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Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

Friday, June 25, 2021

Why Students Turn Off their Cameras in Online Classes

Screen with 25 photos of Dr. Z I HATE it when my students turn off their cameras in class!

I didn't select teaching as my role in life to talk to a bunch of boxes on the screen.  I want to talk to my students and see their responses as we venture into new ideas and experiences.

Unfortunately, when we had to move our classes online, educators met with a number of students who didn't turn on their cameras. I have spent the past year presenting OK Zoomer webinars for Higher-Ed and K-12 teachers.  The #1 question they have is "How can I get my students to turn on their cameras?"

Good question.  There are a plethora of solutions. Some answer that question by mandating students to keep their cameras active. This may be unfair because it is an invasion of their privacy.  Other educators build empathy with their students by sharing important it is for them to have the opportunity to have eye contact with their students.  Some instructors give extra credit points to students who show themselves.  

I have been interested in learning about why students turn off their cameras.  This Spring semester, I taught 100 students in three sections through Zoom. At the end of the semester, I asked them to share their reasons for turning off their cameras. I presented them with a list of 14 options and then provided a place where they could provide other reasons. They could select as many reasons as they wanted.

Reasons Why Students Turn Off Their Cameras*

The results were quite interesting.  Out of my 100 students, 69 of them answered the survey. Here are the results of this survey (n=69): 




Survey Results: Why Students Turn Off their Cameras


I have broken these results into 6 groups: Self-Conscious, Technical, Considering Others, Status Quo, Other Activity, and Privacy:


Self-Conscious: Two of the top 3 reasons given indicated that the students are Self-conscious. They didn't want others to see them and they didn't like seeing themselves. They were concerned about being judged. 

Other Activity: They wanted to engage in an activity other than class. Thirty-nine percent of them turned them off because they were eating. That was considerate (especially in my 8:00 class). You will note that the last two reasons involved them getting involved in something else. 

Technical: Technology tends to fail. Almost 1/3 of them had internet problems. Some had webcam problems. The interesting part of this is that I had students contact me apologizing about how they couldn't use their cameras because of technical problems. 

Consider Others: Surprisingly, about 1/5 of the students turned them off because they were concerned that they would distract their classmates or their professor.  The funny thing is that I enjoyed seeing my students and turning them off distracted me.

Status Quo: Everyone else had turned theirs off, so why shouldn't I?  Why did they feel that it should be the status quo?  Did the teacher say it was OK?  Was the class delivered at one-way communication so it didn't seem like they needed to be part of the discussion?  Did the students get together and decide to keep their cameras off?  Don't know.

Privacy: Should students be required to share their surroundings? One-quarter of them didn't want to show other people and 1/5 didn't want to show their surroundings.  These are significant concerns that could be considered.

How Can We Use These Results?

A preliminary analysis indicates that the most popular reasons that our students turn off their cameras have to do with them being Self-Conscious. While it is understandable that students are concerned about how they look and what others think about them, we need to make their learning environment safe and inviting to reduce their anxiety.

The Other Activity reasons were interesting. It is fully understandable for students to turn off their cameras when they are eating. Finding the "not paying attention" reason at the bottom of the pile was a surprise. While that reason is high on my list when I turn off my camera, it wasn't the case with these students. These ratings may indicate that they were learning in an interactive environment. 

Technical problems are everywhere. They have little to do with attitude and everything to do with happenstance. While some situations are unavoidable (e.g., poor web access in the rural areas), other reasons may just be computer problems that can be corrected. (I wrote another posting about Strategies to Optimize Your Zoom Bandwidth earlier.)

Considering Others' distractions is unique. This may indicate an empathy that has developed in a positive community. 

The Status Quo has to do with expectations. The teacher must share their vision for the learning environment with students so they will know how to perform. There is great debate about whether an educator can REQUIRE students to turn on their cameras. Looking into students' homes may be an invasion of privacy. Some teachers encourage their students to share their cameras by: having theme or color days where they dress accordingly; encouraging students to create virtual backgrounds to support the course content; or having interactive discussions that encourage face-to-face interaction. 

