CCT: Technology

Core Competency 3: Incorporating Technology in Teaching (COLA Engagement workshop, May 2024).

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Workshop attended: Promoting Student Classroom Engagement, Colleges’ Online Learning Academy (COLA), Enhanced Digital Learning Initiative (EDLI), Michigan State University. Facilitators: Dr. Hala Sun and Dr. Min Zhuang.
Workshop date: May 30, 2024
Program: COLA Fellowship, Summer 2024 (certificate of completion August 9, 2024)

Description of the Core Competency

Incorporating technology in teaching means choosing digital tools for a clear teaching purpose: to engage students more actively, to give them and the instructor faster feedback, to make materials more flexible and accessible, or to teach the technical skills students will need beyond the course. Technology is effective when it supports how students learn, not when it is added for its own sake.

I met this competency through the Promoting Student Classroom Engagement workshop in the 2024 COLA fellowship, which the program designates for CCT Competency 3. The workshop was part of COLA’s theme “Pedagogical and technological skills in digital teaching and learning” and focused on engaging students in online and multimodal settings, including the digital tools that support active learning.

Artifacts

  1. Workshop slides: Promoting Student Classroom Engagement. Objectives: develop a conceptual understanding of student engagement, implement effective engagement strategies, and prioritize engagement practices. Outline: defining engagement (types and indicators); increasing engagement through active learning, interpersonal relationships, intentional metacognitive activities, and tools for engagement; measuring engagement with a rubric; participant activity. The session itself modeled the tools, for example collecting participants’ ideas live in Mentimeter.
  2. Workshop description and my session notes, including a jigsaw activity and using a Calendly link for office-hour sign-ups.
  3. COLA certificate of completion, August 9, 2024.

Materials Developed

MTH 101 Rental Market Excel Tasks 1 and 2 (PDF), step-by-step technology assignments that feed into the budget project. Students:

  • download real 2024 Small Area Fair Market Rent data from HUD and open it in Excel through their Spartan 365 / OneDrive account;
  • clean the data by removing columns they don’t need, write formulas to compute rent per bedroom, and convert formulas to values;
  • filter to the Lansing–East Lansing area, use the AVERAGE, MEDIAN, and MODE functions to build a “Measures of Center” table for each housing type, and make a clustered column chart of the results;
  • carry this analysis into the budget project, where they decide which measure best represents typical rent and explain why.

Artifact / Material Rationale

The workshop materials are important because they connect technology to a specific goal: student engagement. They distinguish behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and pair each strategy with tools that support it, such as Google Forms, Kahoot!, or Poll Everywhere for quizzing and polling, Canva or Jamboard for brainstorming, and Slack or Flipgrid for discussion and feedback. That gives me a way to choose a tool by asking what kind of engagement I want.

The Excel tasks are important because the technology is part of the learning goal. MTH 101 is meant to teach mathematics students will use in daily life, including working in Excel. Instead of computing a mean from a short textbook list, students handle a real public dataset, see why cleaning and organizing data matter, and get the computer to do the arithmetic so they can focus on interpreting the results. The detailed, step-by-step instructions also make the tasks accessible to students who have never used spreadsheet formulas.

Interpretation / Reflection

The Promoting Student Classroom Engagement workshop gave me practical strategies for making my mathematics classes more engaging. Seeing engagement as behavioral, emotional, and cognitive showed me that students can look busy without thinking deeply, and that the strategies and tools I choose should target the kind of engagement I want.

As a mathematics teaching assistant, I plan to apply what I learned in four ways:

  • Active learning: group problem-solving sessions, think-pair-share, jigsaw activities, and interactive simulations so students do mathematics rather than only watch it.
  • Relationships: getting to know my students, inviting their input on activities, and being mindful of their individual needs and backgrounds, including simple steps such as an online sign-up link for office hours.
  • Metacognition: regular pre-check, mid-check, and post-check reflections in which students assess their understanding, name their confusions, and set goals.
  • Engagement tools: Google Forms for quick polls, Kahoot! for interactive quizzes, and Padlet for collaborative brainstorming, which give immediate feedback to both students and me.

The Excel tasks I designed are my first step in this direction. They use technology so students work with real data and make their own decisions, and they build a skill students can use well beyond the course.