Bonni [00:00:00] You’ve heard of the shot heard round the world. Today Dave Stachowiak and I talk about the slide heard round the world.

Production Credit [00:00:09] 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 [00:00:46] It’s time for us to time travel back to 2010. Some of you might remember headlines like this crossing newspapers across the country and maybe even actually around the world if I recall U.S. Army makes the world’s worst PowerPoint slide.

Bonni [00:01:02] We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint. Do you remember that one Dave.

Dave [00:01:10] I remember it I remember seeing the the slide and you had to zoom in at full resolution in order to see all the details on the slide.

Bonni [00:01:20] Yes. And we’ll put a linked to this slide in the show notes. But if you don’t recall seen it or didn’t hit your radar there it was supposed to be a slide that described why developing a clear strategy in Afghanistan was so challenging.

Bonni [00:01:36] And instead of really getting the creators of said slide the attention really focused on the complexity of that conflict.

Bonni [00:01:45] PowerPoint became in the crosshairs.

Dave [00:01:48] And it ironically ended up coming into conflict with something that we when we think about how to utilize PowerPoint or any visual aid presentation software well is really it should make the message simpler to understand not more complex.

Bonni [00:02:05] We’ve got problems in higher ed for sure it’s not just the military or in the business world where there’s problems. We’ve got problems in the classroom with how students respond to PowerPoint.

Bonni [00:02:14] We’ve got in our online modules when we try to build them with poorly designed PowerPoint and at academic conferences. Oh my goodness and now because what’s called that back channel which is when we’re at an event is some kind of a hash tag that’s around that event.

Bonni [00:02:31] So if it’s 2015. MC The South Mid Western Conference I made that one up. But people can be having a chat virtually Whalley presenter is up there droning on off of their PowerPoint or worse yet reading to us straight from their paper so we’re certainly starting to see a lot bubble up about the challenge in fact.

Bonni [00:02:55] Dave I’m sure you might have seen although you might not remember it there was a Slate columnist who put together a bunch of tweets that students had lamented. There are things about PowerPoint and I’ll just read a few of them.

Bonni [00:03:11] One student called @collegegirlhumor he says for class today I’ll be reading PowerPoint word for word. Every professor everywhere.

Bonni [00:03:23] The next when college basically consists of you spending thousands of dollars for a professor to point at a powerpoint and read to the bullets and that was @deliNeli. I’m enjoying reading these.

Bonni [00:03:35] Do you want to take the next one.

Dave [00:03:39] Sure. Being a college professor would be easy to read off a PowerPoint you made ten years ago and give online quizzes with questions you googled.

Dave [00:03:47] Here’s another one. Seriously sick of all these power points. Anyone can be a professor. All you need to know how to do is run a PowerPoint.

Bonni [00:03:55] And I liked the spelling. Seriously it’s SRSLY.

Dave [00:04:00] Anything goes on Twitter.

Bonni [00:04:01] I don’t want to not cite our sources that was @ChrisraMae17.

Bonni [00:04:06] And from @BlkSuperMan . Y’all ever sat in a class copied every word down of PowerPoint and still not know a damn thing the professor said that was know spelled Kno.

Dave [00:04:18] Oh yes yes just for extra emphasis right.

Bonni [00:04:21] So the research around PowerPoint isn’t just anecdotal although I will say upfront that it’s mixed. We know that there’s a problem. We know that the problem can be more easily solved when we’re using PowerPoint appropriately.

Bonni [00:04:34] I’m just going to talk through a couple of the studies that have shown up. First off 25 percent of recommendations that are made in textbooks about how to use presentation software only 25 percent were actually based on research.

Bonni [00:04:48] So if we were to pick up a book about how to use PowerPoint it may or may not actually be based and grounded in what the research tells us studies will show that students will often prefer PowerPoint but they are less likely to show up to class with a class that has a PowerPoint that has a lot of notes on it.

Bonni [00:05:05] I think we would all be that way with the faculty meeting if the notes were going to be good enough. Everything and the PowerPoint was going to be contained. There might be less likely to show up ourselves.

Dave [00:05:13] Can I say something about that.

Bonni [00:05:14] Sure

Dave [00:05:16] This is something I’ve run into with classes I’ve taught at the graduate level is you do hear a lot of and you hear more and more complaining about death by powerpoint and having to watch listen to someone read slides to you.

