Bonni [00:00:00] On today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed number 88, Dave and I talk about our top five gadgets for teaching.

Production Credit [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni [00:00:19] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni [00:00:47] Hello this is Bonni Stachowiak and I am once again joined by Dave Stachowiak. Welcome back to the show, Dave.

Dave [00:00:53] I’m glad to be back again.

Bonni [00:00:55] Would you quickly share with everyone listening what it was like for you at 11:00 o’clock last night and what you saw?

Dave [00:01:02] Well first of all… One of my own challenges that I think many in this audience can relate to. For those of us who teach at night on occasion, which I do, and both have taught as an adjunct and in my training world- it is really hard to get to sleep after teaching a class late in the evening. So I often find myself-

Bonni [00:01:22] I’m cracking up that you’re apologizing so much that it was 11:00 o’clock at night. A lot of people go to bed after 11:00.

Dave [00:01:28] I try to get to bed earlier than that. So.

Bonni [00:01:31] That’s not the interesting part, talk about me. [laughs]

Dave [00:01:36] [laughs] I see how this is going.

Bonni [00:01:37] People are already going on to the next podcast.

Dave [00:01:39] Well speaking of-

Bonni [00:01:41] Serial has been going back to review what happened in episode 1 and there’s been some updates on Adnan in the court.

Dave [00:01:47] So speaking of Serial, I go on to iTunes last night at 11:15, whatever it was, and I pull up the main iTunes podcast page and there’s Serial and all these other podcasts that everyone knows about. And then I had to do a double take because right in the center of the screen featured on the main podcast page on iTunes is Teaching in Higher Ed. The big logo right in the middle there. Pretty amazing.

Bonni [00:02:11] And we still don’t know how it happened. Although someone has to have manually made some effort because the logo is not the logo that we submitted to iTunes because it’s a rectangular one and iTunes only has you submit a square one so we’re trying to figure out is there someone from Apple who listens?

Dave [00:02:28] If you are.

Bonni [00:02:28] We want to hear from you.

Dave [00:02:32] Would love to hear from you. Anyway that was really cool. Thank you to all of you for supporting the show; it’s been so fun over the last year and a half now to just see and get to know and build both of our networks, yours especially, through so many fabulously talented educators out there. And I’m excited to be back and to get to be part of that conversation.

Bonni [00:02:50] We’re coming up with our list of top five gadgets for teaching. It’s really hard to narrow down. I just knew we wanted to talk about a couple more of these in-depth otherwise we could probably had the top 100. We have a lot of gadgets in this household, let’s just say that.

Dave [00:03:02] We do. And we both use a lot in our professional work. And your guide that you have folks download when they get on to your subscription list- remind me what’s the title of it again? Is it a Gadget Guide or is it?

Bonni [00:03:15] Oh no. 19 educational technology tools.

Dave [00:03:18] Technology tools. And are there gadgets in there or is that more services and software?

Bonni [00:03:22] Services. Ya. So this is the first time we’re really looking at gadgets specifically and I want to start out with the least expensive item that will be on the list and that is a remote. And when we talk about a remote, we’re talking about a remote that likely plugs into a USB port on your computer. Although you also can have a remote where if you’re projecting off of a tablet computer you can oftentimes make your smartphone your remote or even your Apple Watch if you are one of those smart watch users.

Bonni [00:03:56] But in Dave and my case, we just use really inexpensive remotes. I know in my case it’s because I like to lose them and so I figure if I’m going to lose something, I’d probably rather lose it if it costs around 20 dollars than if it costs around 80 dollars. I have been known to lose them. The nice thing is that I tend to also be able to find them again. So I don’t think I’ve actually permanently lost one, I’ve just lost one for like six months and I find it later somewhere in a crevice or something.

Bonni [00:04:20] And I will put a link to the show notes in the one that I use right now but actually don’t even know what it is off the top of my head. When I go to buy them I just find an inexpensive one. And the biggest thing which I pretty much think they all have now is that you don’t want to have to install any drivers on your computer, you just want to be able to plug it in and it works. And mine now I don’t like the fact that I have to turn it on manually because it took a little while to train me that I had to turn it on because I was used to ones that just ran off the battery all the time.

