Teaching with Technology

Using technology to enhance practice opportunities and assess student learning can open up new possibilities for more efficient and effective ways to interact with your students throughout your course.

• Classroom response systems (CRS), sometimes still referred to as “clickers,” allow you to quickly assess students’ understanding and adjust pace and content of your in-class sessions.
• Explore Instapoll

With the full range of online technologies and digital media at your disposal, there is a vast variety of ways to convey information, both in the classroom and beyond. Which pathways will best guide your students in exploring ideas and building knowledge?

• Choose a “curate or create” strategy that fits your ability to generate and find digital materials.
• Opt for quality over quantity when deciding what to assign students to study.
• Consider using or designing “open educational resources,” (OERs), freely available educational resources like online textbooks or collections of materials that you can use and develop over many semesters.
• Explore UT's OERs for language learning.
• Visit OER Commons.

Teaching with technology allows you to expand the range of these connections and build different kinds of communities and modes of inquiry in your course.

• Online collaboration tools, such as those in Google Apps, allow students and instructors to share documents online, edit them in real time, and project them on a screen.
• Online annotation and visualization tools (e.g., Hypothes.is or Perusall) lower the barrier for students to analyze text passages discussed or discovered in class.

With new and emerging technologies, you can offer students the opportunity to expand their palette beyond text, employ different media, and be more creative in their responses to your assignments.

• Presentation software (e.g., Prezi) allow students to create responses to assignments in different formats.
• Students can present their learning products through online portfolios or collections (e.g., Padlet), blogs or wikis, and aggregate feedback from you and other students.
• Explore Folio

Quite often, the spatial arrangement of a classroom is an implicit statement of your teaching practice to students. Introducing technologies into your teaching can make your classroom and your connections with students more dynamic.

• Think about rearranging your classroom spaces or using technology in the classroom to redefine how students interact with you and their peers.
• Consider digital technologies in the context of the entire classroom ecology.

Even the most effective, engaging courses that you teach can become routine. Introducing new technologies in a spirit of experimentation can allow you to step outside of established practices and see new possibilities.

• Integrating technology can bring new communities into the classroom.
• They can give you a powerful tool to expose students to emerging career paths that are increasingly expecting employees to work and learn successfully in technology-mediated environments.

Technologies can be uniquely geared for organizing all the resources you and your students need for a class while providing extra value: valuable grading tools, spaces for discussion, and timely sharing of information.

• Learning management systems like Canvas can serve as a repository of resources, communication tools, and a single place for submitting homework and grades which instructors and students can access anywhere, anytime.
• Learn More about Canvas.