SorrY CHALK ... IT’S TIME TO

move over make wayfor

Ed. Tech.

By Steve Greenbaum

On the second day of her internship as a paralegal at the law firm of Murphy, Miller and Dorn, Suzanne Hasty – a student in Manor’s Post-Baccalaureate Paralegal Certificate program -- found herself sitting in on a new client interview when things got a little tense.

Travis Dorn, a partner at the firm, was interviewing Edwin Hessler, who had been injured in a car accident. Hasty’s role was to take notes during the interview, which she would later transcribe into an “intake form,” which would become part of Hessler’s new client file. Eventually Kerry Schultz, the administrative assistant at the firm, would teach Hasty how to open that file by performing the tasks needed to create it, including doing a conflict check and preparing correspondence, such as a request for medical records.

According to Hasty, the tension started when Dorn began asking Hessler for specific details about the accident, particularly whether or not he looked at his cell phone just prior to the accident.

“I saw him look at me before answering the question,” said Hasty. “I could tell he was uncomfortable; just not sure if he should be answering the question in front of me.

“But I got to see first hand how an attorney reacts to a client when he is asked certain questions and how Mr. Dorn was able to diffuse the situation,” continued Hasty, “so it was a good experience.”

Luckily for everyone involved, the tension wasn’t real. No more real than Dorn, Schultz

or the entire law firm of Murphy, Miller and Dorn. You see, Dorn isn’t really an attorney, he just plays one on TV.

Okay, not on TV, more like on a computer monitor. The characters of Travis Dorn, as well as Schultz and Jennifer Douglas, paralegal, and Lois Kendall, office manager – who fill out the rest of the staff at the firm -- are actors who are bringing to life the experience of working at a real law firm as a paralegal in the software program The Law Simulation Series: Paralegal Law Practice Experience.

Developed by Manor College Legal Studies Program Director Diane Pevar, JD, and published by Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, the program creates a learning environment that simulates a realistic law office. Pevar uses the simulation in her Legal Research class, in Civil Practice & Procedure and in the Externship class. The simulation is for sale to paralegal educators nationwide.

Designed to allow students to interact with law office personnel and clients, the simulation allows them to perform tasks similar to those they’ll perform after they graduate.

Upon logging into the program with an assigned access code, students see on their monitors a virtual workstation – a desk – complete with client files, a daily calendar, an office form bank and a policies and procedures manual. Meetings and other phases of a lawsuit are portrayed through audio and video files. Through the virtual platform, students receive assignments and submit work.

The simulation includes 150 hours of work broken down into 30 assignments and various tasks. The platform is also customizeable so that it can be used as a complete internship experience or, by selecting certain tasks, it can be used for a specific course.

Students go to work as a new paralegal or intern at the virtual law office, where they meet the lawyers and staff at the firm -- actors portraying their roles based on the script written by Pevar. Clients are also portrayed, and the student witnesses and participates in a variety of interactions, such as meetings, training sessions, client interviews and depositions.

By working through the tasks that are calendared for the student, he or she gets practical experience in office procedures, ethics, research and document preparation. According to Hasty, the policies and procedures manual gives students an idea of what is expected of you in a real job at a real firm. “If you are going in for a job interview, you have a much better idea of what you might be getting into,” she said.

According to Pevar, however, the simulation teaches students much more than about policies and procedures and how to perform the every day tasks of a paralegal.

“Students need to be prepared for the workplace in other ways as well,” Pevar explained. “They need to see modeled behavior and they need to understand what professionalism means.

“They need to learn things we can’t teach

Teaching isn’t what it used to be. Teachers used to need a textbook and a piece of chalk. The blackboard was already in the room. Those days are gone. The world our students live in is digital. It’s loud and bright and filled with images 24/7. Today’s teachers need to compete. Their voices need to be louder than all of that stimulation or they won’t be heard.

Today’s teachers need more in their toolbox than a piece of chalk. Their toolbox needs to be filled with a variety of technological tools that allow them to convey knowledge to students in a way that will engage them and motivate them to want to learn.

Today’s instructors need to be continuously learning; they need to understand the newest forms of education technology, state-of-the-art educational tools that send chalk the way of stone tablets and chisels. Sorry chalk…it’s time to make way for education technology.

What follows are some of the ways Manor College instructors are incorporating the latest forms of education technology into their classrooms and curricula.

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them in the classroom,” Pevar continued, “like time management, organizational skills and how to work both independently and as part of a team.”

The idea for The Law Simulation Series began 10 years ago, when Pevar had a student who could not complete the Legal Externship course due to health reasons. So she created the first incarnation, which was a one dimensional e-mail system consisting of one case file and 10 assignments. After several stages of development, all utilizing e-mail as the delivery system, three years ago Pevar approached Wolters Kluwer with the concept.

“I wanted to provide a more realistic experience,” she said. “I asked them if they could come up with a way to present the content, if I wrote it, in a way that would truly immerse the student in the learning experience.”