Privacy was a big concern when students were forced into online learning. We must pay attention to situations where students don't want to share their home life or companions. It leads us to the problem with requiring students to show their faces. Educators would be more effective if they worked with the student to remedy the situation (e.g., broadcast from the library) than forcing embarassment.

This is Only the Beginning

I am sharing these results with you because it is one of the most often asked questions on educators' minds. I will be analyzing this deeper and submitting it to a refereed journal. Please leave your comments about the research design, my comments, or how these relate to your experiences.

I NEED Your Help Higher Education Educators!!

I am interested in expanding this research to explore students' reactions in other classes.   I am looking for 10 higher education educators who would like to join me.  It may be as simple as having your students complete the survey or we can discuss how this would best address your needs.

Please contact me at Dr. Z with your subject and teaching situation. Put Camera Research in the subject line. 

Have a Great Week!

Z

* This article was edited on 9/16/21 to add the Privacy category.  This was suggested by some readers and it was a valid suggestion.  The numbers were not changed, only the category.








Monday, February 17, 2014

Cult of Pedagogy ROCKS Diigo Tutorial for Education

Wow!!!  I just found a trilogy of YouTube videos done by the Cult of Pedagogy that do an awesome job of giving educators an introduction to Diigo.    This is an endeavor by Jennifer Gonzalez who proclaims "Teacher Nerds, UNITE!!!"

Do you use Diigo?  I have for many years for personal use, but I don't think that I ever really appreciated what I could do with my students. Yes, I have taught about various tagging strategies et al, but I didn't really "get it." Having watched Jennifer's videos on Diigo, I am further along the journey now.  

I know that Diigo has their own tutorials, but they seem to be more interested in selling the product by overwhelming you with all of the bells and whistles rather than providing us with useable instructions.

Tutorial Trilogy
This 7-minute video provides an introduction to using Diigo to research.  She takes you through the sign-on process. She does a good job of showing us how to bookmark a site. It's quick and easy.  She even shows how you can include a highlight and sticky note in your newly discovered website. I like that her demonstrations are well planned and not too entailed. I like how she shows you how to add links to a list and how to organize them once they are there. The only piece that could have been improved would have been to spend a little time showing newbees how to add the Diigo apps (Diigolet, etc) to your browser. 




Part 2 of this trilogy is an important video. It shows how to use Diigo Groups to engage in online collaboration.  This is quite valuable in your classes. She shows how students can join Diigo Groups that are relevant to what they are studying (i.e., Hamlet). As students research, they can Diigo-mark a site and then share it with their group. (i.e, student finds an analysis if Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, Diigo-marks it and then adds it to the Hamlet group so that the other students have access.) She even explains how this can be the basis of an on-going, online discussion between the students on specific topics concerning Hamlet.

  

 The final episode of this trilogy is unique because it explains how teachers can use the special classroom organization tools that are available through a free Educator Diigo upgrade. She tells you how to upgrade your account to an educator status and then how to use those tools.  She demonstrates how educators can use the Teacher Console create student accounts and organize them in groups. This system has a strong privacy system that will protect student's identities. I haven't seen this demonstrated before and found this quite informative.

  

How are you using Diigo?  Are you using it to support your students doing collaborative research?  If you don't think that you are doing it "justice",  review these videos and  forge ahead.

Please share how you use Diigo or how you envision it making a difference in your learning environment.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

What Characteristics Make 4th Graders Better Keyboarders?

Keyboard
Keyboard (Photo credit: Shane Pope)
Recently, Amy Lockhart and I had an article published in the Journal for Computing Teachers. It was the result of our research with her 4th graders into what characteristics affected their success in keyboarding. We investigated gender, age, hand size, music experience and athletic experience. Beyond the characteristics, we explored using the Almena Method for Keyboarding. 

