Category — Tools

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]

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!

Sequence : Gene of my life
Originally uploaded by hawkexpress

First, have you seen this? I thought I’d seen some complex organizational schemes, but this one is incredible. Elegant in its simplicity, yet amazingly comprehensive. [via 43F]

Second, if you’re in graduate school and you use a Mac, you need to check out Schoolhouse 2.1. All I can say about this app is, “Wow!” I’m using it to track assignments and the like in my two doctoral classes this term and I’m thoroughly impressed.

If you haven’t seen the interesting discussion I’ve been having with Michelle, let me bring you up to speed. Michelle is looking for some help getting herself organized for the upcoming school year and has asked for my input. I am not a guru, but I’ve offered some help in the form of brainstorming possible solutions for her.

In the last exchange, she says:

The key questions for me seem to be:

1) Should I combine personal and professional calendars?
2) OR is it a good idea to have more than one?
3) paper or electronic?
4) if paper– which one?
5) if electronic- which one?

Because I think this is something many of us — myself included — struggle with, I’m posting this here instead of in a response to that older post.

On combining personal and professional calendars that’s how I roll. I don’t want to have to look in more than one place, or have the wrong calendar with me at the wrong time.

In the paper vs. electronic debate, I’ve been back and forth more times than I care to admit. Here’s how I see the pros and cons of each:

Paper
The Good: Easier to see weeks and months at a glance; Doesn’t crash and destroy all your data; No sync-ing issues where events disappear or show up twice; Easy archiving that’s always forward- and backward-compatible

The Bad: Paper planners tend to be bulkier than the slickest PDAs and smartphones; If it’s lost it’s gone — no backup available for recovery; When you upgrade your phone/PDA will your calendar be compatible?

Electronic
The Good: Usually extremely portable; Always backed up (as long as you remember to sync…); Can share calendars with others

The Bad: Remembering to sync (unless you’re on a BlackBerry connected to an Enterprise Server or a Windows Mobile device connected to Exchange 2003); Do your calendars play nicely with each other a la iCal and gCal?; Sometimes you don’t have Internet access; Sometimes you have a dead battery; Sometimes your device will crash

Before you send me any hate-mail, let me state that there are always exceptions to the above. When my Palm III crashed, I went back to paper. Then I got a Treo. Then it broke and I went to a Franklin-Covey system. So you see, it’s always a work in process.

My current calendaring system looks like this:

• I’m (finally!) exclusively on a Mac at work and at home.
• I use iCal to manage my calendars.
• I currently have 4 calendars in iCal:



• Work - For stuff I do during my work day. This is red.
• Night coverages - For evening stuff my wife might care about when she’s making plans for us. She is subscribed to this calendar in her own iCal. This is green.
• CSU - For grad school stuff. This is orange.
• Personal - For everything else. This is blue.

• I keep my work and school machines in sync with Spanning Sync and Google Calendar. I don’t think Spanning Sync was designed with the idea of keeping multiple machines in sync, but it works handily. Google Calendar is very useful for a number of reasons (say you’re on someone else’s computer and don’t have access to your iCal. Your PDA has a dead battery, and your paper copy fell in a puddle…), but I like it because it can send SMS reminders to your phone.
• On Friday, I print a hard copy of the current month and the next week. This gets Circa punched and stuck in my notebook.
• I sync all of this with my Nokia N73 using iSync.

This sounds a lot more complex than it actually is, but once you get the syncing set up, it pretty much takes care of itself.

That’s probably way more information than Michelle wanted, but there it is. I’m hopeful that this will help others who are pondering the questions of multiple calendars and whether to go digital or analog.

I had the good fortune of being invited to appear with Principal Miller on her most recent podcast. She was focused on productivity and asked me to contribute. We ended up both on and off the topic, but I think it made for some great conversation. Heck - she called me an “expert!” How could I refuse?

[Direct link to the podcast]

Some links to items we discussed:

• 43 Folders
• Inbox Zero
• Levenger
• Productive Talk
• DIY Planner
• iCal
• Backpack
• TaDa List

Some additional GTD resources - places where I’ve learned all that I know about GTD and productivity:

• The Cranking Widgets Blog
• Black Belt Productivity
• Zen Habits
• Lifehack
• Lifehacker

Here are some Flickr pics (click through to see notes) that I took of my various Levenger Circa products. They’re cameraphone pics so apologies in advance for the quality…

Image: “Speak up.” by dietpoison

One of the most important tenets of GTD is the notion of ubiquitous capture. Why the need to capture everything? Simply put, you can’t rely on your memory. As much as we might like to think we can trust our brains, the fact is that as educators we are barraged daily by a thousand things competing for our attention - some of them requiring action, some of them just white noise that distracts us from the former.

Let’s say you’re on your morning duty in the cafeteria and notice a table with a wobbly leg. You make a mental note to speak with your head custodian as soon as the kids are safely in class. In the meantime, you wander a bit more and talk with Suzy about last night’s band concert, answer Juan’s question about the college visitation this afternoon, and end up chewing the fat with one of your coaches about Friday night’s football game. When you do end up back in your office, you fire up your email client to see 41 unread messages and spend the next half-hour weeding through them and doing email triage.

Your wobbly table leg is all but forgotten. But if you’ve had the tools to capture your thought right then and there, you could have saved a freshman the embarrassment of having the table collapse during lunch thereby covering him in school-issued pizza sauce. It’s not important what tool or tools you decide on as your capture devices — analog, digital, a chisel and stone tablet — as long as you make it part of your routine to have it with you. A capture tool left in your office does no good.

A stack of index cards and a binder clip work great (a la the Hipster PDA), as does a cell phone and an account on Jott (See my post on Jott here). And the best part of ubiquitous capture is that once you trust yourself to capture your actionable items, you’ve freed your brain to work on other, more pressing items instead of trying to remember a dozen unrelated items that need tending to.

So as we start a new year, choose a capture device and make it a part of your regular routine to grab it every time you walk out of your office and use it often. Your brain will thank you for it, and you can stop worrying about what you might be missing.

Image: “Collander” by jbweir

Sorry, folks. This post is old and so are the resources. If you’ve come here looking for GTD stuff, my more recent workflow has been documented under the “productivity” tag.

Since I started this blog in January, my post on education and GTD has consistently been one of the most viewed. I’ve taken some time to update the information from that post and to make it a “Page” for ease of linking and future updates. It’s now a part of my Resources so enjoy:

Using GTD in Education

I had really planned on sticking with the OceanBech 1.0 theme for at least 6 months before moving on, but as much as I liked the look, it was definitely a very 1.0 theme. I had to do a lot of hacking around in the CSS to get it to look “just right” and even still there were some things I was less than pleased with.

I really didn’t want to be “that blogger” who changes the theme of his blog as the mood suits him, but I was really getting frustrated with what I felt were some limitations of my previous theme. I’ve spent some time the last few days really perusing the themes that met my very basic requirements: three columns and widget-ready. After much reading and reviewing, I’ve settled on “Subtle” (a.k.a. Glued Ideas). I like the look and feel very much and there is an active development and support community at http://www.gluedideas.com/.

As always, expect some minor tweaking in the days/weeks ahead. I won’t have time to mess with this stuff once school/grad school starts in a few more weeks.