Use Technology Intentionally

Using new, or different technologies in your class may bring a learning curve for you and your students, the potential for additional financial costs, and a variety of other challenges. However, when selected with care and purpose and implemented throughtfully, technology can help you with the heavy lifting involved with teaching a large group of students; it might help get students more engaged with lessons; and it might help you provide better support to students who need it.

Before deciding what technology to incorporate into your course design, consider how technology might help you achieve your learning objectives and course outcomes. If a technology choice doesn’t promote achieving your goals, it isn’t a good tech choice. If a technology choice is one that is difficult to use, it isn’t a good tech option. The best technology is one that everyone can use.

Consider support for the technology that you are thinking about using in your course. UNL Information Technology Services (ITS) supports certain technology that interacts well with Canvas. If you choose to use a technology that is not university-supported, understand that you might have to trouble shoot student questions and problems yourself if the technology doesn’t provide good support for its product.

Also consider areas of your teaching materials that are most difficult for your students to understand, areas that you find yourself reteaching over and over, and areas that take up a lot of your time. These areas might benefit from intentional technology. As Michelle Miller advises, “Focus on those pinch points” to “resolve the most difficult, challenging, or problematics parts” of your course.

Help Choosing Technologies

Contact an instructional designer assigned to your college to have someone to help you analyze what you want to achieve with technology and provide you with the pros and cons of various options.

Finding, testing, and evaluating technology can be a time consuming task. Let CTT instructional designers and Academic Technolgies staff help you identify the best solution for you and your class.

• Take advantage of Canvas LMS features: (Automation, SpeedGrader, Praise point outs to entire class).
• Integrations with Canvas: Use university-supported technologies
• Use Cell/mobile/laptops/clickers in the classroom to keep students actively engaged. Use those in-class response devices to take attendance by answering a quiz question that is covered during class. Administer in-class reading quizzes. Ask your students to solve a problem or answer a question. Retrieval practice using such tech-based activities helps build the all-important knowledge base and keeps your students actively involved in their learning.
• Feedback via Canvas LMS technology tools: Rubrics. Annotations. Audio. Video. Peer review. How to Give Your Students Better Feedback with Technologyby Holly Fiock and Heather Garcia. Instructor Tutorial: How do I set up Canvas Peer Reviews? Student Tutorial: How do I use Peer Review?
• Use Message Students Who option in the Gradebook to message students individually in the following categories: Haven’t submitted yet; Haven’t been graded; Scored less than [point value]; Scored more than [point value]. How do I send a message to students from the gradebook?
• Set module prerequisites/completion requirements to help your students manage their time. This ensures that your students have mastered necessary concepts and skills before moving on to the next unit. How do I add prerequisites to a module?
• Student Collaborations and Student Office Hours: A couple of ways to make meeting with your students easier include using Canvas Scheduler and using Zoom for office hours. Zoom provides an environment where you can hold regularly scheduled "office hours" and provide an "open space" where your students can enter at any time to study together or to work on a project together. To streamline scheduling of in-person office hours, make use of the Canvas Scheduler.
• Short instructional videos: Create your own narrated videos using a video program like YuJa that integrates well in Canvas. You can repurpose and reuse these educational videos in subsequent courses by avoiding saying timeframes such as “spring semester” or due dates. Create short videos about course topics: discuss a difficult concept or problem, preview future assignments, pose reflection questions. Create video updates during the semester as reminders of upcoming assignments. Post short videos in weekly announcements that review the prior week, give public praise, and preview the upcoming week.
• Embrace “polysynchronous” teaching: Use effective strategies and technologies from remote teaching and flipped course designs. Students engage with course content outside of the classroom (readings, videos, search websites) in preparation for in-class activities.