The 15-minute Experiment

One tool I have used with students for several years is a wiki. I have personally used wikis for group work, class websites and digital portfolios. However, I have had a hard time coming up with a good activities for my students that really demonstrate the affordances of a wiki (group editing, version history, comments and discussion, etc.) beyond the ability to just create a web page. In fact, my experiences were always similar to Melissa Cole, who had a lot of great ideas for using a wiki in her class but struggled to get buy-in from her class. I have had the same problem in the past, where I would set up a semester-long collaborative project for students to build a collective knowledge base. These projects always started out strong before interest fizzled after a few weeks. One interesting piece from Cole's article was the brief taxonomy of wiki usage, taken from Tonkin (2005):

1. Single-user. This allows individual students to write and edit their own thoughts and is useful for revision and monitoring changes in understanding over time.
2. Lab book. This enables students to peer review notes kept online by adding, for example, commentary or annotations to existing lecture notes or seminar discussions.
3. Collaborative writing. This can be used by a team for joint research such as a group project, essay or presentation.
4. Creating a topical knowledge repository for a module cohort. Through collaborative entries students create course content that supplements and extends delivered material.

I don't think this list is exhaustive, but it got me to thinking. How could I show my students the power of collective knowledge without giving them a project that would drag on forever, while harnessing knowledge each student currently possessed?

Well, I came up with the following idea:

Imagine you were each asked to speak to a group of students new to UNT about tips for being successful in their first semester. In other words, what do you wish you had known as an incoming student? Chances are you could come up with several good tips. But what would happen if three or four of you collaborated on the same talk? You would probably be able to come up with an even better list of suggestions for incoming students. What you will do in the next 15 minutes is collectively tap into your knowledge and experience and provide incoming students with a knowledge base that might be helpful to their transition to UNT (assuming they take your advice).

The result was this wiki, which I created using WikiSpaces. The end result is not totally impressive, and you can see that some of the students took this opportunity to be kind of silly (which I can relate to ... I was always that kid in the class). But what was interesting was the reaction from many of the students when we debriefed about this activity. For most of them, they got it. They were able to see in a  short amount of time that many people can collectively put their heads together and create something useful (e.g., Wikipedia, though that experiment has taken many years to create).

On the technical side, there was quite a lot of work I had to do beforehand to make this experiment truly 15 minutes. Here is the rundown:

1. Set up the wiki
2. I took advantage of the free teacher upgrade, which allowed me to add users in bulk. This takes about a day to do, since wikispaces wants to verify your .edu or k12 e-mail address.
3. Created a CSV file with a username and password for each of my students.
4. Uploaded the file and created the student accounts.
5. Distributed the usernames and passwords to my class (via Moodle)

I demonstrated this process to the class as well, in case they wanted to try it themselves. I think this is an activity I will include in the future, and I may even have my students edit or add to the existing entries in addition to creating their own. I may have to find a new topic before long if this one becomes saturated, but I think there are still several topics that haven't been addressed.

So, how do you use wikis in your teaching?

Implementing Digital Fabrication

As I mentioned in my last post, there are a lot of aspects of digital fabrication that I really like. Students being able to design, create, evaluate, re-design and re-create objects that they conceptualized on the computer. Students being able to physically hold something they designed in a virtual environment. There are many elements of this kind of teaching that represent many of the hopes people have had for infusing technology into teaching and learning: direct application, real-world importance, creativity, etc. Until recently, most of my experience designing and fabricating objects had been done in my office on my one machine that is connected to my computer. There was no waiting for other people, no transferring files from one computer to another, no having to think about how and where to save files so I could resume my work at a later time. In the back of my mind I knew that the experience I had fabricating objects would be much different than the whole-class experience my students would have, and there were several technical aspects of this process I had not anticipated until I released it into the wild with my students.

I had some ground rules for myself when deciding how to introduce this activity:

1. I wanted to give the class 1-2 authentic tasks to do. I did not just want to just have the students using the software for the sake of using the software. That has never turned out favorably for me.
2. I wanted them to be able to finish in one week. That means one class meeting for one section and two for another.
3. I wanted them to have fun and like what they are doing. This all gets back to my belief (and that of many other people) that one way to change attitudes toward technology is to provide people with engaging, meaningful and yes, fun activities that include technology. People, teachers in particular, tend to abandon technology because they have had bad experiences with it.

