Peter Pappas »
26 January 2012 »
In Ed Tech, Events, PD, Presentations, Web 2.0 »
One of this year's resolutions was to begin offering webinars. (not that I don't enjoy airports) I recently completed my first pilot (description below) and I'm looking for three school sites who would like to try a free pilot webinar and offer me some feedback. More details on my free webinar below.
Live Meeting - Teacher view with presentation, video, audience, Learning Catalytics
I piloted my first webinar with a group of instructors from Southwest Wisconsin Technical College. We used Microsoft Live Meeting as a platform. Participants at SWTC were gathered in one room. We maintained webcam contact with each other throughout the workshop. (I'm not a big fan of watching webinar presentations delivered by a disembodied voice.) I pre-loaded high-quality video in advance that ran smoothly during the webinar. The webinar went very well and I think we were able to create the level of interaction that I strive for in my on-site workshops.
For years I've used a TurningPoint audience response system (ARS) in my on-site keynotes and workshops. When an ARS is used in a Socratic manner it fosters great conversation and reflection. So a key component I wanted in a webinar was a "distance version" of an ARS. I was pleased to discover Learning Catalytics. While it was designed for on-site classroom use, it was just what I needed to enliven the webinar.
Learning Catalytics is a web-based response system that allows participants to answer from any web-enabled device - computer, tablet, smart phone. It was easy to input questions (it even provides for copy / paste of text) and using it during the webinar was a breeze. It allows the teacher to ask a wide variety of questions. Not only the usual questions such as multiple-choice, priority, and ranking. But also some unique questions for an ARS where students use their devices to - draw vectors indicating directions, indicate the points on an image, and even aggregate student text into Word clouds. Imagine your students generating real-time Wordles from their devices!
Learning Catalytics: Teacher view and iPhone view
Learning Catalytics was designed from the ground up to foster student discussion. It most notable feature is peer-learning tool (which unfortunately, I did not use - my pilot group was too small). In advance of class, the teacher inputs a seating chart of the the class. Students log into their seat locations. After posing a question, the teacher can use Learning Catalytic to automatically create student discussion groups that direct students to talk to specific peers based on their response to the question. "Peter turn to Nancy on your left and discuss the thinking behind your answer." After the peer discussion, the teacher can repost the original question and graph the changing responses.
I like to continue piloting this model so I will offer a free live webinar to the first three schools (or sites) that follow through with my registration process.
I think professional development should model but we want to see in the classroom. So I'd like to start with an 45-minute experiential webinar called: "Higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) - What's that look like in the classroom?"
We'll watch a few short video clips, do a few activities to model instruction at different levels of Blooms and then reflect on the experience. Our instructional goals for the webinar:
- Develop a working definition of HOTS
- Clarify how the tasks we assign students define their level of thinking
- Leave with 3 ideas for fostering HOTS with your students
A few stipulations:
- Participants: Minimum 15 / Maximum 30. Could be teachers or admin.
- You'll use with a single webcam at your end, so they will need to be located in the same room.
- Webinar length - roughly 45 min. Plus about 10 minutes for webinar feedback.
- Timing: Sometime between 8:30 AM and 5 PM (PST – Pacific Standard Time)
- Feedback: Since this is a pilot. I will expect you to assist in evaluating the webinar, gathering feedback from your participants and helping me "document" the user experience.
- Technical details: More to follow if you get a webinar. But for starters - ability to run Microsoft Live Meeting (web access), LCD / sound for display, webcam / microphone to record your end, participants with web-enabled devices, designated coordinator to manage your end.
If you are willing to meet these stipulations in an efficient manner, fill in the request below. Remember - this is just a request. I will select from requests that demonstrate you'll be easy to work with.
After the pilots are completed and my webinar model is refined, I plan to offer a series of (paid) webinars. I think there's a need for short, inexpensive, engaging webinar-based PD that can foster reflection and professional growth. Something you can use with admin, faculty, department or grade level to foster local capacity.
Tags: ARS, Bloom, Critical thinking, Defining, Essential questions, Higher-order thinking, Innovation, Learning Catalytics, Live Meeting, Motivation, Rigor
This Wordle Word Cloud features the 100 most frequently used words from the full text of U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address. Look carefully and you’ll see “education.”
If you want to analyze word use in all the State of the Union addresses, there’s a great tool at “State of the Union.” Image below is from JFK’s 1961 SOTU.
Tags: Obama, State of the Union, Wordle
The “flipped” classroom – This is the idea that teachers shoot videos of their lessons, then make them available online for students to view at home. Class time is then devoted to problem solving – with the teacher acting as a guide to teams of students. It’s a great approach that flips the delivery of the lesson to homework – it’s like a TiVo time shift that can reshape your classroom.
