Sharing Documents in the Cloud

There are several services online that allow students and teachers to collaborate and share files easily online. Using Google Apps for Education is growing in popularity. Here in NJ, Princeton is one of the latest colleges and universities this fall using Google Apps. Google says that seven of the eight Ivy League universities and 72 of this year’s top 100 U.S. Universities (as determined by 2013 U.S. News and World Report’s ranking) are using them.

Students and teachers can collaborate in and out of the classroom using files shared in the cloud. And anyone can take advantage of having files available from any location of device. No more moving files via flashdrives or by email and matching old and new copies.

Using Google Apps across campus involves getting your IT department involved and that may not be easy at your school. There are other services that you can set up on your own. For example, one easy and free service is Dropbox.com. You install a small program on any computers you use (home, work etc.) and you will have your files when you need it them and they will automatically sync so that the newest version is available to you on all the devices. You can also access the files on any device without installing the app at the Dropbox site.

This is a great way to collaborate on a document with others because you can share files with other dropbox users. It's also a service I recommend to friends because it is an easy way to have your files backed up with the cloud copy. If your laptop crashed, all the dropbox folders would still be safe on their servers. You can sign up for the service for free.

But Google Apps does offer more than just file storage in the cloud. Faculty can offer "office hours" and small group presentations using "Hangouts." Students can create e-portfolios in a Google Site; And with document sharing, you can give real-time feedback in a Google document and have students work on group projects virtually.

Is Technology Changing Teaching Models?

We often hear that technology is changing the way we teach and the way students learn, but that doesn't always seem evident. In an article titled "Technology Driving Widespread Shift in Teaching Models" the indicators are that change is occurring. The article was in THE Journal (which is focused on K-12 education) but certainly much of this applies to us in higher ed too.

Their main point is that, according to the report referenced, "over the last two years, nearly half of faculty have moved away from a traditional lecture model and adopted a range of technology-driven teaching practices."  That report, "Learn Now, Lecture Later," was done for the tech vendor CDW-G.

They found an increase in the adoption of classroom-based technology use which resulted in a variety of changes to teaching and learning.

The vast majority of faculty and students, for example, now use notebooks and netbooks as classroom learning tools (75 percent of students and 72 percent of faculty overall), as well as digital content (69 percent of students and 73 percent of faculty).

Learning management systems were in use by a smaller majority, with 56 percent of students and 58 percent of faculty members reporting they use an LMS in the classroom.

What changed in the pedagogy? The increase of tech led to an increase in the use of non-lecture-based instructional delivery methods during class time. Those were identified as s hands-on learning, group projects, guided independent study, distance learning, and one-on-one instruction.

The majority of students participating in the study indicated they'd prefer a mix of delivery models, including:

    Distance learning (the choice of 11 percent of students);
    One-on-one tutoring (8 percent);
    Independent study (14 percent);
    Group projects (12 percent); and
    Hands-on projects (17 percent).

Additional findings included:

    69 percent of students reported they want to see more technology used in the classroom;
    26 percent of students reported they have used tablets in the classroom;
    34 percent of faculty have used tablets in the classroom;
    33 percent of students have used telepresence in their classrooms; and
    31 percent of faculty reported used telepresence.

No surprise that 76% of campus IT pros reported that teacher requests for classroom technologies have increased over the last two years.

Can You Flip a College Classroom?

If you haven't heard, the "flipped classroom" is a big concept in education this year, especially in the upper grades of K-12.

It's the idea of using technology like online video instruction, laptops, DVDs of lessons etc. to flip/reverse what students have traditionally done in class and at home to learn. For example, listening to lectures becomes the homework assignment and teachers use the class time for more one-on-one attention in class and students can work at their own pace or with other students.

Though an article I read traced the flipped classroom to a 2008 experiment by two Colorado chemistry teachers, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, it's not so different from other concepts we have seen in educating with tech. Their idea that students need their teachers there to answer questions or to provide help if they get stuck on an assignment, but they might not need teachers present to listen to a lecture or review content.

When I was at NJIT and we launched our podcasting initiative and became one of the first schools on Apple's iTunes U, we were trying some of the same things. Have students watch and listen to a lecture before class and use the time in class to follow up with discussion and questions.

Of course, professors have been doing that for a long time with readings. And the two forms of content have the same problem. What if students don't do the reading or watch the lecture? I hear many professors complain that students 1) don't buy the book(s)   2) even if they do, they don't read them  3) if they do read them, they don't seem to retain or understand any of what they read.

You might assume that students are more likely to watch a lecture than read a chapter, but I don't think the evidence for that is clear.

Flipped classrooms allow students to work at their own pace and allow teachers to tailor their instruction to individual students.

