This is generally still the first word out of teacher’s mouths when they talk about the changing nature of the role of a teacher. I’ve always hated it, it’s as bad as…shudder…”guide on the side.”
Labeling yourself, speaking of yourself, as a facilitator weakens and devalues what a teacher is and does. You’re a facilitator of what exactly? You facilitate learning?
Stop it.
And don’t think I’m gonna let you off the hook by labeling yourself as a “co-learner” either. Stand up and try that a parent openhouse…”I will be a co-learner of algebra with along with all of your kids.”
Really?
If I’m a parent (and remember, they pay your salary) I want a professional teacher. I want you to teach my kids algebra, not facilitate it. Do what you have to, but have enough respect for your profession to be proud that you are a teacher, and all that brings.
Don’t facilitate. Don’t label yourself as a co-learner. While romantic and trendy, do one thing.
I’ve been intrigued with learning spaces for awhile, especially in regards to the development of digital components that support and extend the physical experience of our schools. To me, the consideration of how space is used in the learning process is perhaps the most forgotten element of instructional design. One size space does not fit all, however most of our schools, designed in an era of where classrooms were the sole place for learning, assume that learning takes place in rows with individual desks, and only there. There is much more to consider now, and truly effective schools, and their teachers, need to consider how their legacy spaces can be modified, altered, and re-created to provide a more multidimensional type of physical support system for learning. This emphasis towards new thinking regarding space should also be applied to the creation of digital spaces for learning. All of us are fortunate that the emergence of connective technologies provide a fresh slate for design, and one that can be created to support the development of key skills that support the development of a shifting notion of what it means to be literate in 2010 and beyond.
My Educon session, entitled “On the Development of Learning Spaces” will challenge co-conversationalists to rethink space. You can read about it here on the Educon site. If you are interested, and even if you are not attending Educon, I would hope that my session resources (I think some of my best work) are of value to you. For those of you attending virtually, I think they will help you follow and contribute to the conversation. The resources provide an overview of my challenge to participants, a flow for the conversation, and resources targeting learning spaces and also literacy. I finish with some questions to stimulate your thinking regarding learning spaces.
Google has released Near Me Now, access it through Google on your browser under Local. Very cool…Google continues to penetrate everything we do. But we always have the choice, don’t we.. It’s called the ON-OFF switch.
Along time ago I wrote a post questioning the added value of a tablet computer in a teacher’s hands.
We’ll shortly have access to a new class of tablets, slates, whatever you want to call them, or at least we should very shortly.
There appears to be new technologies emerging from Apple, OLPC, Dell, NotionInk , and yes, even Google. There’s even the Mag+, which seems to be more reader than anything else.
Do I want one. You bet I do.
And when they appear, especially the Apple product (expected January 26, 2010), can’t you just see the Twitter firestorm? And if you thought the lines at the local Apple store were long for the iPhone, just wait…
So, what does this mean for education?
Probably very little. With a price point that is anticipated well-beyond the price of a netbook (with the exception of the OLPC at around $100, predicted by Forbes.com to come in at $75 bucks), your local school, and their limited budgets will have very little wiggle room for acquiring these devices.
And they shouldn’t anyway, because most are far from having the organizational readiness required to plan for, implement, support, sustain, and evaluate any kind of program that places these technologies in a student’s hands.
In the middle of all of this, across a gradient that ranges from the desktop/laptop on the left, to the future tabets on the right, is the netbook. Interestingly, some have predicted that this will mean the end of the netbook.
I don’t know about that, and I won’t speculate, but I’m hoping it makes them even more affordable, so that I can get my hands on more of them.
That means getting more of them into classrooms, of course, where teachers and kids can beat them up, so we can see how all of these technologies play out in the context of our school-wide technology and literacy goal (Incorporate new and evolving technologies to support the development of literacy.)
The eventual access to a machine that will support many of the same features many of us enjoy on an iPhone or Android is fascinating. And there is no doubt that these will probably make us all rethink what mobile computing looks like.
But just not in schools.
UPDATE: Apple Tablet apparently to ship in March. See Mashable for the story.
I really like this title a lot as it captures what this post is really about. I ran across this phrase when reading Chris Sessums’ post on using Twitter to help in course design. I’ve borrowed it for the title, as you can read. I hope Chris doesn’t mind.