Bonni [00:04:46] But I will say the batteries last a lot longer. And so the one I have now the little- I think they call it a dongle maybe that plugs into the UDB- actually fits inside of the remote and that’s nice too is just one less thing for me to lose.

Bonni [00:05:01] And with the remotes, as far as features go, I have owned as I said more expensive ones and less expensive ones and really all I need is a forward button, a back button, and then a blank button that will blank the screen. I use that quite a bit. And many people probably already know this, but when you’re running PowerPoint or keynote or even haiku deck if even if you’re running one of those types of software off of the web and projecting your presentation onto your screen, hitting the B key will black out the screen.

Bonni [00:05:33] And that’s really nice because then you can not have it shining in your eyes or you could lift up the screen and write on the white board or whatever it is you wanted to do. But your projector is still on, so as soon as you hit that B key again or in this case press the button on the remote to bring it back, it all comes back and you don’t have to wait for the projector to warm up again.

Bonni [00:05:52] So I oftentimes do that when I’m setting up for a large presentation, I’ll make sure everything’s working right. I’ll hit that B key so the light is not shining in people’s eyes and then I’ll bring it back whenever is appropriate.

Dave [00:06:02] You mentioned you’ll put a link in the show notes to this one that you use and the other term that’s used for these is wireless presenter, that will get you exactly where you want to go if you look this up online.

Dave [00:06:13] And I’ve used one Bonni, Logitech by the way makes some great ones. I think both you and I are using Logitech ones right now. They’re fairly inexpensive. I bought one 11 or 12 years ago when I became a Carnegie instructor and I’m still using the same one.

Dave [00:06:29] And up until a couple months ago I was still on the same two AAA batteries which I know is crazy but over 10 years, it had lasted so long, it never had an issue connecting to any device. Somehow the hardware has always worked and interfaced with every computer so I think you’re better off of using something like that that you bring in yourself versus relying on whatever remote might be in a class or a facility because sometimes you have a giant mouse that you have to carry around and I’ve found that having wireless presenters lowers the friction that you have to worry about “OK I need to get used a different device in a different room,” and you can use the same thing everywhere.

Bonni [00:07:08] One of the things that I’ve been doing lately is I do like to show short video clips in many of my classes. But one of the downsides is if you have an unreliable internet connection wherever you’re going to be- I don’t necessarily- our campuses wireless connection is very reliable for me, but I can think about there are certain other locations where I have presented where the Wi-Fi signal is either just poor or non-existent.

Bonni [00:07:35] So I like to have one less complication that could happen and I like to download the videos to my computer. And I have found if these videos are located on YouTube, there’s a program which I will post a link to in the show notes. This is specifically for the Mac but they have the same things for the PC and we’ll post a link to an alternative for the Windows users. But I go to YouTube, I find the little 2 minute clip that I want and I just copy the link and I go over to this software and I paste it in and it downloads that file to my computer so that if I don’t have access to the Internet for whatever reason I’m not going to have to have that interrupt the flow of my class.

Bonni [00:08:16] So what I typically do is I set it up and PowerPoint where I set it up that it’ll go to the screen to the slide where that video is located on my PowerPoint and then that’s my cue for queue up whatever it is you want to say before this video starts playing. And then I click one more time on the remote and it begins the video. And it works really well because then I can be anywhere in the classroom, I like to move around quite a bit. I don’t like to have to hover right by a podium, in fact I always move the podiums out of my way. And I don’t have to be right by my computer either to have to go and actually manually – the default way if you insert a video into PowerPoint is you have to go with your mouse and click on that little arrow to make it play. And I just like it to set up that’s one extra step inside of PowerPoint or keynote to have it animate that way where it’ll play on a click. And by the way the clicking of the remote is counted as a click. And this is really nice as a presenter, I get to that slide OK, you know what that video is supposed to be. You know how you wanted to set that up what the student should be watching for. And then one more click and off we go. And it starts playing. When it’s over, one more click, I go to the next slide.

Dave [00:09:23] Fabulous. Very seamless too.

Bonni [00:09:26] We are going from the less expensive route of remotes to the… [clears throat].

Dave [00:09:32] More expensive.

Bonni [00:09:34] Much much much more expensive I have not shared at all on the podcast yet about my Christmas present which was a very generous Christmas present. And that is the iPad Pro and the new Apple Pencil.

