We’re staring down the barrel of an extremely bleak future, and yet I’m still teaching every week and doing the best I can. It’s sometimes hard to focus on my classes, but sometimes it’s a relief; I do believe that what we do matters and I would like to keep doing it for as long as I can maintain the integrity of my teaching.
Today I’m distracting myself by writing about teaching tools. Lord knows I love a toy. I’m always interested in what people are using, even though I’ve been burned countless times by disappearing tech. (RIP Mozilla Popcorn Maker, Clarity, ManyEyes, etc., etc.) Many people hate how often tools come and go, and I really don’t blame them. But I seem to have a strong novelty-seeking streak and I’m always curious about what’s new.
It probably goes without saying that you can be, and many people are, a top-notch teacher without using any technology beyond paper and pencil. You can also be an abysmal teacher while also being really good at tech. I just happen to like getting ideas for new ways to interact with students via technology, and it’s a good way to get students’ attention (at least temporarily).
I’ll start with tools you can use in any class, and then maybe I’ll follow this up with tools I use in DH classes specifically.
Tools you can use in any class
Pear Deck for interactive slides
Examples of Pear Decks I’ve made: “How Do LLM’s Work?“, “Homophily and Redlining.”
Pear Deck is already familiar to many undergrads, since they often will have used it in high school. It makes your Google (or PowerPoint or what-have-you) slidedeck interactive: you give students a link and you can either control the slideshow yourself or allow them to move through the slides at their own pace. You can do things like solicit text-based answers, ask students to draw a picture, allow them to move a pointer to one thing or another, and take a poll. (Some of these features you have to pay for, which I do myself, because UCLA won’t pay for it and I’m a chump.)
I’ve found this useful in lecture-based classes, as a way of encouraging students to engage more meaningfully with the lecture. I’ve asked them to draw their understanding of how a process works, tell me their opinion about something, ask a question, or move the pointer to indicate their understanding of a topic. Their contributions are anonymous, which I like: I can read a response and ask whether the person might be willing to expand on what they said, and they usually are.
I don’t find the embedded link function very useful, since in my experience it’s kind of unreliable. I tend to just link directly from the Google slide and ask the students to click. I also detest the AI features (get instant slides by entering the subject!), but what are you gonna do, every tool is like that right now. One other small annoyance is that animations work only unreliably (despite the company’s claims about Power-Up Packs), so I tend to make a slide for every stage of what would have been an animation. I also wish there was a stable URL for every version of a slideshow; each time you make a change to the underlying slides, you have to republish the slideshow with a different link.
Noun Project for illustrating ideas
I love this site and pay for it. Artists contribute icons for every imaginable object or idea. With the Google Slides extension, you can search for images directly from the app and specify the exact color and size of the icon you want. I find it really helpful for making coherent-looking, legible slides, and seeing an illustration of a concept often gives me new ideas about how to explain it to students. There’s also a collection of stock photos, but I don’t really use them. Here’s a slide deck for which I used Noun Project a lot.
Descript for making videos
Descript is a freemium video editor (but I pay for it, see chumpiness noted above) whose selling point (for me) is that you can make edits by cutting and pasting the text in the transcript. Since I mainly make tutorial-style videos with voiceover narration, I find this really useful. You can also do things like eliminate the “um”s and “er”s, though that can sometimes make the video a bit jerky. (There are a lot of other features, but these are the ones that make it useful for me.) Once you’ve finished a video, you can host it directly from Descript, which I like because it’s very clear how to navigate the video via the transcript. (You can also export the video in any format and post it to YouTube or what-have-you.) When I make tutorials, I like to make accompanying videos, and then, for each step, link directly to the moment in the Descript video when I complete that step (like this). See how I used it.
AllOurIdeas for eliciting and voting on ideas
I like to leave one class session “blank” and ask students to tell me what they want to discuss that day. To decide on the topic, I “seed” AllOurIdeas with ideas of my own and ask them to vote. They’re presented with two idea pairs and choose the one they like better, over and over again until they get bored. They can also contribute their own ideas. It seems like the fairest, simplest, and most democratic way to get students’ opinions on particular ideas. See how we used it last quarter.
(Oldheads might remember when All Our Ideas was an MIT project, but it’s since been adopted by another organization. It’s also been encrusted with AI options, but you can just ignore those.)
Fun tech-assisted activities
Hexagons for connecting ideas
Make a slide that consists of a group of hexagons that contain keywords from the class. Duplicate the file, divide students into groups, and give each group a link to one of the files. Ask students to work in groups to connect the hexagons in the most meaningful way, and ask them to use an arrow to point to the intersections that are most important. Leave one or two hexagons blank so that students can contribute their own ideas. Then ask each group to explain their reasoning. (The reason I suggest duplicating the file and distributing the links, rather than asking students to make a copy of the file is that this makes it easier to pull up each group’s slide in turn. But you could do it the other way. You just might have to switch out laptops a lot or something.) Idea from here.
Word clouds for eliciting ideas
Make a Google Form in which you ask each student to contribute five (or whatever) words to describe something you’ve discussed. Open the form as a Google Sheet, copy the students’ contributions, and drop them in a word cloud generator. (I like this one.) Then ask students to explain why they chose particular words. (There are other tools that can do this more directly, but none of them did exactly what I wanted.)
Ask for anonymous questions
Pause a lecture and, using Pear Deck or another vehicle, ask students if they have questions they’d like to submit anonymously. I was really surprised at how many (really good!) questions came in that way, even though I’d of course paused to solicit verbal questions throughout the lecture. It’s particularly good if you suspect students might be embarrassed to reveal they don’t fully understand something.