Teaching with Technology Award

ASSETT recognizes Sangbok Kim as the 2024 Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award Winner

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 20:15:10 +0000

ASSETT recognizes Sangbok Kim as the 2024 Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award Winner Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/23/2024 - 14:15

Each year, ASSETT, the Arts & Sciences Support of Education Through Technology, awards a faculty member with the Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award. After reviewing recommendations from peers and students, ASSETT recognized Dr. Sangbok Kim as the 2024 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award for his development and implementation of a language learning program in his Korean classes and for his exceptional use of other technologies in his courses.

Sangbok is a senior instructor and a Korean Language Coordinator at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Kim teaches beginner to advanced levels in the Korean language and has experience teaching at several universities. He also conducts research in linguistics, Korean and English language acquisition, and education. Dr. Kim has published several papers throughout his career.

As an instructor dedicated to enhancing language learning experiences, Dr. Kim's impact extends far beyond traditional classroom walls. His innovative spirit is evident in the creation of PIP Lang, or Pronunciation - Interpretation - Performance Language. PIP Lang streamlines language acquisition by offering students a unique opportunity to practice their Korean oral skills from the comfort of their homes. PIP Lang transcends typical language barriers and fosters a deeper connection to the language. Dr. Kim's dedication to harnessing technology for educational advancement shines brightly, illuminating the path forward for educators interested in incorporating technology into the classroom.

PIP Lang is a web platform that works in conjunction with Kim’s Anytime Korean textbook series. These textbooks have about 4-5 semester's worth of content. This connection between the software and textbooks creates an immediate application in the classroom. Dr. Kim explains that “it allows [students] to practice one-on-one conversations with virtual Korean speakers… [and] it is equipped with AI that automatically grades learners’ pronunciation during these virtual interactions.” Active oral production is crucial when building language skills. Using AI speech recognition, PIP Lang provides real-time feedback to students. Through Dr. Kim’s research on the benefits and effectiveness of using PIP Lang, students reported conversing with confidence, gaining insights into Korean expressions, and improving their pronunciation, oral production and interactions.

Dr. Kim developed PIP Lang to expand his capacity as the only native speaker in the classroom. “This limitation also hinders [students’] ability to receive immediate pronunciation feedback. Furthermore, students engage in conversation with peers throughout the entire class, and since these peers are also learning Korean, there’s a risk of reinforcing incorrect pronunciations and developing a skewed perception of the target language due to shared non-native accents and errors.” Dr. Kim describes PIP Lang as a virtual TA, offering real-time feedback, pronunciation corrections, autonomous speaking practice, and a flexible learning environment.

When asked about his use of technology in the classroom, Dr. Kim said, “I have always placed a strong emphasis on technology in my language classroom. In addition to PIP Lang, Dr. Kim actively uses many other technologies in his courses such as iSpring, Quizlet, and Gemini for their effectiveness in language learning. He also emphasizes the importance of platforms like YouTube for cultural exploration, and he integrates organizational systems in Canvas and OneDrive to share materials and host discussions.

Instructional technology is particularly beneficial for language learning because it caters to learners' perspectives and offers diverse teaching methods.” This is undoubtedly evident in his students’ reflections on their classes with Dr. Kim, noting how his use of technology has helped in their individual learning as well as their collaboration with classmates. One student writes, “Personally, this has helped me a lot with my learning, and I believe that his methods will also continue to improve over time and help many more students in the future.”

Dr. Kim recommends three steps for technology-curious instructors: “(1) Focus on maximizing in-person interaction, (2) use technology to enhance, not replace, instructions, and (3) explore and experiment to find the right fit,” he explains. “By strategically utilizing these tools outside of class time, you can free up valuable classroom minutes for interactive and engaging activities… Don't be afraid to experiment and see what works best for you and your students.”

Congratulations again to Dr. Sangbok Kim! Thank you for continuously working to improve your students’ learning experiences through innovative technology use.

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Meet Bethany Wilcox: 2023 Teaching with Technology Award Winner

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 22:05:26 +0000

Meet Bethany Wilcox: 2023 Teaching with Technology Award Winner Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/22/2024 - 16:05

Each year, ASSETT awards the Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award to a faculty member who was nominated by their peers and students for their commitment to teaching with technology. In 2023, Bethany Wilcox was recognized for her use of technology to help students engage with course materials in meaningful ways that further their abilities to visualize the complexities of physics while simultaneously building their confidence as learners and leaders in the classroom.

