Category — Technology

Ben Wildboer shows how he used some ideas he found online (including some from yours truly!) to upgrade a slide deck about basic Earth structure. His blog post includes an “Extreme Makeover” like before and after look at his entire slide deck.

Ben’s immediate observation distills everything I’ve been trying to convey as succinctly as I’ve seen it done:

There were several students that expressed regret at the demise of the bullet points. It’s easier for them to just copy down exactly what it says (of course it is, they don’t have to actually pay attention or comprehend to do that). How well they’ve been trained by their past experiences!

Ah yes. Undoing years of damage done by the ubiquitous bullet point. Challenging, to say the least. But definitely a battle worth fighting.

Go check out Ben’s slide decks. And the rest of his blog while you’re there. He’s off to a great start!!

If you haven’t seen this (and what Apple computer lover hasn’t?), you need to check it out. If you’re in the same age demographic as I am, you may remember typing many a middle school paper using AppleWorks on a machine exactly like this (attached to a very noisy Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer, of course!).

Dan Budiac scored himself a new Apple //c. And not just any Apple //c — this one has been sitting in its original packaging since it was manufactured in 1988. And he’s got a very retro-cool set of “unboxing” photos from before unboxing was something most people even cared about.

Gosh - just looking at these pictures makes me all warm inside. From teaching myself how to program in BASIC to learning Logo in my 5th grade class and playing the green-screen version of Oregon Trail, this was my first computer experience.

I can’t wait to hear what happens when he sends in the warranty registration card…

[via an interview with Dan on MacBreak Weekly 76]

I received an email from Brian, a middle school social studies teacher in Boston, who expressed an interest in presenting to his faculty about improving his presentation skills. He wrote:

The creative juices that flow as I try and design better slides has not only provided a nice outlet for me in the weeks before Christmas break…but also helped me get more creative in connections I make to the material.

That’s what it’s all about! If you enjoy creating your slides (I do!), you’ll enjoy presenting them. And if you enjoy presenting them rather than making them just a bunch of notes that you have to “get through,” your audience will enjoy your delivery a whole lot more.

My enthusiasm for your presentation, which I shared with a number of members of my staff, has made me into the resident presentation guru in my building.

Nice. I’m glad to have had this kind of impact!

My principal has asked me to do a presentation on presenting at our upcoming PD and I wondered if you had some advice on how to attack it. My audience would be a frightening mix of the computer savvy and folks who refer to “The Google.” What would you recommend in terms of content? I could see the scope being very broad and touching on why design better slides, how to do it, where to find good images, etc. Or staying narrow and looking at the how part.

First off, I love The Google!

Second, and this is just my two cents, if you’re thinking of presenting on presenting to your staff, you need to provide the context. If that’s how we should be teaching kids, it’s surely how we should be teaching adults.

I didn’t look at my presentation to staff as a “How-To” with respect to PowerPoint (although that’s what some of them came to the session expecting…), I planned it as a “Why-Bother” with the intent of raising the level of awareness of what we’re putting on the screen. If it gave at least one teacher pause before they projected the same, tired slide show for yet another year, I felt my presentation would be worthwhile.

See, the “Why-Bother” actually motivated the “How-To” with about a half-dozen of my attendees. It put it into context for them. Rather than telling them how to do something, I shared with them first why they should care.

And it worked! They stayed after my presentation wanting to know more. “OK - I like how you did that. Now show me how to make my slides look like that.” They’re hooked.

A “How-To” without context may be everything that’s wrong with the way we present professional development to teachers, but that’s for me to tackle down the road. You know - that and this whole “global warming” thing.

Not necessarily educationally related, but I loves me some stats! Now you can see all the statistics on your Flickr photos if you activate your “Flickr stats.”

[via Around the Corner]

You asked for it…

For those who expressed interest in a “multimedia” version of my Presentation on Presentations, here is the result of a couple days worth of work. I recorded the voiceover in Garage Band in two takes so there are a couple of flubs (yes, I know video from YouTube isn’t copyrighted, but I didn’t want to go back and re-record…).

Also, SlideShare has a minimum time that each slide must be displayed which causes a minor “out-of-sync” at the end of the slide deck. Other than that, I think it’s a pretty good - albeit “one way” - version of what I presented to my faculty.

Enjoy!

| View | Upload your own

I wrote this post on Monday and wasn’t going to publish it. Then I saw At the Schoolhouse Gate’s recent post about the student who was suspended for posting online a list of students he didn’t like (article here). Seems these here Interwebs have a lot of otherwise level-headed people going off half-cocked.

I’m an active researcher and reader on all things tech and education related, but I never considered the other side of the coin. Having attended a 3-hour meeting this morning at the district office on our “new” filter override process as it relates to CIPA, I am utterly shocked at some of the misinformation that some of my colleagues — intelligent, well-educated, experienced people — have come to assume as fact.

It’s put things into perspective for me, though. Discussing how and when to allow staff members to override the filter is only one piece of the puzzle. Where we consistently fall short is in educating our students and our teachers in responsible use of the Internet.

