Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number one sixty eight of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Teddy Svoronos talks about how to effectively use presentation tools in our teaching.

Production Credit: [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:21] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our personal productivity so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:49] Teddy Svoronos is a visiting lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he teaches courses in statistics and econometrics. Much of Teddy’s teaching revolves around the production and use of fliped classroom materials which he uses both in his residential courses and with cohorts of civil servants in India and Pakistan. When he’s not teaching Teddy is an avid technology geek, I can attest to that by the way, and a jazz guitarist. And Teddy was on the Mac Power Users which is a podcast I love to listen to and I’m so excited to be welcoming him today to the show.

Bonni: [00:01:28] Teddy welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teddy: [00:01:30] Thanks so much Bonni.

Bonni: [00:01:32] As you already know I am a huge fan of yours from getting to hear you on the Mac Power Users. I was listening to their podcast episode number 383 and thought Oh my goodness I have to have this guy on the show! I wonder if he’d be on the show! And was all excited about the potential to have you on and then you also as someone else recommended that I invite you and so it was just like we were all ready to have you on the show – – and here you are. it’s great to be connected with you.

Teddy: [00:02:01] Yeah it’s awesome to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Bonni: [00:02:03] You sent me over the link because you were also on another Mac Power Users, which maybe I missed, or maybe I heard and just faded into the background but I’m definitely going to go back and listen to that one and have it in the show notes too, that was #319. And then for anyone who really wants to dig back to the Mac Power Users archives I was on episode number #240 – just the beginning segment – talking a little bit about how I use screencasting to do some grading. And if anyone’s interested in that that’s a episode that still lives on as far as the types of tools that I use.

Bonni: [00:02:36] I know you and I today talked about first of all I’m just super excited to get to talk to someone who is excited about technology but you’re excited about technology for what it affords us in terms of our pedagogy. So we’re going to talk a little bit about some ways of thinking about maybe you’re using a tool but maybe that’s not quite it. Maybe – in our perspective – maybe that what you’re trained to do in making use of a tool if we just tweak it a little bit, It’ll actually work out a lot better for you and we had some ideas and some brainstorming around that.

Bonni: [00:03:10] And I know the first one is that when we thought about how people sometimes want to provide handouts whether this is a class or some kind of a speaking engagement what I’ve seen many people do is they’ve got their slide deck, they go to the File menu they hit print and they do three slides with the little lines on the right hand side and that’s their idea of a hand out. And I think both you and I agree that in our perspective that’s not quite it.

Teddy: [00:03:40] Yeah I think it’s an incredibly convenient thing that all the presentation apps that I’m aware of let you print out these things that are this nice little grid of your own slides. To me I don’t quite see the value of doing so. Rather I don’t see the additional value of having this printed version that they have in addition to the one that’s on the screen. I am (even though this is not a super automated way of doing it) I’m a big fan of – I actually make my whole handouts first with lots and lots of blank space and lots of areas for students to sort of fill things in and write their own notes and all of that.

Teddy: [00:04:14] And then from that handout I sort of produce slides that I could then use to project which is sort of like a slide if I had version of the handout itself so they know where I’m at in the handout but I have lots of sort of room to do it as though it was sort of PowerPoint slides and I think that at least for me that’s much more useful in terms of getting students engaged because to them that handout is sort of what they’re going to be using to study down the road. It’s like their possession that they’re working on.

Teddy: [00:04:44] And so having that be the thing that I start from and then I use that as a basis for my presentation has been really helpful for me. So I make a handout first and then I design a presentation based on that handout in order to kind of supplement their learning.

Bonni: [00:04:59] And this would of course totally depend just on someone’s style and someone’s preferences. I tend to enjoy thinking about what that image might be or the graphic or some sort of a framework and then go detail and in your sense I think you’re taking some of the real important salient points and then wanting to draw more attention to them by building the site so it’s kind of bottom up or top down depending.

Bonni: [00:05:22] But there are a couple of other resources I wanted to mention if people wanted to think a little bit differently about what handouts could become, one is Nancy Duarte. She calls instead of having our slides when we want to make them handouts she calls them slide docs and I’m going to link to her wonderful resource on how to build slides. Absolutely. Looks like a work of art and she’s very inspirational to me in terms of thinking about that.

