The idea of giving a SPSS lecture to my MSW students, after they have already been in-and-out of classes for the previous 9 hours (I am their last class of the day), did not sound like a barrel of monkeys for them or for me. How could I help them learn how to use this complex program after such a long day, and try to have some fun in the process?
Given that I'm expecting these students to be fairly technology-savvy, I turned first to TeacherTube to try and find some fun videos I could show in class. You may recall that I had luck using a similar strategy to give students some PowerPoint presentation pointers (wow, try saying that 5 times fast...). When I couldn't find any SPSS videos on TeacherTube, I turned to YouTube. Luckily I found a fantastic series of SPSS video clips produced by a professor at the University of Minnesota. I created a playlist of all their SPSS Video Project clips so that I could use them in class.
I spent the first hour of class talking about and giving visual examples of statistical analysis in context. I found the first chapter of John Phillips book, Statistical Thinking: A Structural Approach, to be extremely helpful in this effort. After that, our class moved to the computer lab. Once there, I put the following YouTube video on the classroom "big screen" using the projector. Given that I'm expecting these students to be fairly technology-savvy, I turned first to TeacherTube to try and find some fun videos I could show in class. You may recall that I had luck using a similar strategy to give students some PowerPoint presentation pointers (wow, try saying that 5 times fast...). When I couldn't find any SPSS videos on TeacherTube, I turned to YouTube. Luckily I found a fantastic series of SPSS video clips produced by a professor at the University of Minnesota. I created a playlist of all their SPSS Video Project clips so that I could use them in class.
As the video played, I walked around the room to make sure students were following along and clear up any difficulties. I also passed out handouts from Leonard Stern's book A Visual Approach to SPSS for Windows: A Guide to SPSS 17.0 so they could find out how to repeat our demonstration out of class, step by step.
I believe the whole exercise went really well! In fact, my students had a really positive, dare I say excited, response and seemed to enjoy it far beyond what I might have hoped.
Another positive aspect of this exercise is that students can easily watch the video over and over again on YouTube. I posted a link to the video on our course Moodle site.
I plan to use this technique during the rest of the semester, refining as need be. Hopefully students will continue to find it helpful!
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