The Almena Method is quite different than your typical instructional model for teaching keyboarding. Almena King developed a series of mnemonic jingles to assist in remembering the key locations. Once you learn these jingles, you can recite them to yourself to assist in remembering the location of the keys.

 Here is a brief overview of the study we completed:
This study evaluated the effectiveness of using the Almena Method keyboarding program to teach keyboarding to 4th grade students. Student characteristics were evaluated to measure their effect upon keyboarding success. Seventeen Midwestern fourth grade students of a mixed sex, ethnic, and racial orientation were involved. Students participated in daily 30-minute keyboarding lessons for four weeks. Students tended to increase their keyboarding speed by 33%. Age affected success inversely. Younger students improved more than older students. Music Experience had a positive effect. Larger-handed students improved the most. Gender and athletic background didn’t have any effect upon keyboarding improvement. Specific student characteristics can make a significant difference in student success.

Here is a link to the complete article:  http://www.iste.org/Store/Product.aspx?ID=2523

What do you think?  Does it fit your experience in student keyboarding?

Z

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Sunday, October 23, 2011

How Gaming Makes a Difference in Your World (Ted Talks)

Gaming is much more than trying to shoot down Space Invaders or battling between alliances and hordes in Azeroth or teleport through Portals. Jane McGonigal believes that increased gaming can help solve the problems in the world. Stuart Brown explains the benefits and necessity of having fun to create a fully-developed person.  What do you think?  How does this apply to your concept of learning?

Gaming Can Make a Better World
Jane McGonigal
TED 1998


Dr. McGonigal has a vision for the future based upon the propagation of playing games. She has bases her future ideas on stories of the past. Conversely, her plans involve a future that provides opportunities that are now available due to today's technological opportunities.

Explore Dr. McGonigal's website and share in her visions for the future.  You will notice that her website is presented within a gaming context.

Play is More than Fun
Stuart Brown
Serious Gaming Conference, 2008

The importance of play is apparent throughout society. Dr. Brown demonstrates how it is a necessary aspect of personal development for both human and non-human species.
How does this relate to gaming? What needs to be changed in your learning environment to begin to provide this sort of fun learning experience?

A Manifesto for Play, for Bulgaria and Beyond
Steve Keil
TEDxBG Talks in Sofia, Bulgaria
 
Steve Keil shares his ideas on how the whole culture of Bulgaria can be improved through allowing and pursuing play. Consider the culture he is describing where fun and play were squashed through years of communistic oppression.

Do you agree with his ideas for making change? What is he doing that is making a different world in the world? How does this relate to the messages that Stuart Brown is proposing?
Check out his http://playmanifesto.org to review his ideas.

Look for additional resources and add them to the comments below.  What can you find that will benefit your colleagues use in their understanding of our futures' possibilities?
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Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Keyboarding Skills for 4th Grade Students

What effect does a 4-week online computer keyboarding instructional tutorial have on 4th grade students?

Teaching keyboarding at the elementary level is the way it should be.  Kids are using computers during their preschool ages and should be provided guidance early in their lives so as to develop good keyboarding habits.  I must admit that I am not a fan of preschool keyboarding instruction. I think that it should begin about 3rd grade. Research states that 8 years old is a good age because students have developed the coordination and manual dexterity to keyboard efficiently.

I agree with the physical development statements, but more importantly they have a reason to communicate in a written format.  It doesn't make sense for kids to learn how to keyboard if they don't have much to say.

Amy Lockhart and I had an opportunity to do some keyboarding research in her 4th grade classroom at Price Laboratory School at the University of Northern Iowa.  We involved the students in 4-weeks of instruction. We spent 40 minutes a day in the computer lab learning how to keyboard. It was fun and productive.


We used the Almena Keyboarding Method. This is a unique form of instruction where instead of learning the homerow first, the Almena Method uses a series of mnemonic jingles for each finger’s keys. These jingles consist of three-word phrases that allow the students to learn the keys’ locations. The phrase, “Quiet Aunt Zelda”, was used to remember the left little finger keys; Q, A and Z. The phrase, “Over Longer Periods”, was used for the right ring finger keys; O, L and P.  

