Teaching in Higher Ed

Creating micro lectures for blended or online courses

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

I recently wrote a post for the Mac Power Users about my top ed tech tools. In the comments, someone asked a question about how I create pencasts with my LiveScribe SmartPen. I thought I would broaden the question a bit and share about how I create micro lectures, with pencasts being just one of the ways that task can be accomplished.

pencastdrawingMicro lectures for blended or online courses

Whenever we move to an online environment, we must be aware that our learners' attention spans will be shorter. While in a classroom environment, we might think about having a 50 minute lecture (though the hope is that we are actually not ever lecturing for more than 7-10 minutes without some kind of test for understanding or engagement, even in the classroom).

Online, that same 50 minutes might be broken down to five micro lectures with some means of assessment or reinforcement in between.

When I create micro lectures, my goal is twofold:

  • Keep them short, ideally less than ten minutes
  • Make them visual, with some memorable diagram that the students will “see” in their minds when they go to take the exam

Pencasts

The term, pencast, denotes that audio can be heard (like a podcast), only you can also see accompanying sketches and notes that are in sync with the spoken audio. I encourage you to check out some of the examples on the LiveScribe website to get a flavor of how they work.

LiveScribe Smart Pens

I have owned every version of LiveScribe smart pen since they were first launched. I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with them.

pencastsample1Advantages

On one hand, it is incredibly convenient to record a pencast. You need the special notebook paper that is recognized by the smartpen and you need your smartpen. For the most advanced model of their smartpen, you also need to have an app running on your iphone/ipad to capture the audio (it uses the microphone on your phone, instead of having an internal microphone, like some of the earlier models).

I've regularly asked the students who earned an A in my courses what tools they found most helpful in their learning and pencasts come out on top every time.

I haven't ever come across a student in my ten years of teaching who has been taught about visual note-taking in school before, so it takes some time to get them thinking in this way. By watching the pencasts, I am effectively educating them both about the topic being taught, but also about how to take concepts and capture them visually.

Wesley Fryer, who blogs for a K-12 audience, has an extensive set of resources for visual note taking that are applicable to higher ed, too.

Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage for LiveScribe pencasts has been that they have not been reliable in terms of playback/sharing methods.

Early on, they started by having playback occur via their proprietary system. It was not a reliable way for students to view them, because it was so highly dependent on what browser they used and what version of their browser they were on.

Then, they shifted to having the pencasts play from within Evernote. The same challenges persisted.

With their latest pen, they have PDF as the means for sharing pencasts, only the non-static part of the PDF can only be played/accessed either by using the website they have set up to play them for users, or via their mobile app.

It is hard to figure out why they haven't gone over to a more reliable sharing method, after all the time they have been at it.

Yet, I still keep buying smart pens, so they must be doing something right.

Other options

In answer to the commenter's question, I'm not sure if Notability has some of the same sharing limitations as LiveScribe, as I haven't had a lot of experience using it.

However, I have heard great things about the share-ability of the Explain Everything App.  Its output options include: save to camera roll (on your iPad), save to ouTube, and a bunch of other sharing options. Here's Stephanie Castle explaining how to use Explain Everything in the classroom.

If you want to stay away from hand-drawn micro lectures and want to use other options, Wesley Fryer has a host of tools to create micro lectures in other formats to explore.

 

 

HeadsUp Game is a Lively EdTech Tool

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

I heard something a couple of weeks ago that was marvelous to hear.

That was fun. Really fun.

Headsup
Ian was the champion HeadsUp player between all three sections of the class

My introduction to business class had just finished playing Ellen Degeneres' HeadsUp game. While the free version of the game comes with general trivia decks of electronic cards, you can purchase custom decks for $.99.

I created a custom deck with about 15 vocabulary words from the first couple of chapters of our Introduction to Business Textbook. We spent the first 5-10 minutes of class seeing how many of the words the class could get.

There's a limitation to the way we were playing the game.

No real deep learning was going on. Once the students found a way to get each other to say the word or phrase, the shortcut stuck. One of the terms was baby boomers. Students would typically motion like they were rocking a baby and then make a noise of something exploding.

It wasn't like the students were actually getting a lot of practice even in defining the words, let alone experiencing any higher order thinking. However, there were sure some benefits to us starting out a class that way, early in the semester.

The HeadsUp game

  • Got students out of their seats
  • Reinforced the idea of having fun while learning
  • Encouraged individual students to take risks
  • Helped students start to use the vocabulary words from our class and identify where they may be behind in their learning
  • Engaged the students' attention (not a single person was doing anything other than watching the iPad screen that was held above various students' heads, as they played)

It has been a couple of weeks since we played the game. I'm definitely going to use Heads Up again, despite the verbal shortcuts taken by the students in their attempts to raise their scores.

The students are now able to use the vocabulary from the class far better than in past semesters. Better still, they are having fun while learning and are getting to know each other. This class does an extensive project of writing a business plan and having a sense of their fellow students' personalities and strengths is going to serve them well as they select group members.

Jeopardy Rocks game

For those of you without an iPad, or who are looking for a different game format, Richard Byrne introduces us to Jeopardy Rocks.