Dave [00:09:49] And as Bonni is talking here, I have grabbed her iPad Pro and I am playing with the Apple Pencil. It is the first time, even though you’ve had this for a month or so, I don’t think I’ve actually tried it with the pencil and it is very cool.

Bonni [00:10:02] It’s remarkable. So one thing about the iPad Pro just to share my my observations so far, this thing is large. And I knew that going into it; I knew it was big. I went to my most recent doctor’s appointment- I am in my mid 40s by the way and this is what happens apparently to many of us when we get in our mid 40s, is we lose I forget what the vision is called but I have to hold things farther away from my face in order to be able to put them into focus. So I crack up because I do a lot of reading and a lot of watching of television via the iPad in bed laying on my side so I couldn’t go into the Apple store and say “could I just borrow that iPad Pro real quick and lay on your tables on my side and see how this is going to work.” But it all does work out fine just as long as Dave’s not in bed yet because I do need to have it some distance from my head in order for it to work correctly.

Bonni [00:10:52] But it is large and is not a device where you’re going to carry it around in your hand and be holding it while you’re writing on it and not resting it on something. But I never have a situation where I’m not resting it on something. It’s resting on a desk. It’s resting on, like I said, when I’m laying on my side in bed. So I don’t find it to be inconvenient.

Bonni [00:11:13] The bag that I carry to work with me is a rolling bag, so it’s not like the extra added weight. It’s not really that terribly heavy as far as packing it with you, any heavier than a computer or laptop would be. It’s actually light when you compare it to some laptops.

Bonni [00:11:28] But anyway, so far it’s been great but it is one of those things my opinion is it’s an addition to a laptop. I would never say “oh great, I can just be done with laptops.” In fact, I find myself just really using my laptop more and more these days because I have all these really cool setups and I find that I also carry my iPad with me because I use it quite a bit too.

Bonni [00:11:49] I do like the case that I got. I decided I didn’t want the extra bulk of an external keyboard. If I’m going to be sitting in a meeting, then I’ll just carry an external keyboard with me for that day in my bag. But for the most part I just didn’t want to use the one that Apple has with the keyboard. And I’m happy with that choice. And the case that I have is great, it’s from scena cases I’ll post a link to it. It rotates the screen so that I could have it propped up either horizontally or vertically. I don’t use that feature that much but if I needed it it’s there, most of the time I just prop it up on something like Dave has it right now propped against a book that works great for me.

Dave [00:12:23] I think that the compelling case for this is if – and by case I mean the reason for it is if you are going to be using a lot of things you need to be writing on. So if you’re going to be giving either feedback to students or you’re in a more creative or artistic field, I think that there’s a huge case to be made for this kind of a piece of hardware.

Dave [00:12:47] And I was thinking Bonni as I was the last couple of weeks I remember I got sent a whole bunch of PDFs by one of my colleagues and needed to annotate things all of them. You can do that with the PDF readers, you can highlight and you can insert in text. But it’s really pretty cumbersome and even on a desktop, you have to create the text box and then you have to type it in. And I was thinking I received that this is a great application for that if you’re writing handwritten notes to people and want to capture that or do drawings. Fabulous. And of course the thing to know is it’s almost, I think it’s almost a certainty that Apple’s going to probably support the Apple Pencil and the smaller iPad’s going forward.

Bonni [00:13:30] Mark Hofer who is from the Luminaris podcast and I’ve been on that podcast before he’s been on my podcast before. I suspect the same will be true in a few months, we’ll probably go and visit each other shows again. But he’s asked me to document my pencasting workflow because I used to use an Echo Pen from Live Scribe to create the pencasts and I just got so frustrated with their proprietary PDF format and just pretty much that it requires students to be at a physical computer not at a mobile device to watch them. I wanted there to be more flexibility and they just have changed their platforms too many times and I decided I wanted something on the iPad. And I’ll be talking a little tiny bit more about this when we get to the recommendation segment since it is software, not hardware. But I can tell you as far as the Apple Pencil goes, I am so sold on that thing. It is absolutely an incredible experience and it is really hard to describe until you actually use it for yourself.

