General Instructional Technology – Page 3 – Teaching and Learning with Technology at Reed

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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Tool Talk – Adapter: a three-in-one media conversion tool

There are many media file types that exist for images, audio, and video. A file type that works in one situation make may not work in another. For example, an upload that you need to make might take .png files but not .tiff. Maybe the audio file you are trying to email or upload is too big and you need to compress it. Video files can be particularly problematic due to their size, or perhaps the software you are using accepts only certain formats. The number of possible file types and codecs (technologies for compressing and decompressing files) are seemingly endless and it can be daunting to keep track of this ever-changing landscape. If you don’t want to download multiple apps that facilitate different conversion tasks you can download Adapter and do most everything in one app.

Tool Talk: Soundflower for routing audio

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to route your computer’s system audio output into a piece of audio recording software. Some potential situations that you would want to do this for would be as follows. What if you needed to record the audio from a Skype or FaceTime session? Or you wanted to do some creative re-sampling of a piece of audio? Maybe you want to record something from the web like Tone Generator (a frequency generation tool only available on the web), like a student and I did for RAW (Reed Arts Week) recently. You could also use it for a live situation where you wanted to capture everything you did on your computer.

Annotating PDFs in Preview and Adobe Acrobat Reader

Annotation, or adding notes directly to texts, is an important part of scholarly work. Many of us learned to annotate using some old-school tools: pencils, highlighters, maybe sticky notes to physically “tag” our books. As more and more texts are available online, however, tools for rich annotation of online and digital texts have evolved to allow readers to highlight and take notes on digital texts and webpages. This blog post starts with the basics. In it, you’ll learn how to annotate PDFs using apps you probably already have installed on your computer. It’s the first in a series, so look for future posts to cover other note taking and annotation apps. Continue reading “Annotating PDFs in Preview and Adobe Acrobat Reader”

NWACC’s EdTech Deck

Every year, during the first week of November, educational technology specialists from across the northwest gather in Portland for a roundtable. This year, Trina Marmarelli and I attended the North West Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC) Roundtable. As a relatively new Reed employee, it was interesting for me to meet and hear from educational technologists from many different types of institutions.Many of the conversations I had involved the relationship between technology and pedagogy, and how technologists could effectively work with faculty to meet educational goals—whether with the aid of technology or not.

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Shoot a film with our new iPad filmmaking case!

As an instructional technologist for performing arts my job is multifaceted. One of the aspect of my job is to look for emerging technologies that could be relevant to education within the performing arts; another aspect is to look for new technologies that could enhance creativity within or integrate with performances. Sometimes the technology crosses over between these two and sometimes it doesn’t.

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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”

Language Labs: A Brief History

The middle of the 20^th century was an exciting time for foreign language study in the United States. During World War II, the army created the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) to provide education to officers with strategic wartime skills, including foreign language proficiency. Following the scholarly opinion among linguists of the day, who believed that language was acquired through habit, the ASTP taught language primarily through oral drills. As the ASTP spread to institutions of higher education throughout the country, the army developed audio discs in dozens of languages.

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729 Miles : collaborations in educational technology across the Pacific Northwest

Educational technology is by nature a collaborative effort, with faculty, students, and staff working together to build an effective learning environment within and beyond the classroom. In order to foster relationship across campuses, in May 2015, Reed and Lewis & Clark co-hosted the first collaborative instructional technology event sponsored by the Northwest Five Consortium* (NW5C). We dubbed the conference “729 Miles of Technology”, a name taken from the distance of one route connecting the five campuses. (You can view the full program and other conference details at the project website.)

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