Updates

Two quick updates, since writing this post:

  • I've been unable to get the Jeopardy Rocks game linked to in Richard Byrne's post to work. That's too bad because it looks like a great way to review.
  • My classes played Ellen's HeadsUp game, again, today. This time, I used the random feature on the Attendance2 app to call on students, individually. Then, each student had to describe the word that I was holding above my head. I required that they actually explain or define the term, instead of using shortcuts. The game was still fun for the students, but also required a bit more knowledge on the students' part.

What games have you found beneficial to play in class, in order to reinforce learning?

A book, a mention and an update

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

It has been quite a week.

now_you_see_itA Book

I finished reading Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Businesses in the 21st Century.

I'm not sure whether I benefitted more from the discoveries she offered that will inform my teaching, or the knowledge I gained about the brain as it relates to my own life.

She writes:

What better gift could we give our children than to learn to enjoy as they grapple, to aspire higher when they stumble, to find satisfaction as the challenges become ever greater? As the adage goes, the person who loves to work never has to.

I hope that there will continue to be more emphasis placed in our educational systems on cultivating grit in our students and on helping them develop more self control.

Dr. Davidson also emphasized how much it matters what we pay attention to and how much we are capable of missing. She shared about this experiment in which viewers are asked to count how many times a basketball is passed between players wearing white shirts.

The instructions given by the researchers do not mention that there will also be a gorilla coming through the scene, a fact which the majority of people miss when participating in the research.

The gorilla example keeps coming back throughout the book, as Davidson weaves through how technology is impacting the attention of students in schools and the attention of individuals in the professional realm.

Now You See It is absolutely worth a read.

top 10 edtech toolsA Mention

My second item of note this past week was that I was mentioned by a couple of my favorite podcasters: The Mac Power Users (David Sparks and Katie Floyd). They aired an entire episode on Tech in Education and asked educators to weigh in with our favorites on Twitter.

I couldn't do the subject justice in 140 characters, so I wrote a page on my top ten tech tools for education that they mentioned on the show. It was exciting to get to be a small part of a show that has taught me so much over the past couple of years, since I started listening.

An Update

In the most recent episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, I told a story about the student who didn't ever want me to use his name in class again and was so full of anger. I wound up seeing him a couple of days ago and it was like encountering an entirely different person.

The anger was no longer apparent, being replaced by a nice smile and a warm greeting. I need to make sure that I remember times like this, so that I never forget how transformative the college years can be for our students.

 A Request

I'm excited about the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode that will be airing Thursday. Dr. Stephen Brookfield offers such great insight into how we can all get our students more engaged in discussions.

Would you consider recommending Teaching in Higher Ed to one of your colleagues or friends in higher ed, or writing a review on iTunes/Stitcher, so more people have a chance to discover the show? As the community continues to grow, it makes it more possible to bring on guests like the ones we have had on lately.

Thanks for being a part of Teaching in Higher Ed.

 

Working out loud in higher ed

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Someone asked me the other day if it was strange listening to myself on podcasts.

 

working out loud

I'm now doing a monthly Q&A show on Dave's (my husband's) Coaching for Leaders podcast, as well as the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. I listen to many of them before they air, so that I can create the show notes. All of them wind up in my listening queue on Overcast (my preferred podcast app). My weekly routine has me often listening to them in the car, or when feeding our baby girl at night.

There are often moments when I listen where I wish I would have phrased something differently, or not laughed when I talked about something quite serious. Lately, I'm frustrated at the number of times I'm saying the filler word “so” on the show. Prior to that, the recordings were littered with “you know”s. I'm always working on some aspect of my speech patterns that could potentially be distracting to the listening audience.

Yes, it can be uncomfortable to hear myself, especially during some of my less-than-stellar recording moments.

However, there are so many great things that have come from “working out loud,” a phrase first coined by Bryce Williams. When we work out loud, we make our work visible to a network of people with similar interests and missions as our own.

John Stepper describes working out loud as:

…making your work visible in such a way that it might help others. When you do that – when you work in a more open, connected way – you can build a purposeful network that makes you more effective and provides access to more opportunities.

Robbin Good has a content curation guide that explores emerging practices in content curation and how to get started. There's also this interview with Maria Popova, the editor of Brain Pickings, one of the greatest examples of content curation that exists. It almost feels wrong to refer to it as content curation, or even working out loud. She refers to her work in a far more descriptive and eloquent manner as she writes on her “about” page:

Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

It is risky and takes dedication to work out loud, but the benefits are plentiful.

[Read more…] about Working out loud in higher ed

Sticky notes as a teaching tool

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

This past week was our start to the semester. I was struck, once again, at how little I knew of the students' individual stories that led them to find themselves in my class. As the week ended, though, I celebrated what I was able to glean about them in that short of a time.

A particularly useful tool in connecting with my students was the sticky note.

mostcommon-sticky
Sticky note exercise: Signs were created using the easy-to-use graphics editor called Canva.com

I'm teaching three sections of Introduction to Business, in addition to one marketing elective. I've taught Introduction to Business over twenty times, previously, just not three times in the same semester.

We started out with an exercise designed to help them get to know each other and start to think about how entrepreneurs come up with ideas.

I shared how many business ideas are the result of attempts to solve problems.

There was recently a story from Wired Magazine about the invention of a gadget that helps solve the problem of doctors not washing their hands thoroughly enough. Another example came from college students looking to reduce date rape incidents through their creation of nail polish that changes color when exposed to date rape drugs.

[Read more…] about Sticky notes as a teaching tool