… [we saw] flipping the class as a great opportunity to engage our students in taking more responsibility for their learning. Why not let your students curate the video lessons from existing content on the web?
Here’s an infographic explanation of the flipped classroom. What it is and how it works.
Tags: Engagement, Flipped classroom, Infographic, Innovation, Motivation, PBL
This week Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Is there a lesson for educators about what happens when you lose touch with your customer?
At the core of Kodak’s eventual demise was the failure of the leadership to remain connected to their customers. They convinced themselves that the public would continue to want to buy film, load it into the camera, take a picture, drop the film off at the processor, and return later to pick up their photos. Easy to believe when you’re making money at every stage of that process.
Has our educational leadership lost touch with their customers – the students? Given the growing array of cheap digital tools available to our students, will they passively wait to be told what, how, when and with whom to learn? Is the information flow of the traditional classroom (lecture, note-taking, test) as outmoded as taking your film to the drugstore for processing?
Tags: Creativity, Digital camera, George Eastman, Information landscape, Innovation, Kodachrome, Kodak, Photography, Rochester
Calling all educators from the Pacific NW. Join us in Portland on February 4, for the third edcampPDX – free, democratic, participant-driven professional development. It’s an unconference built on collaboration and dialogue, not keynotes. As one participant from a past edcamp tweeted “#EdcampPDX what an incredible day! I’m ready for September.”
Tags: Backchannel, Catlin Gabel School, edcamp, edcampPDX, PDX, Storify, Unconference
Games are interaction with rules. They mimic the scientific method – hypothesis tested to overcome obstacles and achieve goal while operating inside prescribed system of boundaries. Video games provide failure based learning – brief, surmountable, exciting. While failure in school is depressing, in a game it’s aspirational.
Josh Millard recently began curating a growing collection of video game maps drawn from memory at his site Mapstalgia. Submissions range from detailed rendering to sketches on the back of a napkin. But they all demonstrate a great way to teach mental mapping skills – spatial relationships, sequence, causation, scale, location, and measurement.Use Mapstalgia as an example for your students. Then give them a chance to have fun while demonstrating their ability to translate gaming worlds into two dimensional representations. Let them compare maps of the same game to design their own mapping rubric. Explore different representations of game elements for clarity and design.
Tags: Amusements, Artist, Comparing, Creativity, Engagement, Evaluation, Games, Higher-order thinking, Information landscape, Josh Millard, Legend of Zelda, Maps, Mapstalgia, Motivation, Relevance, Sequencing, Sonic Adventure 2, Summarizing, Super Mario, Visual Literacy, Zork
It’s unfortunate that student don’t get to use their innate perceptual skills more often in the classroom. Instead of discovering patterns on their own, students are “taught” to memorize patterns developed by someone else. Rather than do the messy work of having to figure out what’s going on, students are saddled with graphic organizers which take all the thinking out of the exercise. This clever video, “Doodling in Math Class: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant” captures the fascination of patterns in nature.
Tags: Amusements, Artist, Comparing, Creativity, Design, Math, Science, Vi Hart
Let’s stop acting like hollowed-out zombies, with BlackBerrys and iPhones replacing eye contact, handshakes and face-to-face conversations. It’s time to live once again in the present and simply be where we are.
Tags: Amusements, Casey Neistat, Information landscape, iPhone, NYT, Smartphone, Texting
We devised an experiential project, “Complex City” in order to help students think critically about their communities. To help students to become more aware of their surroundings, in order to foster an educated, ethical, and empathetic community. To facilitate opportunities that help students translate experiences, investigations, and ideas into artistic renderings that effectively communicate new knowledge.
In asking them to map an area of San Diego that had significance to them, we wanted them to step back from the familiar aspects of their community and city, and translate those aspects into a visual map. As part of this project, students researched, interviewed, and investigated their city and community in myriad ways. By compiling their work and making collective and idiosyncratic maps of San Diego, they have been challenged to rethink what they understood to be the reality of the built environment around them, as well as to accept the new knowledges that their classmates contribute. They have become more invested in their own community because their new knowledge implicates them as involved citizens. These maps collect particular versions of this place (versions not always visible to others, or in traditional maps) as we see it in the fall/winter of 2011.
Tags: Artist, Complex City, Creativity, Critical thinking, Engagement, Essential questions, High Tech High, Infographic, Innovation, Maps, Margaret Noble, Math, PBL, Rachel Nichols, Rebecca Solnit, San Diego, Social change, STEM
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