Before I begin, this post isn’t about tools. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s more about building out a presence and the way in which tools can be associated together to build a digital platform. But if you don’t like posts about tools in anyway shape or form, stop reading now…
I’ve begun to build out my digital presence, or “life on the screen” in new ways, and for a number of reasons. Most of this is associated with my work as a school administrator whose responsibility it is to lead a school-wide goal on the intersection of technology and literacy. Some of it is also directed towards adding new ways of engaging people beyond our school community in things that I feel are important to schools. So the purpose of this post is to help me intentionally clarify the structure of my digital presence, and see what you think. I’ll be talking tools here, and how they combine to serve a higher purpose for me, and potentially for our school community.
When I sat down and put all of this down on paper, I was surprised at how many tools I actually use, and the interesting way they combine together. At the present time, there is some overlap as I negotiate the value that competing products have for me. For now, it seems they fall into three groups: 1) information services, or those tools that support the storage, retrieval, and management of information, 2) presence services, or those tools that support presenting ideas to an audience, and support the development of my online presence, and 3) mobile services. or those tools I can use on my Droid. Now, this framework is fairly artificial, and there are gray areas, as well as overlap, especially in regards to the mobile apps, but I guess that is to be expected. Here they are:
Information Services:
del.icio.us: social bookmarking tool I couldn’t live without, although being challenged by Evernote. A huge component of del.icio.us (and yes, I am still del.icio.us old skool and type the name with periods) is the subscription feature, which enables me to subscribe to tags and get information from all users, which is something I use all the time. I’ve never got into Diigo, although I have imported my del.icio.us content there.
Box.net: online file storage which has been indispensable for me-I’ve got all my presentation files there, along with all the images I have purchased from istockphoto.com. Box makes sharing files and folders very easily, and it partners with many other services that I can select to use that add functionality to my Box account (Twitter, post to Wordpress and Gmail, plus about 30 other cool services). For example, I have added Picnik, the online photo editor-so when I have an image in a Box folder that I want to modify, I use the pull down menu associated with the file, open the file from Box into Picnik, do what I need to do, and click the button in Picnik that enables me to save back to the original Box location, either as a new file, or to replace the one I am working on. I lose usb drives, I can’t lose the Internet. All my files are available on my Droid.
Evernote: wow, Evernote blows me away. I’ve been using it for about two weeks so I am still learning it, but it is simply fantastic. Sign up for an Evernote account and get an online account, then download the client to each machine you have. This enables you to sync information between the Web and all machines. You can use the Web-clipping feature to “clip” anything on the Web and organize it in folders, along with searchable metadata information. It also has outstanding iPhone or Android support, with the ability to take photos, create text notes, and audio notes directly into my account, which is a function I’m beginning to value more and more, with the ability to interact with my resources from my mobile. I’ve not yet got the file upload to work that’s available from the Droid app.
Dropbox: online file storage, but what this does exceptionally well is place a folder (for example, on your desktop) where you can drop files into. Install dropbox on any other machine and it all will sync together. I have a home and work desktop, plus two laptops. Using dropbox enables me to have the same files on all machines, a continuual problem for a disorganized person like myself. It works perfectly and its free.
Mozy: file backup. This is different than storage, my files constantly backup offsite automatically. I currently have the 2GB free account, but after testing, Ill upgrade to the unlimited backup for $4.95 a month shortly. Piece of mind for the price of a happy meal.
Google Apps: useful collaboration tool, especially with the forms feature, which has really taken off at my school for survey work. All of our students will have Google Apps accounts and this will form the student content creation space in our multi-dimensional learning space.
Google Reader: aggregator that keeps me in touch with really smart people.
Presence Services:
Wordpress Blog (The Strength of Weak Ties). I’ve divided up my presence for posting my writing/ideas between my blog, my Posterous site and Twitter. TSOWT will be my site for posting most of my in depth writing and ideas, while Twitter is, well, Twitter. I’ll use Posterous as a bridge between the two for posting quotes, quick ideas, notes, and imagery. In 2009, I believe its about representing yourself, presenting yourself, in multiple ways across multiple venues. Blog to Posterous to Twitter provides me with a gradient that I can engage people socially and intellectually on different levels.
Posterous: I really like this site a lot with its ease of use, clean look, the ability to post via Gmail (which means an easy post with my Droid), and the way it handles multiple media types, all with ease. But probably the best feature is the ability of the site to Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Wordpress, Xanga, and Blogger in any combination. So, not only is this a place for sharing ideas, it’s also a distribution platform to extend voice. To give you some data: since November 30, I’ve put up 25 posts that have had a total of 5,322 page views!
