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Increasingly, students enter classrooms with knowledge of various technological tools and skills. I believe that educators must incorporate technology into their classrooms in creative and thoughtful ways to create a dynamic, exciting and interactive learning environment. However, integrating technology just for technology’s sake fails to exploit the capacity of technology for harnessing students’ interest and engagement with course materials. I integrate a variety of activities and technologies to create an exciting, interactive environment that enhances student learning. Scholars continue to debate the benefits and ills of PowerPoint in the classroom. Often educators turn to PowerPoint as a tool for efficient and streamlined presentation of lectures. Although PowerPoint offers many options for making presentations more vivid and visually exciting, all too often PowerPoint encourages a passive classroom that lacks interaction and engagement with material. Many PowerPoint-based lectures include text heavy slides that discourage discussion and student-centered learning. I rely on PowerPoint presentations that integrate text, images and other technologies to create a dynamic, interactive, student-centered environment. If used creatively, the uses of PowerPoint extends beyond simply communicating material to formative assessments and incorporation internet-based audio and video supplements. Personal response systems (PRS) provide another means of integrating technology for creating interactive, student-based learning environments. I often use PowerPoint based Jeopardy review games in my courses prior to exams. Students, seem to enjoy this activity and remark that it a useful tool for organizing their studying. The integration of Personal Response System technologies works seamlessly with PowerPoint and provides students with real-time feedback. Personal Response System uses extend beyond simply review and games to include real-time formative assessments of student learning for altering lectures to ensure that students clearly understand concepts and course content. Technology need not be sophisticated to be effective for creating a dynamic classroom. Often classroom activities generate opportunities for discussion and interaction between students. During my introductory course, my students complete the Titanic Task role-playing activity. This group activity often makes clear how race, class and gender influence life chances – albeit in an extreme situation. Students construct justifications for each decision and are surprised by the similarity across groups for final decisions and justifications for these decisions which further reinforces the power of social status in everyday life. For many, the internet is an integral part of life. A variety of Web 2.0 resources allow harnessing the vastness of the internet for classroom and learning purposes. Specifically, social bookmarking tools such as delicious.com provide the opportunity for students to share useful and interesting websites and stories with their peers. I ask my students establish a delicious account and use an agreed upon tag to bookmark class relevant material. We devote some time each week exploring bookmarked pages and discussing how these sources speak to material discussed during class. For example, students in my Culture War class look for examples of purported culture wars on the internet and we compare colloquial and academic definitions for culture wars. Further, we examine parallels between internet culture war claims and the empirical evidence from the course. I find that this activity makes the material seem less sterile and more personally germane. Creative and thoughtful integration of technology into the classroom creates an exciting, student-centered learning environment. Regardless of the level of sophistication, technology introduces opportunities for educators to engage with students on their own terms and incorporate their tools and skill sets into the learning process.
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