Bonni: [00:05:51] And then Garr Reynolds is another expert in this area and he calls these documents his handouts that we’re referring to he calls them sliduments and instead of trying to make a slide that you’re going to display on a project or do something that wasn’t really intended to do. It was intended to enhance your presentation. And of course the handout you wanted them to be able to retain the information to be able to have a take away from the course – a resource.

Bonni: [00:06:21] And so a slidument is what Garr Reynolds would say that we’re going for so I’d suggest people check out those two resources and consider not just having it where we just print out our slides and then have people take notes on the side.

Bonni: [00:06:33] The other downside to that in my experience it doesn’t matter how dynamic the presenter is and I’ve seen some phenomenally dynamic presenters use this as their hand out. We all still just get tempted to see how many more slides are there and how much longer even if they’re great if we’re having a great experience or just something that says five pages times three we start to do the math. And if you’re working off of a handout instead. No one knows how much longer you have to go. Speaking of which I know you do something to sort of keep yourself on track as far as how much time each slide is taking. Do you mind sharing a little bit about that?

Teddy: [00:07:11] Oh sure so I plan my classes pretty tightly with respect to how much time I want to spend on each thing. But I do also want to allow for discussions and stuff for different parts so I have these little reminders that go off. I use an iPad to teach and I have these little reminders that go off that are silent that the students don’t see that just kind of nudge me to move onto the next section if I’ve been spending too much time on one of them. And I don’t I don’t treat it as set in stone. Sometimes I’ll be really enjoying that discussion and I’ll be willing to make the tradeoff of making the next section a bit shorter.

Teddy: [00:07:43] But it kind of lets me be intentional about it when – because while I’m teaching I have you know there’s so much adrenaline going and everything that it’s kind of easy to lose track of where you’re at. And that kind of keeps me grounded every you know 15, 20 minutes to know where I’m at in the class.

Bonni: [00:07:58] I’ve done a similar thing. And this is not something I do in my regular teaching but if I’m giving a large speaking engagement and I really want to be on my complete a game as far as a presenter goes I will set alarms not alarms but reminders on my Apple Watch because nobody can tell that I’m getting that little slight tap on my wrist. But then I go OK. You’re supposed to be 25 percent through or whatever whatever it is I set up for. For the timing of it and I like that a lot because I don’t I don’t have to turn it off immediately when it starts to go off but it is kind of OK. A little mental check. Are you where you thought you would be at this point and then I can just look down when I want and tap to dismiss it and have the others come up that’s a helpful one for me. But I’m hoping that either I can learn more about what’s out there or more apps will get developed for the watch that will do this with a little bit more sophistication than what I did. Is this just pretty manual at this point.

Teddy: [00:08:54] Yeah that does sound pretty darn useful though.

Bonni: [00:08:57] I love it. I do this with when I’m meeting with students too. I don’t want to be rude. I really don’t like looking at my watch or looking at a clock when I’m talking with someone. But I also get really into the conversations and totally lose track of time. So I love If I only have 15 minutes. By the way that what they’ve scheduled you know is 15 minutes. I don’t want to take up too much of their time to then it just kind of a nice little reminder that I should be wrapping up the conversation that works well for me.

Bonni: [00:09:21] Well our next one we have another that’s not quite it. But I know we’re going to actually bring in some media for this one. So would you say that this particular that’s not quite it up for us?

Teddy: [00:09:35] Sure. So I wanted to talk a bit about using animations and presentations and your PowerPoint presentation or whatever. And the thing. So all these things are often quite overused and the thing that came to mind was this episode of The Simpsons when Homer was making a dating video for Ned Flanders and he was using the animation A-star wipe quite a bit. And that’s the setup for this clip.

Lisa: [00:10:02] Ok. I finished the gardening sequence.

Homer: [00:10:04] OK. From here we star wipe to a glamour shot of Flanders, paying his bills. Then we star wipe to Flanders brushing his…

Lisa: [00:10:12] Dad – There are other wipes besides star wipes.

