Hey there! My name is Sarah Stanley and I am the new Contributing Editor/Occasional Blogger (the latter of which is probably not an official title) at WizIQ! I am twenty years old and in my second year as a Fiction Writing major at Columbia College Chicago. Though I’m not exactly a “techie” (sometimes I can’t even get my printer to do what I want it to), I think I bring a unique perspective to the WizIQ team. I’ve just started my first semester of being a tutor in the Fiction Writing program at my school, so I’m in the interesting (see: totally bizarre) position of being both a student and an educator at the same time. In this blog, I hope to provide useful observations and opinions as I explore teaching and learning, liberal arts-style (online, in-person, and otherwise).

Tweet

Most of my professors teach their classes one of two ways. The first is more traditional. They’ll drone on and on about the topic of that class and occasionally write important information on the board. The second way a professor lectures is through a prepared PowerPoint presentation. Make no mistake, in this second option, the professor still drones, but looking at pictures on a screen arguably keeps a student’s attention better than just plain talking. In my Oceanography class, my professor chooses the second option. She doesn’t project her PowerPoint’s onto a projection screen; she uses one of the three white boards available to her.

This white board isn’t just your average board either…it’s “SMART,” but you wouldn’t know it.

This isn’t because the SMART board is so old that it’s unusable. This isn’t because our university doesn’t provide the necessary resources to use the board, either. It’s because my professor chooses not to use it. Most classrooms have the SMART boards available to them, but in my almost two full years of being at this university, I have yet to see one used outside of being a projection screen. Even in high school, some of our classrooms had SMART boards. Still didn’t see them being used there. I don’t know what it is. Teachers and professors always complain about not being able to keep students interested.

Here’s a start:

Show how you can move the screen around with your fingers. Teenagers and young adults are fascinated by technology. You could own a phone for one or two years and eventually you may grow tired of it, but as soon as a new updated phone is released, you have to get it! If the rest of my class is like me, we would fall in love with the SMART board if teachers used it. The fact that my professor could switch slides just by touching the board would keep me enthralled throughout an entire class period.

This all goes back to my last blog post. It seems the only reason my professor isn’t using the SMART board in her room is because she doesn’t want to take the time to learn how to use it. “More than 1.6 million SMART Board interactive whiteboards are used by over 40 million people in classrooms and offices around the world.” It’s just another example of why our university needs to step up their game when it comes to technology. Just the other day, the very same professor asked if anybody wanted to come draw their diagrams up on the board. Nobody volunteered.

Had we drawn them on the SMART board, we could have interacted with them, we could have saved them and posted them on Blackboard for future reference, we could have done so many things. Because we didn’t use the board, I’ll probably forget the diagram that we drew in just about a week. I could flip through pages of notes, but it would be far easier to just go to Blackboard, click the diagram link, and all of our drawings would be there.

SMART Exchange!!

This isn’t even the biggest problem that I have with the lack of SMART board usage. The company has this great free website called SMART Exchange. “SMART Exchange is a one-stop destination designed to provide teachers with access to all of SMART’s learning resources and the opportunity to connect with colleagues in a professional community.” That’s right, this website allows professors and teachers to download pre-made interactive lessons. This is more focused on grades K-12, but still could potentially be used in introductory courses.

If my Professor would have used SMART Board!!!

In Oceanography, you can’t get very far into your studies without learning the basics. I did a quick search on this website and there were plenty of interactive presentations on things that we learned just two classes ago. She probably spent a massive amount of time making her slide shows and finding animations, when she could have just downloaded free presentations in 5 minutes that also included interactive activities and simulations that students could run through during class. The line of best fit “Smart Notebook Lesson” would have done the trick nicely as she ran through the introductory statistics we needed to understand this week’s lessons. I’ve embedded a preview from the SMART Exchange so you can get an idea of just how easy this could be and just how frustrating it is to plod along with the same tired lectures that could be so much more interesting with a few clicks of the mouse and a few touches of the finger.

I hope one day my professors will get SMART.