So, I set out to design an activity that met these criteria. I had the students complete these activities and submit their work when they were done. The first activity was used to introduce the software (no printing or cutting involved), and the second activity was for application. Overall, my students were very gracious and rolled with the punches. They seemed to like the second activity more than the first (Really!?!), and though I have no data to support my claims, I truly believe they understand digital fabrication more than they did after reading an article and watching a video. Here are my reflections (both technical, pedagogical and philosophical) from the experience.

1. You have to print from the same computer you will use to cut the shape.  If you print from a computer that does not have a Silhouette connected to it, the software will put the wrong orienting marks on the paper and it will be useless for cutting ... unless you want to cut it by hand.
2. The trial version of the software does not let you save your work. You must have a licensed version to save a project on one computer and open it on another.
3. The printing and cutting step of this process is a bottleneck. I have 24 students in each class. They worked in groups of 3, and I brought 2 fabricators to the lab.  Under ideal conditions, everything went pretty smoothly. As soon as there was a hitch, and there were a couple, the line got a little backed up.
4. The more fabricators you have, the better. However, the trade-off is that the more fabricators you have, the noisier your classroom will be.
5. I received a couple different versions of this comment, "I have a hard time envisioning myself doing this activity with my class." It's hard to situate an activity within an instructional context AND create obvious connections to other instructional contexts. When you give preservice teachers a task, they tend to focus on the task. A seasoned teacher may do a better job of seeing those connections because she will have more applied experience than a novice teacher. In other words, I could have done a better job of facilitating what Salomon and Perkins call high-road transfer. I think requires some application and reflection, which we didn't really do.
6. Related to the previous observation, there needs to be more emphasis on creativity in teacher education programs. Rather than being a thing a person either has or doesn't have, I think of creativity more like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to grow and stay healthy. The older I have gotten, the more purposeful I have become in my creative pursuits. As for my role in the creative development of my students, I think the best way to do this is for them to create a digital fabrication activity in their preferred content area. It's one thing to be able to do my activity. It's an entirely different level of creativity to be able to create a learning activity for a group of children. I may do this at some point.

Overall, I would say this was a good activity for my first attempt at a new concept and new technology. I have a completely different vision for how this will look the next time I do it, which is evidence of learning on my part.

Teaching virtual design in a physical world

I first became familiar with the term "digital fabrication" when I was finishing up my dissertation at the University of Virginia. My advisor, Glen Bull, came into my office one day and asked me to watch a demo with a machine he had recently found. I watched with fascination as he created a 3-D model on the computer, printed it as a 2-D net, cut it out in seconds on the CraftROBO machine and folded it into an exact replica of the model on the screen. This was amazing on several fronts:

• It took a matter of minutes to do what would have taken me a whole math lesson (or more) to do with my 4th grade students
• The fold lines were clean and perforated. The physical object actually looked like the model on the screen. For students who have been spoon fed high-quality media since birth, that makes a difference.
• The design was separate from the actual object, which means I could go back to the computer model and make alterations/corrections, then print another one.

That final point is, in my opinion, significant. Let me explain this by making a comparison to the writing process. For children, the act of writing something by hand is laborious. It's labor-intensive to me, and I've been doing it for 35 years. So, when children write something on paper, they want that to be the first and final copy of that particular piece of writing. It's not that they don't like proofreading, editing and revising, but every change they make means another word, sentence, paragraph or page they will have to rewrite. Writing, in addition to being cognitively demanding, is physically demanding on a child's fine-motor skills. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell is right, that the best people in a certain field aren't always the most naturally gifted, but those in the right place at the right time with the opportunity to perfect their skills. Maybe the best writers in school are those that don't get burned out from the physical act of writing.

The same is true when students are creating things in the classroom. I used to have my students cut out nets from graph paper and fold those shapes into 3-dimensional objects. After spending more than one math lesson to do this,  we could finally get to the learning. This is not considered efficient in the business or medical world, yet in education we just kind of shrug it off and learn to deal with it. And what happened if a student's shape was not exactly symmetrical or was missing a side? Well, they got to be the kid with the lopsided shape. What if I wanted to demonstrate how changing the dimensions of the shape could conserve volume but change surface area? I guess I could have the students cut out a new shape, but there goes another 15-20 minutes. The fact that the media students used to design the object also became the object used to teach the concept was problematic.