Homer: [00:10:15] Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?

Lisa: [00:10:17] I’m taking my name off this thing.

Bonni: [00:10:21] We will be linking to that Simpsons clip in the show notes in case you want to get the cartoon visuals along with the audio but that definitely sets it up for us. Talk a little bit about it instead of just using animations because they’re there and they star-wipe for us what should we be thinking about instead?

Teddy: [00:10:40] Yeah. And actually I think this also works on the flip side. I think the people that I’ve encountered in academia are either very very heavy users of animations or at use absolutely none of them in their work. And I teach in economics and statistics and people tend to use Beamer instead of PowerPoint and there are no real animations at all there. And I think that neither of those are extremes kind of get at what you can get with these animations. And so my main thing is to sort of think very carefully about what would enhance the learning of the people watching the presentation.

Teddy: [00:11:13] And for me that is often not using a star wiper a dissolve or whatever. I tend to use tools in which objects on the slide move around for different reasons. This is very easy to use if you use Apple products if you use keynote keynote has this thing called Magic move which lets different objects kind of move around the screen really really easily. And I use that as a way to build concepts from very simple ones to much more complex ones. And I think that the cognitive effect of seeing a sort of simple framework and then watching the pieces kind of get more and more context and more and more objects kind of come into sort of show them is a really powerful way of getting a framework under your belt without just starting from the whole big one.

Teddy: [00:11:58] And so I’m a big fan of not having objects kind of disappear but instead have them repositioned and recontextualized using keynote or PowerPoint animations to kind of make the get the point across that you need to and I think that’s a really valuable thing. I think it would be very valuable in economics and statistics more than it kind of is used right now. So it is a thing I would definitely ask people to consider. No matter where on the spectrum they are.

Bonni: [00:12:22] This reminds me of just the broader conversation that anytime we’re talking about using a piece of technology we want to be thinking about what we want to do for us. And so the purpose of the animation isn’t just to entertain because no one’s really entertained they’ve seen it before it’s not as but as the purpose of it is to eliminate some aspect of whatever it is you’re talking about and the examples I’ve been able to read on your blog really do that. One other inspiration it goes back to Nancy Duarte who I mentioned earlier with the slide docs but there’s a book I’ve recommended a couple of times on the show she wrote called Slideology that talks a little bit about other kinds of animations you could do.

Bonni: [00:13:05] And one example I don’t use animations that much but one example I have used is it gives the illusion of movement. We’re usually used to that. There are slides and they’re almost like index cards and we’re sort of flipping through them and whether we flip through them and they rotate 360 degrees or whether we just they transform you know through little pixilated things.

Bonni: [00:13:26] But in her case she makes it look like almost what I would call a movie screen like something traveling across the screen from left to right. You don’t really know where one slide began and where the next slide ended because with the time when you’re using a wipe from one slide to the next but it’s moving so slowly that it looks like you’re just scrolling through a timeline and that’s really cool that’s really cool.

Bonni: [00:13:53] And then there’s another one where it’ll look like let’s say we were talking about the time line were first we were looking at the history of you know from 2000 to 2010 and then you could swipe up so it looked like you were moving to a new film clip of 2011 to 2020 and it just allows you to create this illusion of movement that’s really really powerful and fun to experiment with and the reason I like Slideology a lot is this is not something that comes naturally to me but if I have someone else’s model of how they’ve done it like when I look at your blog, Teddyt, then then I can go and try to emulate that in some different way that will apply to my speech and a bit more so I would suggest Nancy Duarte’s Slideology.

Teddy: [00:14:35] Yeah I picked up a lot of these sort of techniques making digital modules for students doing classroom stuff. I wanted them to get exposed to the concept before we got into class. And so I was just recording keynote slides basically and talking over them and I was trying to think like how could I leverage what these presentation apps can do in a way that I maybe wouldn’t be able to with some other method. And so I started experimenting with all these different things and then they found their way into my in-class presentations as well so it was sort of a nice energy there.

