Category Archives: teaching

#VCUAltFest Big Idea

Education, learning, teaching,

I had the privilege of attending  #VCUAltFest this week, sponsored by the Academic Learning Transformation Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Not a conference, this festival of learning included opportunities for listening but also sharing. There were powerful discussions both in and out of the rooms, and I added new colleagues to Twitter and Feedly. Not all these folks attended live. I participated in the Twitter Journal Club activity and was able to connect with lots of thinkers all over the world.

I don’t want to lose the excitement of new ideas, particularly those that came out of the #hackJAM. It focused on “hacking” the syllabus. Lyndsey Durham and Jon Becker, the co-facilitators, have already reviewed the session. What I want to do is meet D Jennings’ challenge:

My idea is to reorganize my fall “ed tech for admins” course into a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA). I have some first thoughts:

1. We’ll start by “equipping” our toolkit for the adventure, choosing from various social media and curation tools that each student will use.

2. Blogs will serve as the adventure journals so students can share their adventures with me and their classmates.

3. I feel like we need some shared vocabulary and foundation so the adventure will have touchpoints based on the ISTE Standards for Administrators along with the Virginia Uniform Performance Standards for School Principals. It may be that we have multiple adventures that originate in these standards.

What else am I missing? I think I’ll do some CYOA research starting with this list from Reddit.

Thanks to Tom Woodward for the idea and to the rest of the AltLab team for an amazing event!

Now…for the rest of you…what idea are you going to run with?

Lots of (Virtual) Learning Going On

Education, learning, New Media, teaching, , ,

Much of my time in the last three days have been spent in synchronous virtual learning experiences including a webinar and two day long virtual conferences. These events took advantage of two different platforms: Adobe Connect and Avaya Live Engage. Adobe Connect is a high end video conferencing tool while Avaya is a 3D virtual environment. Both events were put on by experienced users of the platforms who had taken care to train presenters and do the necessary audio and video testing. There were still a few glitches. I lost audio during my presentation using Engage, probably because I had to move the laptop during the session in order to plug in. Warning: Engage EATS your battery seemingly to the tune of 1% per minute, and about half way through I had more minutes left than battery life. It was easy enough to log out and back in but there were a few frustrating minutes where they couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t hear them. Similar things happened during the virtual conference in Adobe. We got off the script in one session and sharing a YouTube video dealt a death blow to the presenter’s audio. Having a presenter back channel helps to get messages to the presenter when things are going wrong. But, the presenter has to be aware of that back channel and be checking it.

For presenters, the interfaces can be challenging. In a face to face environment, you use audience cues for questions or interaction. A hand waving in the air is a little more attention getting than a hand icon beside a name in a presenter list. Keeping track of both audience text chat and back challenge chat adds to the stress.

Engage more closely replicated a live, face to face session. Our avatars were together and, if I was more experienced with the interface, I could have punctuated remarks with hand gestures. Audience members could raise their hands to ask questions or make comments. Even though I knew we were all sitting behind screens, I had a much better sense of presence than with Adobe Connect. Certainly presenters in Adobe Connect can turn their webcams on but that just heightens the sense of being in different places and I find myself wondering about the environments behind them: are they in their offices? their homes? What books are on the shelf? Avatars offer the sense of being in the same “physical” space.

I don’t think I have a preference for either system. I am much more familiar and comfortable with Adobe Connect having served as a host for many webinars. I like the interface that allows for multiple windows so I can be following the text chat along with the presentation. Because the text chat in Engage was more buried, it wasn’t used as much. But, the audio was fairly simple to use, and the room was set up with audience mics so everyone could easily hear the conversation between the presenter and attendees.

The same was true for Adobe as well. Having been with the platform for a long time, I’ve seen audio evolve to the point where almost anyone can easily grab the microphone and talk once they’ve been given the appropriate rights. No more tin cans or ugly feedback.

Maybe computer mics are just generally easier to use as well. In the Adobe sessions, we could easily hold conversations as part of the networking sessions. Some people were still more comfortable just typing and that was OK, too. Multiple ways to communicate open up the learning for audience participation. The presenters who had the most success with chat were those who invited the participants to type something specific in the chat room, such as where they were from or their experiences with a particular technology.

That last thought starts getting at my next blog entry: tips for making virtual sessions more engaging. The sessions in both environments tended to be typical lecture-style presentations with attention focused on the presenter. There are ways to include interactivity that can help pull the audience into the subject matter more effectively so they aren’t, as I was in some cases, simply listening while multitasking in another window.

Getting Started Yet Again

teaching, technology, writing

In a way, I envy Tim Stahmer. He *has* a blogging process to change. Meanwhile, I struggle to even develop a blogging practice. I am taking his idea to heart: just write something even if it’s a question or idea to consider over time.