This is not as much of a problem when the students design their model on the computer because they can manipulate it without having to physically create another shape. And for all those Piaget and Montessori fans out there, the end result is still a physical object that students can touch and compare. Students learn the basic foundations of rapid prototyping and iterative design, two principals and practices that pretty much define research and development. This is a far cry from the current model of "one and done" projects in schools today.

Below is  a video created by the folks in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia who are starting to explore how digital fabrication can be applied in schools to enhance student learning.

I will follow up in a couple of days and explain how I took this concept and turned it into a learning activity for my preservice teachers.

Using Posterous as a class photo archive

I have been playing 5-Picture Charades with my classes for many years. I first came up with the idea (though I'm sure I wasn't the first person to do so) back in the mid-'90's when I was teaching elementary school. I would have my students pick an excerpt from whatever book we happened to be reading, and they would have to act out that scene in 5 pictures. They would then share the images with the class to see if anyone could guess the scene. As you can imagine, the activity was a lot of fun and the students loved it.

In addition to this activity being fun, I also noticed that there was a lot of higher-order thinking going on. Students were having to synthesize passages, evaluate which scenes most accurately characterized their passage, narrow them down to 5 images, decide how to physically portray those 5 essential scenes and ultimately create them. One reason the students loved this activity was because it was challenging, but the kind of challenging that is so much fun you don't realize how much work it actually is.

When I started teaching technology integration courses, I used this activity to teach my students how to capture, edit and publish digital images. I found that they were much more motivated to engage in these  skill-development activities when they were using their own images that they just had a ball creating. I typically gave them fairy tales to act out, but occasionally I would just give them some boundaries (e.g., U.S. History, Literary characters, etc.) and let them pick their own topic. The former category is much easier, but the latter produces much more entertaining image sets. We then use the images to practice image editing, digital storytelling and uploading (which, thanks to Facebook, most of them are already pretty good at).

The only sticky part to this activity every semester was sharing the images with the rest of the class. I tried having them save all of the images to the instructor computer, but it took forever and people ended up sitting around waiting for others to finish. I also tried having the students e-mail the images to me, but that also took forever and sometimes the images were too big to attach (this was before Gmail had such massive attachment allowances). So, it was always tricky getting everyone's images into one place where we could view them.

Well, last semester I got tipped off to Posterous by Wes Fryer, and I decided to use it today for this activity. I created a class account and had the students follow these instructions as soon as they came in from taking their pictures:

Transfer the images from your camera to the computer.

Go to http://posterous.com

Log in using the following credentials

• E-mail:
• Password:

Click on the button that says "Post by web"

Click in the Title field and name it based on your group and section (e.g., Section 001, Group 1)

On the right side of the screen, choose "Upload images, audio, video and docs"

Choose all of your photos at once. You do this by holding down the CTRL key as you click on each photo. Once all 5 images are selected, click Open.

After the photos have uploaded, click Publish.

Have each person in the group save all 5 images to their flash drive

Delete the images from the camera.

Put the camera and all its parts back in the box and return it to me.

I am telling you, I have done this activity many times, and it has never gone as smoothly as it did today. The students came in and got right to work uploading their images to our class Posterous site, and within minutes we were laughing and blurting out trying to guess each group's fairy tale. There was essentially no waiting around or wondering what happened to some of the images. It is almost as if the gallery method of displaying images in Posterous was created just for this activity, and an added bonus is that I now have access to each of these images without having to go around to each computer and copy them to my flash drive.

I definitely recommend Posterous as a place to have students upload images. Flickr groups or Picasa albums are also good, but this is by far the easiest method I have ever used for this purpose.

Students and informal learning

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to contribute to an ISTE book, Teaching with Digital Video, an effort put together by Glen Bull and Lynn Bell. One of the chapters I helped write discussed student-created video in informal learning environments. The premise of this chapter is that rich, deep learning can (and do) take place in settings other than school and without a teacher's direction. I was able to provide a few examples of such learning in the chapter.

Along these lines, I have been working with a News Media club at a private K-8 school, and one of the things the students wanted to learn was how to edit video and use a green screen. The school just happened to have recently invested in a green screen and video editing software, so the conditions were perfect for trying out the new equipment.