Bonni [00:14:29] But it works to me even better than a pencil or a pen would on a piece of paper. And that I could never have said about a stylus before, including the fact that it knows when you have it curved to the side a little bit and actually makes the pen or the pencil mark thicker, it depends on what kind of tool that you’ve selected in whatever app it is that you’re using. But it’s remarkable to me it can tell the angle that the pen or the pencil tool that you have selected it at and actually adjust it. Like they have calligraphy pens in some of the apps and things like that. It is. That’s amazing. And it also can tell the pressure. It’s not just the angle, but also the pressure. I have no idea the technology that makes that work but I am just here to tell you it works. And it’s amazing. The other thing is it charges via the iPad’s – what does that port called Dave?

Dave [00:15:18] Oh the lightning port?

Bonni [00:15:20] Lightning port. And so I just it was low on batteries this morning, I plugged in and it’s a pretty quick charge and off we go.

Dave [00:15:27] I know you’re going to do a more detailed post on this. But for those who haven’t heard you talk about pencasts before, what exactly- like what’s a deliverable to students that they receive and what’s the medium you are using for that now?

Bonni [00:15:38] They get to see me writing and they also get to hear my voice talking and then I actually instruct them to draw along with me. So they’re sitting in front of paper and a pencil taking notes. And what I’ve found that it does actually is it teaches them how to take more visual notes. And they say that they do much better on the tests, the students who tend to get A’s. I say “how did you study for the test?” And pencast is right up there as a number one answer because it helps them, they’re taking the test and they see the silly ridiculous 7 year old drawing that I did of something in their minds and that just helps them.

Dave [00:16:13] It’s almost like doing something on a blackboard or white board and just seeing that and hearing you talk through it and writing it. I’ve heard you say many times like how much your students really like that. And so when they see it, is that on a video now?

Bonni [00:16:26] Mhm. Mp4.

Dave [00:16:28] So people can watch it anywhere.

Bonni [00:16:29] Mp4. They can watch it anywhere. Right now I’m uploading it to YouTube and doing an unlisted video that I then link to inside of our learning management system. But our school just adopted a video tool called Kaltura and that’s supposed to be just the bees knees of streaming video services. I’m really looking forward to getting in and playing with that.

Dave [00:16:50] Awesome can’t wait to hear more about that when you do it because I think there’s a lot applications for that in higher ed and also business applications too.

Bonni [00:16:57] This next one is a favorite gadget for sure. As to whether or not it’s 100 percent just because it’s related to teaching I can’t necessarily say that. It is the Apple Watch. And Dave and I have had the Apple Watch for about the same length of time about when they first came out.

Bonni [00:17:16] And before I would ever tell anyone to get one, you have to have the patience that it is what we call a 1.0 product. It gets sometimes a little bit glitchy for me, sometimes I don’t get text message little buzzes or at least I don’t feel them come in and then I happened to look and notice that there’s a little red dot there and I go I don’t even know somebody texted me. And that happens to me a pretty decent amount.

Bonni [00:17:37] But Dave and I don’t mind having a little bit of patience for what it can do. And as far as my teaching, I’ll try to keep my comments limited although it’s very hard to do. I love. OK I’m already going to stop. One of the things it does is track your fitness levels. It wants you to- the minimum goals are 30 minutes of aerobic activity per day, 12 hours where you stand up for at least a minute once per hour and then the last one is just an overall calories burned. And it keeps track of your heartbeat, so it has some estimate of your calories burned within it. And it’s kind of fun. Occasionally while teaching, apparently I get some aerobic activity if I get really excited. It doesn’t happen often but I laugh because I occasionally get done teaching and have maybe four minutes of aerobic activity during a class session. That cracks me up.

Dave [00:18:25] That is really funny. I had no idea.

Bonni [00:18:26] Yeah. And when I’m teaching of course I will have those easy days where 12 hours on my feet is not a problem, I get home and can definitely feel that I’ve been standing in a lot that day. So that is an easy milestone to accomplish.

Bonni [00:18:39] But as far as teaching I like that I can set a timer easily, the students get such a kick out of it when I’ll say “set a timer for X number of minutes” and that’s a really convenient thing I can be anywhere in the classroom.

Bonni [00:18:50] I like that it’s really easy to change the settings if I want to put it on do not disturb so I don’t get text messages, I don’t actually get that many text messages and it’s not that terribly distracting to me if I feel that little buzz. The buzz on your wrist is really hard to describe because it’s not like- I really get irritated by the vibration of a cell phone, it’s startling to me and this is not any kind of a startling thing. It’s like a gentle tap tap on your wrist.

