UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Teaching Tips

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Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies

Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies

At a recent TLC brownbag session, 4 faculty members from 4 disciplines shared tips for getting started with “Untethered Lecture Capture,” a tool for using an iPad or tablet to show slides and annotate them in real time during class, while moving around the room. They offered these tips to anyone considering adopting ULC, which also allows a teacher to upload a lecture for students to review after absences or simply for multiple exposures to critical content.

  • Don’t overdo it as you get started. It’s not the best tool for a whole course or for some sessions of a given course .
  • Fancy graphics on slides aren’t necessary. You’ll be adding to your slides as you teach the session, and often simpler text and graphic combos are more fertile grounds for that.
  • ULC is great to capture group work, possibly replacing posters and markers. Small groups of students can work on a regular piece of paper (eg in a notebook), and you can take a photo of that and upload it in real time to the room’s projector for reporting out and debriefing.
  • An untethered teacher keeps students off balance in a good way. There’s no more back row that has little contact with the professor if you are able to move around the room, so fewer digressions into social media.
  • ULC technology is not perfect, and making mistakes together with the tool, or being thwarted by the occasional bad connection helps build community, trust and empathy.
  • ULC can help professors keep the class moving when they are away from campus for professional travel; it’s also a way for athletes or other travelling students to have access to the professor’s content and the discussions that occur in class in their absence.
  • There are 52 professors on campus using ULC (so far). Chances are that peer wisdom lurks in your own hallway!
  • ULC is effective in helping students create and observe visual models of complex or unseen processes. A picture really can be better than a thousand eloquent words.
  • Student tutors can use the tool to capture explanations in a tutoring session and share on the Moodle page of the relevant class. Sometimes students grasp the vocabulary of another student when the more polished words of a professor still feel a bit foggy.
  • ULC is one tool, not THE tool, for being an effective teacher.

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Imagining the World Factfully

UP aims to cultivate world-citizenship in its students. We see this in Vision 2020’s push to foreground opportunities and curricula that support internationalism, our robust study- abroad programs, the 69 Fulbrights students have won, as well as CISGO’s set of outcomes for Global and Intercultural Learning.

Part of such student learning depends on faculty possessing a quantitatively accurate understanding of the modern world.

Have you tested yourself lately?

An enjoyable opportunity can be found in Hans Rosling’s 2018 book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think – a book I devoured over spring break.

Rosling was a quirky Swedish TED-talk and global affairs speaker (one known to punctuate talks with displays of sword swallowing). He died from pancreatic cancer in 2017, just as he was finishing this career-capping overview of the true state of the world, as supported by numbers.

Readers start the book confronted by a 13-question multiple-choice quiz on such things as how people are distributed across the planet’s continents, the amount poverty has decreased, rates of girls’ education, access to electricity, and global life expectancy. Sad to say, you and I will achieve a predictably bad score (as Rosling’s three decades of audience testing has determined) – a score likely worse than if we had merely guessed the answers.

Most Westerners’ concept of the world, as Rosling explains, comes from a patchwork of outdated assumptions, unfamiliarity, media sentimentality, fear of the foreign, and a natural instinct for negativity. This leads us to operate with an “overdramatic worldview.” His solution is to cultivate a factful worldview – one based on numbers, proportions, and comparisons, gathered from across our planet’s 200+ countries.

And so we learn that the majority of the world lives in middle-income countries (just 9% live in extreme poverty), 80% of humans have access to electricity, girls worldwide spend an average of 9 years in school (boys spend 10), and 80% of people around the world have had at least one vaccination (on this planet, anti-vaxxers are decidedly outnumbered). This is not a bunch of global trivia but rather the shaping of a worldview – one lit with possibility. Amid the good news, he prioritizes things we should worry about: global pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.

Along the way, Rosling reminds us of basic strategies for avoiding being fooled by data (e.g. getting proportionality with your information, avoiding urgency to maintain clear thinking, questioning categories). He presents helpful charts for visualizing the world and its (often confusing) data, and offers a concrete, four-level way to categorize countries by income (to replace the long-outdated “first/third-world” mode).

While lies inevitably travel faster than facts, Rosling’s data helps fight the War on Error.

In the right course, Factfulness would be an eye-opening inclusion. Knowing that in 2100, 80% of the population will most likely live in Asia and Africa would help our students keep their eye on the future’s true continental leaders (a recognition not given by most Western popular culture). Knowing that world population is not spiraling out of control would help calm fears. Recognizing how the past century has radically reduced global poverty and increased world health and safety would offer hope as we work on more intractable problems of our planet. And re-committing to truth would help keep us from bending it amid the panic of the day’s urgencies (as Rosling insists, “Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intention”).

Faculty can prepare the next several generations of global citizens by first ensuring our characteristically inaccurate and overdramatic worldviews are better tethered to Factfulness.