Because this is a club, rather than a core class, combined with the fact that the students are all new to video editing, I decided to start with something small and simple, which in this case was Charades. I told the students which scenario to act out, and we filmed them performing in front of the green screen. After each student had a chance to participate (twice!), we went to the computer lab and did some simple editing. You can click on the link below to see the result of our efforts, a simple 1-minute video:

• http://ltec4100.magnify.net/video/Green-Screen-demo

The thing that excites me about this experience is not the technology, but the students' response to the activity. I had students stopping me in the hall later that day asking me when we were going to use the green screen again. I could tell their ideas and creativity were flowing. Green screen is cool, but students who are excited about being creative and taking ownership of their own learning is even cooler.

Digital identity

The first time I thought about managing my identity as a teacher was during my junior year in my teacher education program. The final project for my language arts methods class was a professional portfolio that included: a narrative about myself and my philosophy of teaching, my philosophy of classroom management (which was so ridiculous I am ashamed that I actually put it in print and let others look at it) and examples of exemplary lessons and other projects I created for my teacher ed. classes. I remember putting a lot of time and thought into this project because I knew it could potentially be something really cool/impressive to show during a job interview. At the time, my portfolio was quite the technological wonder. Yes, the deliverable was still a printed document (a book printed and bound at Kinko's), but I designed the entire thing on my Mac LC 520 computer. This was a stark contrast to how my classmates completed the project, which included a mix of word-processed and photocopied pages thrown together in a three-ring binder. I used a scanner and Clarisworks to make the entire portfolio have a consistent design throughout. At the time, it was quite impressive, and I think I still have a copy somewhere in a box in my parent's basement.

With all of the digital tools available now (17 years after I crafted my first portfolio!), there is no reason that preservice teachers shouldn't be able to put together a killer digital portfolio. While many of the principles for presenting a portfolio haven't changed that much, if at all, in 17 years, the tools we have access to for making one are lightyears beyond my little all-in-one Mac.

I entered the world of digital portfolios when I was teaching the class "Teaching with Technology" at the University of Virginia. I had my students create a digital portfolio using HTML, and they hosted it on their Home Directory. The project started off very clunky and frustrating and eventually became one that the students all loved and commented that they felt most satisfied with. I eventually abandoned NVU and Home Directory for Google Pages (now Google Sites), and the quality of the projects increased exponentially (not to mention the number of e-mails from frustrated students almost vanished). Looking back, the major drawbacks of this portfolio were that it focused on the projects only from my class and most of the students viewed it as an "assignment" rather than a tool that would continually evolve and could ultimately become an archive of their teaching careers.

My journey into the world of digital portfolios continued when I taught at the University of Illinois Springfield. The department I was teaching in (Teacher Education) had adopted TaskStream for the teacher candidates to use for building their digital portfolios, so I had to adopt this tool as well. Overall, it was pretty easy to use and the final product looked very professional. Besides the fact that the portfolio's format was very prescribed (meaning, it helped my department meet its objectives more than it helped the students meet theirs), the main drawback with TaskStream was that it cost money (not a little money, either), almost ensuring that 99% of the teacher candidates would not use it after they graduated. Once again, I was stuck in this rut of "assigning" a digital portfolio for a "grade," which means when the grade is given the assignment is done.

So, when I was asked to teach a section of "Computers in the Classroom" at the University of North Texas, I was once again in the position of thinking about how to structure my final portfolio project. Having a little more freedom than I did at UIS and having learned some lessons from UVA, I tried to improve my portfolio project. Here is the project description from last semester (Fall 2010). As you can see, it is still pretty "my-class-centric."

But it's amazing what one little blog post can do to spark some new ideas. I taught concurrently with Wes Fryer last semester, and we were constantly bouncing ideas off each other. He addressed digital portfolios in one of his posts, which helped me develop my latest iteration of my digital portfolio project.  Here is my latest project description, which I am pretty happy with at this point. I'm sure once my students get their hands on it I will see some areas that need clarification or revision. The obvious weakness of the current version is my rubric (which really isn't a rubric), which I will definitely be revising.

So, do you give a final portfolio assignment? How structured/open is it? What elements do you have students include that I have overlooked?

