“Making your lectures interactive using the cell phones of attendants”

By Dr. Eduardo Mayorga

One of the drawbacks of lectures, from the pedagogical standpoint of view, is that they may lack interactivity. If present, you can only have it with a very small portion of the audience.

When working with your residents in small groups, interactivity can be maintained, but once you have asked an open question and one resident answers, you will never know if the rest had the answer in mind.

To overcome these two drawbacks, you may want to add an 'interactive answering system' to your teaching tools,.

An interactive answering system is usually composed by some kind of hardware that allows participants in a meeting answer to a multiple choice question that the presenter has posted on the screen. Through special software that receives the answers, the presenter can show the results on the screen. The following images show an example of answering hardware and the results of the answer.

These answering systems have the disadvantage that you have to purchase all the answering devices.

At our residency we use a system that allows using the cell phones as answering devices. In this way we had to purchase only the software that can connect to a cellphone or a modem of a cellphone communications provider. In our case we use the modem.

With this method we can receive interactions from any size of audience. The results shown on the previous image come from the system we use.

One advantage is that you can also receive complete text messages for open questions. Following is an example from a small group of residents that were asked to define the acronym: LASEK.

As you can see, you get all kind of versions. The nice thing about the system is that you can display the results as they enter, or show them all at a time, once the last answer entered.

You can read more about SMS Studio, the software we use, clicking here.

We have no financial interest in this software.

Electronic Portfolio using Google Docs Folders

By Eduardo Mayorga

A learning portfolio is a collection of products (learning experiences), prepared by the resident, that provides evidence of learning and achievement, related to a learning plan.
So the key aspects that are generally recorded in the portfolio are:

The evidence: a demonstration of how the learning is being applied in an appropriate context;
the learning: the discovery that what was has been recalled has significance in the future;
the evidence: a demonstration of how the learning is being applied in an appropriate context;
the learning needs: an identification of where it would be appropriate to go next;
the learning opportunities: an educational plan identifying ways in which learning needs might be met.

Redman 1994: Portfolios for development

Some concrete examples of the components that ay be included in a portfolio are, among others:

•Curriculum Vitae (CV)

• Publications

• Research literature review when selecting a treatment option

• Log of clinical and surgical procedures

• Ethical dilemmas faced (and how they were handled)

• Faculty evaluations

• 360-degree evaluations

• Copies of written instructions for patients and families

• Case presentations, lectures, logs of medical students mentored

By the end of his or her third year, paper portfolios can get very bulky. Besides this, residents start forgetting their paper folder at home. Reviewing residents' portfolios can be an impossible task if one wants to take home the work.

One way of avoiding all these shortcomings is using an electronic portfolio.

Goggle Docs http://docs.google.com/ is an excellent tool where residents can store their activities and share them with faculty. Any document that is not originally electronic is scanned and kept as a PDF document.

In our residency, each resident keeps 2 folders one with the results of exams, shared only with faculty, and one with the rest of the portfolio, shared with faculty and rest of the residents.

To be kept in order, each resident folder starts with the year the resident entered the residency program, as seen in this image:

The shared folder contains the rest of the sub-folders mentioned above:

You can learn more about folders at 
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158074

Using Googledocs Spreadsheets for Developing Reflective Learning Narrations

Reflective narrations serve many purposes in residents’ education. Firstly, by reflecting on what has been learned and how this learning is being applied to practice, residents and their tutors can identify knowledge gaps and other learning needs, and develop a learning plan that could help meet those needs.

Secondly, self-reflection and critical incident reports allow residents realize how these events are influencing their present and future practice.

Finally, by reading residents’ narrations teachers are able to better understand the resident’s thinking process, and how he/she arrived to a conclusion or made a mistake.

Every day, after they have finished their rotation shift, residents in our department reflect on and write a brief narration describing the 2 or 3 most important concepts they consider they have learned that day at the clinic or in the operating room. We have recently migrated from a paper form to a Google docs Spreadsheet, which has the advantage that residents can write as much as they need, and we teachers can read narrations from home at our convenience. The document includes columns for date, rotation, teacher or book where they got the information, teacher’s or program director’s comments and resident’s response, and it is included in the resident’s learning portfolio.

We have found this online “Daily Learning Form” (as we call it) user-friendly and very convenient for all participants involved, for it combines the benefits of mental reflection and web-based teaching.

Finding what you want, when you need it.

By Eduardo Mayorga

Teaching and learning in the digital age makes you store hundreds of documents and presentations on your computer. No matter how well you organize your folders, many times you can't find what you are looking for. When this happens, finding what you need is made very easy using "Google Desktop".

Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you've viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks.


You can find more on Google Desktop features clicking here


You can download Google Desktop clicking here.

"VUE" a tool for helping learning happen.

By Dr. Eduardo Mayorga


(Note: This post has many links. When you go to one of them, remember to use the "Back" arrow of your browser to get back here.)