Bethany is an assistant professor in the Physics department and a member of the Physics Education Research Group. Her responsibilities include researching, serving on university committees, and, most notably, teaching CU's aspiring scientists in Physics, Astronomy, and Engineering. Along with her teaching, she also conducts research mainly focused on studying Physics Education Research, which delves into understanding students' abilities to problem solve in advanced Physics courses, measuring students' learning to ensure that curriculum and course development decisions are determined and grounded in data.

In Bethany’s nomination letter, her nominee mentioned that she is a pioneer at CU for integrating technology in the classroom through her use of a Microsoft tablet that allows her to seamlessly transition between slides, i-clicker software, and other simulations that display complex concepts within Physics. While tablets are common within higher education, Bethany optimizes her use of this device by writing on and annotating slides in real-time during lectures. Through meticulous planning (and hours of pre-lecture prep), she drafts the details of every slide. She uses different colored pens over a black background to explain concepts. And, because she’s sketched out every slide, Bethany can strategically place images on her screen that support her content without interfering with her text. This teaching method enables her to integrate technologies into her lectures that engage students' connections with the course on a much deeper level. Bethany also uses this technique to teach some of the most complex topics in Physics so students not only perform well in her course, but also internalize these concepts - like Quantum Mechanics:

“Quantum Mechanics can be very abstract because it is about the very small world. You cannot see electrons and quantities like spin, which are difficult to visualize because they don't have any classical analogs.”

Quantum Mechanics is a difficult concept. For some students, this hampers their ability to connect with the course material and instills anxiety. Bethany recognizes this sentiment and incorporates simulations, or sims, in her lectures to help students engage with these abstract concepts. During class, students experiment with these sims to understand these difficult and abstract concepts. Bethany often assigns a homework assignment where she has them use these sims to complete question sets. Bethany believes that her use of technology in and out of the classroom helps ground Physics so that students can truly grasp broader terms that are often hard or even impossible to visualize. By creating these exploratory processes, students engage with difficult concepts, further enhance their ability to understand the course material, and discover new aspects of Physics and themselves as learners.

One of the most vital parts of Bethany's research and her integration of technology in the classroom is its ability to instill confidence in students. Bethany creates courses emphasizing "exploration and learning" through tutorials that help create building blocks for students' foundational understanding of Physics. These tutorials are inclusively designed to support and engage the learner with material that enhances and harnesses their understanding of core concepts. Bethany believes this pedagogical approach greatly assists in her students’ ability to engage with and learn more advanced concepts in the future.

Bethany clearly emphasizes that her teaching techniques and use of technology disregard normative teaching structures focused on correctness and speed. Instead her teaching approach encourages students to explore the Physics world, allowing students to build their confidence. All of Bethany’s course lectures and content are available for students to review what they’ve learned from previous class sessions. Bethany believes that providing previous class content aids in her students' abilities to "come to class feeling engaged and relaxed," without worrying about the previous week's concepts.

When asked about what advice she had for others, Bethany pragmatically responded, "Practice and have a plan. Don't try to wing it with technology because Murphy's law applies. Have a plan for what you will do if the technology fails so that you can smoothly transition when things inevitably go wrong. And, above all, check in with the students to ensure everything is going well, and be prepared to change your approach if they have concerns or suggestions."

Bethany shows us that Physics is not only about speed and correctness but also how we can use education and technology to explore, build confidence, and learn what makes us passionate. She is an exemplary educator whose work further enlightens us about how, as learners, we constantly find new ways to shape how we learn and engage with the world around us. We can not be more excited to congratulate Behtnay Wilcox on all of her achievements, and we look forward to continuing to watch her help shape the future of education.

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Dr. Nicole Jobin Receives ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 19:13:45 +0000

Dr. Nicole Jobin Receives ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/14/2022 - 13:13

Alexis Block

Each year, ASSETT awards the Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award to a faculty member who has been nominated by their peers and students for their commitment to teaching with technology. This year, Dr. Nicole Jobin is recognized for her use of technology as not only a tool, but also as a great equalizer in her classroom, placing students as co-creators, rather than passive learners, of their knowledge.

