Google 101 with Dad

I spend my days trying how to figure out how to get the most out of emerging technologies for today's college students. So it's really refreshing to spend time with my 90-year old Dad and his iPad.

Until recently, he has mostly used it for email. That in itself has been a big leap, and a real help to keep him connected with friends and family -- especially since my Mom passed away last summer.  He tends to be on a different schedule than my siblings and myself, staying up later at night and sleeping in longer in the morning. (But hey, after working for 70 years, he's earned the right to make any kind of schedule he wants!)  Being able to email with us means we can stay in touch constantly, even if one or the other of us is asleep.

Just recently, Dad discovered Google. Wow. It's amazing to me to even write that phrase. I mean, he knew about Google, but he didn't know how to Google. Now he has the Google icon at the bottom of the screen, I hope he will use it frequently.  He's a smart man, but he challenges me constantly to use my best tech teaching practices.  For example, after our first lesson on how to Google, he wanted to stop and "write it down so I'll remember."  Now, if something is complicated, or it's a task you won't use frequently, I see no harm in writing down the steps.  But in this case, I said, "How about we just keep doing more searches?"

He was happy to oblige!  My Dad is the kind of person who will sit and read the dictionary. He is a Google dream.

So, if you are feeling overwhelmed by technology, or if you just need a pick-me-up, I suggest you find an elderly person and show them how to use one of these tools that the rest of us take for granted every day now.  Explaining to someone what a search engine does will make you stop and think, "That is pretty amazing."

Update:

He has discovered YouTube.

Clickers. You're doing it wrong.

It's hard to know where to start with this picture I found on Twitter. First of all, the sheer gall of the student to post this blatant dishonesty on the Internet!  I know this is not from my campus (we use a different model of clicker), but it probably happens here, too. (Still! Has she no shame?!)

Here's the thing, though. Beyond the fact that the student is being dishonest and she and her friends are cheating so they get points despite not actually attending class, if the instructor were using clickers correctly, this would not work.

It appears from this image that this instructor is quizzing his students, and asking simple multiple choice questions. So, Sally Student here (I removed her real name from the image) simply lines up the three clickers and punches "A" "A" "A" and waits for the next question. (Maybe she even refers to her notes, which are sitting underneath the clickers.)

So wrong!

Imagine this instead:  the instructor asks a question that requires thought. Sally doesn't know the answer off the top of her head. She has to think. To process. It takes all the allotted time, and suddenly the instructor is telling her she has to vote. She casts her vote, and is now kind of annoyed that she has her two friend's clickers to deal with. Maybe she votes for them, maybe she does not.

Now the instructor has asked students to turn to their neighbor and defend their answer. In talking it over (her neighbor had a different answer), Sally finds that she understands the information much better, and now when the polling is opened up again she changes her answer, because her neighbor had a much better description of the problem and her reasoning made more sense to Sally.

Sally votes, and eagerly awaits the moment when she will learn whether she chose the correct answer this time. She and her neighbor are still chatting about it. Sally is so engaged in the learning process that she forgets to vote on her friends' clickers.

Sally feels a little bad about that. But, she also feels that she was doing some hard work learning during this class, and that it wasn't really fair for her friends to ask her to do all the work while they get credit for the answers.  So she tells them that she won't be taking their clickers to class for them anymore.

Reclaim control of your clicker classroom. Make it more than "Good thing I go to class."