Overheard this morning:

• Reading a student’s MySpace page is the same thing as viewing the text messages or cameraphone pictures on a confiscated cell phone. Clearly this story out of Boulder has people a little bit gun-shy about what’s private and what’s not. I am not a lawyer, but I see a huge difference in terms of the expectation of privacy. I expect that pictures that reside on the memory card of my camera or phone are private. They’re mine. The second that I put them on Flickr or on my blog, however, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. So something a student has written on his or her (public) MySpace profile is “fair game,” so to speak. Going through the contents of their personal electronics (without reasonable suspicion or, even better, probable cause) is the 21st century equivalent of reading out loud the note you caught a couple of kids trying to pass during your lecture.
• But if a teacher doesn’t attend filter override training and uses some other, non-approved way to bypass the filter (read: proxies, vtunnel, etc.), that’s OK as long as the content they accessed isn’t inappropriate, right? I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this Machiavellian rationalization for what is essentially a violation of the district’s AUP that could result in termination. Circumventing the filter is wrong. People have been fired for less than that.
• Hey - have you guys ever heard of Web 3.0? Yeah. That’s Second Life, World of Warcraft - you know - that stuff. Huh?

To be clear, I don’t blame these individuals for not knowing this stuff, but the longer I sat in that meeting biting my tongue, the more frustrated I continued to get because these are the technology leaders in their respective buildings! We (and by “we,” I mean those of us “in the know”) need to be more cognizant of the fact that although this stuff is old-hat to us, it’s completely foreign to many of the people in our organizations.

Call it “Digital Citizenship” or anything else you want, the fact remains that we need to be focusing at least as much energy on educating students and teachers in information literacy as we do on trying to use brute force to protect them from themselves with poorly-implemented filters.

What about you?

I’m thrilled to see something like this so close to home! Within driving distance, no less!

[via The Fischbowl]

I got my first digital video camera last month - a Sanyo Xacti CG65 to be exact. After way too many months of research (and way too many missed opportunities to film my little ones doing things that they may never do again), I decided against going high-def (too much money and not enough ways to play it!) and just bought something simple. I like that it records to SD cards and that I’m able to slurp the video onto my MacBook Pro in minutes instead of waiting for it to import in real-time like with a MiniDV cam.

So we have family far away and they like looking at our Flickr page to keep up-to-date with the kiddos, but I’m not sure that my search for the Flickr of video-sharing sites has yielded a satisfactory result.

I’m trying Vimeo right now (my freshman effort is posted there - first thing I’ve ever done in iMovie and I have to say it’s not as intuitive as I would have hoped…) so watch out Martin Scorcese. One of the things I like with Vimeo is that — as with Flickr — I can make a video viewable to the world, or a specific subset of the world which I deem appropriate. Some will think I’m paranoid, but I don’t like a whole lot of videos and pics of my kiddos to be “out there.” So the granular control over who can see what has been nice.

On the other hand, the site’s been wonky all day today. And there are some other things I like about Flickr that I’d like to have in a video-sharing platform. For instance, in Flickr, regardless of the privacy setting on a pic I can always send a direct link to someone without a Flickr account and they can see the picture. I like that because I know there will be people with whom I’d like to share a video, but who won’t want to go through the “trouble” of signing up for an account, adding me as a “Contact,” and then waiting for me to reciprocate before they can see something I’ve shot.

So I’m temporarily OK with Vimeo — and who knows — I may be missing something that will make it act the way I want it too. But I’d love to know what sites you’ve found useful for sharing videos.

The cause, of course, being to rise to the challenge of bringing students engaging, top-quality instruction.

I’m truly humbled by all of the positive attention my “Presentation on Presentations” has received since I published it one week ago. I’m especially grateful to those who have linked it on their own blogs and increased the potential reach for this work.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating that there is nothing in that presentation that I didn’t learn from following in the footsteps of those who have covered this stuff in far greater detail (Dan, Merlin, Guy, Seth, Garr…). I have merely synthesized from the work of others and distilled it down into a presentation that I gave to a group of faculty.

My goal was to whet their appetites. Not to “convert” them to “my” way of thinking, so much as to show them that there are other (better?) ways to use presentation software — to share the possibilities.

I had a limited amount of time and there is a LOT of information out there. I didn’t know if I’d have another opportunity to share this material with them so I wanted to be sure to include as much as possible in the hour that I had. I wanted to leave them hungry to learn more and to some extent I think that I was successful.

Thanks to all who have commented and linked!

On Wednesday I had an opportunity to present to a sub-set of the faculty on some ideas for improving their use of presentation software. It’s been a rub with me that teachers (and administrators - myself included!) have abused slides as the 21st century equivalent of the overhead projector.

Embarrassingly enough, until I started reading and researching about presenting, the only rule of thumb I followed was, “Don’t read directly from the slides.” Although that’s great advice and a wonderful start, it’s only the tip of the iceberg as it relates to creating effective presentations.

The more time I spent at staff development presentations where presenters were telling administrators and teachers about “effective delivery of instruction,” but not practicing what they were preaching, the more frustrated I continued to get. You can’t stand in front of a room full of educators reading your slides bullet-by-bullet and not expect to hear mass snoring.

The most rewarding thing to me was that six of the attendees actually stayed after the presentation with their laptops open and asked me pretty detailed questions about how I designed my slides and how they could improve some of their dated presentations. We ended up hanging out for about a half hour and I am planning to schedule some time to follow up with each of them in their classrooms to maybe watch and provide feedback on their presentations.

• The PDF (11 MB) - I embellished a little on my presentation notes to make it closer to what I actually said rather than just my outline.
• The Keynote (12 MB) - The full presentation in Keynote.

Update 12/16/07: Now posted with audio at Slideshare. Enjoy!