Week 8

This week I will be shadowing Dr. Theresa Butori, the Instructional Technologist at Dalton State College (DSC).

Today (Monday, March 2nd) we started setting up to test i-clickers. The i-clickers had not been used for several months. The first order of business was checking and replacing the batteries in the student units that would not power on. There were 24 student remotes, of which 12 would not power on. I removed the batteries and replaced them with new batteries. 3 of the devices had old batteries that had leaked and the corrosion would not allow the new batteries to make connection. I disassembled those units, cleaned the corrosion as best I could with the equipment I had, reassembled, and replaced the batteries. I got all of the units to work. I marked the corroded units with blue permanent marker so that they would be easily identified if they give problems later. With the corrosion issues. I decided to remove the batteries from every unit. The batteries are installed easily enough when the devices are needed. The corrosion is much more difficult to remove. Getting all of the i-clickers working took some time. Wednesday we will set them up and test the system.

The blue circle is to show the student clickers - note the blue marks. The red circle is to show the i-clicker base units. The memory stick contains the software needed to install the system on the teacher computer. This system does work with Windows 10. The yellow mark is to show a Turning Technologies classroom polling device. Note that although the student polling devices shown are less than 10 years old, they are already obsolete and have been largely replaced with smartphone apps.

i-clicker marketing

Plickers polling instruction sheets. The polling cards were in the box for the Bold Talks symposium

Second on my agenda was to wire a teacher computer with a receiver for a lapel microphone with a transmitter (in the box under the red circle). This is the receiver needed for the sound system built into many DSC classrooms. The lapel microphone will give the instructor freedom to walk about the classroom if they desire. The classrooms are equipped with smart-boards and projectors as well as sound systems to allow for interactive audio-visual instruction.

Also, I got to participate in a Desire 2 Learn (D2L)/Georgia View issue an instructor was having. Dalton State uses Georgia View as their Learning Management System (LMS). The teacher was grading follow up assignments for a Language Arts class, and his grades were not updating. He would enter a value and save his work. When he refreshed his screen, the last entered value would revert back to the original value and not the value last entered. The problem was due to a setting in the LMS that did not allow a previously reported grade score to be revised. Theresa showed me the problem by duplicating the teacher's work. She ran through a couple of setting changes to no avail. Finally, she turned to Google and found how to work past the setting. Even a PhD needs help from Google from time to time.

Dr. Butori making a LMS settings change in Georgia View.

Wednesday, March 4) Today, Dr. Butori showed me how she edits the settings of a teachers' quiz. The teacher wanted the quiz to be available only during a certain window of time, only allow students a set amount of time to take the quiz - 1 hour from the start until it shut down - and to show the student how they did on the quiz when they finished. The teacher was having trouble with the 1 hour shutdown as well as the display of test score after finishing. The solution to the time out was a setting in the quiz. A radio box stating shutdown after time was not clicked. The display of the scoring was a bit harder. To do this, Dr. Butori had to enter herself as a student so that she could test her settings changes. Then she set the quiz to have a duplicate display (I do not know why - unexplained). In the duplicate display, there was a setting that allowed the test score to be displayed when the student finished the quiz. Dr. Butori guessed at all of the questions to test her settings. She made a 60 on the quiz as reported by Georgia View.

We set up one of the i-clicker base units on a teacher computer and installed the software from the thumb drive. Dr. Butori updated the software from the i-clicker website, and replaced the install software contained on the thumb drive. The thumb drive also contained a "randomized test" setting to check the student clicker units. We tested the clickers using the randomized test. It was interesting to see that every unit scored 100% on whichever answer button was pressed. I removed all of the batteries again, and placed the units back into the box.

While testing these units, I kept wondering two things. 1) Why, if they are obsolete, are we making sure they work? and 2) Do teachers at DSC still use them. While I was wrestling with the batteries, Dr Butori got an email from a teacher reporting an i-clicker error message she was getting: One question answered. Dr. Butori invited me to a teacher event, called Bold Talks, on March 20th. The Bold Talks symposium is an event where teachers present methods and technologies they have had positive results using. The contents of the box pictured above are all tech items that Dr. Butori had been asked to bring to the talks; the second question was answered. Dr. Butori later asked if I would work at the Bold Talks symposium. I agreed, even though I have no idea what working the symposium consists of.

I continued working on the digital citizenship assignment. Dr. Butori wants it to be for the faculty. Her thinking is that the faculty will practice the methodology, and the information will trickle down to the students. The intent for now is to build it in such a way as to make it applicable to all faculty, and to use it as a lesson for the mandatory First Year Experience classes.

Friday March 6, I got to help Dalton State On Campus Information Services (OCIS) set up a video conference system in a conference room for a nursing faculty member. Today, the lady was practicing her dissertation research presentation with her committee at The University of West Georgia. I hope it went well. I got to see how a tracking camera worked, got to help with the Google Presentation software - they were having trouble getting the power point to show to the receiving party in Carrolton while still showing the presenter. I offered that the presenter did not need to see what the receiver was seeing. Charles Akin, the Instructional Technologist at UWG confirmed that was indeed the case. He could see the presentation screen as well as the presenter on his side.