to access course materials. UC Davis faculty and students can access a variety of eBooks in the UC Davis Library eBooks database.   
• Use free video streamlining platforms like YouTube to offer multimodal content, including adding visuals and sound to the content to be learned. 
• Slow down the speed of the audio or video to encourage deeper understanding of content and to support learners whose dominant language may not be the language of the video content. 
• Use free video content to diversify key people in the field or discipline. For example, leverage TedTalks or Kanopy to find and show a diverse selection of movies and documentaries, which span a variety of disciplines and topics, and showcase diverse directors and film subjects. 
• Utilize a multimodal approach to teaching to allow for a variety of students to experience learning in ways which are most accessible or effective for them, while also challenging them to develop in other ways. 
• Use LectureCapture and AggieVideo to record your lectures for students who may need to rewatch lecture content outside of class time. Make sure subtitles and/or closed captions are available for all video content. 
• Turn on live captions on GoogleSlides or Zoom when teaching synchronously online. 

Reflection and Metacognition 

Reflection, introspective thought, on teaching and learning is important to bring awareness to one’s strengths and weaknesses in both teaching and learning. Through an intentional reflective teaching practice, instructors can work towards developing their students’ metacognition, active mental engagement about the various processes involved in learning such as planning, monitoring, reflecting, and strategizing. Through reflection, instructions can continuously revisit their pedagogical beliefs and practices and make appropriate updates as they develop in their teaching and as they interact with a variety of diverse students from different generations and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. 

Tools and strategies that instructors leverage to support reflection and metacognition in their own teaching practice: 

• Use concept and mind maps on platforms such as Miro and MindMeister to map out complex topics, organizational flow, and make comparisons across concepts. Other platforms like Jamboard and Padlet can also provide similar features for organizing ideas to see connections across topics. These exercises can be equally effective in a low-tech environment by having students draw on paper or the whiteboard. 
• Model the use of Gantt Charts for students to familiarize themselves with a three-phase reflective process of pre-planning, planning, and post-planning. 
• Utilize ChatGPT to highlight and reflect on skill sets among practices and illuminate norms between disciplines about certain content. For example, instructors might use ChatGPT to produce essays from two different discipline-specific prompts and have students reflect on the differences. Additionally, instructors can provide prompts to ChatGPT, such as a history question, math problem, or social theoretical foundation and ask students to critically analyze the response and a) decide if they agree with it -- why or why not? and b) determine if the machine-produced responses are accurate by comparing the responses across several sites and external resources. (See the Additional Resources section at the end of this part for additional ways educators are leveraging ChatGPT in higher education.) 
• Include weekly low-point quizzes in Canvas at the end of every week which prompt students to think about the work they completed that week, and share about where they feel confident and points where they might need more support; and include open-ended questions where the students can pose questions or their own reflection comments. 
• Ask students to complete quick Exit Tickets via Canvas or Google Forms at the end of class or at the end of the week, such as through writing a Minute Paper or The Muddiest Point (see the JITT: Grading & Assessment Series, Part 2) to guide students to think about their understanding (or lack of understanding) about certain finite points. 

Knowledge Organizations 

Knowledge organizations are a way of grouping, connecting, and sorting information and can provide students with visual ways to organize, remember, and use knowledge, which ultimately helps students see the big picture in the course (Bruff, 2019).  Building knowledge organizations and helping students visualize and organize information can also help make the details and most significant topics easier to remember (UNC Chapel Hill). 

Tools and strategies that instructors utilize to support building and leverage knowledge organizations: 

• Use collaborative, interactive timelines such as Tiki-Toki to help students gain a deeper understanding of course content. These timelines can prove effective in helping students master complex and historical concepts where several topics are at play, including dates, key figures, theories, and methods. 
• Leverage Prezi to build multimodal timelines, synthesis maps or connection maps. This can be done collaboratively or individually. 
• Utilize Google Earth to highlight and map out important geographical locations relevant to what students are reading in class. 
• Use concept maps platforms, such as the ones mentioned above Miro, MindMeister, Jamboard, and Padlet, to support knowledge organizations.   
• Leverage low-tech concept mapping such as using Post-Its and whiteboard markers to create and visualize connections between concepts, as well as graphic organizers on a simple WordDoc as a way to help students visualize and understand recurring patterns among related class concepts. 

For a more comprehensive list of how knowledge organizations are used among a wide range of disciplines see Chapter 4 in Bruff, D. (2019) Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. West Virginia University Press. 

• Additional Resources
•  
  • Resources for Exploring ChatGPT and Higher Education
    Alexander, B. (2022, December 15). Resources for exploring ChatGPT and higher education. BryanAlexander.org. https://bit.ly/3CagRIX
  • AI Writing and Education
    Caren, C. (2022, December 15). AI writing: The challenge and opportunity in front of education now. Turnitin.com. https://bit.ly/3oJdO7p
  • Policies Related to ChatGPT and AI Tools
    Gladd, J. (2023). Policies related to ChatGPT and other AI tools. https://bit.ly/3Cb9WPG
  • A Teacher’s Prompt Guide to ChatGPT
    Herft, A. (2023). A teacher's prompt guide to ChatGPT aligned with “What Works Best”. http://bit.ly/WWBChatGPT
  • Blending With Purpose
    Picciano, A. (2009). Blending with purpose: The multimodal model. Journal of the Research Center for Educational Technology (RCET), 5(1), 4–14.
• Acknowledgement
• This resource was developed by Lillian Jones (PhD Candidate, Spanish and Associate Instructor) while working as a Teaching Assistant Consultant in the Center for Educational Effectiveness, UC Davis.
• Citation
• Center for Educational Effectiveness (CEE). (2024). Educational Technology Series: Just-in-Time Teaching Resources. https://cee.ucdavis.edu/JITT
• References
• Ambrose, S., Bridges, M., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M., & Norman, M. (2010). How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass.
  
  Bruff, D. (2019). Intentional tech: Principles to guide the use of educational technology in college teaching. West Virginia University Press.
  
  Center for Educational Effectiveness (CEE). (2022). Inclusive practice series: Just-in-Time Teaching Resources. https://cee.ucdavis.edu/JITT
  
  Miller, M. (2022). The Chronicle of Higher Education: How to make smart choices about tech in your class. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://bit.ly/3BL4QJX
  
  The Learning Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (n.d.). Concept maps. https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/using-concept-maps/