Dr. Jobin is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Stories and Societies Residential Academic Program here at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ and primarily teaches first year students. Dr. Jobin is an early adopter of technology as a learning tool, being one of the first faculty to implement Canvas and other online pedagogical tools, while also pioneering remote teaching techniques during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nominators note that Dr. Jobin was “invaluable to the RAPs when the pandemic necessitated a sudden pivot to remote teaching”, quickly preparing resources on Zoom and Canvas for other faculty members, and that she continues to provide tech support for RAP faculty that request help for technology related issues.

Within the classroom, Dr. Jobin “sees technology as a means of empowering students to be creators, and not just consumers, of information.” After forefronting base knowledge and curriculum at the beginning of the semester, Dr. Jobin then allows students to take the reins and use that basis in ways that are meaningful to them. In her “Europe to 1600” class, this means students choose a focus and write blog posts or create timelines, some of which have been included in an Open Educational Resource that has formed the class textbook. In her “War and Society” and “History of Christianity” classes, this practice manifests in digital atlas pages, using ArcGIS Story Maps and/or a Wordpress site that students built together as a class. In addition, throughout these courses students started the “Compendium of the Crusades” project, which houses short form writings about individuals, locations, battles and other events of the Crusades. In either experience, Dr. Jobin says, “Students have a certain amount of agency… I can give a framework and say, this is the type of stuff we're going to look at for this project. But I want you to choose the specifics, the angle or subject that's most interesting to you. And what you create is not something that's just going to cross my eyeballs and never be seen again if you don't want it to”. Students have the option to share their work with the whole class, future classes, and even the greater CU community and beyond.

This approach ultimately ties into Dr. Jobin’s focus on non-disposable assignments, the counterpoint to disposable assignments — those that are completed by individual students, only seen and graded by their professor, and, once returned to the student, are then thrown away. Instead, non-disposable assignments are those that may be shared with the greater community to contribute to a larger pool of knowledge. Students, then, become co-creators of knowledge in the classroom, especially when aided with the sharing features now available to us through technology. In essence, nominators write, “Nikki [brings] these students into the endeavor of writing, and not just consuming, history.”

This teaching practice certainly hasn’t always been easy, Dr. Jobin notes. After experimenting on her own and running into issues with students working from home or running into technological issues that sometimes only OIT can solve, Dr. Jobin has curated a list of best practices for other educators looking to incorporate technology into their own classrooms. To begin she suggests to “try and start small”. Though she acknowledges that sometimes she’s guilty of not doing this, she has found that sometimes smaller is better. She tells us, “Let's do just one little thing and see if it works well and then we can expand to a bigger project”. To help build even more scaffolding, she also suggests creating an example assignment before work starts so that students can have a constant reference point during their own work. Dr. Jobin also urges educators to “make sure [they’re] not latching onto a piece of technology or a way of using technology just because it's shiny and beautiful and new. In other words, before adopting new technology into your teaching — make sure it serves a clear pedagogical purpose. And, be sure to communicate that purpose to your students as well to create understanding of and buy-in for use of a new technology.

In closure, Dr. Jobin leaves fellow educators with this: “I think sometimes people think everything has to be polished and finished… [But] sometimes the process is almost as important as the product”. While Dr. Jobin speaks of some of her successes and some of the snags she’s encountered in using technology, she maintains that the process itself is still worth doing. Almost always, students will still learn something — even if the technological execution is not exactly perfect.

We are so excited to congratulate Dr. Jobin on all her accomplishments, and look forward to following her journey in creating, and helping students create, open educational resources in the future!

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Phoebe Young Receives ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 23:25:34 +0000

Phoebe Young Receives ASSETT Teaching with Technology Award Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/21/2020 - 17:25

Mark Werner

A journey from translation through engagement to scholarship of teaching with technologies

Phoebe Young, winner of this year’s ASSETT Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award, began teaching as many of us do by replicating how her best professors taught. She followed their methods, and used the same technologies. As a historian, she wrote and taught from lecture notes rich with information. She presented images and linked critical text to them by using overhead projectors and 35 mm slide projectors. This approach worked quite well for her until she had an “aha!” moment, when she realized that just because her students wrote a response in exam blue books, that didn’t necessarily mean that they had learned what she had wanted them to learn. As she mulled over that conundrum, she began to wonder if educational technologies might help her bridge the gap between the blue book model of offering students chances to respond to a prompt vs. a newer model of allowing them to reflect their learning in artifacts they produced.