Technology and Priorities

I am at the SITE conference in San Diego, and after 1.5 days of presentations I have heard one theme emerge above all others. This theme can be reduced to one question, "Why do students, who use technology in almost every aspect of their lives, seem so clueless when it comes to using it in their teaching and learning?" You may have seen versions of this conversation framed in other ways: digital natives vs. digital immigrants, 21st Century learning, Content-creators, Millennial Students, etc. The assumption on the part of teacher educators is that students who love technology in certain areas of their lives should love it in their learning and teaching. I would like to suggest a radical idea: teens and college students don't love technology. They love what they can do with technology, which is to address their priorities and motivations. Take technology out of the picture, and this is what I know about college students:

• They like to have fun
• They are more likely to listen to their friends than their parents or professors
• They like to be entertained
• They are confronted with a lot of information that has challenged their worldview, and they are trying to make sense of it all
• They view their classes as something they have to do to a) stay in college and be with their friends and b) graduate and move on to the next phase of their lives

So, why do students know so much about certain technologies yet know so little about other types of technology (e.g., educational/learning technology)? The technologies they know and use help them address their priorities, and as sad as it may seem, being a life-long learner is not a priority for them at this stage in their lives.

I spend a lot of time talking to teacher candidates about knowing their students and meeting where they are in their skills, abilities and prior knowledge. As a teacher educator, I must do the same with my students. I need to understand their priorities and motivations, and meet them where they are.

The Powerlessness of Some Stories

I am still thinking about stories, memory and learning. As I wrote earlier, with a quick scan down the list of former students I can recall the digital story each one of them created for my class. I have had former students tell me the same thing. They can remember the stories created by their classmates, recalling some of the most amazing details. When I read the names of my students, I could hear their voices, see the images in my head, remember the anecdotes they shared, and in some cases, associate the music they included as part of their projects. This made me think of another project I was involved in while I was teaching these undergraduate classes. I spent the better part of two years of my life working with teachers and helping they and their students create short historical documentaries by mashing up archival material and user-generated content. The movies ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration, to the causes and effects of the Civil War. I worked with about a half-dozen teachers and approximately 150 students. I didn't spend as much time in those classrooms as I did with my preservice teachers, but I did spend enough time with them that when I scan the list of students from each class I can place a face with the name. Over the  course of 3 very intense projects, I helped them make about 150 movies, give or take a few students who missed too much school or didn't use their time wisely.

Oddly, I could remember very little about the movies they created, even though they shared many similarities with the movies created by the preservice teachers. In contrast, I helped over 200 preservice teachers create digital stories over a 4-year span and I can remember every single story. As another contrast, the quality and form of the movies was quite different. This is not meant to be a knock on 6th graders, but undergraduates at the University of Virginia knew a little more about storytelling and expression than the 12-13 year olds I was working with. Here are some of the notable differences in their projects:

6th Graders	Preservice Teachers
Chose images from a pool hand-picked by teacher	Took or found their own images
Most of the stories used the same images	Every story was completely unique
Narrative was an expository essay	Narrative was a story
Most of the narratives covered the exact same main points (convergent coverage of the topic)	Narratives were totally unique (divergent coverage of the topic)
Stories did not have music	Stories had music
Stories reflected what the teacher told them they had to remember	Stories reflected personal learning

I know this is probably not a complete list, but this is what I was able to come up with after viewing a few of each type of story. Honestly, the 6th grade movies all sounded and looked the same. Yes, the topics were covered in different order, there was slight variation on the images used and the narrative was worded differently, but for the most part they were identical. Kind of like Kevin Costner movies.

This is an interesting topic to me, and I plan on covering it more in the future. I am leaving tomorrow for SITE, and I hope to have some good conversations about digital storytelling and other tech-related teaching strategies.

Oh, be careful little CV what you say

A colleague just passed this CV along to me, which is quite creatively displayed in Google Maps. I think this a good example of how one can mix new media (interactive map) with an existing purpose (CV) and create a completely unique message. I will definitely be showing this to my students, both as an example of an innovative use of media and as a nonexample for how to write for an intended audience. Let me qualify my impending rant with this statement: I am in academia, not in advertising or copy writing, so the standards and expectations for a CV may differ quite a bit between the two worlds. Furthermore, the owner of this CV is a professional writer and undoubtedly knows more about his audience than I do.

