Avatars, Sound Bites, and Mobile Devices

Captivate 8 is a software-creation tool that's easy for the novice end-user to access for creating learning modules.  I actually have several favorite features that are my favorites within this tool.  The first of my favorites is the avatar tool.  Every presentation needs a version Vanna White, and this tool offers several to choose from including a veritable plethora of additional choices to download.

An additional feature I find helpful is the audio editor.  If you've ever used Garageband you know the convenience of extending or abbreviating the audio, adding effects, and more.  Captivate 8 not only offers these tools, it provides access to the visual element that allows the user to shift the timing for each slide to match the audio.  This feature provides ultimate flexibility for the end-user to create an end product specifically meeting expectations.

Lastly, Captivate 8 provides for multiple platforms and allows the user to view learning modules as they'd be seen on a laptop screen, a tablet, and a phone.  This provides for ultimate flexibility for both the designer and the learner in an environment where any device that accesses the internet may be used as a learning tool.  It's very exciting to think about the possibilities of this seemingly limitless tool. 

Planning with the End in Mind

I know a lot of teachers.  It's my job to teach teachers.  But teaching is a tough racket.  Imagine trying to get someone to do something that they didn't think they could, that they didn't understand, nor want to do, that was really hard, and that they had never previously attempted.  It's your classic resistant reader in the primary grades.  And learning can be hard at any age, in any circumstance.

There are lots of models for how to teach, like HOT PEPPERS which guides teachers planning lessons through a process for hands on training, preparing, examining, reviewing, etc.  Then there are other models for teaching within organizations, such as the ADDIE model which begins with analysis, moves through design, development, implementation, and winds up with evaluation.   Many many other models for instruction or implementing change exist, but none seems to help me as much as simply planning with the end in mind.

What I see so many teachers struggle with is the minutia.  They seem to think that prior to, say, teaching someone how to use a recipe to bake brownies, it might be helpful to learn all measurement conversions for every possibility of conversion such as how many pints in a quart, how many quarts in a 1/2 gallon, etc.  None of this helps me combine the wet and dry ingredients of baked goods in the right proportions, at the right temperature, mixed to the right consistency, and then baked until done.

It seems much more helpful to decide what proficient looks like, what's the goal?  Once that's established, say gooey brownies is our goal, then I can share an example of the finished product before we even begin the learning.  My students, who now know what success will look like, discuss strategies for getting there.  Some will have a favorite recipe, and simply need help interpreting amounts or locating ingredients.  Others will want to find the best recipe available on-line.  Some of those students will want help filtering their searches.  Yet other students may know a thing or two about baking already, and wish to experiment while they invent their own recipes.  My teaching strategies will be different with each student or student group, but we will all end up with brownies.  Then it's my job to focus on what I need to pay attention to as a teacher.  In this case it would be supporting a variety of learning styles in order to reach a common goal.  This idea of working backwards may seem counter-intuitive, but it truly simplifies the task of teaching anything, while allowing for maximum flexibility for learners.

This idea of working backwards is popping up in other fields, like psychology.  Check out Shawn Achor's "Happy Secret to Better Work".  For some the idea of deciding to be happy prior to reaching the goals identified to make us happy seems backwards.  After watching his video, if you're not already feeling pretty happy, I challenge you to try it out for  just one hour - decide to feel happy regardless of your circumstances, and then share comments about your experience on this blog.

Connecting Classrooms

Teaching As a Solo Act VS. Connecting Classrooms

Photo source: http://pixabay.com/en/photos/?q=solo&image_type=&cat=&order=best

Learning analytics would leverage both my PLN and the modeling I do for students thinking about their own PLNs.  Connecting to and collaborating with other teachers has the potential to expand the capacity of my teaching skills exponentially.  Everyone, including myself, stands to benefit from analytics.

Statistics showing which posts are most popular and for which populations tells me who is reading, what they need, when they need it, and where they might be applying whatever it is I might have written about.  It's like seeing what's going on behind the mirror.  I know what I've written and when, but learning more about who reads what, when they read it, and where they are enables me to target my writing to the apparent needs of others in my PLN.

What if my students to create and use their own PLNs?  Kids are constant consumers of popularity information.  Who's wearing what?  What are people saying?  When are friends getting together?  Why are certain connections being made and not others.  I would like to hear what my students' interpretation of analytics information might sound like.  What cues do they ignore, and to which do they pay the most attention.

