Are Incoming Freshmen Digital Learners?

It’s that time of year again when all the reports come out to tell faculty about this year’s incoming freshman class, like Beloit’s Mindset List which annually reminds us all of how old we are.  The Office of Information Technology partners with our summer orientation programs to survey all incoming freshmen about their technology habits.  This year we had 523 responses to the survey. Follow this link to see all eight infographics and read on for highlights: Freshmen Technology Survey Infographics

Generation Z

100% of students have a smart phone; 82% have iphones & 18% have android phonesSome of those reports tell us that our freshmen are members of Generation Z and describe them as “connected since birth” (Cheryl Faux. “Generation Z: Connected From Birth.” 27 February 2015.)  Our survey results bear that out–100% of survey respondents report owning a smart phone.  In past years, there was always at least one who did not; but this year we’ve crossed the threshold to full ownership.  That constant connection comes out in their digital habits–they spend their time online on social media (85%, with Instagram and Snapchat as the leading apps), 63% check their email at least daily with another 19% checking when notified, and 64% manage their to do lists with reminders on their phone. A staggering 90% of students video chat, with 75% using Facetime (82% have iPhones). Take a look at all eight infographics (also linked from the thumbnail below) to gain more insight into how they take notes, manage deadlines, and prefer to communicate with instructors. Continue reading

Google, Mobile, and What Else? Insights from the 2017 Freshman Technology Survey

As we do every year, we surveyed incoming freshmen about their technology habits during summer orientation. This year we received nearly 800 responses.  What did we learn?

Google

Freshmen Technology Survey 2017 Google Use

Freshmen Technology Survey 2017 Google Use

Incoming Freshmen Google Use 2013 - 2017

Incoming Freshmen Google Use 2013 – 2017

Some things we already knew–students like Google and their Google use is only going up. This year we saw 94% using Gmail, 81% using Google Drive, 75% using the Google Chrome browser, and 74% using Google Docs.  Given our recent switch to Gmail & Google calendar, we in OIT were happy to see that.  We’ll also take their use of Drive and Docs into account as we consider whether and when to turn on those other apps in GSuite.

Mobile

And, of course, yes, our students are as mobile as ever.

Freshmen Technology Survey 2017 Mobile Technology Use

Freshmen Technology Survey 2017 Mobile Technology Use

 

Digital Identity? Not so much . . .

What are they doing with their constant connection?  88% report that they use the web for Social Media.  This year, we decided to unpack what that means by asking them if they maintain a digital identity.

Freshman Technology Survey 2017 Digital Identity and Web Use. 71% don't maintain a digital identity and 88% use the web for social media.

Freshman Technology Survey 2017 Digital Identity and Web Use

Students and Social Media Freshman Technology Survey 2017

Incoming Freshman 2017 Social Media Use by Platform

71% of them don’t.  If you look more closely at their social media apps, Facebook and Twitter use continues to decline while Instagram and Snapchat use is growing.  These two apps, in particular, function off the idea of instantaneous and ephemeral communication.  In her study of teen social media use, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Network Teens, danah boyd, argues that teens replicate analog communications and see digital spaces as a continuum not an alternative to face-to-face interactions.  Instagram and Snapchat have replaced my generation’s practice of passing notes in class.  These apps are not necessarily about establishing a brand identity, unlike social media apps, Facebook and Twitter, where we see use declining.

Online or web-enhanced learning?

Past Learning Management Systems Used, 2017 Freshman Technology Survey ResultsWhile they may not be branding themselves on the open web, students are used to using the web for learning.  This year, we saw a dramatic drop in the response for students who have “never used an LMS (learning management system)” from 43% last year to 17% this year.

While most students have experience using an online LMS, they have not been fully online students. Nevertheless, even here we saw an increase:  35% have taken a class online which is up from 31% last year. In other words, over a third of incoming freshmen are familiar with online classes.

 

Working Digitally

Beyond online learning, students increasingly work digitally whether that is composing assignments and notes using online Docs (like Google) or accessing course materials, information, and grades online. What does this mean for instruction?  These students are ready for faculty to level up in Canvas by moving more course workflow online, but they may also be open for more innovative uses of online technology like collaborative projects, writing, peer editing, or group brainstorming.  Instructors could even leverage those ubiquitous mobile devices to expand the face-to-face classroom or encourage virtual group work outside of class.

