Category Archives: Technology

On the Radio

Quoted, Teaching, Technology

I was interviewed tonight for five minutes on the radio about the flipped classroom.

Last night I received an email from Todd Smoot, Executive Producer of News and Programming at KCBS Radio 740 in San Francisco. He wrote:

Hi Professor Frydenberg… We saw the article in the Sacramento Bee about the increasing practices of “flipping” in education. We were wondering if you might have a few minutes tomorrow for a brief telephone interview about “flipping” … What it is? How it works? Why it might be a better method of teaching? The interview would be live on the phone with our anchors and last about 5 minutes. The best times for us are 5:20p, 7:30p or 9:30p (all times Eastern).

I sent them my phone number and asked to be on the 9:30 pm broadcast.  At 9:30 pm, the phone rang. A producer  told me the anchors’ names,  Jeff  Bell and Patti Reising.   60 seconds later I was on talking with them on the radio.   5 minutes and 4 seconds they brought the conversation to a close.  The producer thanked me, and I hung up the phone.  A few minutes later,  they sent me an email message with the audio file.

Their questions… why flip? how can you tell if students watched the videos? what about the digital divide?  Listen in and see what I had to say.

Thanks to KCBS News Radio for the recording, and for permission to share it.

 

Innovative Teaching

Bentley CIS, Quoted, Teaching, Technology

Bentley provost Mike Page (at right) awarded professors Denise Hanes, Mystica Alexander, Jay Thibodeau, George Fishman, and me Bentley’s Innovation in Teaching Award for 2012 at the faculty meeting this morning.

Innovation in Teaching Winners

My application was for the innovative teaching and learning that happens in the CIS Sandbox. It was an unconventional application: Usually these awards are associated with specific courses, and usually the teachers of those courses are actually teaching. In my case, not this time.

The innovative teachers and dedicated learners who made this recognition possible are the CIS Sandbox assistants and students who have embraced the changes we have made, and turned the CIS Sandbox into a place where students gather to teach, talk, tutor, touch, and try technology.

This is my 4th innovation in teaching award at Bentley. I received one in 1999 with Wendy Lucas for a web application we implemented to create personalized course pages that let students check grades online (before the days of Blackboard), in 2005 for introducing Pocket PC’s to IT101, and 2006 for introducing student-created podcasts to the curriculum as a learning tool.

A summary of this year’s application follows the jump.
Continue reading →

Podcasting Flashback

Fun, Quoted, Technology

It was 2004. I was teaching IT 101 using Pocket PC’s. Here Greg Smith, who developed a Pocket PC application called Feeder Reader, spoke with me about teaching using student-created podcasts. This was before the age of iPhones and the mobile revolution.
I stumbled on this video interview we staged at on the roof of a restaurant in Lexington, MA, while looking for something else online.

EdCetera

IT101, Quoted, Technology

Sometimes I wonder who reads my blog. Recently I received an email message from Jennifer Funk, a writer for EdCetera. She saw a blog post about how we used VoiceThread to create an interactive lecture on cloud computing in IT101 last year, and asked more about it.  I told her how we also used VoiceThread in the CIS Sandbox and with my colleagues in Romania.  She wrote a blog post, “How a Prof Used 1 Tech Tool to Build 3 Co-Learning Spaces” which appears in the EdCetera blog, a blog about educational technology.  Thanks for sharing the story!

What is Cloud Computing?

IT101, Teaching, Technology

I was teaching about Cloud Computing in IT 101 – or maybe I should say my students were teaching about Cloud Computing in IT 101.  I posted a slide deck up on VoiceThread, and asked them to read enough about the topics that they could add two comments to the slides.  Together, they would come up with the lecture.   They had to watch the collaboratively constructed lecture before class, and then in class, we talked more about some of their comments, clarifying buzzwords they might have used, or discussing questions that arose as a result of their readings and presentations.

Listen in here.

Teaching about the Cloud is a Breeze

Attending, Conference, Speaking, Technology

Here’s my presentation from the NBEA Conference in Boston. I was asked to talk about teaching Cloud Computing. I had some fun writing the description of my session.

Foggy about the Cloud? Clear up your understanding of software, infrastructure, platform, and data as a service in an easy lesson you can teach using familiar Google productivity tools. Learn how the Cloud precipitates from consumer apps to the enterprise. The forecast also calls for a flurry of cool applications to share in your classroom.

 

Smartphones: Teaching Tool or Brain Candy?

Fun, Publications, Technology,

Campus Technology‘s February2012 issue includes an article that my ISECON colleagues Pat Sendall and Wendy Ceccucci wrote on the use of smart phones as teaching tools.

Here’s the full article.

 

 

 

Let’s get one thing straight. Smartphones are a permanent feature of college classrooms, whether you like it or not. Most students already have them, and it’s just a matter of time before the rest follow suit. From ordering a late-night pizza to posting pictures on Facebook of their roommates eating it, students rely on their phones for everything.

Yet students’ attachment to these devices is not necessarily a bad thing. Like any internet-connected computer, smartphones can play a valuable–even exciting–role in teaching and learning. What better way to reach students than via a device they treat like their significant other? At the same time, smartphones do have a dark side. They are the ultimate obsession of today’s students–a wonderland of games, friends, apps, and YouTube videos. Does the bored kid in the back row really need such easy diversions? As educators work to come to terms with these devices, the challenge will be to find ways to accentuate the positives while minimizing the distractions.