NYCDH-Week Reflection Hybrid Teaching: Tips, Tricks, and (Productive) Fails
As a student of Digital Pedagogy here at the Graduate Center, my decision to attend yet another teaching workshop should come as no surprise to you! The session was led on Friday at Feb 12th at 3pm by Marina Hassapopoulou, an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU and she put together an amalgam of tips, tricks and new platforms with the centralized goal of aiding hybrid teaching environments. As a an adjunct teacher of sorts for over a decade, I was really impressed with the amount of new content she had to offer us. Not only did she share some interesting new software platforms to share our virtual trainings on (some of which I will detail below), she also gave us some great analog teaching ideas that don’t involve the computer at all! I thought I would highlight two of the items that really caught my attention in this session that could support us in our collaboration with each other in our praxis course:
Thinglink: Thing link allows you to take still images and annotate or link portions of the image to additional learning (or any form of media) content. When the student hovers their cursor over the part of the image that contains the linked item, a small pop-up appears which offers the opportunity to ‘learn more’. This tool clearly allows for greater interactivity between students and content that’s hosted online, but that’s also the draw back at the same time. To be clear, your media has to be hosted online somewhere for this to work. Although this platform is free for students with a teacher account, it does beg the question of where teachers host their own content. Teachers will also need to pay for an account but their students may join your Thinglink page for free.
DebateGraph: The other most notable platform (at least for me!) was Debate Graph, which is basically free digital mind mapping software. Again, the opportunities seem endless with this one but what I loved most about it is that you can really clarify ideas or arguments with it in a meaningful, interactive and FREE way! It’s a little old school looking and that in itself felt intimidating to invest my time in, but I am super excited to check this one out as well.
There were at least a dozen different sites mentioned in this session similar to the ones I’ve detailed above and some of them any GC student would already know about. For example, hypothes.is was mentioned and I think we all know by know that it’s great for collaborative annotating and shared reading experiences. I strongly encourage everyone to take a look at the link of teaching resources to discover more on their own that the professor kindly shared to attendees. The last thing I will share is that she gave us some really practical tips for keeping students engaged from their desk space at home. For example, she offered us ideas about taking virtual field trips within students homes, we revisited the old concept of show and tell and even sharing physical drawings on pieces of paper. It reminded me that using our hands off of a mousepad and a keyboard can still be possible in these pandemic days!
