PPT, part 2: Simple Animations

I have been experimenting lately with using PPT as a simple animation editor. This functionality has been around for a long time, but I have only started using it recently. The first animation I created was a short cartoon used to tell my students about an upcoming assignment. I thought it would be more entertaining to do it this way, and the students could watch it multiple times. I did notice a decrease in the number of e-mails from students asking for clarification, and some of the students mimicked this technique in their final projects. This is the highest form of flattery, right? Or kissing up. You can see this movie here. More recently, I created a simple animation to demonstrate the concept of scope and sequence. Thankfully, I saved the original PPT file, and I intend to go  back in and modify it a little bit. But you get the point. I didn't make a big deal of it in my class, but the students had access to the animation and watched it on their own. A couple of them gave me feedback that they thought it was cool. That wasn't my objective, but I was glad to know they enjoyed it.

If you are interested in doing something like this, you will first need to learn how to use the Custom animation tool in PPT. This is something you can look up on the Web, and there are several good tutorial out there. Then, you will need a plug-in to save the PPT file into a SWF animation. I use the free version of iSpring, but you may know of other tools.  I will probably be making more of these in the future, especially as I move some of my classes to the online environment. I have found that technology used in this way actually helps students in both types of classes, so whether you teach online or F2F, this is worth exploring.

Google Transcriber? Far from Beta

I have been using Google Voice for about a month now, and I'm really starting to like it. I have yet to use it for academic purposes, but it comes in handy for making long distance calls from work. I have also put a call widget on my family blog, and it's been fun listening to messages from family and friends from all over the country. I was also excited to learn that Google transcribes the messages into text, in case I want to get the gist of the message before listening to it. This would really come in handy in case I got any messages from angry students. :) One might assume that since Google has knocked just about every other project out of the park, then their transcriptions would be spot on. Well, think again. I have two examples below using messages from my mom and mother-in-law to my two sons (the transcriptions are below the audio widget):

Hi Tina, Kurt being Sam innate sense. This is granny Karen. We love you. Granddad night. Thought about you today. Labor day. We had a fun, Labor Day, so birthday celebration with the and that and for me. I would like to dominos tonight that we miss you all. We hope you had a fun day today. Also, Hi, Okay, I want to tell you bye bye. We'd love to seeing your pictures on the blog spot. Thank you. Bye bye. We love you.

Hey guys, It's G G. We're just hoping that you have sometime today to visit with us on skype. I'm fixing to go out grocery shopping. It's the 920 here 10:20 your time, so I should be. I'll be back here at noon, so if you have time before your afternoon match ups this afternoon. G. G in. Paul Paul would love to visit with you on the web cam. Bye bye.

I was thinking about using this tool to record some phone interviews for a research project I am starting, but obviously I will have to do some serious proofreading. Still, even if this tool gets 60-70% of the words right, I will have saved myself a bundle of time and effort. Using Google Voice, you can record calls and it will send you a transcription of the conversation. I am going to test it out this week and see how it goes.

A book by any other name ...

I just read an interesting post by David Warlick, where he discusses the general misconception by adults that "kids love computers." He was responding to someone who suggested picture books be put on iPhones because "kids love computers." This seems like a logical hook to get kids interested in something they might otherwise avoid. When I was teaching 3rd and 4th grade I used to make that very claim. Students who seemed to have no pulse would suddenly become animated when they heard me talk about going to the computer lab. This was before interactive whiteboards, so I can only imagine their response had I started moving things around the board with my finger. However, I don't think their enthusiasm was directed at the computer, but rather at what the computer represented. One finding from my dissertations was that students in general seem to like using computers in school. However, they like using the computer in different ways and for different reasons. Some students liked the tool they were using -- a web-based storyboard maker. Some students liked the activity -- visual discovery - - and reported they would have liked it just as much without computers. Some students liked visual discovery better with the storyboard tool, and some students thought the whole assignment -- the tech and the activity -- were not that interesting.

