Preparing to teach Online

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 23:54:18 -0400

I've been seeing some tweets over the past couple of days about the wonders of online teaching. How it's at least as good or better than in person or how we should have been doing it all along.

Rubbish.

If you say that online is better than in person that says more about the (low) quality of your teaching than it does about the quality of online tech teaching resources.

I mean, it's pretty clear that anything you can do online you can do in person since you can still avail yourselves of the same tech tools while you can also do the in person live stuff. Online you've only got online.

Looking at it another way, is an online show, concert, or sporting event (weather notwithstanding) ever better than the live thing? There's something about in person even when you take away the connection between teacher and students and students and students that makes it special.

While online isn't better there are times where it's necessary or can be used to complement or enhance in person.

Hunter hasn't made any announcements about any closings due to COVID19 but it would be foolish not to prepare. I also want to figure out if some of my CS Teacher Certification program can be offered remotely as not all interested teachers can get to campus. For these reasons and a few more, I think I'd like to try to do at least a couple of my classes remotely over the next few of weeks (sooner if it's forced upon us).

Technology shouldn't be a problem - all my students get a laptop as part of the Daedalus program. The only questions are will they have sufficient bandwidth if they're joining from home and if they have a suitable location from where they can connect in.

As part of Hunter's School of Education I can use Zoom and that has the video conferencing, chat, screen sharing and whiteboarding. The only thing I have to workout is how to use the breakout room features for group work and to see if that can flow nicely in the class. I've got a couple of lessons that should work pretty well as first time experiments so overall it should be pretty easy to give it a go.

Will it be as good as live? No. Will it be better than nothing? Absolutely. Is it worth burning a live class to learn a bit about online - to see what can be done without extensive training and class prep and to see what can be leveraged in a pinch? I think so.

If it happens, I'll report back.

The Tech or the Teacher

Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Every morning one of the first things I do is quickly glance at my emails and other notifications. I really should wait until I'm more awake but old habits die hard.

As some of you know over the past couple of years I've been making a series of videos and related post on using my editor of choice, Emacs. I've done 48 videos, have over 2500 subscribers on YouTube and people seem to find some value from the series.

This morning one of my emails was a new comment on one of my videos:

Thanks for not describing a single key combination and how that fits into basic usage of org mode. I was going to subscribe but if all your videos are going to be about showing off how fast you are at typing emacs commands on your annoyingly noisy keyborad, then no thanks!

My first reaction was "you know, you could have said something like 'if you slow down an actually say the keys it would be much easier to follow and would be more valuable' and it would be much better received" but then I started to think about instructional videos in general. I started to make these videos for my students. I thought they might be helpful and then found that the Emacs community by and large liked them. They're not teaching anything deep or complicated just how I use a programmable editor. Even so, I was reminded by this comment about the limitations of videos and ed tech in general.

Videos provide some nice features - you can watch them at any time, you can pause and replay, and in some cases you can watch at super speeds. What you can't do is slow the video down and most importantly you can't ask questions or interact with the instructor. You can leave comments if the video is on a platform like YouTube but that's pretty limited.

On the other hand, if this was a class, we would have been able to interact and I as the instructor would have had a much better chance to make sure this "student" was up to speed.

Of course, this wasn't a class. I don't have the time to teach tools like Emacs in class and since it is a mechanical skill, it can be offloaded to a video. The video has the ancillary benefit of living on and being discoverable and viewable by the public at large. This is a good thing. Videos are tech and tech scales. Unfortunately, good education doesn't.

Videos are tech and tech is the rage. Lots of people are working hard to get more tech in front of our kids - usually at the expense of having a great teacher. This is something we don't need. Technology is nice but I'd rather have my kids in a small class with a knowledgable teacher and a piece of chalk than all the tech in the world.

As a computer science guy and a computer science teacher I think it's good to remind myself that tech is cool but a good teacher is way cooler.

edtech on C'est la Z

Preparing to teach Online

The Tech or the Teacher