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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nDanielle Lavin-Loucks (Sociology & Criminology) has never loved PowerPoint slides. She found that they removed the interactive part of teaching, creating a forced march through the slides. Her students were not listening and not engaged, merely typing what was on the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the opposite of what took place in her Inside-Out Prison Exchange<\/a> classes. In that setting, her students were forced to leave their phones and laptops in the car at the prison. So students engaged directly and actively with her and with their fellow students, including incarcerated students. So Danielle decided to use part of her sabbatical to apply the principles from her Inside-Out classes to her regular classes in order to increase the sense of community and engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she returned from sabbatical, Danielle went cold turkey on technology in all her classes. This is now the third semester in which she uses no PP slides and never even turns on the computer monitor. If there is a graphic that students need to see, she will print it out as a handout. She also discourages students from using laptops (except for students with accommodations) and encourages notetaking by hand, telling students that research suggests that taking hand-written notes improves learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even in her course on Media and Crime, she has students watch videos outside of class, posted as homework in Canvas. Danielle begins her 75-minute classes by having students read silently for the first 15 minutes. This ensures that she and her students are literally on the same page. She brings paper copies of texts to class, but students may also read on their laptops. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When it comes to written assignments, she always asks students for a printed copy, but also has them submit online as a back up. She writes her comments directly on their papers and has them do the same when they are doing peer review. She finds that students pay more attention to these handwritten notes than they would to comments on papers submitted online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Danielle expected some push back from her students, but they actually embraced the no tech classroom. On their evaluations, they listed writing on the board and no PP slides as the most effective elements of the class. Student comments were overwhelmingly positive over a wide variety of classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I asked about student participation, Danielle said that in a recent class she only got through 25% of what she had planned, but that 75% of the students spoke, rather than the 2-3 students who used to participate. Freed up from PP slides, Danielle is able to create more active learning opportunities, including simulations, role-playing, and scenario-based activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When her students give presentations, they do not use PP slides. In the past, she noticed that some student presenters would merely read their slide show instead of engaging with the audience. Since Danielle considers public speaking to be a highly underrated skill, she now has them memorize their presentations, though they can use old school notecards and handouts. She finds that student presentations are now much more personal, engaged, and narrative in structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We spoke about AI, and Danielle said that she has no issues with it. But she also believes that there should be some AI-free classes such as hers where students can apply concepts and evaluate ideas on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Margarita Rayzberg (Sociology & Criminology) heard about the low tech classroom from Danielle and is trying it out in her Introduction to Sociology class this semester. The deciding factor for Margarita was her feeling that any technology in the classroom seemed to lead to more of it. When one student opened a laptop, it seemed as if two others would as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Margarita thinks technology is perfectly appropriate for some of her classes. For example, in her research methods classes her students use their computers to search for sources. In her Sociology of Games class, some use of computers for trying out games is essential. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But for this introductory course where students need to learn to do their own thinking, Margarita is fine with not using technology. Like Danielle, she does not forbid the use of computers in class, but she highly recommends it. She now provides handouts for every class. The handout might be a graphic, some vocabulary words, or instructions for an activity. Students often use this handout to take their notes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She was surprised at how willing students were to go low tech. Some of them, of course, have accommodations that require the use of their laptop. For the rest, she tells them that it is their choice. However, if she begins to see a wall of screens she will ask them to shut it down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Outside of class time, she does make use of technology. For example, she posts PP slides and readings in Canvas. She also allows students to take photos of the blackboard at the end of class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Margarita has noticed that students are more present in her no tech class, more focused on the professor and not on their screens. Like Danielle, she now includes more structured interactive activities that have students talking in small groups. Her exams are taken in class and written by hand. She finds it easier to grade these than when students took exams online. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing Margarita is still working on is getting her students to ask questions in class in order to engage more with her and with the material. Although they are willing to talk with each other in small groups, many of them are still reluctant to speak up before the whole class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amanda Brobst-Renaud (Religion) is trying out low to no tech in all of her classes for the first time this semester. She liked what she heard from Danielle and Margarita about how their low tech classes had created a better sense of community, with students more invested in the class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mandy mentioned that she finds herself living on two tracks these days. She has the desire for connection that inspired her low tech classes, but she is also curious about teaching technologies, including AI. To that end, this year she co-led a Faculty Learning Community(FLC) on AI. She thinks that living on both tracks is helping her figure out how to navigate the times we are in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she chose to go low to no tech, Mandy realized that she herself had been using Google Slides as a kind of crutch. So now she uses very minimal slide presentations. She also does a lot of reading out loud in class. Reading a text is very different in the humanities than in the sciences, and she thinks that modelling that difference via reading out loud is important. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This semester her students are doing annotations by hand for their class readings. Formerly she had had students annotate and comment on texts online via the platform Perusall. But she found that some of them were simply plugging the document into AI and asking AI to generate comments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mandy initially quit using paper because of environmental impact, but, on the balance, believes the interaction with students is worth it. So now she prints the texts with wide margins and asks students to underline important passages and make at least two comments per page. She finds that students are not only engaging more deeply with the text, but that their personalities emerge in the comments, including their emotional reactions to the actions of Biblical characters. She matches the students\u2019 energy by responding with written comments of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her midterm evaluations, Mandy found that a lot of her students like this low tech approach. However, a few are finding the annotating to be laborious, so she is considering shortening the readings. She also had a student comment that professors are spending a lot of time and energy reacting to unauthorized use of AI by some students, thereby taking the focus from the students who do always do their own work. She takes that concern seriously and will consider how to address it in future classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since she is AI curious, Mandy has experimented with AI use, but sparingly because of her concern about the environmental impact. She tries not to use AI for things she can do without it. She does not use it for her own research because the ethical guidelines of such use have not yet been developed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n During a time when she felt she was running out of creative ideas for her classes, she used AI to help her brainstorm classroom activities. She has lost some conversational partners in her field, so she found that it helpful to use AI as a conversation partner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Through her work with the AI FLC, Mandy came to realize that students are more and more using AI for assignments that they perceive to be busy work. But Mandy realized that \u201cbusy work\u201d can often be a building block for higher order skills. She compared it to doing reps at the gym to build muscles for more important activities. She realized that she needs to be much more explicit with students about how activities such as annotating Bible passages are building toward higher-level thinking skills. One example of this is that she explains to her VUE students that their weekly reflections and pre-writing assignments (handwritten outside of class) can get them halfway to a final paper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mandy\u2019s final comment is that she has learned that if she expects heavier lifting from her students in a low tech classroom, then she needs to match their energy with her feedback. If she shows them that she is also willing to do a heavier lift, they are more willing to do it themselves. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development Are you sometimes discouraged by seeing your students glued to their laptops or phones instead of engaging with you and their classmates? Three of your colleagues have decided to address technology use in the classroom head on by experimenting with a low tech or no tech classroom. Danielle…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[208,58,59,102,115,132,133,143],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-21020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-216","tag-active-learning","tag-ai","tag-assessment","tag-instructional-design","tag-pedagogy","tag-student-engagement","tag-student-presentations","tag-technology"],"author_meta":{"display_name":"crutz","author_link":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/author\/crutz\/"},"featured_img":null,"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"Profile":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"crutz","author_link":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/author\/crutz\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development Are you sometimes discouraged by seeing your students glued to their laptops or phones instead of engaging with you and their classmates? Three of your colleagues have decided to address technology use in the classroom head on by experimenting with a low tech or no tech classroom. Danielle…","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["2026<\/a>"],"unlinked":["2026<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["active learning<\/a>","AI<\/a>","assessment<\/a>","instructional design<\/a>","pedagogy<\/a>","student engagement<\/a>","student presentations<\/a>","technology<\/a>"],"unlinked":["active learning<\/span>","AI<\/span>","assessment<\/span>","instructional design<\/span>","pedagogy<\/span>","student engagement<\/span>","student presentations<\/span>","technology<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":"0","relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 4 weeks ago","modified":"Updated 4 weeks ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on March 30, 2026","modified":"Updated on March 30, 2026"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on March 30, 2026 12:01 pm","modified":"Updated on March 30, 2026 4:38 pm"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21020"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21031,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21020\/revisions\/21031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21020"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intra.valpo.edu\/cital\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=21020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Margarita Rayzberg: Experimenting with the Low Tech Classroom <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nAmanda Brobst-Renaud: Both AI Curious and Fostering Community via Low Tech Classes<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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