Tweet

Sitting in a classroom one day, waiting for another ordinary dragging class to begin, the professor turned on the projector in the room. Almost every classroom at my university has a projector. Some are new and shiny and hang from the ceiling. The one that this professor has is black and bulky and sits on a table. While the newer models have better technical capacities, they both do an equally good job of, well, projecting images on the screen. That’s what they’re for, after all. Yet, at that moment, my professor decides that her projector is broken and too old to be used, because apparently things “went wrong” before she even started her lecture.

Is it my professor’s problem or IT department’s!!

She begins to rant on and on about how the IT department is filled with nice guys, but they really have their hands full with too much and that they should fix technology before they add new technology, etc., etc.. And the whole time, I’m sitting in my chair wondering to myself what her problem was. There were three problems that became clear with a moment’s thought. The first: the webpage she was trying to show us would not expand enough to have all the words display on it without scrolling. The second: the color hue of the picture projected on the screen was not exactly what it was on the computer. The third: the sound wasn’t loud enough.

Somehow, these three issues led her to believe that the technology ready and available to her was unusable until IT fixed it. Professors at a university are not there to be technology experts, but they shouldn’t be completely dumbfounded by simple little issues like this. Nor should they blame it on IT, when it is simply their limited knowledge of technology that causes the stress. Case in point: to fix her first problem, my professor could have either changed the zoom on the webpage or, if she wasn’t sure on how to do that, copied and pasted the text from the website into a Word document and shown it from there.

The two other problems she was having were not IT’s fault either. The color hue was not the same, because no projector will exactly match the coloration on an LCD, not to mention, someone had changed the contrast on the projector. The sound wasn’t bursting out of the projector, because the sound on the computer wasn’t turned all the way up. Once she had fixed her problems (after students had pointed out the solutions to her), she sat down and proclaimed, “Nonetheless, I should still probably go down to IT and get this projector checked out.”

Suffice to say, I didn’t participate much in what was left of that class period as I sat there in shock at her words. Really?

What saddens me is it’s not just this one professor that has issues with technology. Just yesterday, while each of my professors was in the middle of their lectures, a Java Auto Update popped up! Not one of them just canceled out of it calmly and went on with their lesson. All of them were none too happy about how one pop-up wasted class time and how IT should fix it.

It’s not IT’s job to download Java for each professor…

If they don’t want it showing up every day during their lectures, they should come in early, download the new update, and then it won’t show up for a while! Of course, in a couple of months down the road whenever the next update for any type of software on their computers comes around, they’ll probably just complain about that too. Whenever something unusual happens with technology at my university, professors never take two seconds to look it over and probably fix it. Instead, they immediately call IT and wait for an IT guy to come to the classroom. Who’s wasting precious class time now?

Tweet

What is a “White Paper”?

Most of you know what a journal article is, but what is a “white paper”?  I decided to share my findings with you. I began my search on Google search engine. For articles and academic peer reviewed information, I use Google Scholar. For a more general understanding of terms and their history, I use Wikipedia. According to the latter, the origins of the term “white paper” are in Palestine. The term used to mean “authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions, and may be a consultation as to the details of new legislation, it does signify a clear intention on the part of a government to pass new law” (Wikipedia). In the early 1990s, “the term white paper has come to refer to documents used as marketing or sales tools” (Wikipedia). However, the purpose is not only to sell a product or service. A white paper will discuss not only the product, but also the reason for using it to resolve problems. The problems and the solutions are often research-based so that it’s wrong to view the underlying reasons behind the white paper as merely commercial and business oriented. According to Purdue University, a white paper serves both the company members and others outside the company. The purpose of a white paper is to serve and cater to a population’s needs.

How do you write a “White Paper”?

The Internet is making us smarter by providing easy to access information on any topic. One way of transmitting the information is through white papers. When was the last time you wrote a white paper? What steps should you take when writing a white paper?  Jennifer Mattern suggests you follow these steps:

1. Choose a problem
2. Proof that there is a problem
3. Mention other related problems
4. Offer available solutions
5. Suggest your solution

Hire someone to write your “White Paper”

Tweet