David Warlick's says this about kids and technology:

First of all, kids do not love computers any more than I loved my baseball bat, shoulder pads, or box of legos.  They were merely the apparatus of the play that I engaged in.  Computers are no different, except that they are NEW to my generation and in almost every respect more compelling than any Louisville Slugger (JU’s Thinking Stick notwithstanding).  Our children do not go to their mobile phone because it is their “tech of choice.”  They go there because it is where their friends are.

I found this to be very insightful, and it reminded me of this quotation by Esther Dyson:

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

People are drawn to technology because of what it will let them do, as well as what it represents. My mother and her friends have become heavy users of Facebook, not because they love Web 2.0 or social networking software. They love it because they can reconnect and keep up with the people they otherwise might lose touch with. Applications like FB give you a sense that people aren't that far away, a comforting feeling in an age when people seem to constantly move around and get farther apart.

So, while computers and other technology may be a hook to get student attention initially, we can't expect that initial fascination to be sustained over time. Unless these students associate the technology with things they find enjoyable, challenging or rewarding, we run the risk of giving them one more thing to roll their eyes at. It's more than an object of fascination; it's a conduit.

Is there such a thing as a toss-aside course?

I used to hear from students that my technology course was commonly regarded by their advisors as a class they should "just get out of the way early." I don't think the advisors were referring to my course specifically, but rather the required technology course in that program in general. The course is primarily taught by grad students, so there is  a new instructor every 2-3 years. I don't think the faculty members even try to keep up with who is teaching the class every semester, unless the grad student takes the initiative to meet the faculty. Most of my students enjoyed my class and would make comments about how much they learned. I think this is the case for most educational technology classes, where most of the students have never seen technology modeled well by their teachers or professors. Their expectations coming into the class are pretty low, and this isn't helped by the attitude held by most of the advisors that it is a toss-aside class. In some ways these pre-existing attitudes act as a barrier, but I think more often than not they created a perfect opportunity to blow the students' minds and help them completely reframe how they think about, and hopefully use, technology in the classroom.

Another common theme, beside the belief that they would have to endure my class until December or May, respectively, is that I was going to teach them how to do a bunch of stuff. I would always ask them at the beginning of the term what they expected to learn from the class, and their responses were almost unanimously, "How to make  a ... " or "How to use ... program." This is important, but I don't think I ever heard someone say, "I want to learn how to support learning in social studies (or any other content area) through technology," or "I would like to learn how to plan a technology-based lesson." Technology was typically regarded as the thing a teacher adds in at the end, throws in for a diversion or uses for his/her own productivity. This context is a fertile ground for discussions on student learning, content, teaching strategies, classroom management and student engagement. Students were so focused on the how question, they rarely considered the why question. Why should teachers use technology? Is this even the right question? Maybe a better question is, what do I want my students to learn, and what are the best resources I can use to help them get there? What would motivate my students to want to get there? What do my students learn on their own when there are no teachers, parents or grades in the picture, and how do they learn it? You can hardly ask a question like this, framed within the context of the 21st century, without mentioning technology. Clearly, there needs to be a change in the way technology is thought about and presented in schools of education, and I think a lot of programs are moving in that direction.

So, to answer my own question, no I don't think there is any such thing as a toss-aside course. The approach and delivery may need some work, but the content -- the big idea of technology's role in teaching and learning -- is just as important as it has ever been.

Non-evil uses of PPT

People who know me know I hate PowerPoint. It's not exactly the program that I hate, but rather the way people use it. I was recently looking through some notes from a class I took in grad school and saw a packet of printed PPT slides, and there were no less than 72 slides! And every slide was just packed with information. This kind of thing is neither helpful to the students nor a good use of the professor's time. I guess it could be a good use of time for the professor if creating the slides helps him or her form thoughts. Unfortunately, many professors who rely on slides also read from them rather than talking to the class. Despite the evil ways I've seen PPT used, I still use this program quite a bit and think it can be helpful. I just don't use it to create lecture slides. Conference presentations? Yes, but not for class lectures. So, I have decided to dedicate some posts to ways I've used this program in ways out of the ordinary. My main caveat is that some of these ideas are mine, while others were taken from others. I will do my best to differentiate between the two.