Bonni: [00:15:07] Our next that’s not quite it is to think a little bit about using what’s there. And we have a couple of different ways we’ll tackle this but one would be some of us and this would not be me by the way. Some of us in our classrooms actually do have more than one screen. It just happens to be the screen that I bring with me. But but you’re talking about what the first idea here is when you have more than one projector in the class and what can you tell us what you’ve done here?

Teddy: [00:15:36] Yeah. So I’m very lucky to teach in a room with a big enough class that sort of a nice enough room that it has more than one screen there’s a main projector and there are these sort of side screens. And I think what a lot of people do and there’s nothing wrong with this is they just mirror their main presentation across all the screens that they have so that students can sort of pick whichever screen they want to look at.

Teddy: [00:15:59] But I would suggest that if you have access to more than one screen Think about what would be useful as supplementary content for the smaller screens that could be existing alongside the main screen that you’re using.

Teddy: [00:16:13] And so for me I project my iPad onto the main screen and annotate my version of the handout. So I’m kind of go back to the handout with the students and then on the side screens I have my Mac plugged in and that’s either showing just very just big headers for what part of the class we’re at so that if we’re getting really deeply into a proof for into an example people can look up and say oh yeah like we’re doing this particular topic or this subtopic now I also put up equations and things like that as people refer to during the class.

Teddy: [00:16:47] If students had a really interesting point in the discussion forum related to the topic I’ll take a screenshot of my computer of the discussion forum and then show that on the side screen. And if I’m using polling software – we use poll everywhere – I’ll have those polling slides be on the side screens and what’s nice about all of this is that the whole time the main handout the main content is still fair and everything that’s happening on the side screen is just supplementary stuff.

Teddy: [00:17:12] And this could range like I said from really really just top level titles to all kinds of really interesting unique equations and ideas and things like that. But having access to that I think is really valuable for the students. And so I just bring two devices with me to class one for the main screen and one for the side screens. And I think that that really enhances the experience for the students.

Bonni: [00:17:35] And even if we don’t have to display is like that there certainly are other creative ways where we can think about how we transition between Poll Everywhere or are our headings and how we even design our slides sometimes just even having something up at the top as part of the header or or using some kind of a color scheme helps us see that. Oh we’re now we’ve moved on to the next part of the hand out to the next part. There’s these little visual things that we can do – or how we’ll use a whiteboard.

Bonni: [00:18:04] I’m really intrigued by the possibilities that are coming really quickly. For all of us despite the size of our institutions in terms of students being able to easily project what’s on their screens up onto the projector. And by this I mean under our guidance of course. But I mean does this idea where we could be walking around the class and say oh that’s really into well why don’t you put that up on then and then I think I have some of the faculty where I teach are using Apple TVs and actually bringing an Apple TV device with them and then being able to walk around with one device that’s connected wirelessly and not being connected to physical wires and being able to then even have the students interact with that device be it an iPad that can be riding on it with a stylus and then see that on the screen so the students can actually be physically interacting with the slides themselves and annotating them in a in a really different ways. I think there’s lots of possibilities here for us all to be thinking about how to engage with our students in this way.

Teddy: [00:19:04] Yeah I do that actually as well with projecting the apple protecting the iPad to Apple TV. And right sometimes I get my iPad to a student and they can write on it and sometimes even if they don’t have a device with them if they’re just working on the hand out in a small group setting I’ll just take a picture of their work and ask if it’s OK if I show it to this class and then I can write on top of their work projecting to the main screen just because I have this iPad that I can walk around the class with.

Bonni: [00:19:31] That’s fabulous. Well I know we were also going to talk about using an iPad in the class so why don’t you go ahead and extend that over to that if you’re ready and tell us a little bit more about how you use that tablet in the class.

Teddy: [00:19:42] Yes. So I do project I had to do an Apple TV and I said earlier that I have this presentation that is kind of a version of the handout that’s made or for slides and I personally am a big fan of annotating what my presentation is instead of just sort of going through it. I think that’s maybe specific to my discipline and how I like to teach but I am just constantly constantly writing on my presentation.

