Are Used Texts Really the Answer?

  At the beginning of the semester, textbooks are a common topic of conversation.  In my classes,  promote buying used books and often tell students to look online to find good deals.  As I read the article Why are Textbooks so Expensive?, by Henry L. Roediger III,  I wondered if I was, in fact, contributing to the problem of high textbooks. 

Photo from blog.georgetownvoice.com

Roediger says that the used textbook companies are to blame for the problem.  The publisher has to spend money on the production and marketing of the textbook, which can be quite expensive.  Students sell their books back to the bookstore or to a used textbook company for a small price.  Those books are marked up and sold again.  When the books are resold again and again, the publisher nor the author makes no additional profit on the books. 

Richard Hull and Michael Lennie in their article Why E-Textbooks Just Make Sense agree with the thought that the high price of books is directly related to the used textbook stores.  They say "perceived student savings from buying lower-priced used books is deceptive, because the used-book industry essentially forces publishers to prematurely publish expensive 'revised editions' for the primary purpose of reducing their losses from used-book sales."  Hull and Lennie say that few course texts need to revised every three years. 

Online texts, or etexts, may be the answer.  Publishers often offer online texts, which can save the student quite a bit of money. Purchasing a text this way would give the authors and publishers some profit,  and may stop some of the used textbook sales.  The students, however, wouldn't be able to recoup any of the money at the end of the semester.

What are your thoughts?  Do you feel that texts would become less expensive if students purchased more new texts?  Should students purchase etexts?  Would this require them to print out their texts if they are to be used in class?  Many questions to ponder at the beginning of the semester!

Note:  Thanks to Cheryl Bowman for today's blog information. 

Movie Clips in the Classroom

The start of a new semester is always inspiring.  What will you do to tweak your class this spring?  I'm going to add a few movie clips to my lectures, just to spice things up a bit. 

There are a number of ways to get movie clips.  One way is to buy the DVD and then play the clip you have found.  Another way is to use your Netflix account and pull up the movie, if available, via online streaming.  You might also use movie trailers, available on many websites.  I recently discovered an even easier way to find and use movie clips, and that's through the website movieclips.com.

The good folks at Movieclips have dissected over 1700 movies and have provided over 12,000 clips.  Going through the clips would be a daunting tast, but because Movieclips has attached categories to each clip, it's a breeze to find the one that would work in your classroom.  You can search the movie clips by movie, mood, theme, actor, director, or 25 other categories.  Once you find the movie clip you want to use in class, you can embed it into your PowerPoint or Prezi presentation, or share the clip through e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.  As with many cool online sites, this one is helpful, but can be a time-waster! 

Here's a good one for the start of the teaching semester, even though it's related more to high school than college.  Click on the link, and move the curser at the bottom of the video to :45 seconds into the clip to start the feel-good video of the day.   I am a Teacher!  (Note:  The movie clip isn't embedded here because it's now allowed by Blogger.)

Movieclips provides a great service, but with any use of movie clips in the classroom, you need to follow a few general guidelines.  Make sure the movie clip is introduced properly.  It should be closely tied into the class topic.  Test the clips prior to class to make sure they will work properly when you need them to work!  Finally, don't overuse movie clips; they lose their effectiveness if used too often.

Questions? Comments?  Please comment below or e-mail me a jrudnick@epcc.edu.  See you next week!

Free Writing-A Great Tool for Students

What fifteen-minute ungraded activity can promote better test scores? There are many answers, but today’s focus is a quick five-minute free writing activity followed by a short discussion. According to a study by Drabick, Weisberg, Paul, and Bubier (2007), students who participated in free writing about the course content did better on multiple choice exams than those who were not part of the study. In addition, students attended class more often.

Photo Credit

Richard Day, in his article “Two Writing Activities for Extensive Reading,” says that having students extend the free writing to a slightly more advanced timed repeated thinking and writing provides three benefits. Students can have a starting place for their writing, they improve their writing fluency, and the instructor has a better insight to the students’ reading. Imagine having your students write for a few minutes each day about what they read or what they heard during the last class period. It would be easy to find out if they are keeping up with the class. As Day says, “If they have not read a book, they will have little, if anything, to write about.” This is equally true for those who haven’t attended class, or have not paid attention.

