Tech in the Classroom

Brian Norberg / brian.norberg@marist.edu / Digital Technologies Librarian

Work with contemporary info like social media

Help students find new ways to communicate Scholarship

Engage the public and research community

Deconstructing tech

When doing digital projects it's best to ask what students can't do to determine what they can do. Students can't:

What Teachers can do to scaffold their students' digital work

Prepare for imperfect work (your expectations should be similar to those for traditional assignments)
Get student permission

Ask not what students can do for you...

Setting digital ground rules

Type of digital projects

Whole Semester (e.g. websites, digital exhibits, databases) - teacher needs to decide on course theme, tool to create project, and guide students on finding, describing, and entering resources with documentation
Lessons (e.g. podcasts, text analysis projects, geospatial projects) - teacher needs to know a little bit about the digital method explored, decide on tools to use, and develop structured activities to build up to final project
Replace a Paper (e.g. multimedia essays, timelines, maps) - instead of putting materials in an essay, student puts knowledge into another medium; teacher must decide on possible media and grading guidelines

Omeka and Wordpress are a web publishing platforms that can be used to share digital collections and exhibits
These are semester-long or Lesson projects

The CMSs: Omeka, Wordpress

Sway is a cloud-based, interactive storytelling platform from Microsoft.
Allows users to create narratives and presentations with content one uploads to the Sway application or finds on the Internet
More flexibility than Powerpoint and less seasickness-inducing than Prezi
This is a replace a paper type project
Very easy to use; accessible through Marist’s Office 365 Suite

Digital storytelling

StorymapJS allows users to create spatial narrative by adding images one uploads to the application or images, video, and audio from the Internet to slides that are associated with points on a map or background image
Cloud-based application that is extremely easy to use and free; iframeable
This is a replace a paper type project

Spatial-based storytelling

TimelineJS allows users to create a temporal narrative by adding images one uploads to the application or images, video, and audio from the Internet to slides that are associated with points in time on a timeline
Cloud-based software that is straightforward to use: data is rendered from a Google Spreadsheet
This is a replace a paper type project

Examples: Republican Run-Up & ADAPT (go to digital stories tab)

Temporal-based storytelling

Google My Maps allows users to create custom maps by dropping pins on a map and associating them with image, video, and other multimedia; add polygons, lines, and directions to highlight connections between points
Easy to use, free cloud-based application; need Google account; iframeable and good for collaboration
This is a Lesson type of project

Spatial analysis

Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment.
Work with your own corpus or practice on one of the included corpuses
Does work frequency, co-occurrence, word clouds, topic models, etc.; allows exporting of graphs and iframes
Cloud-based application that pairs well with a free text repository like Project Gutenberg
This is a Lesson type of project