Teddy: [00:20:07] I use an iPad and the iPad nowadays on the iPad Pro has this stylus called an Apple Pencil and it’s very very precise and so it basically feels like I’m just writing on a piece of paper as I’m walking around the classroom and dealing with different concepts and changing colors and making things bigger and smaller and all of that. So I find that to be really really useful.

Teddy: [00:20:26] And another thing that I that I really enjoy about using an iPad is that if your main app projects has like a presentation mode where not everything that you see is projected So you know if you have it you can imagine like a presentation mode on a PowerPoint app in which you’re seeing this slide on the next slide. And they’re only seeing this slide any app that has that kind of mode. You can have an additional app on the screen of your iPad and the students don’t see it.

Teddy: [00:20:56] And so I use this supplementary app to do a bunch of stuff I’m using polling software I use it to see how people are responding to a given poll without actually showing the whole class what the results are.

Teddy: [00:21:09] I’ll have notes about who I want to call on which we can talk about a little bit later or I can even use a remote app to control my computer which is on the secondary screens. And so I can advance slides or whatever on the Mac that’s plugged into the secondary screen from my ipad wirelessly. So having this iPad lets me first of all get a lot more tactile with the presentation itself. And then secondly do a lot of kind of cool things that I think have real pedagogical value but in a very low friction way. I think when we adopt technology there are sort of two considerations. One is how valuable is it. And two is how much friction is going to introduce into your workflow. And once you start using.

Bonni: [00:21:53] I’m sorry I’m so sorry for interrupting you I’m like I’m not so good at the second one. I get so excited about it and then I’m like Is this the payoff that you’re going to get out of whatever it is you’re trying to do worth it for the friction? I really like this way of thinking.

Teddy: [00:22:08] Yeah. Because I mean like even as you think about it as a student if you’re just like kind of toggling things on and off and saying Hold on I’m trying to fix this thing and then you kind of start… It takes away from sort of the value of what you’re doing. And so using that for me the iPad has been this like super low friction device that has actually made a lot of other parts of how I teach low friction. So that’s an example of real tech when to me is a device that both enhances the student experience and also reduces friction.

Bonni: [00:22:35] So whether you’re using Keynote and of course there’s also we were talking about other types of tablets that are available to Keynote, PowerPoint whatever it is. If you’re annotating on the slide do those annotations get saved.

Teddy: [00:22:50] Right. So it depends a lot on the app that you use. I believe if you use Powerpoint you can save them if you use Keynote, they don’t get saved. But one of my main projecting slides are actually PTF files. So I use an app called Good Notes which is really really good for annotating on PDFs and doing all kinds of stuff with it. So all of that because it’s on a PDF. All of that gets saved and I actually have started posting my annotated version on my course web site but again it just depends on the app you use and also the device you use. I imagine a surface will have different sort of defaults for if it saves your annotations or not.

Bonni: [00:23:29] So you created it in Keynote but then you saved it as it PDF and are displaying that PDAF within good notes and then writing these annotations which get saved as a part of the PDf.

Teddy: [00:23:41] Exactly. And the nice thing about Keynote is that you can save the PDF if there’s an app there’s an option where every build in a given slide is a new PDF page. So if you have like lots and lots of different aspects to a slide where different things are being introduced you can just check the setting and then that one slide turns into like five or six PDF pages.

Teddy: [00:23:59] So you can kind of page through a given build.

Bonni: [00:24:03] You were talking about the Apple Pencil and I can’t resist just mentioning it. I tend to be a bit of a gadget person and I have owned zillions of styli (is that the plural of stylus?) over there over the years and I’ve never used anything even remotely close to the experience of use an Apple Pencil because so many times you just talk about friction.

Bonni: [00:24:27] The Apple Pencil you take it out and you start writing and you’re ready. I mean it just it works. Now the only downside is there is battery life so I do have to remember to plug it in and plug it in you have to plug it in to the end of your iPads you have this big pencil sticking out that’s just begging to have your children walk by and break it off you know inside of them.