Twitter: a place for fun, some ideas, and seeing a lot of great resources I wouldn’t have. Interestingly, I’ve been watching the page views of Posterous posts, and most go over 200 very quickly, simply by links being sent from Posterous into Twitter, and then being amplifed by the network.
Web site: My main Web site presence, Jakesonline.org, where I host a lot of my Web content. Personally, with my presentation work, I need a place where I could do a little more (for example, hosting multiple media types) with building Web content. I could do that with wiki technology, but that technology wasn’t there yet, when I needed it to be. So, I’m sort of traditional here, with a dedicated Web site.
Wiki site: available at jakes.editme.com. I use this principally to host my presentation content, and its a lot easier to update than my Web site. Plus, I need a place to host collaboratively created content, which to be honest, I haven’t done as much as I should. I really like the Editme.com site, which has fantastic customer support, and is a unbelieveable bargain at $4.95 a month. Plus, at that cost, it gives me the granular level of control I want, with public view, registered view, administration view, as well as public, registered user, and administrator content creation rights, all which can be combined in a various permutations.
Facebook: one site I need to explore further, certainly more social than anything, which is ok. Not sure where it fits into my overall presence, as I’m not that big of fan.
Slideshare: I really like this site alot, especially with the ability of the site to generate embed code and put it in different locations. I currently have 51 slidedecks at the site.
Dim Dim: pretty excited about this one, which for$19.00 bucks a month gives me the opportunity to deliver Webinars. We’ve also integrated this into our Moodle instance at school, so I’ll be interested to see how it works. I’ve got some ideas how to leverage this kind of environment in school environments, which I’ll share in another post. Be sure to watch for an announcement on Twitter about my first Webinar, which I think will focus on presentations and slide redesign.
Adobe Presenter: I’m playing around with it, as it integrates into Powerpoint, and provides the ability to create video/Powerpoint online slide decks. I’m not satisfied with the performance so far, and at $500 for the license, I’ll probably look for something else. But I want the capability to do this.
Adobe Connect Pro: I’m also considering this for webinars but it carries a more hefty price. Still trying this out.
Flickr: a must for any digital presence, I really like how I can use Pixelpipe to distribute photos from my Droid directly into Flickr.
Youtube: I be looking at developing my YouTube presence in the new year. This is probably going to be one of my biggest growth areas.
TwitPic: a repository for my photos from my Droid. Again, not a competitor to Flickr, buts it free and easy, and I can post out of PixelPipe directly here, so why not?
Mobile Services
PixelPipe: an awesome app that ties together a lot of my online tools to my Droid phone and let’s me publish ideas to a variety of media sites. I currently can publish in one click to Box, Flickr, Google Docs, Posterous, Scribd, Slideshare, Twitpic, Twitter, and YouTube. That’s pretty phenomenal and although I only 9, there is access to 114 sites. Wow. Read more about my PixelPipe use here.
AudioBoo: gives me the ability to post audio through my Droid, directly into Posterous. Sweet.
This is the infrastructure of what I do. It’s important, it’s pretty cool, and it provides me with a lot of flexibility in an media-based world. Combined together, they represent a suite of tools that enable me to express ideas, engage people in conversations, and learn. Additionally, I can connect to most of this through my phone, which for some reason still amazes me. In an upcoming post, I’ll explore how I’m using all of this as more of a mobile user.
I happened to be working the other day at Caribou Coffee, which has pretty good coffee, a cool northwoods atmosphere, and free wifi. It’s a fairly big space, with ample electricity, different table sizes, and a really nice environment for reading, writing and learning. A wide range of people use the space, including high school kids.
As you might imagine, its filled with people using laptops and other forms of mobile technologies. People come and go, people re-arrange the furniture. No rows. No desks. So, I was interested when a group of high school kids invaded the table near me. They were kids from a school I taught at for 10 years and I had some fun talking with them about my recollections of the school. These kids were working on calculus, talking, using their cell phones to text, and their graphing calculators. No surprise there, they’re kids. But what was interesting to watch was the way they interacted. I’ve been interested in learning spaces for awhile, and I’ll be doing a conversation about such spaces at Educon. Watching these kids, and knowing the classroom (a word I use intentionally here) that they would go back to, I wonder where they would rather learn and interact in. We all know the answer. We need different spaces for kids today. Yet, there is very little focus on establishing or creating spaces that serve today’s learners. When kids walk into Caribou, what kinds of interactions do they believe will happen? When the same kids walk into a classroom, what kinds of interactions do they believe will happen? My question: How does the design of the learning space influence the perception of the type of teaching and learning about to take place? In other words, how does design inform the intent?
