1. Mobile App Game
I would like to create a mobile app game that would allow students to play against their classmates. There is an existing app — QuizUp — that allows you to play against others by either using your email address or signing in through Facebook. You are both shown the question and whoever answers it first correctly wins that round. There are 5 rounds. If you win the tournament, you go up a level. I think I could perhaps have certain incentives for reaching certain levels. Maybe extra points on tests or something like that.
Somethng to consider is whether students have smart phones or not. I asked my Intro to Psy class whether they had smart phones and 2 out of 39 did not. I would not want any student to not have access to the app, so I may have to consider making the game accessible in other ways besides a smart phone.
2. Social Networking Site for Class
This idea is designed to move the realm of learning into students’ everyday life. Social networking is something we usually do with our “friends.” I’m thinking of Facebook, not Linkedin. Having a site for the class, I hope, would help students integrate their student identities with their personal ones. It would also help students see their professors as real people, as opposed to super nerds who do nothing but read and think about esoteric theories. Hopefully, humanizing professors would lead to students feeling less like learning is for other people. I’m specifically thinking of underrepresented students at community colleges.
3. Interactive Course Site
This new idea has come out of hearing others’ ideas and thinking about the lack of technology in my classroom at the moment. This would be a website for the course that presents the information that has also been presented in class. The difference would be that for each topic, there would be links to relevant youtube videos. In addition, students would be able to leave feedback about ways they remember certain terms. The idea for students leaving “learning tips” for topics comes from students doing this in class. For example, one student suggested that the O in occipital lobe looks like an eyeball (the occipital lobe processes visual information), while another student said occipital reminds her of optical.
Hi Silvana, you make a great point about students’ technology access (and remember that some have smartphones but limited or no data access on them), and might also consider a mobile-friendly website rather than an app as one way around this. For quiz-like game/apps I have a colleague at City Tech who uses a site called Quizlet that might be worth a look: http://quizlet.com/
Your #2 idea is one of the main motivations we at City Tech had for creating the OpenLab — in addition to offering faculty an alternative to Blackboard for courses and to providing eportfolios for students, we’re also interested in the potential for an academic social network to help build community at the college. The site is http://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu if you’d like to take a look.