Focused free writing is probably more beneficial for most courses, but if you’d like to try free writing that isn’t focused on your course topic, go to Creative Writing Prompts, where 346 topics are ready for your use. If you are in a computer room and want to control the free writing time, you might want to have students use this site to write their ideas.

While most instructors don’t have the time to free write in every class, adding this to your class activities would be useful to students. Focused topics could help students think about what is discussed in class, and could help them on their exams. As you’re planning next semester’s classes, think about adding this beneficial activity.

Note:  Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, there will be no blog entry next week. See you in December!

Yes! Text in Class!

  If you have teenagers at home, you know that their cell phones are used as watches and as texting devices. Occasionally, they're used as  phones, if they have to talk to you, the parent!  In that respect, our college students are not much different than younger teens.  There are few students who do not have cell phones in class, and they use them to text.  If you want to read more about cell phone use at every age, you might want to read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, called  Y U Luv Text, H8 Calls, by Katherine Rosman.  Obviously, texting is here to stay, at least for now, so, let's join the party!

  One way to put the cell phones to good use in the classroom is to use Poll Everywhere. As the name implies, Poll Everywhere is a polling system that can be used for quick interactions.   Poll Everywhere is free for a group up to 30 people, and can involve your students and let them use their cell phones at the same time.  Poll Everywhere can be at as a quick substitute for Clickers, which have become more popular in our classes. 

  Once students have texted their answers, either from their cell phones or computers, you can show the results live via the Internet or a PowerPoint slide.  An Internet connection is necessary for this, of course.  The following video gives you an overview of how easy it is to use Poll Everywhere.



There are a couple of limitations to Poll Everywhere.  It seems that you can create just one question at a time, but you can quickly move from one question to another.  Also, students must have access to a cell phone or computer connected to the Internet to participate. 

Poll Everywhere is something I think would be a good ice-breaker at the beginning of class or a quick wake-them-up activity after 20 minutes or so of lecturing.  Students could also create test questions for the their classmates to answer.

Once you've tried Poll Everywhere, comment on the blog so we can learn from your experiences.

Have a great week.

Inspiring the Love of Learning in Today's Student

Blog note:  Today's guest blogger is Margie Nelson.  Margie is an Assistant Professor of English at the Valle Verde Campus.  If you'd like to discuss teaching and learning as a guest blogger, feel free to contact me at jrudnick@epcc.edu. 

by Margie Nelson

At this year's Southwest Seminar, I was lucky enough to attend the “Inspiring the Love of Learning in Today's Student” session. Instructors from various disciplines and different colleges shared their techniques and ideas for inspiring the love of learning in our students.



Photo credit 

 After an in-depth discussion, our group organized our numerous ideas into two major categories. The first category, Connecting with Students Early and Often, included ideas that stressed the importance of appropriately showing students your “human” side, making students feel invested in the course, and demonstrating the course’s relevance to students’ lives and “the real world.” Some specific examples include a math instructor bringing in a utility bill to demonstrate equations, an accounting instructor sharing his academic and work history with students, an information technology instructor comparing computer programming to everyday “programming,” and a writing instructor using email assignments to show audience.

The second category, Strategies to Motivate Learning in Class and Beyond, was comprised of strategies that instructors had successfully employed to motivate students’ learning in class and life-long-learning (LLL). Some specific examples include reminding students about their motivation for being in class (even if the course is a degree requirement), requiring or encouraging students to publish their work on the web (such as EPCC’s Borderland’s Project), involving students in professional associations and conferences, and appealing to students’ personal interests while developing their technology skills with biographical assignments on the web (such as using Microsoft’s Photostory software program).

Discussing and sharing techniques with such passionate instructors inspired me. I want to thank all of the instructors who participated and shared their excellent ideas and to El Paso Community College, Central New Mexico Community College, and EPCC’s Faculty Development Office for an enriching seminar. Motivating students to love learning is a legacy we can pass on to our students. Yes, it can be a challenge, but this invaluable legacy is worth all the hard work.

Do Your Students Read the Textbook?