Dave [00:19:17] It’s really hard to describe if you haven’t felt it.

Bonni [00:19:20] Not startling at all .

Dave [00:19:21] I’ve found so many interesting applications for this. Because you remember when this was first  announced it’s like “oh my gosh I’m so not buying this. I did not need the internet on my wrist.” And Apple’s marketing machine got to me and my geekyness got to me and I decided I’ll try it out. And I totally used this differently than I thought I would. What I’ve found is quite the contrary to being interrupted more, I actually find it to be really helpful being present. And here’s just one example and this is true. You’ve used this with students. I use those sometimes with her son Luke is bedtime is in however many minutes and rather than sitting there and me keeping an eye on the clock or looking at my watch, I just set a timer and I say “OK bedtime is in 25 minutes, I’ll set a timer.” He’ll even do it with me. We will set it and then I can totally focus on him I don’t need to think and worry about the time or how much time is left before bedtime. We can totally be engrossed in our game or activity or whatever it is. And then when I get alerted, I get alerted. And so it really helps me to stay more present with him during that time that we have.

Dave [00:20:24] And you do this with students I know Bonni where you set a time a lot of times on your watch. And that way you don’t have to sit there and be worried about looking at the clock or how much time do I have left and you can really be that much more present with that person. So that’s something that’s been hugely helpful to me.

[00:20:40] The other thing that I love about the Apple Watch which I did not expect when I first got it is that you can dictate into it and have it remind you to do things. So if you push and hold the button and just go “Remind me to whatever,” it will automatically put that onto your reminders list in the Apple ecosystem on your phone. And then you can have it do things with that, whatever you want it to do. Mine goes automatically to omnifocus which is my task management system.

Dave [00:21:09] So this happens all the time. In fact last night I was teaching a class and I’m team teaching with someone when the instructor said “oh we should do this at the next class.” And right at the end of the class after all the participants had left. So right away on my watch I pushed it and I said “remind me next time I teach session four to do this.” And she’s like “wow did that really just happen? Like that went somewhere?” I was like “yeah. It goes on my list.”And so once a day I have a task to remind me to go through and clear that list and put that wherever it needs to go. So it goes from that list to Evernote or my class notes or wherever.

Dave [00:21:40] So what’s great about it is any time I have an idea on how to do something, even literally driving down the road like listening to a podcast, you don’t even have to touch it I can just raise my wrist and just talk into it and say “remind me to look up this book,” if I hear about a book in a podcast or something and never take my eyes off the road. And I can record my thoughts and anytime I have ideas for articles or teaching that’s all right there and it’s really cool and I use that many many times a day.

Bonni [00:22:09] Anything else you want to add about using the Apple Watch in our teaching?

Dave [00:22:13] I don’t think so from a teaching standpoint. I mean there’s so many different applications you could use for it but I’ve just found it really to be great for those two things.

Bonni [00:22:20] My absolute favorite feature you told me about after we owned it for about two months and that was I am notorious for losing my iPhone all the time in the house. I don’t literally lose it, it’s just somewhere in the house. And you told me if I swipe up and press that little button it will ping my iPhone no matter where it is, even if it’s on silent which my iPhone is on silent most of the time. Ah, life saver.

Dave [00:22:44] That’s cool.

Bonni [00:22:45] I use that more than anything else. Funny little tether for my iPhone.

Bonni [00:22:51] And the last gadget that we’re going to talk about before we get to the recommendations segment is a webcam, which most of us have a webcam whether it’s on our computer or laptop or whatever device it is we’re using, our tablet. And I say this because there’s just something about the connection. It’s not quite as good as in person eye contact, but it’s getting pretty darn close.

Bonni [00:23:16] And I have shared this story before when I was talking to- I don’t actually remember which episode it was- but I was talking about that the synchronous video meeting tool that I use at one of the institutions I teach at broke in the middle of a session. And you had to come in Dave and be the hero and set us up quickly with your Zoom account.

Dave [00:23:37] Mhm.

Bonni [00:23:38] And so Zoom is a just one of the many and I do mean many tools that allow you to have meetings with people via webcam. And like I said there are many of them out there and many of them focus on being really feature rich and Zoom is one of those that just gets out of your way. It does what it needs to do but it is incredibly easy to use.