My most common use of PPT is as a quick image editor. My wife and I take a lot of photographs of our boys, and while most of them are uploaded to photo sharing site with no editing, occasionally I will need to edit or crop a photo quickly. Picasa is pretty good for most quick edits, but if you want to annotate the image at all you need a different program. PPT offers a quick way to edit a photo then export it as a JPEG, PNG or GIF. Here is what you do:

1. You start with an unedited photo
2. You will insert the photo into PPT
3. Make any changes you want to the photo,  such as annotations, cropping or adjusting the color.
4. Click "Save as ..." and choose "Other formats"
5. Then choose JPEG Interchange Format from "Save as type." You can also choose GIF, TIFF or PNG.
6. You will be asked if you want to export every slide or just the current slide.
7. Click Save.
8. You will also want to save the file as a PPT, in case you want to go in and make more edits later.

That's it. The quality of the images is not stellar, but it's good enough for most things. If you want to retain the image quality, then something like Photoshop is probably better, but for a quick way to edit a photograph, this is pretty slick. I have included a slightly more detailed guide on how to do this, in case you're interested.

Unrolling Prezi

I have dabbled with Prezi a few times, but tomorrow and the next day will be the first time I will use it as a presentation tool in my class. The interface takes some getting used to, but after awhile I found it very simple and now prefer it to the traditional menu format. Of course, the thing that really took some getting used to was how to think in a way that leveraged the affordances of the tool. Prezi enables you to make graphics using shapes, arrows and text. PowerPoint, though I don't use it that much for presentations, has really branded itself on how I approach lectures, talks, etc. After getting past the initial confusion with the tool itself, I had to rethink how to actually design a presentation with it. I kept wanting to default to linear, bullet-pointed lists of information. I don't think my first two attempts are that great, but they are a step in the right direction. I will keep learning this tool, not because I want to replace PPT, but because I want to bust my thinking wide open. This is another example of how technology has imposed constraints on my thinking, rather than supporting my brain's natural way of looking at the world. Prezi still has its limits, but at least it has prompted me to get away from laying down one slide after another and to organize information in a different way. If I can think about new ways of presenting content, I am more likely to see the content in a new and fresh way. Here is an example of something I made today.

From a student's perspective, I think this would be a lot more interesting than PPT, even though it is really much simpler. There is no theme, no background, no images (though they can be added, as well as video and PDFs); just the content. I am also prepared for some of them to complain because PPT has dictated the way they take notes. For people who like to just write down whatever is on the screen, this will be quite frustrating. This may be a case where providing graphic organizers will be helpful. If done well, which mine really isn't, the content becomes the visual. Most people think of their content, then try to create or find a visual to go with it. Using this tool, the content can be arranged and navigated through as a visual. Pretty cool stuff. So, jump in there and give Prezi a try. You may just become a fan. And if you have examples of cool ways to use it, please share.

My Self won't stop following Me

I just browsed a really interesting book on autobiography in education. I plan on finding it at my school's library or through ILL because the Google Book only gave excerpts from each chapter. I have always been a believer in reflective practice in teacher education since my professors made me do it in college. They were successful in indoctrinating me. :) Seriously, self-reflection exposed a lot of "baggage" about my own experience as a student that, if left unexamined, could have led to some less than desirable outcomes as a teacher. In a nutshell, I was the guy who made good grades but never really thought much about what I was learning. I never made trouble for my teachers, but I never really made a difference in my school. I stood out because of my own talents, but I never really stood up for anything. Seth Godin touches on this in an insightful post. Schooling is about learning the ropes and working the system; whereas, learning is about getting it. I don't honestly think I got it until I was a sophomore in college. In many ways, I still don't get it. However, I am content to know the difference between what I get and what I don't get. The things I don't get that I still want to get, I am pursuing. The things I don't get that I don't mind if I never get, I am content to drop them. Or at least shelf them until I have a desire to get them again someday.

