Well, at least the former two would be true if you're thinking of digitizing your assignments. What might be your reasons for digitization? To keep yourself and students better organized? Students will no longer have an excuse for not handing in their homework on the due date? To keep up with the times? Students will relate better? I would have to say all of the above and some.
When I think of how digitizing my assignments could help me be more organized, I think of what a disaster zone my work space can be. I have books, markers, dictionaries, post-it notes, and piles of exams and assignments sprawled in and around my desk. It is often a mess, and it is not unheard of for me to mix up different classes' assignments or to not be able to find a worksheet I made to supplement a particular unit of the text. My filing system pretty much goes like this: staple a pile of tests or assignments together and set it beside another pile if my desk drawer is already full-which it is. Digitizing all or at least a portion of my assignments would help to clean a lot of this up, replacing much of the aforementioned items with bits and bytes of info stored in folders on a hard drive or virtual file system on the Internet such as iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or one of the popular Learning Management Systems(LMS) currently available such as Schoology for example.
How many times have we heard our students use the excuse, "I lost my paper", or "It's at home, sorry teacher."? I can only imagine how nice it must be for teachers who have made the move to digitizing their assignments. There's no excuse for late or lost work when the instructions are online and accessible via any of the students' devices able to have an Internet connection. The convenience of this is awesome. If a student has a tight schedule and has genuinely had trouble getting an assignment done he or she can easily do it on a mobile device while riding the subway if the desire to do so is there. I was recently at the annual Kotesol conference in Seoul and was checking out one of the latest LMS's available for ESL instructors called Language Cloud. One of the developers was leading me through a virtual tour and pointed out that teachers can easily monitor the activity of their students. It was very interesting to see that a very high percentage of assignments were being completed only hours and sometimes minutes before their respective due dates/times.
Speaking of dates and time, while you can't believe everything you read or see on the Web, the stuff online that is true is generally more current than any book or periodical you find on the rack at the library or bookstore. And while it's a little sad to think of the library as a slowly disappearing resource for study and research materials, it is comforting to know that much of the info we find on the Internet is up-to-the-minute. An example might be if you give an assignment to summarize an article for discussion for the following class; there could be heaps of new material on a given subject available between the date assigned and the following class.
Finally, while it might not be a particularly good idea to completely eliminate teaching students how to navigate the library for a book, using tools that they already know how to use is almost always of an advantage for both teacher and student. It stands to reason that students would simply feel more comfortable working in a way that is familiar to them. If most students are already fluent in the digital world, and mainstream educators are moving in that way as well, why not follow suit and digitize not only assignments, but a whole curriculum?
And with that, I leave you with a song. Albeit an old song with a chorus obviously celebrating the end of the school year, it is also one that I feel some of the lyrics could easily describe today's emergence of digitized education.
Enjoy and thanks for reading!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMe0P_DqmCg
Yes. No more pencils, no more books. In this digital age it is inevitable that this will come true. With the world wide internet availability increasing, and it's use increasing, and the development of devices improving, the time for digitizing our classrooms has come.
ReplyDeleteThis course is definitely an eye-opener to the software already available for us to begin digitizing our classes. I'm sure you learned a lot at the KOTESOL seminar and I only wish I could've been there. I hope you can share some more information from that. I'm really interested in learning more about the current LMSs. Having seen the Schoology site I'm excited about getting these systems implemented in my classes.
My current filing system is similar to yours. I would like to save a few trees and unclutter my desk. It would certainly keep me much more organized. Having students pass in writing assignments in the physical world just doesn't work out as I plan (ie; written on candy wrappers) and the virtual world seems perfect in every way.
nice post bud. I've seen your desk and compared to the Fukushima-esque disaster zone my desk is yours is doing fine. ha But, I totally agree that going paperless would definitely relieve some of the junk that resides in my work space. Also, my students are notorious for losing assignments and study sheet as well. I am already ready to go with a dropbox that I will use for all all my classes so that they can go on there and download any lost documents. I'll have to take a look at the icloud to see if it is superior. Thanks for that bit of info. Lastly to your point about the internet being much more up to date than the library, I couldn't agree more. When my wife sees me with a book she usually says " You read?!" and I usually reply " all the time" but I definitely do most of my reading online these days. It is how I stay "SMRT". ha Nice work Dizzle.
ReplyDeleteHey Brodie, Great stuff! My work space would probably challenge yours for sure. Bombsite! I think moving to a LMS is exactly what we need but it's a big jump and needs a fair bit of work to get it up and running. Totally agree with your point about keeping up to date with tech education stuff. Online material is always going to be ahead of printed works. Wonder if there is a PLN for KOTESOL?
ReplyDeleteHey Brodie, I enjoyed reading your post. I liked how you mentioned feeling sad because libraries are becoming obsolete. I think one of the great joys in life is opening a brand new book, knowing that you are the first person to ever read the written words in that particular book or getting a book from the library and someone has written comments in the margins. However I agree with you that the future is digital. There are so many advantages, up to date references, information is easily obtained and the plethora of trees that will remain alive.
ReplyDeleteI remember my University days trying to track down an overdue book from the library that I needed to complete my essay, a situation that students nowadays will never have to encounter. Lucky them.