Dave [00:05:29] And yet when as a faculty member if you choose to come into a classroom and not have detailed power points and not have something that people can take notes on. I’ve gotten pushback from that on a number of occasions of like well where all the detailed PowerPoint were the notes were the things I can print off in advance and follow along with what you’re saying.

Dave [00:05:46] I’m like I don’t do that and and people have mostly come around to that and realized the dynamic of how I do in the classroom. But but but. So that’s kind of like one of those things you can’t have it both ways.

Dave [00:06:00] And sometimes I think part of this is driven just by the culture of what’s expected in a classroom. A lot of students do expect there to be slides and PowerPoint even though I think we all agree that that’s not always the most engaging way to to educate.

Bonni [00:06:13] Oh yeah. Allows for a lot of apathy and it doesn’t really activate the brain and so they can sit there and check out and.

Dave [00:06:21] But it’s in everyone’s comfort zone.

Bonni [00:06:23] Yeah but certainly it can be a cultural thing and so I think it goes back to what Stephen Brookfield recommended way back in episode 15 which is for us to be more transparent and why we’re a protein teaching the way we’re doing. He’s not the only one that has mentioned that but that was a big piece of what I took away from getting to hear him.

Dave [00:06:42] I say that and of course I don’t have any research but that is just my own personal experience that has a lot to do that. Have you run into that with students?

Bonni [00:06:50] Sure. Yeah although if you start out the conversation with I guess most of my 18 to 22 year olds. They are tired of being read to. So they kind of get it.

Bonni [00:07:00] But then the pushback actually comes when the first exam comes and they go wait a second you didn’t feed me everything I needed.

Dave [00:07:07] I was supposed to be like reading and attention.

Bonni [00:07:09] Yes yes yes.

Bonni [00:07:10] But I do think being transparent about how her teaching helps so that the PowerPoint in another study providing it resulted in either having no impact on students test scores or in having slightly worst exam scores though the type of slides that were used in that particular study were the traditional kind with a lot of text and graphics.

Bonni [00:07:32] Students do show a preference for visual power points and the visuals I will talk about later on they do need to be tied to the content though it’s not just like isn’t this a pretty clip art that it actually needs to be tied by the way speaking. Side note unclip Art did you hear that Microsoft is doing away with clip art.

Dave [00:07:50] I did not hear that. No.

Bonni [00:07:51] Yeah I think that has got to be something worth celebrating. Yes. Yeah. Good good news for audiences everywhere. So David I have four recommendations on today’s episode around how to make our PowerPoint B not the slide that gets heard round the world and the first one is Dave.

Dave [00:08:11] Put less on your slides and use relevant visuals.

Bonni [00:08:16] That was not it, that was awesome though. Use PowerPoint for its intended purpose to enhance your presentation and to deliver it. You’ve read really well that.

Dave [00:08:27] The notes are not numbered. Ironically they’re bullet pointed.

Bonni [00:08:32] Oh. Will spare everyone the behind the scenes. You can probably hear it in my voice if you’ve been listening to the show for a while you know this is not my normal voice so I’m down with a little bit of a cold. And this is Dave propping me up saying don’t skip an episode for a week you can do this. Here we are.

Dave [00:08:52] So we just flipped number one and number two right.

Bonni [00:08:55] Oh I didn’t realize that’s where you were. Yeah. Oh I it just went well with you. There we go. So number one use PowerPoint for its intended purpose to enhance your presentation.

Bonni [00:09:07] Not to deliver it. So in this case there’s a great Garr Reynolds quote and he talks about the unique contribution that slides have to a presentation. He describes it as follows.

Bonni [00:09:20] Slides are slides documents are documents they aren’t the same thing. Attempting to merge them result in what I call the slidument the creation of the slidument stems from a desire to save time. People think they’re being efficient to kind of killed two birds with one stone approach or [?] in Japanese. I do not speak Japanese but Garr Reynolds does.

Bonni [00:09:48] Unfortunately unless you’re a bird the only thing quote killed is effective communication. Intentions are good but results are bad. This attempt to save time reminds me of a more fitting Japanese proverb. Chase two hares and get none.

Bonni [00:10:06] So we don’t want to try to have our sides be a document we don’t want our documents to be slides we want to have slides enhance the presentation and we’ll show you in a little bit. That means we don’t have to entirely use the PowerPoint throughout the entire 50 minute hour 15 class so it can be used to enhance parts of it and then be put on the back seat for other parts. All right Dave. Number two. You’re so good at this one.

