This lab serves two purposes 1) give participants hands-on experience quickly prototyping infinitely sortable, searchable, and customizable online galleries using Airtable 2) expose participants to our curated galleries of free online instructional tools and blended learning course design materials.
Wondering how you can save digital artifacts that are easy to later find and share with your students? Considering asking students to collect and select their learning artifacts to build an ePortfolio? How do you facilitate online scavenger hunt activities with students? All of these can be accomplished with something we use every day – the database. But how many of us have the coding chops or time to learn SQL and PHP? It’s now possible for you and your students to easily create your own database collections, and quickly slice and dice your information to create Pinterest-style galleries for various audiences using Airtable. What’s more, you and your students can collaboratively build collections using survey forms that can be created instantly from fields in your Airtable spreadsheet. With its wide range of applications, Airtable should be on your list of “killer apps”.
Airtable is a free web-based spreadsheet and relational database builder that features easy drag-and-drop file uploads. This tool is differs from Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets because you can quickly create Pinterest-style galleries, calendars, as well as surveys, from your spreadsheets. In addition to being a versatile spreadsheet tool, Airtable also allows you to link records in different tables of a “base”. With this simple procedure, you can harness the power of relational databases to create an infinite number of galleries for different audiences without needing to modify your primary “repository” spreadsheet. When you need to update entries in your primary repository, the changes are automatically reflected in all your shared galleries.
What will participants do in this workshop?
Participants will address the problem of inefficient digital information/artifact collection, organization, and sharing through rapid prototyping using Airtable. Participants will form small groups based on interest and use a pre-populated database to collaboratively build an Airtable spreadsheet and filter its information to create a shareable gallery. After working with the tool, we’ll reconvene to brainstorm applications of Airtable that make collecting, organizing, and sharing digital information and artifacts efficient and impactful.
Discussion: we’ll begin by talking about how participants currently go about organizing their teaching and learning practices, such as gathering and distributing course readings, and guiding students through the process of creating an ePortfolio.
Demonstration: we’ll proceed by showing how the Seattle University Center for Digital Learning & Innovation created our Gadget Finder and Blended Learning Course Design Materials galleries. We will also briefly browse the various templates provided by Airtable to give participants a sense of the many additional uses of this tool.
Participants will then be asked to form teams based on interest in specific uses cases for Airtable 1) ePortfolio collection & selection engine 2) learning library for creating readings lists for different courses 3) course scavenger hunt exercise 4) calendar of course readings 5) course evaluation survey.
Teams will be provided a handout with instructions on creating an Airtable account, creating fields in a base, linking fields between two tables, and collaborating on the base with team members. Edits appear in real-time, so all team members can work on the shared base during the lab.
Innovation: we’ll come back together in the larger group to discuss initial reactions and brainstorm additional applications of the tool. Participants will have time to copy the group-authored Airtable to continue building individually after the lab.
Supporting Materials:
- Seattle University Center for Digital Learning & Innovation Gadget Finder: https://www.seattleu.edu/cdli/toolkit/gadget-finder
- Seattle University Center for Digital Learning & Innovation Blended Learning Course Design Materials (in development)
- Airtable Templates: https://airtable.com/templates
- Airtable Overview Presentation (forthcoming)
- Team Instructions Handout (forthcoming)
- Airtable Guides: https://guide.airtable.com
What will participants have to work with after this session?
Airtables are easily copied. Participants can create a copy of their team’s base to continue building individually after the session.
What is an emerging trend in educational technology that this workshop pursues?
Productivity tools abound in iOS and Android app stores. It’s no wonder - with the abundance of information on the web we need user-friendly yet customizable tools to manage our personal treasure troves of digital artifacts. Airtable combines foundational concepts of digital information management and retrieval (i.e.: the spreadsheet and relational database) to create something new – an easy-to-use tool that serves as a personal information organizer, but also provides the ability to create galleries for sharing different views of a collection. While this topic isn’t as seemingly innovative as 3D printing, we’re all looking for a way to tame the chaotic firehose of digital information in a way that works for us (rather than to us) so we can better realize the potential of having the world’s information at our fingertips.