What’s Next?

Finally, we always ask what new technologies students are interested in.  This year, wearable tech, 3D printing, and virtual reality headsets all passed 50% . Is it time to get a makerspace on campus?

Freshman Technology Survey results 2017, what new technology are students interested in?

What new technology are students interested in? 2017 Freshmen Technology Survey Results

Acknowledgements

Thanks to  Brenda Adrian, Jenny Cha, Ling Chen, Laura Lucas, Chris Mosier, Joana Trimble, Mike Weston for contributing insights to this post and to Eric Trimble and the team of student workers in Instructional Technology for the graphics.

Experiential Learning at Wild Basin

Wild Basin Biodiversity Project

Wild Basin Biodiversity Project

Join Instructional Technology staff and John Abbot, Director of the Wild Basin Creative Research Center on Thursday, March 20 at 11 am in the FRC (Faculty Resource Center, Premont 110) to explore experiential learning at Wild Basin.

How can you encourage student learning outside the classroom? How do you break down research tasks to make them accessible for students? How can you involve students in collaborative research projects? In this Tech Snack John Abbott, Director, Wild Basin Creative Research Center, will discuss how they are using the mobile app iNaturalist to involve students and the public in the documenting the flora and fauna at Wild Basin. Share your own ideas for crowdsourcing, collaborative student research projects, mobile learning, and place-based learning.

Student Researching and Crowdsourcing

The Wild Basin Creative Research Center offers a wealth of learning opportunities for students across the disciplines and encourages a variety of innovative pedagogical approaches.  For example, Wild Basin invites student research and creative works at many different levels.  While the Hook Fellowship offers $1,000 for more developed projects, even the casual visitor can contribute to the work at Wild Basin through the Wild Basin Biodiversity Project on the iNaturalist app.  Just use your phone to snap a photo of flora and/or fauna and upload your observation to the app.

This app allows Wild Basin staff to open up their research to the general public in an approach generally called crowdsourcing and more specifically termed citizen science.  Both phenomena break down tasks into smaller units, or microtasks, so that the labor can be divided between many different people.  Such microtasks often have reduced expertise requirements or represent skills that can be easily taught then repeated.  This approach lowers barriers for the general public to contribute to scientific knowledge.  The same approach offers an easy entry point for students in the sciences, as well as humanities and social sciences to contribute to scholarly knowledge production, as I’ve written elsewhere in Crowdsourcing, Undergraduates, and Digital Humanities Projects.

John Abbot, Director, Wild Basin Creative Research Center, is a veteran of citizen science projects.  Check out some of his other projects:

Mobile and Place-Based Learning

Wild Basin also offers a model for how to integrate mobile and place-based learning approaches into the curriculum.  One of the key advantages of any residential liberal arts colleges is its local environment.  St. Edward’s has a unique location and perspective from our hilltop overlooking Austin.  How can we take advantage of the special opportunities Austin affords us and our students?  One way is to encourage our students to expand their classroom, to learn from places in and around Austin. Mobile devices make that possible by connecting the classroom and the world off-campus.  Students can gather data, e.g., images, videos, sounds, geospatial data, survey responses, etc., with mobile devices, then use that data for project work in class.  Such practices give them both the opportunity for authentic, applied research and insights into local perspectives. Wild Basin is but one location in and around Austin that enables such experiential learning for our students.

Tech Snacks, sponsored by Instructional Technology, is an ongoing series intended to foster dialogue about the pedagogical use of a specific technology, software, or practice. Faculty members are encouraged to share their experience, ideas, curiosity, and questions. All Tech Snacks take place in the Faculty Resource Center (FRC) in Premont 110. Find out more: http://bit.ly/seutechsnacks 

For more posts on tech snacks, see: https://sites.stedwards.edu/instructionaltechnology/tag/tech-snacks/

 

 

Apps for the Commuter

a snapshot of traffic in Austin on a typical morning

A Typical Morning of Traffic in Austin

Last week, Profhacker’s Open Thread Wednesday asked about our favorite mobile apps.  The text of my response is below, with the addition of links:

I have to give a shout out not to an app but to some built in functionality in iPads and iPhones. My commute can be up to an hour, and since public transportation is not an option that means all driving and no reading.