The Almena Keyboarding Method was relatively successful. The 4th graders averaged an improvement of 2.6 Adjusted Words Per Minute (A-WPM). The A-WPM was calculated by subtracting the number of Errors Per Minute (EPM) from the WPM. While 2.6 doesn't seem like much of an improvement, consider that they began at an average of 7.2 A-WPM.  This means that they improved an average of 36% in keyboarding fluency.  Not bad.

What was unique about our action research was that we also investigated how specific attributes affected students' ability to keyboard.  These characteristics were: Gender, Age, Hand Size, Music Experience, and Athletic Experience.
  • Gender - Boy or girl.
  • Age - Students’ ages ranged from 9 - 11 years old.
  • Hand Size - Students’ hand sizes ranged from 5.0 to 6.75 inches in length from wrist to the tip of the middle finger. This variable was classified into three groups for analysis.
  • Music Experience - Students were questioned about their musical experience. If they had taken lesson for playing a musical instrument, they were identified as having Musical Experience.
  • Athletic Experience - Students were questioned about their athletic experience. If they had been involved in an organized athletic activity, they were identified as having Athletic Experience.
We had some interesting results.  Here is an table displaying the overall results based upon Adjusted Words Per Minute:


What does this tell you?  The small size of the sample does not allow us to generalize to a larger population, but it shows some trends that should lead to additional research. 
  • Musical experience seems to have an affect on success using keyboarding tutorials.
  • Younger students tended to key faster then their older classmates.
  • Students with smaller hands tended to key faster than their bigger-handed classmates.
We need to further analyze this data to investigate how multiple variables affect A-WPM. Do small-handed 9-year-olds key faster then bigger-handed 9-year-olds?

If this research catches your interest, you can download the whole .pdf file here:


What are your experiences in young students keyboarding? 

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Buying Research Papers is Cheating!!!

Have you ever purchased a research paper? What does it mean when you purchase a paper? Are you too lazy or too rich or don’t you “just get it” about why professors ask you to write papers?

I just had a company that sells research papers leave a comment on my blog and I rejected it. Maybe I am just being idealistic because students can always use Google to find these sites but I have no intention to support this criminal activity. For that reason, this posting will lack the many links that I like to include in my blog.

Not familiar with these research paper mills? Let me tell you something about what they are offering: These businesses market themselves as centers for “research paper assistance.” They suggest that you can purchase their papers to provide additional research for a paper that you are presently writing. HOGWASH!!!

They claim that all of their papers are guaranteed to each of their customers an “A+”. HOGWASH!!! This is ironic when their sites are filled with grammatical errors and misspellings.

They build upon the “Us and Them” structure that they claim educational institutions provide where the teachers make assignments and then “cast off” their students to fend for themselves. One of the sites asks if the students are “victims” of any of 5 research paperwriting problems. These problems include:
  1. Where to find research paper help.
  2. No knowing how to organize your extensive research.
  3. Not have a clear idea of how to write a research paper.
  4. Stuck on research topic selection.
  5. Don’t know how to format a research paper.
  6. Clueless about who to address your writing problems.
(Yes it IS true that their title says 5 problems and they list 6.)

Wondering how much this service costs? There is one site that simply charges $10/page but that is not the norm. Typically, the prices are not based upon quality or quantity, but rather urgency:
  • 6 days or more $15/page
  • 3 days $20/page
  • 24 hours $25/page
  • 8 hours $37/page

This means that these sources say that a student could order a 10-page university-level paper on Thursday morning for $250 and submit it to meet a Friday 3:00 pm deadline!

AND
These mills are claiming that each of the papers is ORIGINAL!!

What HOGWASH!!!

What is your opinion on this? In my next posting I will talk about why teachers assign research papers and what they can do about this plagiarism issue.

What do you do to address this kind of problem?

Photo: flickr.com/JOPHIELsmiles

Monday, November 23, 2009

5 Facebook Dangers (not involving predators)


"Wow Man!! I was SOO wasted!!"
"This job is really boring."
"I think that I am getting tired of my girlfriend."