OK, enough of that. The reason I brought this up at all is because I am really wrestling with the kinds of things my students should be reflecting on, and how they should be reflecting on them. For me, blogs are great but they don't work for everyone. For me, transparency is OK, but not everyone feels comfortable with it. I want my preservice teachers to have the freedom to admit when they are struggling to find the "teachable moments" in their field experiences, but I want them to look past the schooling game so many of them have played for so long and think about learning. On the other hand, I don't necessarily want to push every student toward the "deeper experience," as one of my online students so accurately put it this summer. Some of them may not be at that point in their learning, and it just adds unnecessary pressure when students think they need to uncover the drama in an experience that was probably pretty bland to begin with. Frankly, my K-12 experience was devoid of very many light bulb or a-ha moments, so a dramatic account of my school days would be predominantly fiction.

This gets me back to the scaffolding issue. With a little modeling, some constructive formative feedback along the way and a clear target for the kinds of things they should be looking for in the classrooms in which they observe or teach, I think reflective practice can be, and is, very effective. I know entire dissertations have been written on this topic, so I haven't even scratched the surface. But it's a timely thing to be thinking about as I start my classes next week.

Facebook profiling

This ties into what I was writing about the other day. A friend of mine mentioned this article about Facebook on, of all places, Facebook. I swear, I read this AFTER I posted about Twitter the other day. If you have the time, or if you spend any time at all on FB, you should read this. It's funny, true and a little embarrassing because we are all probably guilty of doing some of these things at one time or another. This article, and my recent post about Twitter, have really prompted me to think about how innovations cause us to constantly reframe the world. I have been telling my ed. tech. students for years that we (humans) create technology, then technology creates us. My classic example is highways. Highways were created to facilitate faster, smoother commutes from one place to another. Over time people have become dependent on highways, and as the population has grown they are getting more and more crowded. Now, instead of technology working for me, I have to arrange my life around the constraints of the technology (i.e., roads that can't handle the number of cars). Thankfully, I don't live in a city with traffic problems anymore, but that really isn't the point.

The point is, people create technology and technology, in turn, begins to shape us. Some people are dependent on their smart phones. Some people won't speak in public without presentation software. Some people feel compelled to share every minute detail of their lives. The list could go on forever.

Human personality traits have probably not changed all that much in the last 10,000 years. I knew sympathy-baiters and town-criers well before FB or Twitter existed. What's interesting is how a simple little tool -- the ability to write what's on your mind from any place at any time -- has pushed these personality traits to the forefront. Perhaps folks who fall into these categories had other outlets before FB came around. Maybe they were the chronic mass-emailers of the world. But I tend to think that technologies like this have amplified these traits in people that otherwise wouldn't have been labeled in this way.  I used to get relatively few forwarded mass emails before FB, but I receive dozens of FB invitations every day. Who has time for all these games, causes, lil' green patches, farms and mafia warfare? I barely have time to be writing this. And now that Griggs has given these personalities labels, I don't think I will ever see my FB friends in the same way.

This phenomenon is also true of the online teaching I've done. The online environment pushes some personality traits to the forefront that I otherwise wouldn't have noticed. On one hand, it's nice to see a different side of students. I actually get to know my online students pretty well, and a lot of them thrive in the online environment. But I'm also tempted to label students in different ways. And if I can label someone, it makes it easy to dismiss them. I constantly have to resist the urge to label students as ignorant because they misspell everything in the discussions or lazy because they do everything at the last minute. These particular traits aren't really that evident in the classroom environment. I find it ironic that an environment that is, inherently, more private removes some of the hiding places students use in the classroom. While I am able to conduct class in my pajamas from the kitchen, certain aspects of my personality that I can hide in public are suddenly exposed.

Just some thoughts. I'm sure this will come up again. Until then, I will go lurk around on Facebook.

