Chester Ismay – Teaching and Learning with Technology at Reed

An introduction to R, RStudio, and R Markdown with GIFs!

The development of the bookdown package from RStudio in the summer of 2016 has facilitated greatly the ability of educators to create open-source materials for their students to use. It expands to more than just academic settings though and it encourages the sharing of resources and knowledge in a free and reproducible way.

As more and more students and faculty begin to use R in their courses and their research, I wanted to create a resource for the complete beginner to programming and statistics to more easily learn how to work with R. Specifically, the book includes GIF screen recordings that show the reader what specific panes do in RStudio and also the formatting of an R Markdown document and the resulting HTML file.

Updated R Markdown thesis template

In October of 2015, I released an R Markdown senior thesis template R package and discussed it in the blogpost here. It was well-received by students and faculty that worked with it and this past summer I worked on updating it to make it even nicer for students. The big addition is the ability for students to export their senior thesis to a webpage (example here) and also label and cross-reference figures and tables more easily. These additions and future revisions will be in the new thesisdown package in the spirit of the bookdown package developed and released by RStudio in summer 2016.

Plickers: An excellent alternative to clickers

There has been much coverage in education and instructional technology circles about the use of clickers in the classroom. Clickers can be an excellent way to look for student understanding of lecture material or outside the classroom reading/flipped content during class. Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University, is thought by many to be the pioneer of using “just-in-time-teaching” (another name for these classroom response systems and the instruction that goes with them) in science classrooms and has spoken and wrote much about the benefits of this style of teaching. But these clickers come with some downsides as well that I will address in this blog post. Additionally, I will discuss a new, cost-effective, superb alternative to clickers called Plickers (paper clickers).

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R Markdown senior thesis template

“Science is reportedly in the middle of a reproducibility crisis.” This is the claim of quite a few these days including an article from ROpenSci which directly references another article by The Conversation. But what is “reproducible research” and how can statistical tools be used to help facilitate it?

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Creating nice tables using R Markdown

One of the neat tools available via a variety of packages in R is the creation of beautiful tables using data frames stored in R. In what follows, I’ll discuss these different options using data on departing flights from Seattle and Portland in 2014. (More information and the source code for this R package is available at https://github.com/ismayc/pnwflights14.) Continue reading “Creating nice tables using R Markdown”