I find VoiceOver–one of the accessibility features on the iPad and iPhone–to be invaluable. Here’s how I include it in my workflow. During breakfast, I read RSS feeds using Mr. Reader on my iPad. (I love this app because I can send articles to InstapaperDiigotwitter, etc.). I send the articles I want to read later to Instapaper and make sure they download before I leave the house. (I only have wireless on my iPad, so no downloads on the road.) In the garage, I open Instapaper and ask Siri to turn on VoiceOver. Then I start my iPad reading and listen to the morning’s news while I drive. When I arrive on campus, Siri is once again working on the campus wireless network, so I have her turn off VoiceOver.

Turning on VoiceOver

How To Turn On VoiceOver

Turning on VoiceOver

You can also turn VoiceOver on and off using the menu, but when it is on it takes more clicks. You can find the feature under Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver. You can also set the speed of the voice here.  I find I have to keep mine closer to the tortoise and the hare so I can follow the text while I am driving.  Be aware that touch gestures may be different in this mode.  For example, you must click to select, then double click to open items.  Scrolling is also different.

Alternatively, I have used Voiceover to read books in the kindle app. I found that I could do one chapter of Hirsch’s Digital Humanities Pedagogy per drive, and I could almost hear Lisa Spiro or Tanya Clement talking as their works were read to me. I also used VoiceOver when riding in an airport shuttle when reading made me queasy.

Using my iPad for this reading means that my iPhone is still free for other uses, like checking traffic on the maps app during traffic jams.  I find this type of reading useful for texts I want to familiarize myself with but which I don’t need to go in depth. Since I’ve also saved them to diigo, I can always go back to them when I need to read deeper.  VoiceOver works better on connected prose because if you miss a word, you can usually get the meaning by context.  Finally, I had to slow the pace of the voice down to make sure I caught everything.

You Too Can Youtube!

Want a great way to reach your students in and out of the classroom? Create your own video content. Creating your own video content can help stimulate interest in subject material and reinforce what is being taught in the classroom. Instructors are able to share videos with future classes, reuse captured video material with other video projects, and make content available so students can have access to videos even after they have completed the course.

Creating video content has never been easier. With smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices readily available that have the ability to record HD quality videos, you can quickly create and share video content directly to the web. Youtube offers a free browser-based video editor that allows users to edit video clips with several options that are commonly found in video editing software. The Youtube editor has plenty of features that allow users to create videos and has been updated to allow more precise editing. Some of the key features are:

  • splitting/trimming video clips
  • editing audio
  • adding an audio track
  • adding titles with backgrounds
  • adding annotations

Below is an overview of some of the major features available in the Youtube Editor:

Upload

Once you log in to your Youtube account, click on the “upload” button located next to the search bar. The “upload” page will appear giving you several options to create videos. You can select video files located on your computer, record a video using your webcam, create a photo slideshow, broadcast a Google+ Hangout session or use the video editor. We will be focusing on the video editor features for this article.

Video Editor Interface

The video editor allows users to view the video clips that they have uploaded to Youtube (up to 55 clips) and edit them individually or together on a timeline. The main interface allows users to insert titles, edit clips together, add transitions and an audio track. Users will also be able to publish their edited video from this interface.

Quick Fix

When a video clip is selected, users have the option to apply quick fixes to their video. Users can apply an auto-fix that automatically adjusts color, brightness and contrast. Users can also manually adjust brightness and contrast as well. Another great feature is the ability to stabilize the video clip. This helps remove the “shaky camera” effect when users are recording video without a tripod.

Filters

Users can apply several different filter effects on their video clips to alter the look of their video. These filters adjust color saturation and can give your video a new style or look.

 

Text

Text can be added over video clips or as title bumpers before a video clip. Users can adjust fonts, position, size, style, color and alignment.