Bonni: [00:24:48] But besides that I mean charging the only thing where I think gosh it’ll be great when we get to wireless charging on something like an Apple Pencil. But yeah I did that. I mean it’s phenomenal you just pick it up and start writing and it has the wrist guard thing where it doesn’t smudge because your hand is there it knows that you’re holding the pencil and it just works. It’s amazing. And the lag time is . I find it even more pleasant than just writing with pen and paper.

Teddy: [00:25:12] Yeah. And speaking of friction is right I because I’m sort of a tech person I was using iPads with just the styli that you’re talking about. I have like a drawer full of them and none of them work even close as well. And I wasn’t comfortable recommending iPads to colleagues who weren’t just as comfortable with iPads because the styli just felt like you were just mashing a finger against a screen. And now with the pencil I feel totally comfortable doing it. And for what it’s worth I’ve heard that the surfaces pen is really really good as well. So we’re getting to a point where if you like using a document camera you should consider trying a tablet because the stylus is style. Sorry the styli are getting quite close to just using a pen or pencil.

Bonni: [00:25:52] I said that and there’s probably not even the real pleural threats to I’m cracking up right now because when I was having trouble pronouncing someone’s name that had written in for a Q&A episode about a month ago I was struggling just like I’m struggling now and I started getting all these e-mails and tweets from people trying to help me before the episode was even over and I actually got the resolution right and solved the problem myself. But don’t you can stop yourself. Look it up don’t worry we’ve got Google.

Teddy: [00:26:20] I like styli when I talk about more than one person in my family I talk about “Svoroni,” too.

Bonni: [00:26:26] We have two Lexus [vehicles] and we usually say “Lexi.”

Teddy: [00:26:29] So there you go.

Bonni: [00:26:33] Oh that’s great. So I was going to mention too that I have a person who’s become a friend of mine through being on the podcast Doug McKee and he’s teaching out at Cornell now and similar topics as you and he wrote a post just this week on teaching online with Zoom, Duet Display and PDF expert. I’ll be linking to his post in the show notes and also introducing the two of you because I think you’re going fast and furious friends but his big thing was the lag time. So he found a solution that he thought were met his needs as far as the lag time goes and talking about extending screens so he’s got an online class that he’s doing all of this with with Zoom and duet display and PDF. So it’s something worth checking out in the show notes.

Bonni: [00:27:15] This is the last “that’s not quite it” segment that we have and this is both of our beliefs that we shouldn’t just have one way communication and our teaching. We’re not big fans of just the 50 minute lecture and then go out and learn outside of class but wanting to have there be a lot more engagement and you’ve got a spectacular way of doing that can you share a little bit about what your workflow.

Teddy: [00:27:39] Sure. So I am very very skeptical of my ability to keep track of things in class. I get really excited talking about the concepts I get really is sort of like into it and then the class ends and I realize I totally forgot to do something. And one of the things I think that I forget to do is to be intentional about who I call on and why I’m calling on people. Teaching at the Kennedy School, people are coming from all kinds of super interesting professional and personal backgrounds. And I want to take advantage of that when I call on people.

Teddy: [00:28:10] So when I’m planning my class plan I actually sort of go and look through students work students backgrounds and I kind of have a sense of who I might want to call on for a given thing especially if drawing from personal experience would be useful. And so when my class plan then I have a list of sort of who I want to call on based on how they were doing in the class. I’m going to be talking about and I kind of have that as sort of a reference so that I can be much more intentional on who I call on and when in a class or otherwise I would just kind of point at the first hand I saw which can be I think pretty counterproductive to the dynamic of the class.

Bonni: [00:28:49] Yeah I’ve heard a little bit on some gender differences as far as who actually will raise their hand in a class like that. And there have been many a TED talk talking about the same thing where sometimes women aren’t as apt to step up and say that they have an answer but might have a great answer too so it sounds like you’ve really done some more intentional thinking about how to engage people not just based on who volunteers but who might really have something to contribute.

Teddy: [00:29:16] Yeah and I think as sort of a econometricians I should be as data driven as possible so I have my teaching fellow keep track of who I’m calling on in the class. And then after class I can sort of go back and see you know the proportion of people I’m calling on that are women that are English as a second language maybe I’m focusing on one side of the classroom versus another side of the classroom. These are the kinds of things that I wouldn’t notice I don’t think if I was not being intentional about it.