Dave [00:10:32] Can I say something about the other one.

Bonni [00:10:33] Sure of course.

Dave [00:10:33] You know this is a huge huge obstacle and so many of the corporate customers that we have because there is such this drive for efficiency of created creates something once. Use it for the PowerPoint use it for the arcade version and there’s just so many reasons and Reynolds captures this beautifully.

Dave [00:10:49] But why. You just don’t want to use that for both you just kill you kill the ability for people to get a clear message during a presentation because most often the document is written for the PowerPoint written for the documentation for the archive and I go to some of these meetings and I see.

Dave [00:11:08] I watch people just at their eyes glaze over it all these detailed notes on sites and no one reads that stuff and the message is often very incoherent in. And you and I have both seen the same thing in higher ed classrooms.

Dave [00:11:20] Where you know and that code for the one I created something 10 years ago earlier that rings true. I’ve seen it happen and where someone you know ask a question on Slide and the professor isn’t even really that knowledgeable about it on the side because it’s something they wrote four years ago and haven’t reviewed it recently and so it’s just a it’s just not the right dynamic for what PowerPoint and all the other visual software is intended to do.

Bonni [00:11:47] Number two.

Dave [00:11:48] Number two. Put less on your slides and use relevant visuals.

Bonni [00:11:52] So Garr Reynolds recommends each slide should only contain one idea. And that’s really a challenge because we kind of are have this idea of gosh that three or four ideas he might want to put together on a slide but it’s really easy then to kind of break it up after you’ve maybe put together a list of bullets.

Bonni [00:12:10] You take each bullet you take the bullet away and you make it into just a single slide that has a graphic that’s related to it. And that just encompasses one idea.

Dave [00:12:23] I’m not sure if we mentioned this on the show before but I work with the Dale Carnegie Training Organization and we have a rule that Dale Carnegie called the Ten second rule when we’re coaching people in their presentation skills.

Dave [00:12:32] The 10 second rule is if the audience doesn’t get the message of the slide in 10 seconds it’s too complicated there there shouldn’t be multiple bullet points and paragraphs. It should be either a like you just said a a visual that sends a message or a very very short phrase or maybe even a word or two.

Dave [00:12:51] And that’s that’s what you really want to get across you want to make it simple and the real message comes from the presenter the presenter is the person who is communicating the message or the instructor or the faculty member whatever the case is it doesn’t come from primarily the slide the sides just learn to support it.

Bonni [00:13:07] And the 10 seconds that Dave is referring to is if you weren’t talking.

Bonni [00:13:11] And I just looked at your slides for me to be able to process it. That doesn’t mean the two are only going to spend ten seconds on that slide and go on to the next one but it’s just that the rest of the content is coming out of your mouth not necessarily needing to be upon the slide itself.

Dave [00:13:26] And even if you found a way to make it complex side really interesting if it takes more than ten seconds for someone to understand it they’re spending all that time trying to process the site and not listening to you as a faculty member which is where you really want people to be listening to is focus on.

Dave [00:13:42] Otherwise why not just send out the slides and cancel class like what’s the value then of having a faculty member in a classroom in a collaborative learning environment. So I think that that’s a real challenge for all of us who use Powerpoint or other visual aids to really think through.

Dave [00:13:59] Is this enhancing my message or my trying to get this to be the message because I’m not willing to put forth the work and the effort to communicate it verbally or interactively or with dynamics or car or dialogue in a classroom like so many of your episodes and guests have pointed out Bonni.

Bonni [00:14:14] And that’s what the research shows to and Dave I’m glad you brought this up that when we’re trying to read a slide the words and we’re trying to listen.

Bonni [00:14:23] One of those things is going to suffer and say you’re actually slowing down someone’s ability to process your hindering it then if you keep the real short phrase one word a short phrase and then the visual and then they get to pay attention to what you’re saying and that visual what’s on the screen enhances what you’re saying instead of detracting from it.

Bonni [00:14:43] Number three.

Dave [00:14:44] Number three change your media focus at regular intervals.

Bonni [00:14:48] So we know that time attention spans are not that long. And so what we can do is have the PowerPoint actually bring people’s attention back by not using it the entire time.

Bonni [00:14:59] And one of the really great tricks is that when a PowerPoint slide and by the way this works on key note to when it is showing. So you’ve gone to use slide show and it’s actually showing on the screen you press the beaky and it blinks out the screen. And I love using this trick for a number of reasons.

