6th annual Teaching & Learning with Technology Fair! April 18, 2007

I attended the Teaching and Learning with Technology Fair on Wednesday, March 21. It was a yucky bus ride downtown for me, but I managed (with some help!) to find the conference in time for the presentation of awards and the keynote address. Dr. Peter Doolittle from Virginia Tech gave the presentation on technology in education. His style of address was great, because he used lots of audience participation exercises. I really enjoyed his discussion of cognitive psychology, especially the example about mental pictures. The audience shown 15 sentences on the projector that disappeared, and each person had one of four sets of directions about what to do with the sentence, without knowing what the other directions were. One group had to count the number of vowels in the sentence, one group had to make a mental picture about the sentence, and the other two groups had the same directions but were also told that they had to remember the sentence. Then Dr. Doolittle (ha, ha…) asked the audience questions about the sentences. The results showed that the people who were asked to create mental pictures had a much higher recall rate than those who counted vowels, and the instruction to “remember the sentences” made no difference in the amount of correct answers to the recall questions. We learn what we process, and whether it’s intentional or incidental doesn’t really matter.

Also interesting was the “Hype Cycle” graph that we saw about the excitement people have about new technology, which is really high at first, then dips low and eventually rises and tapers off, as Professor Rozema talked about in class. Immediately following the keynote was Dr. Doolittle’s break-out session on “The i-Podification of Education.” Both of his talks dealt with the ways technology could be integrated into the classroom past the “death by PowerPoint” that so many teachers have begun using as a crutch. Doolittle’s own PowerPoints were not “deathly” at all, and while his “intro to iPods” might have been more useful for the, um… older… professors who were unfamiliar with them, the incorporation of iPods into a variety of curriculums was very interesting. iPods are a great tool because they can hold so much information and also be portable. Expense is a factor, but I think that with the work Dr. Doolittle is doing and the programs that are already started at several universities, iPods will be a much more common and useful tool in the near future. (Once the graph has time to level out, of course.)

The other break out session I attended was “Digital Storytelling” by Russ Barneveld and Barbara LaBeau. This session was about using Photo Story 3 for Windows to create stories in the classroom, a project that they were using with their Education students at Grand Valley. I had never heard of the software before, and it’s free, so I might use it. The examples they showed gave me some ideas, but the presentation was weak and definitely contained “death by PowerPoint…” it made me a little embarrassed for Grand Valley that Dr. Doolittle was in the (tiny) audience for a weak an simplistic presentation that was nothing compared to the work he is doing. The presentation wasn’t very impressive, although I do think there are some great possibilities for digital storytelling in the classroom, both as an instructional deivce and as a tool for the students to create their own stories about themselves and literature.

The conference was interesting, and even though it was not intended for students, I found the presentations interesting. I also walked around the booths and looked at the presentations, which were mostly more impressive than the second breakout session. I’m sorry that I could not attend the Bright Ideas Conference, but I think this alternative was also interesting and useful.