It would be most interesting to observe teachers looking at their colleagues as a connection of learners as in a PLN.

http://pixabay.com/en/photos/?q=network&image_type=&cat=&order=best

Teaching is traditionally an isolated practice and our model has been consistent for over 50 years.  Changing the landscape of how we teach might begin with creating and using PLNs to support the collaboration which takes teaching to the next level for our learners.  Teachers are preparing students for a life in the 21st century with jobs that don't currently exist.  PLNs will be essential to surviving in an ever-changing professional landscape.

This Is Your Learning:

http://www.solaresearch.org/OpenLearningAnalytics.pdf

Open Learning Analytics: an integrated & modularized platform 

Proposal to design, implement and evaluate an open platform to integrate heterogeneous learning analytics techniques

Citation:   Siemens G., Gasevic D., Haythornthwaite C., Dawson S.,  Buckingham Shum S., Ferguson R., Duval E., Verbert K., Baker R. (2011). Open learning analytics: an integrated & modularized platform. Society for Learning Analytics Research, 178 (28), 3-19

A veritable plethora of analytic resources abound for educators attempting to assess learning.  In fact, we may have too many resources and so be doing nothing useful with them at all because the mere availability of resources is staggering and overwhelming.  This article attempts to integrate tools for analysis in a new way.  This article proposes an integrated learning analytics platform by providing an open infrastructure for researchers, educators and learners to develop new technologies and methods.  The primary method is user controlled visualizations allowing for a completely customizable and entirely trackable learning environment.  

This article takes tools and concepts with which we are already familiar, and reformulates how we think about using them.  The authors offer thinking that takes a simple concept, customizing your environment as in a google theme for your email, and applies it to a TEL environment.  The tools aren't revolutionary and the ideas are not groundbreaking, but they do offer a new spin personalized learning environments.  

Using previously-existing tools in new ways fundamentally changes how we do things.  The misuse of data in the digital ocean of information in analytics for learning is not an isolated occurrence.  Teachers have been inundating their very own students with too much useless information. Check out what Mr. Dewitt has to say about learning science:  

This article was well-written, clear, and provides important ideas around streamlining and making more efficient use of data in analytics for learning.  Much more research on this topic is needed.  The digital information age requires new theories and research that account for the data deluge of the 21st century.  What I find most useful in the article as it pertains to my work is integrating different TEL environments with social media and assessment data gathering using tools I'd like to invite into my learning environment.  It has me thinking about how I might even model bringing diverse technology into the adult learning environment in part for the purpose of modeling.  I'm excited about the interface of the customizable learning dashboard and the learner, and what useful data might be mined from that interaction.

The Networked Student: PLN's in the 21st Century

Review of Drexler, Wendy's "The networked student model for construction of personal learning environments: Balancing teacher control and student autonomy".

Drexler, W.  (2010). IThe networked student model for construction of personal learning environments. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(3), 369-385.

This article examines issues facing both teachers and students in creating a learning environment that supports both autonomy and structure in student-created learning environments.  

Concepts on which this article are based include learning, constructivism, and principles of connectivism.  Students are connected to other students, tutors, information, and other learners, and this article attempts to create a viable and replicable model for structuring learning in that context.  Modeling networked learning is one of the most powerful things a teacher can do in order to support students in their own creation of a Personal Learning Network.  Teachers can be connected to a variety of resources: curriculum documents, colleagues, popular media, print and digital resources, family and local communities, BLOGS, WIKIs, video conferences, social networking, online communities, social bookmarking, digital photo sharing, and tool/content development communities to name just a few.  The PLN model for students can be exponentially larger, and Drexler categorizes those entities into 4 groups:  RSS, Contacts, Information Management, and Synchronous Communication. Two key components for helpful student-created PLN's is their familiarity with the software tools and their motivation around the topic of the PLN.  

This article begins to do something I have been wondering about and am only seeing for the first time: what might a model for teaching K-12 students how to leverage PLN's look like?  It serves as a beginning point for teachers eager to give their students the advantage of having explored a PLN prior to their college and adult-life-long-learner career.  Drexler offers a well-written, clear template for this work but it is only a beginning.  More research, theory, and practice are needed to support the general educator in teaching students how to leverage PLN's for their own purposes.