Bonni [00:15:17] First of all it’s hysterical to do because if you know what you’re doing and you press the beaky every single eye in the room will go on you see you’ve shifted the focus and that does tend to bring people back in.

Bonni [00:15:28] So we’ve shifted it from the PowerPoint. Now everybody is looking at you you press the b key again at toggles back on everyone looks back at the PowerPoint you can play Little games with people. What did we watch their little eyeballs go back and forth like they’re watching a tennis match .

Bonni [00:15:42] But that really is a healthy thing to do to switch the focus because now I’m I’m back engaged we’re doing something different. Now we’re back there so the other thing I like about using the beaky is from a technical standpoint your PowerPoint is still running.

Bonni [00:15:58] So your projector stays on because if you were actually to shut off the powerpoint and not be using it for a while you might find that your the projector would go to sleep on you.

Bonni [00:16:10] So that’s the nice thing. Press the b kye it’s like you’ve turned it off essentially because there’s no light coming out of the projector but if you hold your hand up there it’s still ready to burst the light right back up.

Bonni [00:16:20] So it’s a really good trick by the way the w key turns at White. So in that case you would still have the white bright light and if you needed to write in the white board if you were projected onto a white board that would work for you too.

Dave [00:16:31] Or shadow puppets.

Bonni [00:16:33] You could do some shadow puppets. I never got good at that but you certainly could.

Dave [00:16:37] Most of the wireless presenters now also have a button on them that allows for you to blink out the screen. Does the same thing as the beaky does if you’re in show mode on any of those pieces of software so it’s a really good tool to get around the room and to dialogue with people and to have conversation is you don’t have to be stuck at your keyboard to do that.

Bonni [00:16:58] So the next recommendation I’m going to make is a Mac specific one but I’m going to ask Dave to Google to see if there’s something like this for windows so we can recommend it. So on the Mac there is an app called Caffeine and that solves another problem of your Mac falling asleep.

Bonni [00:17:12] I don’t know if that happens do you but I’ll be right in the middle has something else on my Mac goes to sleep and then the projector starts to have that I’m not connected to anything blue screen that comes up so Caffeine just shows up in your menu bar in the top right hand corner and you just press the little caffeine button one click and it’ll make it so that your Mac will not fall asleep it’s absolutely fantastic. And Dave might have found one for windows.

Dave [00:17:38] Well I see one for linux there is an article on caffeine for Windows alternatives so I have a feeling there’s probably one here that might be helpful. I’ll send you the links you can put in the show notes.

Bonni [00:17:48] OK. Sounds perfect. So we are now on to number four. Our final recommendation for how to be better at PowerPoint and not have your slide heard round the world. Employ a non linear slide structure so we tend to think about our slides in order from slide one slide however many and that they’re going to come in a sequential order instead.

Bonni [00:18:14] You might think about a couple of ways you could think differently about PowerPoint. One would be that you could have a slide that was essentially a table of contents slide.

Bonni [00:18:24] So if you had 20 topics or so that in a in a longer type session students may need to have additional clarification on. Or you find these are some frequently asked questions you could click on that table of contents go to that section and then have a link on that slide that takes you back to a table of contents.

Bonni [00:18:43] This sounds like a hard thing to do but it’s actually quite easy. You would highlight the text you type up your table of contents for example highlight the text and insert a hyperlink.

Bonni [00:18:54] But instead of a hyperlink that takes you somewhere out on the web it’s a hyperlink that links you to a now there’s slide in your presentation.

Bonni [00:19:02] So we don’t have to think about linear slides this really frees us up to approach the design of a PowerPoint and a lot of different ways so the one example I gave you is a table of contents or frequently asked questions as one way of approaching your slide design. Another way might be a choose your own adventure type.

Bonni [00:19:19] When I was young we used a lot of those Choose Your Own Adventure books and you’d get to the bottom of the page and it would say if you want to go down by the river turn to Page 36 and a few would rather go back up on the mountains turn to Page 42.

Bonni [00:19:32] And depending on what you chose would depend on how things ended and there’s all sorts of applications. Those of you in the sciences and the humanities and there’s all kinds of ways we could think about designing a PowerPoint or by the way an online module as a Choose Your Own Adventure using the same thing.

Bonni [00:19:51] You could draw a couple of arrows at the bottom depending on what someone chose they click on that and that takes them to a different slide that you have designed. So I’m going to recommend two by the way if you didn’t listen to Episode 25 regarding large classes with Chrissy Spencer.