Bonni [00:24:00] I did the one time what I told myself and my students never to do which is to just experiment without having practice in advance to use its breakout room features which Doug McKee talked about when he was on that he was looking forward to using those. It’s just seamless. I clicked breakout rooms, how many breakout rooms that I want, that I want it to set them up for me or did I want to set them up and then it even if I had the algorithm do it for me, then I could even just drag them around if I wanted to just tweak a couple of them. And it it just worked. It’s wonderful. So I would say that- I was explaining- I did a workshop for my campus yesterday and I was explaining it just like Doug McKee did. Thank you, Doug. As far as it’s like you’re on the Brady Bunch and I can see all nine of the Brady Bunch. But then Marsha Marsha Marsha and then it goes and just focuses on Marsha because she is talking. And then it goes back out to the nine and then Dave starts talking- actually I should use another character, Peter starts talking and then we get a close up on Peter and then it goes back out. I think Brady Bunch for our generation is the perfect analogy for that.

Bonni [00:25:03] And it all just works. You’re not pressing buttons to get it to focus on another person. And it really does start to feel like we’re having a conversation in person and it’s very hard to allow yourself to get distracted by whatever’s on your computer when you know that you’re expected at any moment to engage.

Dave [00:25:22] We’ve had a few guests on the Coaching for Leaders podcasts that I host talking about this from a business context and there are more and more organizations that are starting to have the expectation for their teams that when they have a team meeting that rather than just connecting by conference call by audio that they connect by video because it really does encourage people to be a lot more present to the meeting and you’re not doing for other things when you’re on a video. And it allows people to have a much richer communication, you don’t have to do that for every meeting necessarily but for the key and critical meetings.

Dave [00:25:52] And I have used zoom with great success with the coaching for leaders Mastermind groups that facilitate, Bonni, and it is it is a great application and one of the things I really like about it in addition to what you said is it’s fairly inexpensive so even if your organization hasn’t invested in it for I think it’s about a hundred dollars a year, you can get a membership that does pretty much anything you’d need to do.

Dave [00:26:14] It’s very inexpensive. It’s extremely reliable, I’ve never had an issue with it. And you mentioned this ease of use. But the key thing with the ease of use with Zoom is ease of use for the end user. It’s easy for the host to use it. But I’ve yet to have a person who’s really had any difficulty setting up and using it either on a tablet or a phone or a computer it seems like it’s just so much simpler that a lot of the other solutions out there.

Dave [00:26:41] Even though some of the other solutions do more, you don’t really need a lot more in most contexts, unless you are doing really fancy webinars or things like that that I think most people are probably not doing in a classroom setting. It does video great. It does chat great. The breakout room is great. So it’s really fabulous for us.

Bonni [00:26:58] If you haven’t used a tool like this before, one of the biggest learning curves for yourself or for your students is actually easy to resolve, but it’s just the comprehending that you can’t just have it play through your speakers and then talk to your microphone and not have issues with feedback because what’s happening is the sound of everybody including you talking is coming out of your speakers going back into your microphone and that’s creating this loop of feedback.

Bonni [00:27:28] And so some people have said like “oh then you just mute yourself.” I’m going no it doesn’t help if you mute yourself because if you ever want to say anything then and plus if it’s a small enough group having to turn off and turn back on mute is really a pain and can cause some distractions in the conversation that don’t really need to be there. By the way Zoom does have really easy- somebody whose dog is barking and you can mute everyone really fast till you figure out who’s dog is barking. You can figure it out because their volume indicator is going to be going and showing you who it is and then you can mute everybody else and mute the person with the dog or whatever.

Dave [00:28:03] And usually it’s the person that suddenly looks nervous and is frantically looking around or you see a dog come into the screen, it’s a good indicator.

Bonni [00:28:10] I think it was probably that dog.

Dave [00:28:12] Maybe that dog that just tackled that person on this video might be where the noise is coming from.