These are all phrases that can get people into BIG trouble when they share them on FaceBook. FaceBook is a great way to communicate with your friends and share what's happening in your life, poorly selected photos and descriptions of your adventures can cause SERIOUS problems in getting jobs, being admitted to college, or even being sentenced in the courtroom.

's article, The 5 Facebook Dangers, in her Young Adults About.com column, provides an important list of ways that poor choices in postings can affect their futures in school, jobs, and court prosecutions.

Students don't realize how much their presence on the Web will affect their futures. Every semester, I discuss this issue with my university students and the fact anything they post on the web will "be there forever."  They see their social networking sites as great places to share things with their friends, but they don't consider the fact employer and admission offices search the web to find out information that isn't conveyed on their job/school applications.

Be careful what you post because it just might come back to haunt you in the future. 

BTW, related to Facebook but unrelated to what I have been discussing, I just found some research by Aryn Karpinski reported in April, 2009, compared the grades of students who use FaceBook to those who don't. They surveyed 219 students from Ohio State University and found that Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5.  Students in the study who didn't use FaceBook had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0. They also found that FaceBook users spent an average of 1 - 5 hours a week studying and non-users studied between 11 - 15 hours.

It should be noted that this research DOES NOT find a causal relationship between low school performance and using FaceBook. It merely found that those who used FaceBook tended to have lower grades and study less. Chances are that if they didn't use FaceBook, they would have found other distractions instead of studying.

Another question is how can university students have a 3.0 GPA average with only 1 - 5 hours of studying per week?  I have plenty of ideas about that, but that deserves another posting.
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Friday, January 23, 2009

The Horizon Report for 2009

The Horizon Report for 2009 has been released.

The Horizon Report is an annual report that is produced jointly by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. This account charts the existing and future trends in emerging technologies.

Since the first report in 2002, the Horizon Report has been develped using a veritable Delphian study format for investigation. Each year, a group of about 50 advisory board members research and discuss emerging technologies to generate a list of technologies, challenges, trends and issues that are relevant to today's education.

Each year, they identify a variety of technologies "to watch" as well as how soon we can expect them to be adopted. This "Time to Adoption" is usually broken into "One year or less, Two to three years, and Four to five years"

Here are some lists of what was listed over the past few years:

The 2009 Horizon Report:
One Year or Less: Mobiles and Cloud Computing
Two to Three Years: Geo-Everything and The Personal Web
Four to Five Years: Semantic-Aware Applications and Smart Objects.


The 2008 Horizon Report:
One Year or Less: Grassroots Video and Collaboration Webs
Two to Three Years: Mobile Broadband and Data Mashups
Four to Five Years: Collective Intelligence and Social Operating Systems


The 2007 Horizon Report:
One Year or Less: User-Created Content and Social Netowrking
Two to Three Years: Mobile Phones and Virtual Worlds
Four to Five Years: New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication


I like to use the Horizon Report to inform me of the emerging technologies that will affect our educational paradigm. Do you read the Horizon Reports? How have you found them useful?



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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

A New Look @ Research-Based Keyboarding Instruction

Last summer I wrote a white paper for Sunburst Technologies, A New Look @ Research-Based Keyboarding Instruction, which was a review of the existing research in teaching keyboarding. I want to share this document with you because I believe that it is an important overview of what has been found out about best practice in teaching keyboarding and addressing the needs of students in their pursuit towards becoming efficient and effective keyboarders.

Admittedly, this document was sponsored by Sunburst Technologies but that doesn’t reduce the importance of the research synthesis provided here.

A New Look @ Research-Based Keyboarding Instruction

If you have further interest in Teaching Keyboarding and the research behind it, visit my blog - KeyboardingResearch.org It is filled with references that you might find useful when you are trying to answer questions about keyboarding or need research to support what you are trying to do in your classroom.

photo: www.flickr.com/atcbugman