Bonni [00:20:07] You go back and listen to that one because she talks about that her students she goes through these cases and she’s got slides set up because she knows she’s going to get a question soon shows like How did she know I was going to ask that. She does happens to have a slide for that. So this table of contents approach will help you navigate that pretty quick too.

Dave [00:20:27] It’s a great way to do it. And I have another suggestion on how to do this sponge even outside like the PowerPoint keynote. Way is I’ve done classes before and I regularly do a class that’s a Saturday. Most of the day class with graduate students sits a class on a graduate course on education and training.

Dave [00:20:45] And I create a mind map. And so I actually create that in mind no software and I just PDF it and then I display it on the screen and it is very much a Choose Your Own Adventure.

Dave [00:20:55] There are probably 30 different topics on there all of which are relevant to the class all of which I am ready to talk about if people want to and they select what the class is going to be that day of because you know we have other places in the class for the things that we have to hit on or are hit on.

Dave [00:21:10] So this is this is provides a little more space to be able to get on some of the practical things of implementing training and learning in organizations. And so one way I’ll do that is old some of the rooms where I teach have or the screen if you pull up the screen there’s a dry report behind it.

Dave [00:21:27] So I’ll just projected on the drivers and have people go up which Iris markers of the B in the class and hash mark which ones they want to talk about and the ones that have a lot of hash marks or maybe someone puts also have them put a star of like what’s the one you really want us to talk about.

Dave [00:21:39] So I’ll try to hit on all those during the class and they drive the class entirely and it’s one document for the whole class.

Dave [00:21:46] But it’s just a it’s an opportunity to just frame where they could go but they actually choose where they want to go based on their professional interests and what’s going to be most relevant to them in their the practical application of their degree.

Bonni [00:21:59] That is so helpful to be able to give them that ability to drive especially when we get to the master’s level where they do know more about the content and therefore it’s going to be that much more relevant and they can see the real world connections sometimes better than our typical 18 to 22 year old might be able to. So that’s a really motivating factor for a student.

Dave [00:22:19] And many of them do plan to go on to teach and I always do make the point. This is not necessarily the dynamic to use in a classroom with 18 to 22 year olds.

Dave [00:22:27] If you’re teaching in more of a traditional age you know at an undergraduate population that may not work as well. But when you have really highly motivated graduate students who are there and in many cases that’s that’s one of the classes they really took the program for that can be a really great way to approach it.

Bonni [00:22:42] I always recommend having some kind of a backup in case your technology isn’t working in that particular day. So if I’m going to do a workshop of some kind. I always have a printout of my slides and I’ll print them 9 slides per page so that they’re not filling up an entire page.

Bonni [00:22:57] But little ones and then I number those and if you numbered those it’s going to be what that slide number is of course. And then while your slide show is running assuming it’s working by the way you can just press number five and hit enter on your keyboard and they’ll take you right to Slide 5 you hit 18 on your keyboard.

Bonni [00:23:13] Hit enter and Ill take your right to Slide 18. So that’s another way you could actually just skip back and forth to slides. And if someone had a question back earlier you said having to go backpack my backpack backpack you can just type in that slide number if you have a printout that indicates your slide numbers.

Bonni [00:23:30] Now candidly I don’t do that for my everyday classes but I always have it where my PowerPoint slides are stored on Dropbox and I did have a situation the other day where the projector was not working in my classroom.

Bonni [00:23:43] And I had to shift the gears so I shifted the gears and brought it up on Dropbox. I could see it on my I think I had my iPhone or something like that the students couldn’t see it but then I just I don’t even call attention to it.

Bonni [00:23:56] But then we just start working on the white board a little bit more that day and act like that’s how we planned it and they never know the difference. I think there’s a certain level of professionalism that comes with that don’t you know just a protractor doesn’t work again you know I just don’t think that’s a good thing even to model for our students.

Dave [00:24:12] One and a related point to this is I was also often get feedback or get questions from a class of why don’t you post the slides in advance up on the elements or on the class website. And you know what class slides are you going to use tonight where are the notes. And my answer is Well I don’t know.

Dave [00:24:28] Because depending on how the class goes I may not use a whole section of slides I may only use the first four slides if we get into a great conversation about one particular topic in the course. I’d rather explore that in depth than try to hit on like the eight the eight things that you know.