Bonni [00:28:17] Probably them. But at any rate it’s easily solved with headphones. And in fact one of the highest quality of sounds as far as I’m concerned that I’ve had on however many episodes of this podcast, it has been 88 episodes was Jesse Stommel when he was on and we were just talking over Skype and he was using the Apple headset that came with his phone that goes in the ear and then it has a microphone. He sounded great. He was actually outside on his porch and just really high quality sound so it doesn’t have to be anything expensive as long as they’re in ear or over ear headphones and some kind of a microphone that’s going to avoid then having it be your devices input microphone that’s taking it in you’re going to have all the issues. So that’s the biggest thing if you’re going to think about how do I start incorporating virtual meetings into my classes. It isn’t going to be the software because as Dave said- by the way Zoom has a free account too that can maybe take you far enough that.

Dave [00:29:13] We’ve got to link for it . I’ll get it to you. The key thing is I think the headphones is the key piece for telling students or participants. I don’t worry so much about the microphone piece, because every device has a microphone in it these days. And if you start telling people that they need to get a microphone, that’s like a lot harder for most people because they don’t have microphones laying around. If you’re doing a podcast or something professionally, it’s a different story. But as long as you get people using headphones their microphone that’s and their device is going to pick it up to be good enough for a classroom experience. So you’ll be fine doing that.

Bonni [00:29:41] Just training them and training yourself to know that you’re not going to ever do a session without those headphones on to resolve those issues of the feedback. Anything else you want to add? Any gadgets you want to throw in before we go to the recommendations?

Dave [00:29:53] If you want to go beyond just your built-in webcam in your device, whatever your device says, a lot of the tablets and phones really have great cameras in them but some of the laptops and desktops don’t have great cameras. We’ll put a link to the Logitech webcam that has 10 ADP HD quality on it. It’s the best in class for this. So if you’re doing a lot of video work are you going to be doing a lot of virtual things, it is really fabulous and it’s basically the gold standard of webcams out there right now and it pretty much works with any computer and any operating system.

Bonni [00:30:29] This is the point in the show where we each give a recommendation. I’m going to recommend a tool that I’ll go right along with if you’d like to start trying out pencasts or anything visual in your presenting. It’s called Doceri and it is an iPad app.

Bonni [00:30:51] Now I will say getting started was a little bit just to wrap my head around it because there’s two different ways you can use it. You can use it to present things on your iPad. And in my case, presenting meaning drawing like a 7 year old like we described those pen casts earlier and then recording my voice on top of that. Or you can use it where there’s actually a Mac app where you can be projecting on PowerPoint and your slide can be on the screen and then you can be drawing on your iPad or your students can be drawing on the iPad and that’s projected on the screen. That is not what I have experimented with and that’s an extra expense. I just use the Doceri app on my iPad and like I said I draw and then I I replay the drawing. What’s so neat about it is I can speed up and slow down the drawing or even pause it so I don’t have to have the timing worked out perfectly. The first thing I do is I do the drawing and that can take as long as I want because later on – it actually it just edits out my pauses. If I went and grabbed a cup of water came back, it’s not going to have actually recorded that entire time I was gone. It’s just the strokes that it’s recording.

Dave [00:32:02] Interesting.

Bonni [00:32:02] It’s really smart. And then it’s super easy to control as far as speeding it up, slowing it down, pausing it when I go to record. One of the things I had such trouble with the pencasts that I used the live scribe pen with was I would have to draw and talk at the same time. So what I used to do would be to draw it in advance in pencil and then trace over it with the pen while I was talking but it still was remarkably hard to even trace and speak at the same time and I feel so much more relaxed now; I feel like the pencasts are turning out so much better now by just getting the drawing part done first. That’s kind of fun because then at the end when I’m going back and reviewing I can even just add a little colour and highlights to go back and say oh we looked at three things today we looked at this, we looked at this, and I am drawing and highlighting just to bring that extra added benefit.

Bonni [00:32:49] It’s really really been fun. I really like it a lot. A great app. Again, it took me a little bit just to wrap my head around it and to get a little bit of the work flow. I would say it’s not necessarily the most intuitive app I’ve ever used but it was so worth the time that it took me to learn it and it has now just become my go to tool.

Bonni [00:33:06] I absolutely love it, I can’t recommend it enough. I would suggest you check it out even if you don’t have the iPad Pro by the way. Any iPad that you have that you have a stylus. In fact, even if you didn’t want to have a stylus but you just wanted to project images, you can import images, you can import video. Actually draw on top of a video as weird as that sounds. You can talk over the video. I mean there’s all kinds of things that you can import into it, it’s a very powerful and robust tool.

