In technology, as in so many things, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It takes college students one hot minute to figure out when technology is just a useless embellishment, and they’re unforgiving when you have no good answer for why you chose to go with digital materials when pencil and paper would have sufficed.
In order to determine whether incorporating technology into your teaching makes sense, you need a crystal-clear picture of what you want to accomplish with the technology. Here are some strategies I’ve found useful in my own teaching that can help you uncover which aspects of your course would be best served by bringing in technology and also help steer you away from superfluous, why-are-we-using-this tech choices.
Focus on the pinch points. Under this approach, your tech goals seek to resolve the most difficult, challenging, or problematic parts of the course. In choosing technology, people naturally gravitate toward tools that seem fun or easy, even if they’re not the most useful. You can counter that tendency by setting tech goals that focus on your biggest teaching problems. This also helps ensure that the payoff from these new tools you’ve chosen will be worth the costs.
Ask yourself the “magic wand” question. In a course-redesign program I direct at Northern Arizona University, I sometimes ask faculty members: If you could wave a wand and change one thing — a skill students lack, a misconception that stubbornly persists, a task students opt not to do but should — what would that one thing be?
You may find an area of your teaching that’s ripe for the kind of transformation that the right technology can bring. For example, when I teach my introductory course in cognitive psychology, I find that students are pretty good at picking up terminology and identifying course concepts in real-world situations. But they often struggle to understand how major principles of psychology are derived from patterns of data obtained in laboratory experiments.
Getting students to make that mental leap is my magic-wand issue. To deal with the problem, I turn to technology: I assign an online laboratory application that simulates classic experimental paradigms in abbreviated form. This online lab lets students see and experience — from the perspective of a research subject — the procedures they’ve read about in the textbook. Most important, as they complete the lab, they can see whether the quantitative results they’ve generated align with the theories they’re learning about in class.
Use backward design. This is a powerful strategy for figuring out tech goals. Like the name implies, the idea is to start your planning with an end in mind. In the case of teaching, the end goal essentially corresponds to all the things that you hope students will know and be able to do by the end of the course. Once you’ve defined your end goals, use them to plan the semester — making sure that everything students do (i.e., learning activities) and everything they turn in (i.e., assessments) are tightly aligned to those objectives.
I find that the backward-design concept accommodates technology choices particularly well. Especially toward the end of the design process, when you are figuring out the details of how you’ll arrive at the end goals you’ve laid out, you can dive back into the larger pool of technology options that caught your eye and choose the ones that map onto the goals.
Make tech choices through the lens of the learning sciences. I use this strategy most often to make goal-focused technology choices for my own courses. One of the best reasons to use technology in teaching is that it offers ways to put into practice the extensive body of research in cognitive psychology and related sciences on how human beings learn.
The research on attention, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, and other learning principles is incredibly powerful. But it can be difficult to put those principles to use in your classroom without some kind of technological aid.
Take the concept of retrieval practice. Retrieval practice is what you do any time you pull information out of your memory. It kicks in when you’re taking a test, a practice quiz, or any other kind of assessment. But it can also operate when you are using flashcards or writing in a journal to induce recall.
Multiple studies have established the effectiveness of retrieval practice for promoting memory — allowing students to remember more information per minute invested than just about anything else they can do with their time. This is exciting news for teachers because, although building a base of knowledge isn’t the be-all and end-all of learning, it is an important part. And it’s something that has to be managed if students are going to have time and energy left over to handle other, higher-level learning goals in your course.
Myriad ed-tech tools allow you to take advantage of the research on retrieval practice. For example, you can use your institution’s learning-management system to set up low-stakes quizzes on the assigned readings. There are also quite a few great choices for in-class short quizzes that run on students’ mobile devices (see, for example, Kahoot!, Top Hat, and Poll Everywhere) and offer rapid feedback and options to create friendly competition.
These activities can also have the useful side benefit of keeping students attentive during a face-to-face class. That’s important because — despite folk beliefs about learning through osmosis — attention is a requirement for forming new memories. When we focus on the fact that memory is one part of learning, and that we can use retrieval practice to promote memory, it sharpens and gives shape to our technology search. Knowing, for example, that you want students to be doing more active retrieval in your course considerably narrows the field of tech options.
Just having students view certain content won’t achieve much. They must be interacting with it repeatedly across varied problems for real learning to occur. So you will want to choose tools that allow students direct, repeated practice and complex, high-level interactions with an extensive base of problem sets, examples, case studies, and other content. Ideally, their practice will also feature feedback and some level of personalization of the sequence, amount, or type of content.
Tech tools with all of those features aren’t a dime a dozen. Nor are you likely to find technology that reinforces thinking skills across the board, in a discipline-independent way. Human cognitive processes tend to be wedded to the specific context in which we use them.
Your best bet, therefore, is to start searching within your discipline or even within a specific course topic. See if there’s a commercial product you can buy unbundled. If you’re lucky, you may even find a good-quality open resource. You can also come at it from a slightly different angle: Start with the type of activity you want — e.g., problem-based learning — and then search for a tool within your discipline that emphasizes that activity (the University of Delaware’s online PBL Clearinghouse is a great example).
Using technology well means being selective. Choosing the right tech tools for your teaching means making strategic choices, weighing costs against payoffs, and staying laser-focused on your course goals.
Michelle D. Miller is a professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University and director and co-creator of its First Year Learning Initiative. Her latest book is Minds Online: Teaching Effectively With Technology, published by Harvard University Press. This essay is an excerpt from her online Chronicle advice guide, How to Make Smart Choices About Tech for Your Course.