I’m constantly amazed when I see kids in our library cutting and pasting from a Web site into a PowerPoint file.
I’m really not amazed that they do it.
I’m amazed that a teacher would design a learning experience where that would be a possibility.
Have you thought deeply enough about your assignments? Your projects?
I think that the solution is fairly simple. Here is what I had students do:
Them: Write deeply. Use multiple sources. Cite stuff. Let me see your thinking on a deep level.
Me: Provide constructive feedback. Re-direct their efforts. Help them make what they do better. Be involved in the process…
Them: Re-write.
Me: Re-read. More feedback.
Them: Find deep ideas. Storyboard.
Me: Assess storyboard. More feedback.
Them: Build presentation media presenting deep ideas. Use text and imagery, limit bullets.
Me: Assess. More feedback
Them: Present. Convince me that their ideas have merit.
Me: Assess: More feedback.
Them: Let me know what they learned.
Now I’ve got a bunch of artifacts that demonstrates their learning process. I’m involved at all points as someone who challenges and redirects their efforts.
More specifically, I have a scholarly analysis and a presentation that is extracted from it. The presentation is designed to give them an opportunity to stand up and have their say. Doing so with a deep analysis first puts them in a position to learn deeply.
This is my keynote at NYSCATE 2009. The title of the presentation was “Beyond the Web 2.0 Hype: Focusing on What Really Matters. Resources for the presentation can be found at http://jakes.editme.com/hype
If you have been on the Moon for the past two days, you might have missed this. Google is offering a Google Teachers Academy for Administrators in San Antonio. After looking at the announcement, I couldn’t help thinking that its basically the same program offered for teachers. Even the title of the program might suggest that…
Personally, I think programs like this are generally beneficial, but not as beneficial as everyone thinks. I’ve written about his before, especially in regards to my distaste for the badges that participants display on their blog. I think most do not consider the implicit support for a commercial entity that results from the use of the badge, especially within the context of being a public employee (in most cases).
I also think that this represents a great opportunity for Google and a great opportunity for administrators. But, if it’s just the GTA re-purposed, I think it might miss its mark. Why do a teacher academy for administrators? I guess it could imply that everyone is a teacher, or it could simply mean the organizers did a bad job of crafting a title.
It’s a different audience with a different need. And if they don’t know the tools by now, which is a reality, they shouldn’t apply. That’s directed at administrators, not at Google.
The time has come for a different kind of experience, moving beyond tools. Tools could certainly be included in the context of the day, but it needs to be more.
Before I give you my perspectives, here are my biases from which I operate:
I’m a 12 month administrator and have been for 10 years. I taught for 15.
I work in a school. I face the challenges that that brings on a daily basis.
I’m a Google Certified Teacher by default-I presented at the Chicago conference. I have not engaged in the Google online community-I do enough of that already, and my engagement online with others must be larger than just Google-focused.
I believe that the Google Academy is a good thing for most teachers, although it could stand a heavy dose of pedagogy.
My school district has signed up for Google Apps for education, and it is a component of a much larger vision of how learning can occur in digital environments. Google tools, and what they bring, are incredibly important to us.
I think that in 2009, Google represents the true spirit of innovation. I’m amazed at what they produce.
_________
So, if I were designing an administrator academy, these would be my underlying questions that I would hope the day would answer for attending professionals. Embedded in this is the understanding that some tools would be explained, and that the experience from the day could be expanded through online community participation.
Here they are:
Will the academy help administrators understand why teachers in their schools could benefit from being part of the GTA program?
Will the academy help administrators understand why they should adopt Google Apps for Education in their schools? Will the academy demonstrate to administrators, clearly, the affordances that the use of such a system brings, and demonstrate how they know?
Will the academy help administrators understand the necessary policies that need to be developed to effectively scaffold the use of Google tools in schools?
Will the academy help administrators understand how they can meet mandated legal requirements (such as email archiving) when using various Google tools?
Will the academy address strategies for the systemic application of Google technology to support increased student achievement?
Will the academy address initiatives such as Response to Intervention and how Google technology can be used to address the student support required by such programs?
Will the academy address the negotiation of the uses of learning environments featuring Google tools and how that can be balanced against high stakes testing regimes and NCLB?
