Things That Are Banned in School

Great Google Docs presentation from Lisa Nielsen.

 

The Innovative Educator: Banned in School:

An essential element for 21st century learning is thinking outside the ban, however, many schools fail to do this banning the very items that are crucial to success in the world. When viewing this compilation of items banned in school it is clear we are not preparing students for success in the world.

Free E-Book: Web Tools for Educators

The Super Book Of Web Tools For Educators:

Here is the book. Download it, pass it out, share it with your colleagues, administrators, teammates.

Super Book Of Web Tools For Educators -

Passion in Teaching

In a post about the recent death of Jaime Escalante - the math teacher who was the subject of the 1988 film 'Stand and Deliver' - Steven W. Anderson posts this really great word cloud. Great image for any teacher!

Enduring Passion...

Avoid Death By PowerPoint - Respect Your Audience

Many people have very strong - mostly negative - opinions about PowerPoint. The phrase "death by PowerPoint" has been used (maybe over-used) to describe the painful experience of sitting through a bad PowerPoint presentation. Let's begin with some thoughts from Edward R. Tufte - professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale. In a September 2003 Wired Magazine article PowerPoint is Evil Tufte illustrates his thesis with a really creative metaphor:

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

One could sum up the sentiment by borrowing and adapting a phrase from Security Consultant and blogger Steve Riley - PowerPoint is "... the place where knowledge goes to die."

While we don't disagree with Tufte and other critics that the use of PowerPoint is part of an ever-present misconception that technology fixes things or makes things better, we're not here to pile on--instead we'd like to offer some ideas to make PowerPoint more effective in your classroom. While technology can and has provided some great benefits to society, it's not a panacea - you can't just throw PowerPoint into the classroom and turn a poor lecturer into a good lecturer or a good lecturer into a great lecturer. Tufte gets it right when he says:

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

So how do we become better presenters? Most teachers would agree that there's no better way to learn how to do something than by watching and learning from people who are great at what they do, so we'd like to share with you today some interesting and innovative presentations that hopefully will inspire you to look at PowerPoint and technology in new and different ways. The first is the 2005 Open Source Convention keynote--Identity 2.0--from Sxip Identity founder and CEO Dick Hardt.

What's interesting and unique about this presentation is the style. In a presentation that lasts only 15 minutes, Hardt uses hundreds of slides--many with just a single word or image--to tell a story that is rapid-fire, humorous and engaging.

At the end of the presentation, Hardt credits Lawrence Lessig - Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School--for inspiring his presentation style. That said, here is example number two--Lawrence Lessig's presentation from the 2007 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference. This is a shortened (20-minute) version of Lessig's Free Culture presentation.

What we can learn from Lessig (considered the master of the simple slide show) and Hardt is to break free from the constraints of PowerPoint--the titles and the bullet lists and the charts. Also consider how Lessig expertly weaves together humor, video, and storytelling to create his narrative and ultimately make his case.

The final example is Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start speech at TiECon 2006 - the annual meeting of The Indus Entrepreneur organization. Kawasaki gives a great presentation about innovation and business evangelism, speaking plainly and peppering the presentation with humor.

Some of the key points Kawasaki makes are:

• abandon the traditional business paradigm of Mission Statements in favor of shorter, more meaningful 3-4 word Mantras; and
• adopt the 10/20/30 rule for presentations--no more than 10 content slides (Kawasaki favors top ten lists); no longer than 20 minutes (his presentation is nearly 40-minutes); and use nothing smaller than a 30 point font.

We really like the Mission versus Mantra discussion--it really parallels the Lessig/Hardt approach of simple is better. The 10/20/30 rule is interesting as well. While it may not work or be right for everyone, it does accomplish a few things--the 10 gets you and your audience to focus on 10 key points you'd like to get across (Mike uses takeaways); the 20 keeps the presentation short and digestible; and the 30 ensures that you HAVE to know what you're talking about--you can't read it off the slide, because it's not there.

We encourage you to watch and re-watch these videos and to try out some of what you see. Take one of your lectures and try the 10/20/30 rule or "simplify" it like Lesig and Hardt or come up with your own unique style. The key is to focus on the content and the learning and not get seduced by the technology, the animations, or the bullet lists. So, open up your mind, set aside your preconceptions; don't view PowerPoint as a crutch or as a substitute for your lecture, but instead as a spark that can ignite and excite an audience. And lastly, don't ignore Tufte's most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

Teaching Genetics

Do you teach biology? Wouldn't this image be a great way to begin a discussion on genetics?

(Via How genetics works.)

Finding Photos for Your Slides

In an earlier post, we found interesting slides for our lectures. Now let's take a look at how we might create our own eye-catching slides. For this exercise, we'd like to create slides for the 10 Questions to Ponder we posted last week. We'll focus this week on photo hosting/sharing site flickr. Flickr is a great site for finding high-quality photos, as well as posting and sharing your own photos. Once you create a Flickr account, you can upload your own photos and "favorite" the photos of others.

