Teaching and Learning with Technology at Reed

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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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.

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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.

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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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