Today we will present a tool that will help your residents move faster on their way on becoming experts. This tool will help them build the concept maps we talked about in our first post and develop schemes and flow diagrams that will aid them to store and retrieve knowledge faster and better.


Following are the definition of schemes (or "schemata") and flow diagrams you can find in Wikipedia:
"The concept of schemata was initially introduced into psychology and education through the work of the British psychologist, Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969). This learning theory views organized knowledge as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures which represent one's understanding of the world."
"A flow diagram is a diagram representing some kind of flow. The most known is the flowchart, but there are more kind of flow diagrams."
Cognitive psychology teaches us that one of the ways that novice doctors start turning into experts is because they start building schemes that help them reach a diagnosis.
Following is a flow chart that represents a scheme on differential diagnosis of anisocoria presented by Eric R Eggenberger.

Click to enlarge

Conceptual maps and flow charts are very easy to build using tools such as "VUE", an acronym for "Visual Understanding Environment".

"VUE" is a free tool and is a concept and content mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research, and for anyone who needs to organize, contextualize, and access digital information. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students can map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content.

"VUE" can be downloaded clicking here.

A Rubric for a Lecture’s Peer Review and Survey Software

By Helena Felipe

On today’s blog we will be directing you to explore the power of online surveys and share with you a rubric for peer review evaluation of lectures.

A rubric is a scoring tool for subjective assessment of a chosen piece of work.

It consists of a summary of criteria and standards related to learning objectives with the purpose of grading someone’s performance.

A rubric contains a set of relevant dimensions critical to assess a piece of work. Each dimension offer several levels of potential achievement and excellency.

Rubrics produce more detailed, objective and reproducible assessments than a single, holistic grade.

They are usually the result of a collaborative effort of a group of people interested in gathering feedback from a certain educational paper or event. Thus work can be graded in a more objective, independent, accurate and less time consuming way consistently helping in continuous improvement and refinement.

In summary a “Rubric is an assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback and promote student learning”. (D.Stevens, A. J. Levi)

We built a Four Level Rubric Framework for Peer review of a Lecture presentation (Lecture Design and Lecturer’s attributes assessment)

If building an effective, reliable and valid rubric can be a very challenging task ideally brainstormed by an interested group of people sharing common goals, rubric’s presentation, data collection and subsequent analysis can be extremely easy.

A rating scale can then be created, making use of the free and friendly user “Survey Monkey”. http://www.surveymonkey.com

Using this web tool you can, in a very simple way, create your own questionnaires, collect data and analyze final results.

The following series of screens show the systematic steps to proceed.

First you must make your own account, and create your survey.

The next image shows how you can chose different types of questions.

An online questionnaire is inexpensive to administer and provides a fast way of collecting results, draw conclusions and redesign attitudes to meet excellence.

You can test it before you officially administer it, which is the case of the screens here presented.

The following screen shows the example of our rubric being uploaded.

Finally, we can follow the evolution of participation and analyze results since statistical analysis is automatically performed as you can see on the next screen (at this time all in 0 because the screen capture was done before the survey started)

Our example can be reached at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Z5BZR9R or http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=2jhw91P0lJLBbay4OAqnCQ_3d_3d

You may download our rubric at: http://www.oftalmohi.com/EM/ico/PresentationRubric.pdf

We thank Dr. Karl Golnik for reviewing our rubric and making very helpful suggestions.

References: 

1. Introduction to Rubrics, Dannelle. Stevens & Antonia J. Levi – 2005, Stylus Publishing. http://Styluspub.com
2. Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson, Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment (Jossey-Bass, 1998)
3. The, What, How & Why of Rubrics, Health Sciences Summer Teaching Institute.August 19, 2009. Temple University Teaching and Learning Center. Retrieved 20^th March 2010 at http://www.temple.edu/tlc/events/health_science/hssi.htm
4. James Bardi: Developing A Rubric. May 11, 2009 Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence: Measuring Student Outcomes. Retrieved 20^th March 2010 at http://www.schreyerinstitute.psu.edu/pdf/Rubric_Schreyer_5_11_09.

Using your cell phone as your notebook's modem.

by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga

The digital era has changed the way we handle information. In the the digital era knowing where to find the information is as, or even more, important than having the information. Why? Because the amount of information we can store in our long term memory is minimal if we compare it with what is stored in the Internet, which is also easily retrievable.

Internet access is available almost everywhere, but sometimes it can happen that your home Internet connection is down or you are at an airport with no access point, or at a convention where you have no access and need to connect to Internet using your computer. At these times is where using your cell phone as a modem can be very useful.

To connect to the Internet with your notebook and a cell phone you will need software to make the connection.
One place to look for this software is "Junes Fabrics" where you will be able to find the software that suits your phone.


Once you have it working, never again you will be "disconnected" from information.