When someone posts photos in Flickr, they have the option to make them public or private and to license them. The licenses range from "All rights reserved" to a variety of "Creative Commons" licensing. Let's talk a little bit about some of the "Creative Commons" licensing options--in particular, some of the terms we encounter.

• "Attribution" is present on all; this term means that we must cite the source of the photo - in this case the Flickr user.


• "NonCommercial" means that we can't make any money from the use of the image - is anyone paying for your PowerPoints?


• "ShareAlike" licensing requires that any modifications we make to the photo be shared back with the community (i.e. Flickr).


• Finally, "NoDerivs" means that we are prohibited from creating derivatives works from the photo - for example recoloring or altering the photo to create an entirely new version.

Within Flickr, we can navigate to "Advanced Search" and limit our search to "Creative Commons" licensed content.

If you want learn more about Flickr and some of the advanced features available in Flickr, here's a great slideshow "Flickr 101" from the Nebraska Library Commission:

Flickr 101

View more presentations from State of Nebraska.

Now let's dive into our 10 Questions to Ponder!

#1 How do we support the changing role of teacher?
#2 What is the role of the teacher?

These questions both deal with the role of the teacher, so we've combined them. We found this diverse set of photos by searching for terms such as "teach," "teacher," "teaching." and "professional development"

Photo by yewenyi Photo by foundphotoslj

Photo by superkimbo in BKK Photo by superkimbo in BKK

Photo by Barrett Web Coord Photo by Dale Basler

Now a little more on Flickr. We really like the two the photos from "superkimbo in BKK" that we included above. We can click on her username to see her "photostream" - the images she's posted to Flickr and made publicly available.

Wow - she's posted some really great photos. We can continue to "favorite" individual photos - as we've been doing, but if we come across a Flickr user whose work we really like, we can also add them as a "contact."

When you add someone as a contact, you will get an e-mail every time they upload a new photo. This is a great way to keep up with their work. You'll see some great photos from user paurian later in this blog post.

Now let's get back to our questions.

#3 How do we help students discover their passions?

The first photo we found by exploring paurian's photostream; the second by searching for "students" and "passion."

Photo by paurian Photo by orangeacid

#4 What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?

There may be better photos to describe essential learning, but searching for "light bulb" we found this image, which makes us think of spark, imagination, or idea.

Photo by zetson

#5 What is the purpose of school?

You can find lots of pictures searching for "school" "university" or "college." This is a great photo of the Front Quad of University College, Oxford. Apparently, it's very difficult to get permission to take photos here.

Photo by Lawrence OP

#6 How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?

We found this photo by searching for "adapt" and "technology." This isn't one of Mike's cats.

Photo by Tom Lemos

These photos we found with search terms such as "kids," "technology," and "learning."

Photo by Barrett Web Coord Photo by Phil Scoville

Photo by cogdogblog Photo by cogdogblog

Searching for photos even led us to discover an image that caused us to ask a new question:

BONUS QUESTION Do we risk kids becoming addicted to technology?

Photo by Joits

#7 What does an educated person look like today?

We love this photo - would you have guessed that we searched for "educated?"

Photo by paurian

#8 How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?

Time: These images were discovered searching for "time" and "clock" - you can even try "tick tock."

Photo by Leo Reynolds Photo by Leo Reynolds

Place: These images were found with search terms "world" and "Earth."

Photo by woodleywonderworks Photo by woodleywonderworks

Photo by aussiegall Photo by strollerdos

#9 What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?

We found lots of interesting stuff by searching for combinations of "informal," "learning," and "education."

Photo by misterbisson

Photo by jaycross Photo by Cyprien

#10 How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?

To find this figure we searched for the terms "rich" and "poor."

Photo by Christopher Saccaro

That should get us started. Next week we combine these images with our questons to create slides - stay tuned!

Questions to Ponder

Will Richardson led a session at EduCon 2.2 focused on answering the question:

What are the ‘big’ conversations that schools should be having in relation to the ‘tectonic’ shifts that are occurring with social learning online?

From the session, Richardson was able to compile a fairly long list, from which he generated a Google Form and encouraged his blog readers to vote on the top ten. We've listed the top ten below, along with three questions that just missed the top ten. These are all great questions! Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend entire faculty days discussing some of these questions with your colleagues?

The Big Questions: Now What?

So as of today, 220 of you were kind enough to vote on what you thought were the 10 most important questions from the list that we generated at Educon. Here are the ‘winners’ at the moment:

1. How do we support the changing role of teacher? 116
   
2. What is the role of the teacher? 110
   
3. How do we help students discover their passions? 110
   
4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students? 109
   
5. What is the purpose of school? 102
   
6. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using? 100
   
7. What does and educated person look like today? 97
   
8. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning? 97
   
9. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school? 92
   
10. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity? 92

And here were the next three that didn’t quite make the cut:
- What is preventing us from being adaptable to change? 79
- How do you validate or evaluate informal learning? 77
- How do we measure or assess the effectiveness of individualized self-directed learning outside of school? 68