Writing the content took six months, largely due to the details included. The law firm of Murphy, Miller and Dorn has official letterhead, profiles of each attorney and staff member in the office, employment policies and even information on what photocopy and phone systems are in place.

“I wanted it to feel like a real place,” Pevar said. And according to Hasty, it does, and it is because of that attention to detail.

“It’s awesome,” Hasty exclaimed. “It’s like a real internship.” And she should know. She is currently interning for one of her instructors, who is a sole practitioner.

“The actors and videos, in fact the whole experience, are very authentic. It’s like they

are talking to each student specifically. And the workstation…it’s like you could reach out and touch things.

“You could practically put it on your resume as real experience,” Hasty continued. “It doesn’t feel much different from actually being there.”

Referring back to her Day 2 experience, Hasty elaborates on the authenticity of the simulation, explaining that, when Hessler gave Dorn the police report from the accident during the interview she was taking notes on, you could see the papers.

“Then later when you look at the client files on your virtual desk and click on Hessler’s name, those documents are there,” she said. “That’s what makes it cool.”

Cool, yes, but how else is Hasty benefitting from using the simulation?

“Law isn’t memorization,” she explained. “It’s knowing how to find the answer to a problem. As paralegals, we’re there to assist the attorney and help him find an answer.

“The simulation makes us more resourceful,” Hasty said. “It recreates, or demonstrates, the processes and shows us what you have to do to be resourceful by taking a very practical approach to it. And seeing real situations shows us how to conduct ourselves because we’ve seen the situation played out.”

“It is an excellent way of stimulating a student’s interest in the practice of law while developing skills and building confidence,” Pevar concluded.

MEET ALICEWhile “fun” and “interesting” may not be the first words that come to mind for most people when they think about computer programming, that is exactly what the students taking the CS106 course at Manor are saying about the class – thanks to Alice.

But Alice isn’t a teacher, at least not a human one. Alice is a software program designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming, allowing students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice’s innovative, 3-D programming environment, people, animals and vehicles populate a virtual world and students create programs to animate the objects.

“Alice teaches students programming without getting into writing lines of code,” explained Norma Hall, director of Manor’s Information Systems & Technology (IST) program. “You can teach them function without syntax; it really is fun.”

According to Hall, Alice teaches students what a program is, and demonstrates for them the fact that a computer does what you say, not what you want. She used the peanut butter and jelly sandwich analogy to further illustrate.

“When you make a PB&J,” she explained, “you just think ‘put the peanut butter on the bread, put the jelly on the bread, etc.,’ but if it’s a computer program it’s, ‘open the cabinet…take out the peanut butter…unscrew the lid…open a drawer…take out a knife…insert the knife in the peanut butter…’ you get the gist.

Right: The workstation that greets students logging in to The Law Simulation Series: Paralegal Law Practice Experience includes client files, a daily calendar and office form bank and a policies and procedures manual.

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“There is a progression that must be followed,” she explained.

Using Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language. This allows students to immediately see how their programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animations. By manipulating the objects in the virtual world of Alice, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

According to Armando Buligon, a freshman student in the IST program, using Alice, “broadens your imagination and makes you think outside the box. It teaches you programming with objects you see every day, like people, cars, and animals.

“It’s like playing a game,” Buligon said. “The challenge is to get it to work. Alice demonstrates the detail involved,” he continued. “You have to consider every possibility.”

“This generation, and really anyone who uses a computer, takes it for granted,” stated Hall, explaining the detailed programming that allows Word to simply ask if a user would like to save a file. “Alice gives students a glimpse under the hood.”

The other advantage to using Alice in the CS106 class is the preparation it provides for the CS212 programming class.

“Because of Alice, when they arrive in the programming class everything I need them to know they’ve already done,” explained Hall. “At that point, I just need to teach them to create the program and write the code.”

NOT YOUR FATHER’S PRESENTATION PROGRAMWhen Cherie Crosby, director of the Early Childhood Education (ECE) programs, assigned her students a paper, and required them to also present their papers to the class, she introduced them to Prezi, Popplet and VoiceThread, presentation tools that move beyond the rather dry and droll, traditional bullet points and text – and linear movement -- of PowerPoint.

Crosby gave a five minute introduction of each program, then cut them loose, realizing that they would have to learn how to use the programs through trial and error – and by playing with them.

“It reinforces the idea of play,” Crosby explained. “They say children learn through play, but everyone does.”

According to Crosby, these programs allow students to be more creative and makes them think more about what they’re doing, resulting in them caring more about their learning because they want to utilize these tools.

“If we continue to just use PowerPoint, or have students produce traditional posters – that’s nice – but not interesting to today’s millennial students,” Crosby said. “Students want to try new things, and if they know they won’t be penalized for not using them perfectly they’ll try it.”

In fact, one student who used VoiceThread – a presentation program that allows you to incorporate your voice by recording a narration and embedding it into the presentation – moved Crosby to tears.