That said, I have three main observations about his CV, which I think would be great conversation starters for graduating seniors or grad students. First, how casual is too casual for a CV? I think I am just too accustomed to the stuffy academic CV. The overall tone of this CV is quite casual and resembles something you might read on Facebook or a blog. Should style change with the medium? Would a more formal tone undermine the affordances of the interactive map?

Second, he does a pretty good job of focusing on the high points of his career, but he also commits some major job interview no-nos: talking about goofing off in college, bashing (or at least making fun of) a former boss and mentioning dissatisfaction with an old job. I have sat on several committees where we interviewed teachers for an open position, and I was always able to tell what kind of colleague the person would be just based on what he or she said about former students, principals, schools and districts. If a former principal or colleagues were described as "horrible," chances are he or she would find something horrible about future colleagues and principals. I was always "coached" to be very positive about former work environments and be selective in what I said about colleagues and bosses. In Ed's defense, he doesn't say anything really scathing and he is much more positive than negative in his descriptions of former employers.

Finally, some of his humor is a little misdirected. Considering the recent earthquake in Chile, the comment about Chilean geography may come across as insensitive. I am not an overly sensitive person, and I was immediately struck with how untimely and inappropriate this was. As a person who knows a thing or two about digital media, I know it won't take very long to move that little pin to a different place on the map.

Overall, I think this is pretty cool and I hope it ultimately leads to a job. Best of luck, Ed!

My Band plays in a Garage in the Cloud

I recently read about a suite of web-based tools hosted by aviary.com, and I was quickly blown away. Most of the tools are for image editing, but they recently added an audio editor. Each of these tools is web based ,which means they require no downloads, installations or updates. Each time one of these tools comes out (e.g., Google Sites, Weebly, PBWiki, ScreenToaster), I can feel a new life being breathed into my teaching.

When I was teaching ed tech classes, I was always hesitant to show my students applications like Photoshop, Camtasia and Dreamweaver. These programs are powerful and may very well be useful to teachers, but they required a massive leap from what the preservice teachers already knew to what they needed to learn to be successful with them. At different times, I dabbled with the tools, but the focus quickly turned to the tool itself and I would be inundated with e-mails about how to do this or that. I know there are folks who consider the ability to use these tools a necessary literacy for teachers in the 21st Century, but I chose to keep our discussions and projects grounded in pedagogy and the classroom. This makes choosing tools for different projects quite difficult. On top of their complexity, there is the issue of cost and accessibility. If I in fact wanted my students to use these tools and strategies as teachers, it hardly made sense to rely on expensive software that they would a) not have access to once they left the university and b) had to come to the computer lab to use. Using Everett Rogers' criteria for "adoptable innovations" as my framework, it made sense to me to use tools whose trialability, observability, compatibility, relative advantage and complexity matched the needs of teachers.

It just so happens that in the last few years, as more schools are experimenting with student-created digital media, the tools to create these media have been moving to the Cloud. For example, I was eventually able to replace Dreamweaver with Google Page Creator (now Google Sites), and I noticed immediately that the "how do I make a picture show up on my website"  questions vanished. Our conversations shifted to questions about pedagogy and implementation with students in their classes. However, until recently there were no suitable web-based alternatives for editing images and audio, or for creating screencasts. I still had to rely on desktop programs for podcasts, and I got pretty good as using PPT as an omnibus program for all things related to digital images.

Well, I have recently discovered, thanks to TechCrunch, a suite of new tools that may potentially transform (yet again) the way I do things. Aviary has developed a web-based audio editor that allows users to record, mix and download audio files without ever leaving the browser. The interface is extremely easy to use, and you can add up to 10 tracks. Worried about copyright for the audio clips students put in their projects? Myna (the name of the audio editor) provides over 14,500 loops for users to mix into their recordings. Of course, if you are planning on becoming the next Jared Hess or Brian Ibbott, you will need to get permission before using the music loops, distributed by APM Music. Creating an account is free, and you can either save the audio file online or download it to your computer. Needless to say, I am very eager to test this out and see if it's feasible for my students to use. Here is a screenshot of Myna (captured with Aviary's screen capture tool ... of course).