Dave [00:24:43] I mean obviously stay true to the learning objectives but I’d much rather go into one or two things in depth of the examples are good if the dollar is good. So if I sent out the slides in advance or hand out press give a hand out to people or post them then I’m tied to that that I have. And then it’s like oh if you didn’t hit that well you skipped the slide.

Bonni [00:25:00] We didn’t get our money’s worth.

Dave [00:25:01] Like that’s my prerogative because I made a decision as a faculty member that that wasn’t relevant to the conversation of showing up in the classroom today and what’s what’s important for us to dialogue about.

Dave [00:25:12] And maybe the slide that I skipped I was able to incorporate in the conversation earlier so I just think that I’m not saying never give slides in advance or don’t post them but I think just just thinking through some of the strategy of you know how you do that and kind of getting outside the box of how we normally handle slides and posting slides is helpful for all of us to just think through how we’re using that from a strategic standpoint.

Bonni [00:25:34] And I would say this is the final thought before we move on to their recommendations. Just being able to get around really comfortably on your computer helps. So if you’re not familiar with this shortcut this is something everyone should know on a Windows computer it’s alt tab holding down your Alt key and pressing tab and on a Mac. It’s a command key tab and that’s going to cycle you through any applications that are running.

Bonni [00:25:57] So let’s suppose I have now running PowerPoint and I also have running my web browser because I’m going to show a video on YouTube or something of that nature. And so I want to be able to switch back and forth from the full screen viewing slideshow to my web browser. The first time I do it it sorta locks it in.

Bonni [00:26:19] So the next time I do alt tab they’re right next to each other and they don’t have to go alt tap tap tap tap data have to go over the 47 applications that are running to get to that one before I let go of the Alt key or that command key.

Bonni [00:26:33] And that’s just a really nice smooth thing to be able to switch from a PowerPoint to a web browser and then back again and back in episode 15.

Bonni [00:26:43] Our guest Stephen Brookfield recommended the Web site todays meet dot com and today’s meet dot com relies on the students having laptops or at least some sort of smart device where they can access a browser. I just used it yesterday in my classes and they were doing some research.

Bonni [00:27:00] You might recall from past episodes I don’t I typically don’t have laptops in the classroom. We put our devices away and we engage with each other because it’s a blended learning format so they get to be online in other cases.

Bonni [00:27:11] But in this particular case bring your laptops because we’re actually going to show you had to do some research using some tools we’re going to get ready to write our market analysis and so bring.

Bonni [00:27:21] And they all started going out and doing some research for their market analysis and posting it on today’s Meet and then I could click on one single button to bring up the transcript and I could easily copy and paste it into an email for them to be able to leverage later on. So it was just a really nice easy tool.

Bonni [00:27:38] I broke my own rule and used it for the first time in class.

Bonni [00:27:42] I mean I guess I had seen it a little bit but it was just so easy to use. I didn’t have to create an account to set up a room it’s good for the next hour. I mean it was really a nice seamless experience if you want to set up an account of course you can. But yeah it was real nice.

Bonni [00:27:55] So this is the point in the show in which we give recommendations and I wanted to just quickly mention that we had recommended previously haikudeck.com. And so that’s not officially my recommendation but if you want something that really steers you toward building very simple PowerPoint that are enhanced with some sort of a visual it’ll allow you to search for creative commons visuals and it’ll site them for you so it takes away all the effort.

Bonni [00:28:24] As far as siting your images and giving credit where credit is due. But my recommendation is another technology tool I’ve been trying out I blogged about it this week. But in case you missed it I’ve been trying out a new communications tool that’s getting really popular in the business world it’s called slack.

Bonni [00:28:39] It’s a little bit challenging to describe at first because it’s a communication tool unlike e-mail but also unlike text messaging that sort of if those two got together and had a little communication baby and the kitchen is called slack.

Bonni [00:28:53] And so you can go in there and create channels so I’m doing it for a class where they’re working on some different service learning projects and there’s a channel for each one of those. We’re going to be doing a movie night coming up at our house.

Bonni [00:29:05] I’ve got a channel for the movie night. It keeps the conversation steered towards specific topics allows you to instantly drag a file on there and share it. Drag a photo on there and share it. And I’m finding it a nice mix.

Bonni [00:29:18] I’ll try that with one class in its class of students I mostly know from prior classes and that are my juniors and seniors so I know the maturity level is a little bit higher than some of my earlier students.

