Students, teachers tackle technology in classroom
By Kathryn Walters
In the midst of readings and Moodle forum posts, senior Gwendolyn Pitkin counts Twitter and Instagram as some of her weekly homework for her News Writing and Reporting class.
“It’s kind of a way to encourage us to be more active in social media and develop a more professional presence,” she said.
Pitkin’s class is just one instance of the increasing trend of technology as a learning and teaching tool for students and professors at UP.
While some have reservations about the use of digital devices like smartphones, e-readers and tablets in class, technology continues to have a growing prevalence in education.
Students put technology to the test
Senior Elizabeth Cavender uses her iPad in class to take notes and follow along with course lectures. She said her iPad’s portability allows her to bring important papers to class and keeps her organized.
“I just like not having 600 papers to worry about. It’s all in my iPad,” she said. “There’s folders for my classes, and all my PDFs are in there, and I can look for the name and find it.”
Although Pitkin doesn’t own a smartphone, she still uses social media platforms like Instagram for her journalism class, and appreciates how helpful they can be to her education.
“Using Instagram, it’s a little harder for me without a smartphone, but it’s a really good use of technology to just snap a picture instead of thinking long and hard about what to write,” she said.
Technology in the classroom is especially helpful to Cavender, an education major.
“If a bunch of us have our computers in class, we can look things up for the professor and add in extras from outside the class, which is helpful for ed classes because when we’re talking about the standards and curriculum, we can be pulling up the websites for the standards,” Cavender said.
Teachers tackle technology
Students aren’t the only ones taking advantage of technology in the classroom.
Communication studies professor Jennette Lovejoy, who teaches Pitkin’s journalism class, uses Twitter, Instagram, her iPad and other technology to prepare her students for life after graduation.
“Honestly, with the global media businesses and organizations, often you’re going to be Skyping or tweeting or chatting with a counterpart, and you may show up in London together and have to present to the company and you’ve never seen each other face-to-face,” Lovejoy said. “Students should be able to hone in on this skill.”
Lovejoy also said using technologies for class can be a good strategy for teaching students with various learning styles.
“Some people are very visual, some people are very auditory, some people are very verbal, some people are more introspective and quieter and some people like to talk a lot in class,” she said. “I think using and tapping into social media and trying to create an online discourse allows for different personalities and learning types to contribute in a safe space.”
Journalism classes aren’t the only ones where technology comes into play. After years of teaching, earth science professor Bob Butler noticed that students had trouble grasping certain concepts in his classes.
With the help of a Portland computer animator, he began creating video animations that illustrate geological processes.
“What’s challenging about earth science is that you have to work over a huge range of scales, literally from sub-atomic scales all the way basically to the size of the solar system, if not the universe,” Butler said. “And we have to think about processes operating over thousands and millions of years, so that does invite you to figure out a technological approach.”
Technology can be useful for teachers to put their students’ learning to the test. History professor Brian Els has used digital clickers in several of his courses to quiz students on assigned readings and save time grading, which has actually enabled him to interact more with them.
“Not only do students answer the questions, but I can stop after every question and we can talk about it. So it actually forces me to get into the readings as well in a much more interactive sense,” Els said.
Technology: help or hindrance?
Despite technology’s ability to aid teaching and learning, students and professors agree that it can also complicate the education process.
Pitkin said using social media for class can be distracting.
“The way social media is set up, it can encourage distractions,” she said. “It’s really easy to have good intentions at first and then get distracted.”
Cavender said her iPad can sometimes be more interesting than what’s happening in class.
“It’s really easy to just go on Facebook, but I try not to,” she said. “But it’s always there so it’s an option.”
Lovejoy said it’s important to teach the difference between casual and constructive use of technology in her class.
“It’s easy to teach technology,” Lovejoy said. “It’s not easy to teach critical thinking about technology.”
Even though Els was pleased with how his clickers worked in class, he still remains wary of introducing technologies into his teaching.
“Because I’ve used them (clickers) in a very simple way, I don’t think it interfered,” he said. “But it is introducing another wild card in the classroom that could get in the way of what you are trying to do: teaching and learning.”
Butler experienced what it was like to use a new technological advance in the classroom and fail. When PowerPoint first came out years ago, he tried using it for a geophysics class and saw it didn’t help his students learn.
“It was dangerous because you could outrun the student and they would be buried and be unable to follow the mathematical derivation,” he said. “It was much safer for me to do the mathematical derivations on the blackboard and field questions.”
Whether technology helps or hurts education, Pitkin said it all comes down to whether a student or professor uses it in a productive way.
“It’s our responsibility to use it in a responsible way. It’s really easy to get off track and stop being productive,” she said. “It really takes everyone agreeing to use it responsibly to have a positive benefit that it has the potential to have.”