  When I started the semester, I made sure that students knew they didn't have to purchase a new textbook.  I told them they could rent a book, buy a used book, or purchase chapters from the publisher's website.  What I may not have made clear, however, is that they should read the book.  When I started discussing the first exam, I suggested to the students that they should be reading the chapters.  I warned them that what I talked about in class was just a part of the information they needed for the test.  For over a week, I asked them how their reading was coming along.  Perhaps you can guess the results.  Many students waited until a couple of days before the exam to read the book, and missed many details.  The resulting test scores were miserable.

I hate to see students do poorly on exams, so I took the opportunity to research a bit to see what I can do to help the students read their assignments.  My research took me to the Association for Psychological Science Teaching Tips.  In her article about using textbooks effectively, Denise  R. Boyd provides a number of ideas that I might use in my classes to promote the reading of the book.



Photo from http://collegexperience.net/

 Boyd says that in her classes, she explains that lectures will be more interesting if she doesn't have to provide a list of items that they could read themselves. 

Boyd also uses the text in class.  Instead of putting up a PowerPoint slide of a graph, she directs the students to open the book to the graph.  Some students may feel uncomfortable and feel like they are missing something, so they bring their texts to class.

Another idea of using the textbooks is from  Barbara Gross Davis, University of California, Berkeley.  Her article, Motivating Students, is reprinted here.  In the article, Davis provides an example from J.W.Daniel (please see article for full citation).  The professor that Daniel refers to gives an assignment for the next class.  At the start of that next class, he has students give him a notecard containing information from the reading, such as definitions, or key ideas.  The professor collects the cards and returns them to students a week before the exam.  At that point, students can add information, apparently during class, but then must turn in the card to the professor.  The professor returns the cards on exam day for students to use. According to Daniel, "this faculty member reports that the number of students completing the reading jumped from 10 percent to 90 percent and that students especially valued these...cards."

I have used something similar in my classes.  I let students bring a 4 x 6 "cheat sheet" for their exams.  They can write whatever they want on the cards. It's amazing how much they can fit on a card.  My rationale is twofold.  First, it forces the students to use the text to create their exam card.  Second, I think it lessens the urge to cheat.  My results have been mixed.  Unfortunately, the grades aren't very high, but they don't cheat!

What are your tips for encouraging students to read the text?  Post them in the "Comments" section, and let's see if we can get a discussion going.

The next post will be in two weeks and will focus on information learned from the Southwest Seminar.  See you then!

Stumble

In my Internet travels, I run across many websites.  Some provide me with research, some inspire me, and some are just for fun.  I often choose to use one of my favorite websites, StumbleUpon, to find things I may not have found using more traditional search engines like Google.  I've checked boxes on the website to show StumbleUpon what type of things I'm looking for.  According to the StumbleUpon website, there are almost 500 topics from which to choose.  The topics range from the serious to the ridiculous.  I have selected educational topics to my list of hobby and humor topics to justify my surfing existence. 

You can stumble in two ways.  The first way is to search from the website.   The second way is to download the toolbar.  You can't do this at work, (of it you can, it's frowned upon), but feel free to do it on your home computer.  You do have to sign up so that your topics can be remembered, but it's free. Once you're registered and have decided on your topics, start clicking on the "StumbleUpon" button. 

You'll notice a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" on the site.  If you like the page you're visiting, you can save it by clicking  "I like it!."  Likewise, if you don't like the content of a specific webpage, you can click "thumbs down," so that site is no longer in your mix of searched websites.

StumbleUpon is unique because it is a social website.  According to doshdosh.com, "Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. By surfing the web and tagging or submitting specific websites, each user can keep track of which websites they like and share it with others."  If you find a website that isn't already part of StumbleUpon, you can click "I Like It!" and it will become part of the network of websites that others will be able to view.

Although it seems like it might be a total time-waster, depending on what you choose as your topics, Stumbleupon can produce very interesting results.  By using this toolbar, I have found great recipes, topics for classes, and I've also had some fun along the way. 

Give StumbleUpon a try.  I'll warn you, however, it's like candy corn.  You'll want "just one more," and may end up clicking the night away.

See you next week!