Titles

Titles can be applied before clips and transitions. Users can create titles by simply dragging a title style from the title tool directly to the timeline.

 

Transitions

Users can also apply transitions between clips, images or titles. These effects will help transition between titles and clips.

Audio Track

Another great new feature is the audio track tool. YouTube now offers a free audio library that has a collection of music tracks that users can download and feature as background music in their videos.

 

Here is a sample video that was created with an iPad and edited using the Youtube video editor.

Demo: SEU Campus Tour

 

Here are some other helpful resources on ways to use videos in education. Feel free to contact us here at the Faculty Resource Center if you have any questions regarding video production for your classroom. Good luck.

20 Ways to Use Video in the Classroom
http://www.mediacastblog.com/20-ways-use-video-classroom/

6 Simple Ways To Use Video In Education
http://www.edudemic.com/6-simple-ways-to-use-video-in-education/

Different Types of Videos Used for Education
http://56wrtg1150.wikidot.com/youtube-vodcasts-and-skype

Youtube Video Editor Support
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/183851?hl=en-GB

Free music for your videos in Audio Library

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3376882?hl=en-GB&ref_topic=3014750

Faculty Mobile Device Mixer

On September 20th Instructional Technology welcomed thirteen faculty, Center for Teaching Excellence staff and Library staff to our first Tech Snack for fall — “Mobile Device Mixer”.  We started off by using a mobile app Poll Everywhere to ask faculty to name their favorite app.  Poll Everywhere allows you to conduct a quick poll using any mobile device, including laptops.

Wordle with most popular app displaying as Evernote

Note Taking

No surprise that Evernote tops the list!  Evernote is a great productivity tool.  You can sync notes across multiple devices (Windows, Android, iOS).  You can sort notes into notebooks and tag them for easy searching.  Ann David shared an educational use for Evernote.  She uses Evernote for  Learning Logs for her Educational Technology class. Students make Evernote notebooks and share so she can see live what students are writing.  She can’t edit or make notes on their notebooks but she can give immediate feedback.  Students can include audio, images, and videos to record their experience.

File Management and Sharing

Ryan Hoover discussed the ease of using Google Drive across devices to share documents with students.  DropBox also has an app that lets you access files across devices.

Annotation and Reading

We had a lively discussion on tools to annotate PDFs or ebooks via mobile devices.  Annotation of PDFs and ebooks is still challenging for some students.  Julie Sievers shared her favorite, iAnnotate, which is available for iPads and Android devices.

Other apps we discussed:

  • Quip –  a shared word processor so everyone is editing the same document.  You can add photos to create a collective photo album.
  • TalkBoard – a shared whiteboard, great for creative projects
  • SimpleNote – a note application available on iOS and Androids
  • vBookZ PDF Reader — Reads PDFs to you — great for commuting in Austin!

 

Faculty Must-Have iPad Apps #1: Evernote

Evernote is a multi-purpose app.  First, it’s a simple tool for taking notes in a meeting or conference presentation.  Second, it’s a way to “clip” web pages, documents and images in much the same way as one would clip interesting articles from paper-based newspapers and magazines.

The above features are not necessarily unique.  However, Evernote is downloadable to each of your devices, from phones to iPads to desktops and laptops and synchronizes across all of them, which IS unique!  Essentially, this functionality allows you to create notes on one device that, when synchronized (automatically once an internet connection is detected), becomes available across all of your devices that have Evernote.  In many instances, this can eliminate the need to email documents and other information to yourself.

Evernote.com

Tech Snacks: iPad Apps and Productivity

Have you ever wondered how the iPad can be used for education and productivity? On Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 11:00 AM in Premont 110 (Faculty Resource Center) come learn about iPad apps that increase productivity, create to-do lists, calendars, and help you organize class or assignment schedules.

Tech Snacks, sponsored by Instructional Technology, is an ongoing series of short presentations and demos for faculty. Each session will emphasize the pedagogical use of a specific technology or software. Bring your curiosity, questions and an appetite for some snack foods!

Join us on Tuesday, February 26th at 11am in the Faculty Resource Center (FRC) for some snacks and learn more about iPads and productivity apps.