Given the focus on the role of Google tools, and that they should be used by teachers to help students learn, will the academy address, or offer suggestions and strategies, on how schools might address the technology gaps that exist in under-served populations in schools (defined here as those without home technology) so that access is equitable?
Is the academy taught by fellow administrators or is it taught by the same teachers that instruct at GTA? If teachers, do they have the requisite systemic experience to understand the larger context of schools that administrators operate within?
Do the presenters, if administrators, have school-based examples to share, in the context of what Google offers, of what works, and can they explain how they know it works?
So, those are my questions. And while I understand that a lot of administrators aren’t there yet in their understanding of…tools…well, I might suggest that there is a different place where that can occur. In my opinion, the day should be learning more than tools, and realizing that we can connect to each other digitally.
Administrators have different needs than teachers. They just do. That’s not bad, it just is. Technologies that are offered by companies like Google, and that are used by teachers, require some rethinking of how we operate. That’s good. Google could help admins understand that, with a day dedicated to just that.
I’d be glad to offer my assistance in planning or helping to adjust the program, or explaining this in more detail to Google planners.
It’s easy to bash presentations. It’s also easy to bash presentation styles.
Included in this process is always the obligatory derogatory comments directed at PowerPoint. Standard stuff.
Of course, much of this consternation towards presentations originates with having to sit through some really bad presentations where the presenters are just awful and have no clue how to communicate and engage an audience. We’ve all been there.
It’s also easy to bash the lecture because everything now needs to be collaborative, on a wiki, shared in a Google Doc, or done together in a backchannel. But I’ve attended some phenomenal lectures, where the lecturer/presenter just had tremendous ideas. Mimi Ito and Connie Yowell come to mind, where for an hour I sat and wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to capture every profound thought. My engagement was with the ideas, and singular. Me. Processing. No one else. Just a stream of ideas, balanced against my beliefs, with individual processing and plenty of time for collaborative discussion later. But for an hour-me, the presenter, and ideas…
Most might look at the room and what was taking place with a presenter talking and people listening and characterize that as a passive learning experience for the participants. But passive? Only if you wanted it to be. It certainly wasn’t that for me-it was very active.
And the presenters used slides. With text.
So I was intrigued by this blog post by John Pederson, who quotes (I think it’s a quote) Heather Gold who proposes something called tummeling.
It’s easy to dismiss bullet points. I don’t think they work especially well and a presentation filled with slides of endless bullet points can be absolutely disastrous for a presenter, not to mention the audience.
But let’s not dismiss text. Text and bullet points are two different things.
And we certainly shouldn’t dismiss slides, because slides can carry a very critical element of a presentation.
Emotion.
In any presentation, you are selling ideas. As Seth Godin says: “Communication is the transfer of emotion.”
And that emotion is communicated through two channels: the presenter and through the visual content of the slides, and processed by the 3.5 pound (1.58 kg) processor inside your head, all in an effort to make meaning.
The choice not to use slides, and not to use the capacity of those slides to carry images that communicate visually, represents a shallow understanding of human communication. As the speaker in the video indicated, effective communication is supported by an “emotional substrate.” Yes, that can mean face to face emotion crafted by the presenter.. However, it should also mean carefully selected visuals that enhance the emotion channel of the presentation. Ignoring visuals, or failing to include visuals, means you just ignored or failed to include a very powerful communicative element-an element that might just make all the difference.
To extend your thinking a bit, if you haven’t seen Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning, you should. His book is based on “seven researched based principles for the design of multimedia messages” that we should all learn and apply to presentation design. Here are four that I think are most relevant to this post:
1. Multimedia Principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
2. Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
3. Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
4. Individual Differences Principle: Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners rather than for low-spatial learners.
Basically, images and text are critical to learning, and especially more so for low-ability learners when the media design is appropriate.
Let’s not forget that presenting is communication. Let’s not forget that presenting has its place.
And there are numerous ways to present ideas, ranging from Twitter to blogging to sitting on a stool, telling a story. You can even…ah…tummel. However, presenting to a small or large audience alike requires, skill, effort, and knowledge as well as an understanding of human communication. It’s in vogue to consider new ways to communicate, new ways to engage an audience, its vogue to present using a test-based wiki for example.
But having an audience walk away with being energized, being challenged to think, being moved by a message communicated through appropriate media, and with the ability to process additional insights that can lead to actionable next steps that they didn’t have an hour ago is also pretty damn good…
Mayer, Richard. Multimedia Learning. 9th ed. New York, New York. Cambridge University Presss, 2007. 184. Print.
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