Those two teachers have a book, Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day and there is a Flipped Learning Network, a nonprofit organization launched this spring to train teachers from schools across the socio-economic spectrum in the strategy.

A article I read this week about an attempt to flip a classroom in a Portland, Oregon elementary school, points out one major obstacle. "Flipped Classroom' Model's Promise Eludes Poorer School Districts" shows that the teacher discovered that none of her students had computers at home. She had just one in the classroom.

Sometimes we make the assumption that there is ubiquitous computing and (high-speed) Internet access amongst our students. That is particularly true with college students who we imagine all being plugged in via their smartphones 24/7. The article points out that anecdotal evidence suggests that flipping classrooms is a more popular practice in wealthier suburban communities where nearly all students have Internet access at home and schools are more likely to have computers in classrooms.

Another criticism of the flipped classroom is that it still relies on lectures by teachers. Remember that over-used mantra of "guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage?" What happened?

In higher ed, blended learning (AKA hybrid learning) is probably the closest thing in place now to the flipped classroom. It too attempts to move some of the learning online, or at least out of the classroom space, and using the face-to-face time for what works best in that setting.

When I was designing hybrid courses, I always told faculty right off that they should do in the classroom whatever worked best in the classroom. If that meant having their truly dynamic lectures live and moving the discussion online, then do that.

Are you doing anything like a flipped classroom?  How would the flipped writing class work? Would it be like the low-residency MFA writing program?

We would love to get your comments.

Electronic Portfolio Use at PCCC

Writing Intensive students at PCCC have been using an electronic portfolio product called eFolio since 2008.

The Writing Initiative has played a very important role in making the case for portfolios as a means of campus-wide assessment. The use of portfolios is slowly taking root in the campus culture. Faculty outside the Writing Initiative – including those in areas such as Early Childhood Education, English, and the College Experience - have successfully piloted or will pilot eFolio in their courses.

As a result of these efforts, the Vice-President of Academic Affairs has outlined a five-year, three-phase plan to adopt portfolios for assessment in several academic programs.

This year the Writing Initiative team is implementing strategies to increase use of electronic portfolios, including hiring a faculty mentor for portfolios, and discussing best portfolio practices at the Faculty Institutes. 

As the number of WI sections has increased, the Initiative team is unable to go in-person to the 20+ WI sections each semester. So, we have developed a set of online video tutorials recorded with Echo360 lecture capture technology. The short, highly specialized tutorials are available to students 24/7/365. Follow-up in-person eFolio sessions are conducted as needed, and students with eFolio questions can drop in or schedule an appointment with Ken Karol. In addition, all WC tutors have also been given training in basic portfolio use so that they can assist students if necessary.

Here is a presentation we made at the 2010 NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices showcase about the ePortfolio soft launch at PCCC.

Soft Launching An Institutional ePortfolio Initiative

posted by Ken Ronkowitz

Technology and Writing

Writing Intensive students and faculty have access to some technology hat was purchased as part of the Initiative.

For example, we require that WI students use tutoring in their class. That can be face-to-face in our Writing Center, but it can also be using the eTutoring service that we have available at PCCC.

We also require WI students to use an ePortfolio for these course sections.

All WI course have a LibGuide with online resources for that course. Most of these web sites are collaborative efforts with faculty, librarians and Initiative team members contributing and editing the site.

We have also contributed money to the College's purchase of the Echo360 video classroom capture software and hardware. This allows faculty to not only capture classroom activities (lectures, presentations etc.) but also create brief videos on their own time to use in class.

In addition, we encourage WI instructors to also use the Blackboard learning management system, our online Library resources and subscription streaming media services which are available to all classes.

Overall, what is most encouraging in our use of technology is that we see a "ripple effect" of use outside the Initiative and the WI courses sections.

The Writing Initiative has played a very important role in making the case for portfolios as a means of campus-wide assessment, and using portfolios is slowly taking root in the campus culture.

Faculty outside the Writing Initiative – including those in areas such as Early Childhood Education, English, and the College Experience - have successfully piloted or will pilot eFolio in their courses.

As a result of these efforts, the Vice-President of Academic Affairs has outlined a five-year, three-phase plan to adopt portfolios for assessment in several academic programs. In the meantime, the Writing Initiative team is implementing strategies to increase use of electronic portfolios, including hiring a faculty mentor for portfolios, and discussing best practices at the Faculty Institutes.

LibGuides is certainly the most popular of the resources we have introduced as part of the Initiative. Having started as a resource for Writing Intensive courses, PCCC now has 216 LibGuides in various disciplines and different uses. Only 30 of those are actually part of the Initiative itself. So far this year, the Guides have had 58,530 hits on the home page and 186, 726 views on the Guide pages.

Find Us on Facebook

The Writing Center now has a fan page where people can see updates, Center hours, and general goings on within the Writing Center. It also contains links to our website and the Writing Initiative website.

