Using Textwall in the classroom

Happy New Year! This post is a little overdue but the latter part of 2014 was absolutely manic, with the busiest Autumn Term I’ve ever experienced, and finishing off my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PgCAP) on top of that. However lots of us will still be teaching this term so hopefully it’s not too late in the academic year to be talking about classroom tools.

My institution has had access to Textwall for a little while, and last term I decided to give it a go myself.  It’s a tool which allows students to text in answers to or comments on a question that the teacher poses on the screen. Numbers are not stored and it’s anonymous, so students can comment without it being attributed to them, which I thought might be an advantage in getting students to “speak up” in sessions.

I first tried it in some seminars that I ran for one of my first year cohorts, kicking off the session by putting a question up about what concerned them about the topics we were looking at that day (using library resources, referencing and plagiarism), and asking them to text in their answers. I had no idea what kind of response I would get, but actually in every session I received lots of answers (with referencing and avoiding plagiarism being the main concern!), more than I have in the past when I’ve tried asking a similar thing verbally. The students seemed surprised at being asked to get out their phones and text, but I think that element of surprise encouraged engagement. It was really useful for me to get an overview of what the class was thinking too, and it provided a reference point for me to return to at the end of the session, to check with the students that we had covered everything.  I could see how Textwall could potentially be a great tool for gauging student understanding in a similar way; asking a question and being able to see the general response from the class – if a large number were misunderstanding something, for example, that would be a sign for me to go back over that thing.

I therefore tried it again with a different first year group, asking questions about what we had covered during the session. I had reservations about whether to go ahead with it as the group had been difficult, with a few disruptive students, but decided to try it anyway; it didn’t really work. After several questions along the lines of “Miss, is this your phone number?”, when I eventually persuaded them to text responses, I got mostly silly ones.  I learnt from this that it’s really important to gauge a group before using it mid-session (not so easy to do so if you’re using it at the start though). 

I think Textwall can be really useful in the classroom, but it is important to remember that there may be inclusivity issues i.e. students who don’t have a phone, or who have pay-as-you-go and will have to pay for the text message, so it’s not the only way we should be attempting to check understanding. And then there’s the problem of students using it to be “funny” or disruptive - you need to think in advance how you will deal with offensive or silly comments.  I will definitely be continuing to explore the potential uses of Textwall though.

Teaching first-year undergraduates about plagiarism

At the beginning of this term I was asked to take over the seminar slots for the first year Sport and PE students during the third week of teaching; two hours in which I would teach the students how to use the library resources, how to reference, and how to avoid academic offences such as plagiarism and collusion. I did something similar last year, and had found it difficult to keep the students engaged over the two hours on what can quite honestly be dry topics. So this year I decided to try some new things to add some more interactivity and liven the session up a bit, and I remembered a plagiarism exercise I had heard about at a Library Camp. This came from a school librarian and I'm afraid I didn't write down her name - if you're reading this, please contact me so I can credit you! - and I adapted it slightly for use with first year undergraduates.

About halfway through the seminar I handed out pieces of scrap paper and asked the students to write down the best thing that had happened since they'd been at university so far. After some looks of bemusement they all managed to write down something (I emphasised that neither I or their tutor would read it!) and I asked them to swap their piece of paper with someone else, then to write their name at the top of the paper they'd received, and to count up the words on it. I then asked for the highest word count, and gave the holder of the piece of paper with it a chocolate. Each time, this person looked baffled and said "but I didn't write it", to which I replied "but it's got your name at the top!" - and then the students realised what I was getting at!

I was worried that it wouldn't work; that either the students would twig straight away and would see the whole exercise as childish, or the opposite, that they wouldn’t realise what I was getting at, but it actually worked pretty much perfectly in each seminar – the students appeared a bit taken aback by it and then realised what I was doing at exactly the right point in the exercise. I think it also worked really well at that halfway point in the session; after the “finding books and journals” bit that they would be expecting, doing this exercise shook the session up, got the students doing something different, and added an element of unpredictability which was also humorous too; the students gently laughing at the rightful owner of the chocolate missing out (I did actually give them one too eventually!), and also much hilarity ensuing when they read each others’ answers to the question I had set!

I will definitely use this exercise again with first-years (hopefully their by-then second-year peers won’t spoil the surprise before I get to do it!).