N IFTY AND F REE T OOLS FOR I MPROVING S TUDENT C OLLABORATION AND LEARNING S. Jane Fritz Faculty Technology Conference May 14, 2012

M OTIVATION Move from SAGE ON THE STAGE to GUIDE ON THE SIDE ( Ben Schneiderman- U. Maryland)

C HALLENGE Technology can be isolating - how can we utilize it more effectively to engage students and encourage interactive learning ? How can we design Learning Environments in which students are challenged to question, discuss, collaborate and share their insights with one another? Many attempts: Clickers Blackboard threads and discussions “Flipped classroom” Etc…

O VERVIEW OF N EW AND N IFTY T OOLS Piazza – Stanford University Graduate Engineering Student – Pooja Nath Sankar Gathering place for students to ask, answer, and explore 24/7, under the guidance of their instructors Classroom Salon - Carnegie Mellon University Collaboration between English and Computer Science Departments. ( David Kaufer and Ananda Gunawardena ) Tool that is useful for discussing e-documents Combines documents, collaboration, annotation, people, and analytics, all on one place Encourages “digital commenting” and highlighting Dropbox - single location to store and retrieve documents, photos, etc.

I NTRODUCTION TO P IAZZA Piazza – public square for “meeting and discussion”; a place where people come together to share ideas and knowledge Started as a homework help and discussion group, which encourages students to collaborate and answer one another’s questions Instructors can be active participants, or passive observers, offering support, confirmation (“good answer”) and direction as needed. One of it’s objectives is to provide quick responses to student questions, concerns or inquiries.

B EGINNING P IAZZA - D EMO (Student quad) Posts: Notes – announcements Questions – expect response Poll “Sandbox” Demo: Sample interactive “class”:

P IAZZA – A DDITIONAL I NFORMATION Questions or feedback Contact or call or

O VERVIEW OF C LASSROOM S ALON A salon is a meeting place; in this case it is an interactive forum around a common interest Classroom Salon – called “Facebook for Learning” Classroom salon makes assignments more “social” Classroom Salon integrates documents and discussion (unlike some course management systems where documents are in one folder and discussions are in another location. Can be used to collectively edit documents Can be used in conjunction with Blackboard

H OW TO U SE C LASSROOM S ALON Create a salon and invite the students to join Create or upload a document and add it to your repository (My Documents) Add questions or tags to the document and share Invite students to join the discussion, add comments, etc… Encourage students to “highlight” – major themes, areas that are not clear, etc… “Dashboard” facilitates managing users and documents

C LASSROOM S ALON A NALYTICS Understanding what a student or group is doing within a document: Isolate the response of a single student- focus on one at a time Compare a student’s comments to your annotations Measure student participation Show where there is an overlap among a group of students Follow “breadcrumbs” – highlighted areas either in response to a question or as something not well understood. (Darker highlighting indicates greater number of responses ) Use “most helpful” to see influence of one student on another Measure distribution of comments, most interesting paragraph, most puzzling, etc..

B EGINNING C LASSROOM S ALON Videos: Salon in Social Media –transforming the classroom Writing, commenting, and web 2.0 Step 1: Login, go to Quick Start ==> My profile and upload picture Change/update profile information anytime. o Step 2: Create a Sample Salon Quick Start ==> Start a Salon Enter name, make it public, private (and change or repurpose this salon anytime) o Step 3 : Salon combines (context + interpretation) of an activity to make it more efficient for management and analytics. Then as students interact with the document, it produces activity analytics.

B EGINNING C LASSROOM S ALON - CONTINUED Here is an example: (a) Unlike courses/activities you develop in a CMS, Salon activities are easily shareable. Join this salon: wSalon&id= wSalon&id=1098 (b) Click on this activity link and perform some tasks. n=annotateDocument&id=13395 (i) when you see something interesting, highlight, make a comment, choose a tag (ii) In the crowd sourcing exercise, choose 2-3 problems, highlight and provide your answer n=annotateDocument&id=13395 (iii) Do whatever other activities you'd like to perform.

B EGINNING C LASSROOM S ALON - CONTINUED (c) Now here is where we benefit from "collective intelligence" Click on this link to see everyone else in the world who did the same activity. ewDocument&id=13395 (i) You can click on any highlighted section and see all the people who contributed (ii) Click on "My Hotspots" to see who else overlaps with your work. Do they agree with you? or disagree? What can you learn from them? (iii) go to "Tags" and filter annotations by tags. For example, if the instructor used "confusing" as a tag, you will know immediately which part of the assignment is confusing or difficult. ewDocument&id=13395

S HARING F ILES AND D OCUMENTS Step 4: [Sharing with others] So just as I shared the link to My Salon and activity, you can invite others to join your salon and complete your activity. Using document manager, you can add tags and questions, set access times for activities (must complete by this date, can view everyone's work after this date etc..)

C LASSROOM S ALON M ODES Step 5 : [Modes of Operations] Salon has 3 modes of operations for each activity/document 1. Annotation/participation ---> in this mode users are only able to participate in the activity by selecting, commenting, choosing tags and responding to questions 2. View mode ---> this mode is social. It shows collective work of everyone. Using various filters, you can discover many things 3. Dashboard ---> This mode shows interesting analytics of everyone's work. This mode can be locked from the view of students

D EMO You can access all 3 modes for this activity ect.aspx?action=viewDocument&id=13395http:// ect.aspx?action=viewDocument&id=13395 Click Menu and then switch from one mode to another

E XPORT D ATA Step 6: (Export Data) The most interesting part of Salon is the ability to export Data for you to analyze. For example, you can export an excel file of student work using Menu --> Site Menu --> Export Comments This file can be parsed in multiple ways to produce grades for students or to find course analytics. You can create a file called questions.txt that was generated from a comment file. [This would be an example of how many questions were generated by students as a result of salon]

C USTOMIZATION Step 7: (Customization) For many user and institutions, it is important to customize the UI (User Interface) to match the tasks. Here is an example of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee building a custom UI to make it easier for students to access their activities. You may want to join the salon: ction=viewSalon&id=876 if you want to see the activities. ction=viewSalon&id=876

S UGGESTED U SE Suppose you have an e-textbook that students are reading, but in the process they are using tags to tell the instructor where they are having trouble. Instructor can use this information to tailor his/her lectures. Much better way to deliver instructions. Since each salon, activity/document is a link, we encourage each individual/organization to build their own custom UI's (or use existing CMS) using embedded salon links (or use salon as is).

C LASSROOM S ALON S UMMARY Salon is simple, provides opportunities for innovative instructional design (using annotations, comments, tags and questions), customized UI's, provides many levels of social features (reply to comments, join discussions, follow experts....) all without losing context of conversation or activity. Salon's export data facility provides innovative organizations to build their own analytics engines. We encourage you to build web based analytics modules and share with other salon users. Enjoy Salon. Send us feedback. We will build the core. You build the content, instructional design.

C LASSROOM S ALON R ESOURCES ngStarted.pdfhttp:// ngStarted.pdf ( Getting Started Manual) to Related Articles: gie-mellons-classroom-salon-encourages-collaborative- critique.aspx