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Using Technology for Teaching

Five Uses of New Technology

New technologies can help you perform teaching tasks better and more easily. Below are five ways you might use technology to enhance your teaching:

Administration: Administration of courses can be effectively and efficiently handled with a course website, electronic discussion groups, and e-mail lists. These tools can improve student-instructor, student-student, and even student-outside expert interactions, engage students, and create a feeling of community.

• With a course website you can: advertise a class, provide copies of the syllabus, assign discussion sections, and get out course news.

Readings/sources: The World Wide Web and data storage devices (CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc.) make a wide variety of secondary and primary sources available to students at little to no cost. With your guidance, your students will gain access to materials that were previously available to only a select few. Your students will then be able to take "their own path through the material," form unique opinions and bring more interesting and informed arguments into discussions, writings, and lectures.

Papers/presentations: Technology can be used by students to perform various independent exercises in writing and publishing, build projects and exhibits, and assemble and present a unit of instruction to their classmates. Exemplary projects and instructional units can be archived and used in later sections of the course.

Lectures: A computer with presentation software, a projector, and a projection screen are common technology tools that can augment lectures with outlines, slides, statistical charts, tables, images, music, and video clips. These classroom presentations can be easily converted to a web-friendly format and posted so students can print them out for later review and test preparation.

Discussion: Electronic discussion tools (e-mail, conferencing software, and on-line chat services) can be used to begin students thinking about discussion questions before a class starts, or follow up on questions and issues that were raised during class. For asynchronous distributed learning courses, these tools allow students to interact with each other and the instructor, bringing the course to life on their home and work computers.

Brinkley, Alan, Betty Dessants, Michael Flamm, Cynthia Fleming, Charles Forcey, and Eric Rothschild The Chicago Handbook for Teachers: A Practical Guide to the College Classroom. 1999