Bonni [00:29:31] So I thought it was a good class to experiment on and I like it because it has a good mix I think. I don’t like giving them my cell phone number I’m not necessarily inclined to get that many texts at all hours.

Bonni [00:29:41] But it’s kind of like that in the sense of if I want to I can see on my phone there’s some kind of message that’s come up there and they like that. I mean they like that more immediate feedback with each other. They have an exam this evening so they’re all studying up there. Does anyone know where we can find this. I had put some exam study hints up there too.

Dave [00:30:00] Yeah I’ve heard great things about slack there’s so many startups and small businesses that are using Slack for virtual communication and teams. It’s powerful.

Bonni [00:30:09] I’m using it with my T.A. too by the way. And so I’ve used an integration with an online project management system called Asana because with my team I want to see when she does stuff and so we set up I mean and she adapted to it so quickly she is on board.

Bonni [00:30:24] So in Asana I said hey can you put in there when ever these students are going to be uploading things so you can get that all taken care of and it’s nice.

Bonni [00:30:32] I can kind of know where she’s at and she can communicate with me.

Dave [00:30:36] While your recommendation is cross platform mind is not to and I know we have a lot of Mac fans in the in the audience here so forgive me if you’re a PC fan but the the two recommendations I have.

Dave [00:30:47] I think one of them we’ve mentioned before Bonni and one of them we haven’t. Want and this is all. It kind of in the realm of how to make things simpler and maybe not have as many slides necessarily. One recommendation is an app that’s on the Mac App Store called tapes.

Dave [00:31:02] And what it is a screen cashiering if you install tapes on your desktop on your computer what you can do is you just click a button in your menubar you can do up to a 3 minute screencast and as soon as you’re done with it.

Dave [00:31:13] Which records are audio and everything you’re doing on your screen. And as soon as you’re done with it it automatically uploads the video to their service copies and it copies the link to your clipboard so you can just paste it right into an email.

Dave [00:31:24] So if you need to show someone like how to do a logon or something quick on a computer. It’s really great for that stuff. There is a limit of how many minutes you can use a month but I know you’ve hit it before Bonne I have not. So it’s a great service and system for that.

Bonni [00:31:37] And then the other option which is far more powerful if you’re doing screencast if you’re wanting to do something that’s off outside of the classroom is a product called screen flow.

Bonni [00:31:46] They’ve just had a new version come out screen flow 5 that’s also on the Mac App Store it is the the gold standard as far as being able to capture things going on on your computer if you have a Mac and doing audio and screen casting and those are and you can export lots of different ways to upload it to your LMS or social media or whatever you’re utilizing in order to interact with students so those two good recommendations as far as getting screencast to work for you if that’s part of your job your syllabus and classroom strategy.

Bonni [00:32:17] There was an article which I can’t remember if it was the Chronicle or Stanford’s faculty development but I’ll find it and I’ll post a link to this in the show notes about the effectiveness of verbal feedback or some kind of more than the red pen. I remember that and the title.

Bonni [00:32:31] So I’ll find it and send it out. But if are not a Mac user snag it. You can do a quick video capture just like Dave described for tapes or a screenplay. It’s the same exact thing where you can see what’s happening on your screen. You could be giving the students a feedback. I do this through a rubric I talk through a rubric using negat it’s negative multi-platform and then they have a button. Now one click and you can save it to Google Drive and that’s a nice option because I kept heading the limit on so I’m kind of done with tapes.

Dave [00:33:02] I didn’t know that. I didn’t snag it was close cross platform I use it all the time for like editing videos and resizing or editing photos and resizing graphics and all that stuff. It’s a fabulous program for that kind of stuff.

Bonni [00:33:12] You don’t know what you’re missing to because actually the windows people have a lot more features than we have. So we have to wait to catch up with them. But it’s a wonderful product. Tech Smith has been good to me for more than a decade. Excellent excellent company and they develop excellent products.

Bonni [00:33:29] Dave I want to end the episode before thanking you for being on another episode of Teaching in Higher Ed.

Dave [00:33:36] Always a pleasure. Thanks.

Bonni [00:33:37] And would you tell people how they could give us feedback on this episode.

Dave [00:33:41] Yeah so we go to teachinginhighered.com/33. This episode number 33.

Bonni [00:33:48] If you have feedback for the show in general. That’s at teachinginhighered.com/feedback and always if you haven’t. Subscribe to the weekly update. It’s one article on teaching and productivity and the show notes from the podcast that could be in your inbox once a week. By subscribing to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next time.

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