I’ve always tried to use technology when I teach. Before I thought about it much, it was mostly just an extension of being surrounded by and immersed in technology in my daily life. A few years ago, my friend and I were very into making hilarious memes of things we came across in our teaching or research, and as you can imagine, this yielded all manner of hilarious jokes that we (naturally) foisted upon our students. Trust me, these absolutely killed in my Latin and Greek Myth classes.

As I started thinking more seriously about pedagogy, though, I realized that (shockingly!) there was a lot more that I could be doing with technology and digital media than bringing gratuitous—though, for the record, always relevant—clips from my favorite movies into the classroom.

I’m currently pursuing the new GTC+ certificate through CRLT. This is a modified version of the Graduate Teaching Certificate (GTC)—that “plus” is shorthand for “plus digital media” and it has “a particular focus on integrating digital media into college instruction, providing structured opportunities to engage with current scholarly conversations about the ways digital environments shape our thinking and practice as teachers and learners.” In short, this program has allowed me to think a lot more deeply about the ways that technology can really enhance my own teaching, which has given me a lot of great resources and opportunities to improve the ways I teach.

That’s not to say that it’s been an entirely smooth process.Last summer, I took an online workshop called “Engaging Students in Learning.” We watched several videos about ways to integrate things like blogs and Google Docs into a class and then reflected on ways that we could potentially implement these ideas ourselves. I also completed a workshop called “Using Technology to Check Student Understanding and Provide Feedback (offered again in February for anyone who’s interested!),” which included more in-depth reflections on some technologies like Jing (a free screencasting program) and more detailed thoughts about ways to integrate Google Docs into writing courses. We also spent some time looking at the wonderful ProfHacker blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education.Sounds straightforward enough, right?

Last semester, I was teaching Great Books, a first year writing requirement course. I decided to try out a lot of these new techniques I’d been learning about, and I thought it would be a fun idea for a blog post. Keep in mind, at this point, I was imagining a triumphant, victorious blog post about how I had redefined the very idea of teaching with technology. I intended to try out a few technological tools that were essentially new for me (GoogleDocs, Google Forms, and Jing screencasts). I paired this with continued use of Survey Monkey—I’ve always been a big fan of getting anonymous student feedback throughout the semester so I can change my teaching style, rather than only finding out what isn’t working after the semester is over. Putting all this together, here’s what I learned from my semester of technological experimentation:

Jing screencasts: This was my biggest experiment of the semester. Here are a couple examples from an ungraded writing assignment on summary and analysis at the start of the semester. This student made some great arguments but they weren’t as clearly split into analysis and summary as we’d asked in the assignment, so I was able to make some of those divisions more clear with the screencast. This student got into some interesting and complicated issues about translation in their assignment and I felt like I was much more able to elaborate on those in a screencast, rather than a written response.

• Pros: For final drafts of papers, since students aren’t revising any further, this allows for much more holistic feedback. I would read through the final draft and highlight passages I wanted to discuss with the students. For the actual screencast, I would open their rough draft and final drafts side-by-side and talk through the papers. I could point to things that were good and I could elaborate more naturally and conversationally about some of the nuances of their writing. One student wrote that “I found them very useful. It helps to be essentially guided through the paper. I also find it useful to be able to hear your comments rather than simply read them.”Another wrote “I think they were really helpful because it was like being able to talk to you about my essay, and you could explain your comments better than would have been on paper.” I also tried out some screencast tutorials (here’s an example) in order to provide additional writing instruction, in order to save some in-class time.
• Cons: Jing limits the free screencasts to 5 minutes, so for the longer papers, I would have to send them 2-3 videos to watch in order, which wasn’t ideal. Also, I learned that I had one student who had partial hearing loss and without being able to see me talking, the videos were hard for this student to hear and understand (I switched to all-written feedback for this student in the future,but it was a situation I regretted putting them in). Also, if you don’t much care for hearing your own recorded voice, this will be a tool that really takes some getting used to.
• Take-aways: After the first round of student feedback, mid-semester, I adopted more of a “mixed” approach to paper feedback. As one student wrote, “I think that the screencasts were useful, but I would have also liked some sort of written feedback. I like to save the comments from essays so that I can look back at them and try to prevent making the same mistakes.” Another wrote that “I preferred the word feedback (written) right on the document — I feel like it is easier to work through and reference … I feel that it was better to get verbal feedback from office hours.” That said, the feedback was generally really positive and this is something that I will continue to use in some form in the future, though I will definitely give students the choice to opt out of screencasts if they don’t feel that this is as useful as written notes.

Google Forms: Here’s one of the forms I used for a discussion section on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.This would usually be something I’d send out in advance of section.

• Pros: Rather than discussion questions that some students would think about and others would ignore, this was a way to get every student to think about some questions in advance. I would usually tell them that they didn’t need to write out a justification, but that I might ask them to justify their position in class (and I had them on record as having a certain opinion, so they’d better be able to back that up!). This was also a great way to sort students into groups (I could put everyone who sympathized with a particular character into one group, if we were going to have some sort of a debate in class, or I could split up students with similar opinions to make sure a diverse range of ideas were represented in each group). Finally, this was a great way for me to check comprehension—I could ask a question about a particular topic and then glance over all my students’ answers and see how well they’d understood the point of a lesson without putting anyone awkwardly on the spot in class.
• Cons: None, really! This was my favorite new technology that I tried out, and I’ll for sure be using it in the future.
• Take-aways: Particularly for people who are already using Google platforms for lots of things, this is a really great tool.I had much more success here than with my abortive experiments with Google Docs.

Google Docs: I kept some running lists (for example,characters they needed to actually know in the Iliad, since there are hundreds of relatively obscure characters and, as one student wrote, “because there were so many new names and everyone was dying!”). I also had a “questions you have as you’re reading” document,where students could post minor questions they had while reading, and I could answer in that document.

• Pros: Google Docs is great for collaborative work and this seemed like a good way to keep a running list of things. Also, it seemed like lower stakes and a more anonymous setting for students to ask questions they might not have wanted to ask in class. I agree with one student who said “I feel they were a helpful way to post supplementary information,” and I think it was helpful for students to have lists of critical items they could use to review.
• Cons: Students didn’t often (or, really, ever) use these as a forum for asking questions. Part of this might be because, as one ‘fessed up when I asked them for feedback: “It was not really helpful for me, because I would always read the readings right before or close to right before. I feel like if I had read further in advance, I would have made more use of the Google Doc.”
• Take-aways: I still think this could be useful,and I’ll take most of the blame for the under-utilization on this one. I didn’t continue using them after the start of the term, and one student justifiably wrote “I don’t remember using them at all.”

So, in the end, not exactly the unqualified success that I’d hoped for, though this probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. In all other aspects of teaching, I’ve always found that my own teaching only improves through a process or trial and error and improvement. Hopefully, I can learn from both my successes and failures this past semester and improve on these experiments in the future!