Teddy: [00:29:46] And so by having this record and this data and I’m kind of in the process of trying to work with some colleagues to make this more sort of an automated thing it helps me make sure that I am not relying on my own implicit biases or availability biases or things like that when when doing participation.

Bonni: [00:30:05] When you talk about one side of the room versus the other many moons ago something like 20 years ago I had had someone tell me that I tended to favor one side of the room versus the other and I never would have noticed that if I didn’t have that kind of feedback coming and there’s things that is very unlikely for us to notice on our own until someone else or some automated system you know kind of brings that to our attention.

Teddy: [00:30:25] Yeah I mean it’s like it’s the last thing you think about right you’re thinking about the content you’re thinking about your students you’re thinking about what’s next in the presentation you’re thinking about how much time you have left. You’re not thinking about what side of the class you’re calling on unless you have made a decision to really kind of be more equitable about where you’re calling on people. So I would definitely advocate for being really intentional about that with data or sort of more into it in terms of personal reflection.

Bonni: [00:30:51] And if you don’t have [teaching assistants] in the room and you’re concerned that maybe you won’t notice – I do have a colleague who actually makes tick marks next to the students names when he calls on them and I just I know I would lose track of that in my head. There is an app that I really enjoy using called Attendance 2.

Bonni: [00:31:06] It’s the second version and so that’s a – you want the second one and not the older one. And it allows you to obviously take attendance hence the name but it also has a number of features that I use one is to randomly call on people. And then that way I can avoid the biases that we talked about already. And then it also helps me learn students name at the start of a semester or a term because it almost does flashcards the same random thing. But I cover up their name and all I can see is their picture and they can go through that and that randomly is displaying their names helps me learn it way better than just trying to do that on my own. And then it also has random groups. So if I want to divide students into groups I can I can use that to obviously teach much smaller classes than Teddy does.

Teddy: [00:31:52] That that’s a really really cool I haven’t used this app and I’m excited to get into it.

Bonni: [00:31:56] It’s got a lot of ways of easy easily importing students into the app which I like. So from our either are learning management system or our other records database I can just get a file that as long as I have the right headers and even if I don’t it lets me Matt. What is the last name? What is the first name that I can import easily? Same with the photos. It works really easy to import photos from it. So it’s great.

Bonni: [00:32:20] And then if a student comes and says you know how many absences do I have of course we [would] love it if they kept track of that but they don’t always and so I just have a couple of taps so I can email them the official attendance report that I have within my app so it works really good.

Teddy: [00:32:33] Awesome.

Bonni: [00:32:34] This is the point in the show where we each get to give recommendations and our talk about Apple Pencil got me to thinking actually that since I think since the last time I recorded an episode maybe that’s not true but I certainly have been enjoying a new device that came into my life.

Bonni: [00:32:51] I do tend to be an early adopter so when the iPad Pro first came out there was the 12 inch? Is it 12 inch?

Teddy: [00:33:00] Yeah. Twelve point nine.

Bonni: [00:33:03] I did decide to purchase one and really enjoyed the Apple Pencil really enjoyed the pen casting that I do within it. But I’m telling you reading in bed which I do every night for at least an hour this huge screen is so big and it’s heavy and I have been hit in the face multiple times because I fall asleep and it falls back on me you know it’s big it’s unwieldy trying to hold that around the class if you were teaching it it is much too large for most people’s needs.

Bonni: [00:33:30] So I did decide to splurge and do the ten point five inch which just came out you know fairly recently. And it’s it’s just perfect it’s like Goldilocks and the three bears who went from too small to way way too huge to just right. It’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfect perfect size as far as viewing things. And I still think – they’re coming out with the new operating system for iOS in the fall.

