This month’s guest blogger is Dr. Denis Keyes from the Department of Teacher Education in the School of Education, Health, & Human Performance.
I wasn’t really sure how I was going to use the iPad we received from the FTI last year, as I tend to be more of a “traditional lecturer” than an “innovative interactor.” The most difficult course I teach is the undergraduate assessment course, which covers a multitude of topics related to screening, testing, evaluating skills and determining individualized education programs (IEPs) for children who have various forms of disabling conditions, primarily mental, learning or emotional disabilities. The worst part of this is that there are only so many hours in class time, and with so much to cover, it becomes impossible to do any really fun things in class…
One of the most important aspects of this course is teaching students to correctly administer the norm-referenced, standardized tests they are required to give, in order to achieve valid results. This requires some role playing, but when you have 37 students (yes, you read it correctly – 37 students in a 400 level course), individual role playing exercises become a zoo really quickly… But I needed to show the students how to administer these tests – particularly the Wide-Range Achievement and the Woodcock-Johnson Achievement tests. This is where my iPad became of great use!
I used my iPad to video-record myself administering both of those tests to students, and showed part of it in class, then put the rest of it onto OAKS so they could watch it in their own good time. When I did this, I realized that I could also add subsequent dialogue to the video, and headings, using the SPLICE App that we learned in the FTI last summer. Both of these Apps have been very useful to my courses in other ways this year, too. Not the least is recoding my graduate and distance education lectures so that I can post them on OAKS, in case students either missed the lecture live, or if they need a ‘refresher’ view!
As always, the FTI is, in my opinion, the best thing the College offers its faculty short of a paycheck! Many thanks for giving me this opportunity to learn and even be paid to do so!!! You guys are, to use a very overused phrase…. AWESOME!!! :>)