The page has followers from both in and outside of PCCC, including connections to writing centers at other colleges around North America. To become a follower of the PCCC Writing Center on Facebook, click the "Like" button below.




We created a Facebook page for the Center to increase our network of both students and faculty who have an interest in Writing Center work and the Writing Initiative at PCCC. Most of our students are on Facebook regularly, as are our faculty! This is an easy way to reach a large number of people at the same time. It saves us from having to print and post flyers, saves time, and keeps us from cluttering up people's in-boxes.

Updates will be posted regularly, so be sure to stop by and see what's going on!

Putting the Lib Into Our LibGuides

This week I offered a LibGuides Advanced workshop for the PCCC Librarians.

Librarians have been a part of the Initiative's use of the guides since we started using them in 2008.

Starting with the PCCC Library's own LibGuide, we introduced them to the software.

Glen Bencivengo was the "early adopter" on the library staff and he created the original guide for the first Writing Intensive course we developed, Western Civilization II.

The plan has always been that every WI course would have a LibGuide that would be created as a collaboration between the faculty redesigning the course and the librarian who works with that subject area.

A number of guides have been created by the library staff and I used that group as a sounding board for developing a list of beginning and more advanced LibGuide skills for workshops that I plan to offer this fall to our college community.

In this advanced group, we focused more on design elements, formatting, HTML code and scripts.

My own guides includes a meta-guide on using LibGuides that I use for training and workshop presentations and that has also been used by other colleges as a starting place for their guides.

The LibGuides software encourages sharing guides and content. When you create a new guide, it asks if you want to use another guide in the system as a starting place and offers you a way to ask permission of the owner.

Currently, there are 104,451 guides by 22,921 librarians at 1580 libraries worldwide. Even if you don't subscribe to the service or create your own guides, they are a tremendous resource for students and faculty at the secondary and higher ed levels.

Here are some examples of LibGuides that focus on the "lib" part from our staff:

• Citing Your Sources
• Electronic Books (eBooks)
• Information Literacy Guide for EN 101 and other applications of Information Literacy
• Library of Congress Classification
• Library Research
• Ethics and Law in Radiologic Sciences - Guide to Resources

Beginning Portfolio Use at PCCC

Whether it is a collection of writings, artwork, photographs, computer programs, architectural drawings or videos, any portfolio is a compilation of work that has been put together for a specific purpose. Portfolios have long been used for job interviews and for promoting your services to a potential client. In educational settings, they are most often used as a way of documenting a student's progress and performance in a course or program.

At PCCC, we have several purposes in using them as part of our Writing Initiative. We expect them to help show student achievement as a writer and critical thinker in the writing intensive courses.

The members of the Initiative team will also use the portfolios as a way to assess program effectiveness.

We also expect that students will do their own self-assessment through the reflective writing that we ask instructors to include in their WI classes.

Some of goals in piloting ePortfolios at PCCC are:

• making these learning portfolios
• having a repository of writing samples for assessment of the grant objectives
• being able to set benchmarks for the future
• providing continuity for students taking multiple writing-intensive courses
• making the process "product-neutral"

The College also has objectives for this pilot:

• help provide institutional and program assessment for Middle States and other programs
• interface with assessment software
• examne and recommend portfolio products
• consider implications for the future including the expressive, transfer and career portfolio uses

eFolio is an e-portfolio product being piloted by students enrolled in Writing Intensive courses at PCCC. eFolio users can share academic and personal information with professors and peers.

We will be posting additional information about the pilot here and on our Portfolios LibGuide.

ECHO 360 for Capturing WI Moments

This past summer, Passaic County Community College, in collaboration with the Title V Writing Initiative, purchased an ECHO360 system. Traditionally known as a “lecture capture” system, ECHO 360 consists of a camera, computer podium and overhead projector. It allows presenters to capture voice, projection onto the screen, and views of the classroom, or any combination thereof.

Multiple units were purchased for the main campus, including a portable unit and one for the Writing Center Annex. In addition, each satellite campus has one classroom equipped with the technology.

The college has great plans for the use of the technology. While some instructors plan to “capture” their classes and make them available to students, others plan to make videos or podcasts to supplement their in-class lectures. In addition, the Center for Student Success and Admissions departments have plans for instructional videos on everything from registering for classes to logging into Blackboard.

The Writing Center intends to use this technology to help support distance students and others who may have difficulty coming to the on-campus Center. There are plans to capture writing workshops as well as create instructional videos for using the different technological supports available to students in the Writing Initiative. ECHO 360 videos and podcasts can be made by faculty and staff at PCCC by contacting Tom Tierney at ttierney@pccc.edu. WI faculty can contact writingcenter@pccc.edu to schedule use of the system in the Writing Center.