Bonni: [00:33:55] And so I haven’t gotten to experiment with all these drag and drop features but it seems like it’s going to be big enough to work with two different apps and be able to move things around. And I just I want to totally recommend that if I heard a couple of people on Twitter were asking a few of us what we thought and we all just thought yep. Ten point five. The twelves are just just too large – too heavy for what they get you. Yes, they do get you more screen size so I’m sure occasionally when I’m screencast you know are sorry when I’m pencasting I’ll wish that I had the larger size but it isn’t going to happen more than a couple of times a year. And I just love the portability of it and if I get hit in the face. It’s…

Teddy: [00:34:36] It wont hurt as bad.

Bonni: [00:34:36] It’s not going to hurt as bad.

Teddy: [00:34:38] Those new ones also I think they have doubled the refresh rate right. So the lag if you were concerned about lag before which we kind of worked with Apple Pencil it’s twice as much.

Bonni: [00:34:47] Yes. Yes.

Teddy: [00:34:48] And it’s like super duper fast. Incredible.

Bonni: [00:34:49] I haven’t even gotten to really realize it yet because I haven’t been doing as quite as much pen casting but yeah. It’s supposed to be phenomenal. And what do you have to recommend for us today, Teddy?

Teddy: [00:34:58] Yes. This is a thing that I used to do a lot. And then in the past year I stopped doing it now and try and do it again. I just wanted to make a plug for keeping a journal – maybe separate ones for personal or professional – or maybe just putting it on the same thing but using a journal and requiring that you write in it every day even if it’s like three words or two pages just write in a journal every day about what you’re thinking about about where things are at. About anything that you need. I use an app because I’m sort of in the same geek camp as Bonni.

Teddy: [00:35:34] The app I use is called Day One and it lets you have separate journals so I you have one for my teaching stuff and one for my personal stuff. And what’s so great about it is in addition to I can write whatever I want and I can add photos and it adds like location information for where I wrote that given entry.

Teddy: [00:35:51] What’s awesome about it is that it’ll let you know if you have written an entry. A year ago today two years ago today or if you wrote an entry in this location that you don’t go that often and you can kind of revisit where you were at and by writing it every day you’re kind of not just capturing the really intense moments of extreme happiness or extreme sadness you just are seeing a snapshot of kind of where you were at and what you were thinking about and that I think is just this incredibly valuable way of seeing where you’re progressing as a person in whatever aspects of your life you care about. So generally definitely Journal and if you want a recommendation for a journaling app I recommend Day One.

Bonni: [00:36:31] Thank you so much for that reminder. I own Day One and didn’t even realize that it did that little reflection back on a year ago. I also enjoy it when Facebook does not use a memory from a year ago. Kind of really does help us take stock in our lives a little bit of a different way when we’re reminded of what happened on this day a year ago and I imagine that that would make journaling feel that much richer when you could revisit it like that.

Teddy: [00:36:54] Absolutely.

Bonni: [00:36:56] Well Teddy I’m so glad to have been connected with you and grateful that you accepted the invitation to come on the show. And I’m just disappointed that I didn’t get to ask you all these other things because you’re a huge music fan and I get to talk to you about that. And so I guess I hope to say at the end of this episode is what you come back and visit us again so I could ask you even more questions.

Teddy: [00:37:16] Bonni I would love to. It’s wonderful wonderful to be here and I would absolutely love to come back.

Bonni: [00:37:20] All right. And I’m definitely going to be connected with Doug so you guys can geek out on the econometrics and all that other stuff.

Teddy: [00:37:27] Awesome.

Bonni: [00:37:27] All right. Thanks so much.

Teddy: [00:37:29] Thank you, Bonni.

Bonni: [00:37:31] Thanks Teddy for being on this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed and thanks to all of you for listening. If you want to go check out which I totally recommend that you do. Teddy’s blog. I link to it on the show notes at teachinginhighered.com/168. It’s completely worth a visit and you’ll find yourself getting captured by all the great things he’s doing in his teaching.

Bonni: [00:37:54] And if you want to not have to remember to do that you can subscribe to the weekly show notes and that will just be an email that comes in with an article I’ve written about teaching or productivity along with the show notes below that you can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and when you do you’ll get the free guide on 19 tools you can use in your teaching and productivity. Thanks so much for listening and I’m looking forward to all the great guests we’ve got coming up. And I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.