I actually used Twitter today

As an avid TechCrunch reader, I have a history of creating accounts for tools they mention without really thinking about what the tool does or whether I will actually use it. One such tool was Twitter. I honestly cannot remember when I created my Twitter account, but my inaugural tweet was almost a month to the day before my twins were born. I honestly have no memory of writing either of the two tweets recorded in my account, and I don't know why I decided to post a random comment about watching my twins play on the floor in late March of 2008. I have a really good memory, and both of these events, while permanently archived in Twitter, have completely dissolved from my mind. As if this can't get any stranger, I have 22 followers. I'm practically Ashton Kutcher. It's just weird to me that 22 people either saw or searched for my name and clicked the "Follow" button. I'm sure they are very disappointed. I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident the lack of activity in Twitter can be attributed to two things: a) I don't have a cool phone that lets me tweet at anytime and any place, and b) I find it kind of obnoxious. (I try not to think that some people actually consider what I do on this blog essentially the same at tweeting.) When I see status updates on Facebook that are obviously from Twitter (e.g., @, #, bit.ly, misspelled words, etc.), I actually get annoyed and don't read what the person actually wrote. More than that, however, is the fact that I don't really have time to read up-to-the-second updates about what people are doing. Do I really care that someone I kind of knew in high school needs more coffee? Personally, I don't feel the need to tell the world that I am sitting at a traffic light or that I just ate too  much for lunch. And I am suddenly feeling the need to confess that the most chronic Twitter addicts in my Facebook network have either been de-friended or hidden. Wow, that feels better.

However, today things changed just ever so slightly. It all started when a web tool I like (Google Calendar) wouldn't load. I tried refreshing several times with no luck. I went to the Google Dashboard, but they don't even have today's date up yet. So, I had to look in the only place I knew would have realtime information on this. And I found out that some people are experiencing the same thing. There is no explanation or clue as to when it be available again, but at least Twitter let me find out that I'm not alone. It seems that this is not affecting everyone, by the way. So, rather than obsessing about this and trying to see if the problem was caused on my end, I could let it rest and get back to work.

Twitter can count this as a score in their favor. I still refuse to tweet, but if a widely-used web page won't work for me I will likely look on Twitter first. This is by no means comparable to the protests in Iran and the subsequent military crackdown, but I did get to experience firsthand the benefits of realtime data. I'm still trying to get my head around the implications this has for children growing up in the 21st Century and how these technologies will shape how they define "news." But it's an interesting thing to think about. And one more thing from curbyalexander @somerandomdude: We're all tired and ready to go home at the end of the day. But thanks for sharing.

Cookies in a Flash

When I read this article, I chuckled a little. Developers of web content and sites that host web content are getting better and better at collecting data about how people are using their tools. Some examples are Youtube's Insight and Visible Measures. The latter of these two examples actually will display in a graph when people are rewinding the scrub bar and re-watching portions of the video. Granted, I think a person has to have about 50,000 or so views for this to work, but it does give a pretty accurate display of audience engagement with a video. In the tool I helped design for my dissertation -- PrimaryAccess Storyboard -- we used something similar to Flash cookies to collect data about how the students were using the tool. This tool is built using Flash, and Bill (the programmer) was able to add in some code that records everything the user does while logged into this application. I was able to get detailed information from each student, such as when he or she logged in, whether or not they logged in after school from a different computer, every single move they made with the mouse or keyboard (I didn't know what they wrote and deleted, just the number of characters typed and deleted). I was even told how much time each student spent on task. Of course, we who have been teachers know that a general number for time on task, such as 52 minutes, does not really tell me much about what the student was doing. Using the rest of the data, I was able to see the differences in how the students used their time. Some would experiment with different images, layering them on top of each other and tinkering with the order. Other students were just playing with the tool, adding characters, spinning them around and deleting it.

This approach to data collection was not perfect, and Bill and I are still thinking about ways to make this data more useful to teachers, but it did answer a longstanding issue I have always had with technology in the classroom. Computers, just like  in other contexts, make it easy for students to look busy when they really aren't. As an observer, I was able to see how students would deftly switch between their work and Solitaire without the teacher ever noticing. Even though the data told me how long they stayed on task, I was able to infer from the rest of the data that they really weren't very engaged. And even if they looked engaged, I could see how they were spending their time. Some used the tool creatively to make the best product possible, while others played around but did not put a lot of thought into their final product.

I see a lot of potential in this kind of data collection. We can learn a lot about how students use different tools and scaffold projects in a way that anticipates these patterns. This also opens the door to looking at how teachers make instructional decisions based on the feedback they get from the students' tool use. Given what they know about how a student is using his or her time, can they make better decisions for directing student effort before the final product is turned in? I think there are lot of good questions, and hopefully some answers, that will come from this kind of data.