By: Sabrina Doyle
Two years ago, Kevin Cheung started having trouble standing for long periods of time. He would get dizzy and feel faint. Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but it was impacting his work.
Cheung teaches math at Carleton, and math teachers generally stand and write on the chalkboard a lot. When they’re leading big classes through various problems and complex formulas, students need to be able to see the process.
Cheung tried a few digital teaching aids but found that none of them quite suited his unique needs. So he made his own.
Cheung spent half of his sabbatical developing the software for his own app. As part of that app, he included a chat server, where shy students could send in questions anonymously during class time. He would see the questions pop up on his laptop and could choose to respond immediately or later.
As a complementary perk, Cheung included a feature that allowed students to not only ask questions in text format, but by drawing something (such as a proof to a math question) on the online canvas. In one window, Cheung could see 30-50 submissions from students. He could then project some of the answers on the large screen and have a real-time problem solving session.
It took about eight months for Cheung’s yet-undiagnosed health conditions to improve. He gradually stopped feeling like he would fall or faint. But his application had been such a success that he kept using it, and it helped him garner an Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award from Carleton this year.
“I think it will be essential that we’ll have to integrate some kind of digital component to our teaching to make it more efficient. It’s already helping me teach my students,” he says.
Cheung thinks that educators should embrace technology in their teaching, but realizes that everyone doesn’t want to be, and shouldn’t aim to be, on the leading edge of every new technology, and can stick to technologies that are well-established and less likely to glitch instead.
“It’s important to shape and design things in such a way that it doesn’t look threatening. When it comes to online learning, we have to make things more human.”