In nominating Phoebe for this award, her peers and students recognized her for excellence in teaching with technology, and in consistently demonstrating a commitment to advancing teaching and learning through technology. She has been on a journey throughout her entire career to find ways to help her students improve their learning. When first exposed to PowerPoint, Phoebe saw it as an opportunity to help her students examine an image critically. In the WebCT learning management system she saw an opportunity to engage her students with course material, and an efficient way for her to communicate with students outside of class. In time she came to see that these technologies allowed her to replicate the good teaching that she had done in paper and film media into a digital form. But translating from one medium to a newer medium was just the start of her journey. Phoebe was more interested in seeing if technologies might be able to allow her to transform the way she taught.

Now when Phoebe is teaching with technologies, she focuses on helping students use them to produce more authentic and if possible, public objects. She found in the past that students would work really hard to produce an excellent paper and turn it in to her only to have that be the end of their work. However, technologies such as Omeka and WordPress have allowed her to guide students in producing an artifact that has been shaped through dialog with her and their peers, and to become something they can share with a wider audience. Her students have produced impressive multi-page websites and timelines, for example. They leave her class with an artifact they can show and share if they want to.

As Phoebe became more interested in engaging her students in their learning processes, she observed a physics instructor who taught with clickers. She was amazed at how interactive a lecture class could be! She saw students debate with one another over questions posed to the class. So she decided to try clickers in her class, and found that it made larger classes feel smaller. With clickers, she found she could assess in the moment where her students were in their learning processes. This was a great improvement over only getting a glimpse into students’ learning if they happened to raise their hand and asked a question. Just as clickers helped her with engagement in class, she found Perusall could engage them with texts and artifacts outside of class.

When asked if she has advice for faculty members considering adopting a technology when they teach, her advice is usually, “don’t take on all the variables at once.” That way you can tell if something you changed in your teaching works. However, she realizes that COVID-19 is requiring us to teach and learn in new ways, and to take on more changes than we might normally want to. In that case, she suggests faculty members figure out what their goal is first and then examine what technology might do to help with that goal. She offers the example of a faculty member considering PlayPosit, which is a technology that embeds quizzes inside of video content. She suggests thinking about a gap they would like to address (for example, assessing whether students are understanding key concepts in the video) and then thinking about how PlayPosit can help address that gap (for example, by inserting multiple choice questions about the concept in the video to see if the students are engaging with those concepts).

Phoebe’s quest to improve her teaching is by no means finished. She would like to increase her focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). She agrees with her history colleague Natalie Mendoza, whose work in SoTL suggests that it can be a good thing to recognize a problem in your teaching. Those problems can become research questions that can be approached with scholarly methods and skills. Phoebe wants to go beyond assessing her teaching through anecdotal accounts of students’ learning to examining students’ learning processes in an evidence-based way.

We are excited to celebrate Phoebe’s accomplishments and we look forward to following her work in the SOTL area!

Note: If you are interested in exploring any of the technologies mentioned in this article, please reach out to us at ASSETT@colorado.edu for a consultation.

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Nominate A&S Faculty for Excellence in Teaching with Technology

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:38:12 +0000

Nominate A&S Faculty for Excellence in Teaching with Technology Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/27/2020 - 12:38

ASSETT is currently accepting nominations for the 2020 Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award. The award is presented to an Arts & Sciences faculty member (of any rank) who has been nominated by their peers and/or students. Nominees should have a record of excellence in teaching with technology, as well as demonstrated commitment and leadership in furthering ASSETT's mission of advancing teaching and learning within CU's College of Arts & Sciences.

The recipient will receive a professional development award of $500 and catering for a reception within their home department. The recipient will be interviewed about their contributions to teaching with technology in a feature article for the ASSETT website and newsletter and will be invited to speak at an upcoming ASSETT event.

To nominate an individual, complete the online form no later than 11:59 pm on May 7, 2020. Peers and students are encouraged to submit nominations; nominations of early-career faculty members are especially welcome. For more information, email assett@colorado.edu.

Submit a Nomination

Image: pch.vector via Freepik

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