Dave [00:33:33] Sounds exciting. I might do some of that at some point and I’m going to use that tool if I do. So my recommendation is a service called Airtable. Airtable is a service that allows you to create databases up in the cloud. The best way I could describe it, Bonni, for folks who may not be familiar with using databases is it would be like super powered version of Excel. And some some things it does better than Excel, somethings not as well. But it’s like a version of Excel in the cloud on steroids. And I say that because what’s really powerful about it is it’s all web based for one. So it’s very easy to share with other people and you can of course do that with Excel files, but like I can set up an account give you access to things you may want to see and and collaborate on it. But there’s tons of collaboration tools that are there but also integrations with other services.

Dave [00:34:29] And I’ve been thinking as I’ve been starting to play with Airtable for just tracking some of my documentation and giving course information for my work with Carnegie, Bonni, I’ve been thinking that there might be an application for like student rosters and some of the things you do to automate some of that and pull in integrations from other places and it integrates with that service that does all those different integrations for all kinds of different tools.

Dave [00:34:51] There’s lots of things you can do to put information in a database, to create records, to export, import. Anyway, I’m just at the very beginning stages I’ve just messed with it for a few days but looks really interesting. So if you are dealing with large amounts of data in your classes or with your students and there’s places that you need to house data or potentially give students access to, I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it. And they’ve got a free version and they have paid versions but there’s a ton you could do with the free stuff.

Bonni [00:35:17] And one cautionary note, I’m not an attorney but I do play one occasionally on TV is that the FERPA regulations would prohibit you from putting student data on something like that. So you’d want to be cautious about not putting any student data up there. But I could certainly see data sets that weren’t privacy related to our students going up there and just the creative side of getting students engaged in terms of the social aspect of it I think. It’s really interesting, I’m not experimenting with it yet. I did go to to try to wrap my head around what it was and look at some of their demos and samples and that gave me a better idea. It looks really incredible.

Dave [00:35:56] Interesting and it’s good. I’m glad you mention about the FERPA thing because I wasn’t aware of that.

Bonni [00:36:00]  I’ve just been reading, there’s been some conversation on Twitter related so it is top of mind these days.

Dave [00:36:06] It’s so interesting of just how we’re navigating this whole world of technology and privacy and all the rules and regulations. In some cases some of the things we keep online I’d argue are more secure than what we’ve been doing previously and yet the regulations don’t necessarily reflect that a lot of cases. So yes, be mindful of that obviously for your institution and for yourself as far as how you use those things.

Bonni [00:36:30] Well Dave and I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode and selfishly I hope that you enjoyed it so much that you’re willing to go write a review or rate it because it’s fun to be on the front page of iTunes podcasts. .

Dave [00:36:42] Surprise.

Bonni [00:36:43] You could help us maybe stay there or get back there some day when they take it off and put someone else’s up there, really fun. So you do that by the way at teachinginhighered.com/iTunes if you listen to iTunes or slash stitcher if you listen to stitcher or whatever service you use we’d love to see a rating or a review and it doesn’t take that long to do it.

Dave [00:37:03] And if you are looking for more tools that would be good companions to things we talked about today, the educational technology resources guide that you’ve published as a really great place to also be thinking about how you could use these in integration with that so you can get that by joining the weekly updates you send and the articles you write every week. And there’s lots of fun things in there. In fact you just wrote this past week and I’m trying to think of it was it was a really cool article-.

Bonni [00:37:30] Using the Due app?

Dave [00:37:32] Oh yes, Using the Due app and how you use that in your teaching. I love that.

Bonni [00:37:35] I got a lot of clicks on that one.

Dave [00:37:37] You did?

Bonni [00:37:38] Yeah. So you’ll automatically get the show notes with all the links of the things that Dave and I talked about as well as the typically weekly article I write on either teaching or productivity. You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Bonni [00:37:52] And as always, we welcome your feedback. We get so many great ideas for topics and show guests, you can do that at teachinginhighered.com/feedback or just send me a tweet, that’s @Bonni208. And Dave is at a really harder one to spell.

Dave [00:38:09] Dave Stachowiak. @DaveStachowiak. That’s an easy one to spell. So we’ll just put a link in the notes how does that sound?

Bonni [00:38:13] That sounds good to me. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for listening .

Dave [00:38:17] Thanks for having me back.

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.