Technology in the classroom can be a wonderful tool – speeding up the learning process through discovery, looking at the variety of functions demonstrating a particular concept, however if the instructor is not motivated to discover these instructional methods, technology can be a distraction, slow the pace of the class down considerably, and decrease a student’s comfort level with technology. At the University of Colorado DHSC we have a wide variety of instructors who teach our lower-level math classes: full time instructors who are averse to using technology because of the time investment required, graduate TA’s who know only how they were taught, and honoraria who are brought in to teach usually just one class and have their own method for teaching.
One advantage we do have is that we are fortunate to have two instructors who are experts in teaching with technology: Bruce MacMillan (using the TI-89) and Mike Kawai (using just about every other software available). The goal is to incorporate proper use of technology in the teaching of as many classes as possible. Our first attempt was to use Bruce MacMillan and Mike Kawai as course captains and consultants: we run workshops at the beginning of each semester to which all non-honoraria instructors are required to attend; Bruce and Mike met with the instructors of individual courses about once a week suggesting computer/calculator activities; encouraged instructors to attend their own classes. This was only partly successful – full-time faculty continued to teach in their own (mostly non-technology oriented) style, and perhaps about 60% of the graduate teaching assistants began using technology in the classroom.
To improve our usage of technology in the classroom, we decided to switch from running 2 to 5 sections of calculus to a lecture recitation format. This required some creativity as our campus has a real limitation on large classroom space, but ultimately we were able to schedule at most 2 lectures per class and running small recitation sections. This helped us in several ways: we could schedule our most experienced technology-wise instructors as lectures, and we could put our most inexperienced Teaching Assistants in a recitation section where they can be mentored closely by the lecture-instructor. This has the disadvantage that there is less interaction with the lecture-instructor, but we continue to work on this.
Encouraging new instructors to use technology when they are not use to it is not easy, especially when they are under the time-pressures of being a graduate student as well. Encouraging the new instructor to try to have one technology oriented discovery/analysis type activity per lecture is a reasonable goal, and allowing them to watch a more experienced instructor helps immensely as well. The best new instructors are the ones who took the time to sit in on an entire class taught by an experienced instructor and then incorporated some of these ideas into his/her own class.