So, here’s my observation for today: if you stick around long enough in education, ideas come around again. And, sometimes, it makes me feel old. This time, it was this tweet:

It’s a pedagogical approach I used way back in 1988 when I was a beginning English teacher. Except instead of taking a picture of my student writing, I ran it through the copier to create an overhead transparency and then wrote on it with markers. Remember, student writing in those days was actual handwriting and the overhead projector was my only way to project an image to the whole group.

The affordance of the digital technology is that it is easier to save the changes and share them with the student. I don’t remember ever sending the overhead home with the student. Our collaborative editing was much more ephemeral even as the writing itself was more ephemeral, shared only with me and the class, rather than with the world. Digital technology makes the pedagogy more powerful, I think.

And makes me feel a little old.

24/7 Support

Education, teaching, technology

I spent last evening having a thoughtful discussion with other educators about a wide range of issues. From integrating technology to creating authentic learning to getting beyond the “testing season,” we dug into the complex concerns about how to provide the best possible education for our students. What we didn’t discuss as much was the impact ubiquitous computing might have on educators.

We know that testing has put more and more pressure on teachers but what about all those devices and that access? I hadn’t thought much beyond the classroom setting until I happened to read this Education Week blog entry reviewing an ISTE presentation on the challenges of mobile devices. The article focused on problems related to sending school-owned devices home with kids and general planning related to rolling out 1:1. But here was the paragraph that struck me:

Devices have been distributed to ninth graders in the district, and students are using them to complete practice problems in class, create videos about how to approach problems, and video chat with teachers from home when they are working on homework. Having that 24-7 support helps academically struggling students get their questions answered and allows teachers to provide more personalized feedback to each student, said Friebel.

I know teachers are all about helping their students as much as possible and many work long past the scheduled work day already. But aren’t we expecting a little too much when we think they should be providing 24/7 support to their students? The article doesn’t say anything about the expectations that have been set for teachers in terms of being online outside of school hours. Are those video chats scheduled? Or do students simply “pop in” when they see their teacher online? What about email or instant messaging? Are teachers expected to provide their phone numbers to students so they can answer their students whenever and wherever they receive messages? I’m imagining the kid who complains that he couldn’t finish his homework because Mrs. Jones wasn’t available for a video chat when he got home from the football game at 10 PM or didn’t answer his 2 AM email.

Talk about trying to find a work/life balance…

The Learning Isn’t Over Until…

21st Century Skills, Education, learning, teaching

I have been learning non-stop for the past two weeks. First Educon 2.5 and then VirtualVA2013. Lots of conversations, glimpses into innovative classrooms, and connections with other thoughtful educators. I’ve been reflecting on the experiences but haven’t had time to put fingers to keyboard. Here are the big themes that have stood out in my personal reflections…I’ll expand on them in future posts but for now, I’ll start with the bulleted list:

  • Schooling vs Learning…but also Jobs vs Work: This distinction rose out of a conversation about how happy kids and teachers were on snow days. I pointed out that lots of grown ups were also excited to miss a day of work.  There seems to be some parallel between the two worlds: schooling and jobs both imply structure while learning and work seem to imply objectives and goals. The consensus seems to be that we have put too much emphasis on developing structures that are keeping people from enjoying learning or work and really accomplishing worthwhile goals. But can we ditch the structure completely? I was particularly intrigued with an idea I’ve encountered before: that we need to talk about the whole system including the physical spaces where we learn and work. Hacking education goes way beyond a new curriculum or even a new pedagogy.
  • Doing More Than Just Showing Up: In the midst of all this learning, I’ve been reading Seth Godin and he has had a couple blog posts that add meaning experiences I’ve had, especially at Educon. Beyond Showing Up and Watching Is Not Doing address the idea of being more involved in our lives and our learning. Educon is the perfect example: you get out of Educon what you put in. There are conversation leaders who help provide some structure but you are expected to participate by offering your ideas, sharing your resources and tweeting your heart out. We had an “open mic” session during VirtualVA2013 that mimicked a bit of Educon and gave us a chance to talk about some of the big themes that had come out of the week’s sessions. Our opening and closing sessions were more about conversation than slides and the presenters willingly engaged with the attendees.
  • Entrepreneurs vs. Entrepreneurial Spirit: The panels at Educon talked a lot about how we can help kids become entrepreneurs. I just finished reading Yong Zhao’s book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students as part of an ISTE SIGAdmin book group so I was particularly interested in the intersection of the book with the conversations. Someone made the distinction between the people (entrepreneurs) and their dispositions (entrepreneurial spirit) that made a lot of sense to me. And there’s a lot more here to explore…why entrepreneurs and schooling don’t seem to mix and if schools can produce entrepreneurs at all.

I am also aware that there is a lot of overlap between these three themes…it’s part of the problem I’ve had this week trying to sort out the various strands of conversations. I think it can be simplified a bit: the ultimate goal is to provide learning experiences (spaces?) for our students that challenge and engage them in meaningful ways and help them develop into thoughtful, active citizens.