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When Students Stop Showing Up

What do you do–what CAN you do–when a student stops showing up to class? the Teaching and Learning Collaborative hosted a brownbag conversation about that question and got concrete, specific insights from the Shepard Academic Resource Center, the Care Team and once another. Big takeaways: follow through on attendance policies in your syllabus (changing them out of sympathy does NO ONE any favors); let students know, in word or email, that you noticed they were gone and that you’d like to help them get back on track; don’t shy away from alerting the Care Team (via Early Alert) after a student misses a week of class without explanation. There were several other strategies and insights that are compiled in this 2-page document.

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Need a Moodle Question Answered?

Do you have Moodle questions? Maybe you are new to UP and are coming from using a different LMS like Blackboard or Canvas. Perhaps you’ve been using Moodle for a while but want to leverage it more to create efficiencies or open up new opportunities. Or maybe you are brand new to the world of Moodle – in any case, Academic Technology Services & Innovation is here to help!

Contact Us!

You can always reach us at atsi@up.edu – you can get questions answered, or get connected to more resources if you need hands-on tech-training or instructional design consulting to enhance your use of digital resources in your teaching.

Are you more of a “show me the tutorials and let me have a go at it” type person? Check out our Moodle Guides site for quick tutorial articles and videos on common Moodle tasks. Here are some of my favorites to spark your interest:

*/ Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

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Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy

In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom and other researchers collaborated to create what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes. This has been revised over the years and includes today six cognitive dimensions:

  • Remember: recall facts and basic concepts (e.g., define, list, state)
  • Understand: explain ideas or concepts (e.g., describe, explain, summarize)
  • Apply: use information in new situations (e.g., solve, complete, change)
  • Analyze: draw connections among ideas (e.g., contrast, categorize, connect)
  • Evaluate: justify a stand or decision (e.g., criticize, defend, prioritize)
  • Create: produce new or original work (e.g., design, modify, write)

The accompanying verbs can be used to develop and organize learning goals and objectives for our curricula, courses, and daily lesson plans. Many UP faculty already use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide for planning, but we can enhance the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy by considering our objectives through the lens of knowledge dimensions that Anderson and Krathwohl added to the taxonomy in 2001. The four dimensions are:

  • Factual knowledge (basic elements to learn in the discipline)
  • Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements within a larger context)
  • Procedural knowledge (methods in the discipline)
  • Metacognitive knowledge (awareness of how learning work in relation to one’s self)

Anderson and Krathwohl developed a matrix for combining cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions that can be adapted when planning courses and lessons. As faculty, we can adapt this matrix in our own lesson planning. Here’s an example from a 300-level applied linguistics course that I teach in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

Basic concept: Individual differences in language learning

Knowledge Dimension: Factual knowledge

Bloom’s Taxonomy Cognitive Process: Remember (Related actions verbs: define, list, state, recall, identify)

Learning Goal: Students can accurately define individual differences and list examples.Writing assistance working with student

Assessment: Students take a low-stakes quiz in which they define individual differences and provide examples they recall from the reading and group work activity.

Learning Experiences: 

  1. Students read section on individual differences in How Languages are Learned respond to reading prompts before class.
  2. In class, students work in groups to identify individual differences in written profiles of learners and present their findings.

Intersecting with multiple knowledge dimensions

As faculty, we can also run concepts and theories we teach through both multiple knowledge and cognitive process dimensions as we plan instruction. Let’s take, for example, the social cultural theoretical perspective of second language acquisition from the same applied linguistics course

Factual dimension / Remember

Instructor provides learning experiences so that students practice recalling definitions of terms and characteristics and elements of the theory.

Conceptual dimension / Understand

Students participate in learning experiences that guide them to start explaining principles and models of the social cultural perspective. It’s important to note that at this level, the students are not just restating an author’s or instructor’s explanation; that would be remembering. Rather, they are using concepts, terms, and paraphrasing to explain the concept or theory.

Procedural dimension / Analyze

Eventually, students point out passages in a research text that indicate the linguistics researcher is writing from the social cultural perspective of second language learning. They are using their knowledge of the theory as an analytical tool.

Metacognitive dimension / Apply

Finally, the instructor can work with students to develop and apply motivational and language learning strategies that are based on a social cultural perspective of second language learning.

The above processes can also be reorganized into a class lesson planning tool.

Application in your teaching

The combination of Bloom’s Taxonomy and knowledge dimensions create a powerful approach for your faculty toolbox in support of our efforts to provide the excellent undergraduate education opportunities to our students. For more about deploying Bloom’s Taxonomy and the four dimensions of knowledge, check out Laurie Richlin’s Blueprint for Learning: Construction College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning (2006), one of the sources of today’s TLC blog entry. If you would like to explore in more detail using dimensions and Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs in a lesson planning form, download this MS Word version.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in the Shepard Academic Resource Center in Buckley Center 163, where he trains tutors to reach Level 1 of the International Tutor Training Program Certification. He also teaches German, an applied linguistics course, and a preparation course for study abroad in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey is currently the president-elect of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He is happy to meet over coffee or lunch to discuss course and lesson design, training, and teaching in higher education and can be reached at white@up.edu.