“She was having such a hard time figuring it out, but she really wanted to,” explained Crosby, “and I told her she just had to play with it for a while. So she did, and she

got it, and when she sent me the finished presentation, I was really moved by what she had accomplished.”

According to Crosby, Prezi – a program that takes PowerPoint to a whole new level by allowing for a more fluid presentation with more movement and a more creative layout – also teaches valuable critical thinking skills. “Prezi does not allow you to just load up slide after slide with bullet points and text,” she said. “While it makes for a more interesting presentation by being more flexible and not so rigid, it also has space limitations so you have to decide what is most important to the presentation, what points do I really want to make. You have to be more selective.

“Its limitations are also its benefit,” she concluded.

Aurora Mattern, a freshman in the ECE program, loves using Popplet – which allows you to create an online poster where specific points can be highlighted and “pop out” for the viewers -- because it is, “easy to use and gets your point across using colorful displays.”

Crosby loves it because it is another tool to promote critical thinking. Users are forced to decide what points will be highlighted, which points will pop out, and how the presentation will flow. “The program was really enjoyable to use,” said Mattern, “and made me want to use it over and over again.”

“By giving students some leeway and tools that let them play and create, we’ll be amazed at what they can do,” Crosby said.

MARYLA & TYLER GO TO COLLEGEWhen Marla and Tyler began taking classes at Manor, each had difficulties adjusting to college, although vastly different ones.

Above: Travis Dorn and Kerry Schultz are portrayed by actors, in the Law Simulation Series.

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As it turned out, Marla, a marginal student in high school, came to Manor largely because her friends were there, so it wasn’ta huge priority. By mid-term of her first semester, she received three academic alerts.Conversely, Tyler was an excellent student in high school and wanted to do it all in college by taking the maximum number of credits so he could finish early and joining every club and organization available.

Tyler didn’t understand that college courses are different and when his instructors told him he needed to improve he was shocked. He realized he needed help with time management and knew he could get that help from his academic advisor and from the college’s Learning Center. He also recommended to Marla that she seek help at the Learning Center.

By the end of the first year, Marla had learned how to study, changed her major to one that interested and motivated her, and received academic honors. Tyler’s advisor helped him prioritize and balance family, work and school so by the end of his first year he was invited to join the honor society.

Like the characters populating the virtual law firm of Murphy, Miller and Dorn, Marla and Tyler are not real people. They are cartoon characters – created with the program Xtranormal – who are struggling with very real issues that students bring with them to college today and they are featured in the First Year Experience, an online, pass/fail course all freshman are required to take that augments the traditional freshman orientation.

“We have found that the traditional freshman orientation, usually an on-campus seminar that introduces students to the services and procedures at the college designed to help them succeed – just isn’t enough anymore,” said Pevar, who created the First Year Experience course.

“Those presentations just don’t supply the information in a way that students will retain it.

“We wanted to provide this information in a way that would engage students and hold their attention,” she explained. “The days of the boring and monotonous talking head are gone.”

The First Year Experience course is taken online, so it can be taken anywhere and any time it is convenient for busy students juggling work, school, and sometimes family. However, the course is still monitored by an instructor and students still have to pass tests to demonstrate a certain level of knowledge. Students can complete the course in as little as 10 hours, making it possible for them to be exposed early in the semester to information that can help them succeed. Four lessons are delivered through several different ed. tech. tools.

The Xtranormal movie making program that brings Tyler and Marla to life delivers a lesson in academic support, teaching study skills and time management and introducing students to the resources available to them to aid in their academic success, including the academic advisor and the Learning Center.Marla and Tyler are also featured in a

comic strip, created with Pixton Comics, which demonstrates the application process and the importance of maintaining good grades in a lesson on financial aid. “There is so much text – information – to deliver regarding financial aid. Why not deliver it through speech bubbles coming through a cartoon character’s mouth?” Pevar explained.

Infographics created using Piktochart visually represent the social network at Manor, showing the kind of student activities available on campus in the areas of clubs, sports, community service opportunities and honor societies. A series of mini-lessons hosted by an avatar of the college librarian familiarizes students with research techniques and deals with issues like plagiarism.

“Every student can benefit from knowing where they can get learning support and what kinds of awards and recognition they can strive to achieve.” Pevar said. “We believe if a student knows more about the kinds of services and support that are available on campus, they’ll have a more successful academic career and a more rewarding college experience. Hopefully with this course, we are making that less of a possibility and more of a probability.”

Above: Tyler and Marla, virtual students in the First Year Experience course.

Right: Marla (3rd from left) was created for the First Year Experience course to demonstrate the assistance available to students who struggle academically. After seeking help from her advisor, she changed majors and learned how to study. She is seen here receiving academic honors at the Business Scholars awards ceremony.

Left: Tyler (left) – a character created for the First Year Experience course -- participates in the honor society induction ceremony. Tyler was created to embody an over achieving student dealing with time management issues and to demonstrate college resources available to help students succeed, such as the academic advisor and the Learning Center.

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