When I was an undergraduate, my Shakespeare professor wanted to show a video of one of the best performances of Falstaff she had seen. The problem was that she didn’t know how to work a VCR. (Mind you, this was in the late 1990s.) She spent about 20 minutes trying to get the VCR to work. She had never used a VCR before. We watched and watched her, not knowing whether or not it would be appropriate to offer her help. After all, she’s the professor and smarter than us. Her actions confirmed what we suspected all along: that she really was living in Shakespeare’s world and was stuck in Elizabethan England.
Baruch is fortunate to have “smart classrooms” equipped with computers, an overhead projector, an opaque projector, microphones, speakers, and white boards that slide and layer over one another, making it possible to for instructors to write, write, write, and refer back to what they have written without fear of having to erase for lack of writing space. Some of us may not think of white boards as “technology,” but after having taught at a college campus with blackboards and nothing else to offer in the way of teaching aids (hardly a piece of chalk could be found), I have learned that whiteboards are technology.
I have found, however, that some instructors don’t use the tools in their “smart classrooms.” Many instructors did not even know that they had an opaque projector or what could be accomplished with an opaque projector. When my colleagues and I set it up for them and project a piece of student writing onto the white board and have the class workshop a thesis, the instructor is invariably amazed at having discovered a new, simpler, more effective way to model thesis revision for the class.
In these smart classrooms, where the technology looms like a scary storm cloud overheard in the form of a projector and the computer console sits like a large, strange beast in the corner, I find that students are stealthily text-messaging under their backpacks, in their laps, inside their purses, under their textbooks, and yes, sometimes in plain view.
Students turn to us for help with assignments, but very rarely do we turn to them for help. They know technology, and they know it intuitively. I might spend 10 minutes trying to set up an opaque projector if I’ve never used one before, but I bet a student, who has also never used one before, could set one up in thirty seconds.
My Shakespeare professor eventually asked for help. The video was inserted in the VCR, the play button was pushed, the TV was turned on and set to the correct input channel, and the video played. Falstaff laughed and drank and jostled about. I wonder how arcane we must seem to our students when we hesitate over using the computer in the classroom or simply avoid using the projector because we are afraid of what are, after all, just buttons and wires. What are students not seeing because of an instructor’s fear of technology? Rather than being afraid, we should turn to those who so often turn to us.
I recently ran a workshop in a classroom that I had been told did not have a computer, which was too bad since I like to project the text we’re talking about on the white board without pulling the screen down so we can write all over it with the markers and have a copy of the text we can see and focus on. When I got to the classroom and discovered that there was a computer connected to a projector, a VCR, and a transparent overhead projector, it troubled me that the college provides these materials but the classes don’t take advantage of them. Rather than having their attention directed to the front of the classroom, the students were left to read the photocopies on their desks, or their cellphones, sidecars, blackberries, hidden just below their desks. In an effort to salvage my chance to provide a technology-assisted aspect of the workshop and bring the students’ attention back to the classroom, I logged into the computer, logged into my e-mail, opened attachments of the texts we were discussing–all tasks that are second-nature to me, but perhaps were alien to the professor–and pressed the button on the remote control to have the text project on the board. Nothing happened. I pressed again, carefully counting the six seconds the instructions suggested I hold down the button. Nothing. The remote’s batteries, much like my attempt to use the classroom’s technology to distract students from their own technologies, had died.
Reply to Jody
Jody, I face the same thing at Maritime and have developed an “e-teaching survival kit.” It contains AA and AAA batteries, an adapter cord for the PC to the projector, and a long extension cord. I add to the kit as experience dictates.
I’ve become a popular guy.
Jim
Reply to James Drogan