Reading Notes #2 Fall 2011

Reading Notes #2 Comm 702 9/8/11 Margaret Brady

I have been teaching Human Anatomy & Physiology at the college level for 8 years. Anyone who thinks that a “virtual body” tour on the computer will replace dissection in the lab is out of their mind. We have visual body software and it is fun to watch and play around with but the experience of cutting into a body and feeling the tissues and moving the organs and tracing the path of blood vessels or nerves cannot be equaled by any computer program!

When I first started teaching in 1990, we had chalkboards and overhead projectors in the classrooms. I have just come back to teaching in 2010, and we now have whiteboards and doc cameras and computers linked to the internet! Some of the modern technology is great, however, I find it easier to be animated and engaging in a large class setting (90+ students) if I can walk around in front and use colored markers on the board while lecturing instead of standing by the computer.

I also prefer using the overhead projector as opposed to clicking through images on the PowerPoint. (The publishers now send us a CD with the figures and tables from the text as opposed to transparencies.) What I like about the transparencies is that they lay flat on the overhead and you can write and draw what you want on top of the figure from the book and it is easy to highlight certain features. It is also easy for me to open my folder and pick and choose, physically, which ones I want to show the class. With the PowerPoint images, I feel like it is unprofessional when I have to click through the ones that I don’t want to show to get to the next one. I believe this is distracting to students, because, as stated in the readings, students want to write down what is presented to the in classroom.

At the beginning of this semester, we, as faculty, were in a workshop with how to use the new computers in each of the lecture rooms. They have these stylus “pens” in a holder on the back and we can click on them and then touch them to the computer screen and then draw or circle items on the screen and that shows up on the projected image. Okay, cool. The first classroom that I went in to practice this, the stylus had been left on and the batteries were dead! I went to a different room. Okay, I get it, I’ll try it. So, on the first day of class, in a lecture room with 92 students, the stylus clicked “on” BUT the computer wouldn’t let me edit or circle any of the images. Where is my overhead transparency and marker????!!! Another day, I plugged the images in on the jump drive and when I opened the folder, some error had occurred and I couldn’t get to them...