Time to switch gears. Being a connected educator is great, but I am also a learner, right?  I registered for the ISTE conference in Atlanta in June.  I’m excited!  I’ve been to business and industry related conferences before; they’re always informative and great networking opportunities. This one feels different though.  Perhaps because I’m focusing my professional energy […]

It goes without saying that one of the key forces driving our creation of the K4STEMLAB is the relentless and accelerating pace of technological change. Schools and organizations everywhere struggle to keep up, forced to contemplate expensive and complex infrastructure improvements to give students powerful, accessible learning environments with the resources they need to be creative, collaborative and effective learners. It’s a gargantuan task. We are absolutely thrilled to announce our partnership with Classlink, who will be providing their award-winning Launchpad service to students in the K4STEMLAB at Northfield Community School for the 2012-13 school year! What’s Classlink Launchpad? Check out this quick video overview: You can find other helpful Classlink videos here, here, and here. But what is "The Cloud?" This video from ABC News explains, in layman’s terms: But why does it MATTER, particularly in K-12 schools? The New Media Consortium’s 2012 Horizon Project has this to say about cloud computing: Cloud computing has become the unifying factor among content and applications on the many devices people use in everyday life. Whether connecting at home, work, school, on the road, or in social spaces, nearly everyone who uses the network relies on cloud computing to access their information and applications. The ability to access services and files from any location and on any device offers considerable promise for extending learning beyond the boundaries of the school day. We have yet to talk here on the blog about other cloud-based services K4STEMLAB students will be utilizing - most notably, Google Apps for Education - but one of the reasons we are so excited about Launchpad is that it seamlessly integrates with our existing network infrastructure, giving students the ability to access existing network files, shares and other resources from any Internet-connected device. We live in a blended world. Cloud-based tools like Launchpad will give our students the ability to access and utilize legacy applications like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel while we move closer to becoming a "Google School" just a few short years from now. It’s coming. NCS students will be ready! This post is part of a series about our plans to "reinvent" my K-4 Computer Lab class as a STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology & Math) course starting in September 2012. By "thinking out loud" here I hope to keep stakeholders apprised of our ideas, activities & progress while I gain wisdom and perspective from anyone who cares to join the conversation.  

Just watch the pretty roses…. There’s an article online by Mark Smithers called ‘Is lecture capture the single worst educational technology use in higher education?’  My instinct on reading this was to jump up and down several times screaming ‘YES!’  You can read the article here, by the way. Now, it’s not like me to dismiss anything that is doing the rounds in the learning tech zeitgeist. Keep an open mind but be critical of everything is my motto, so I have embraced the world of MOOCs despite people regularly reporting high attrition rates, have taken on board the fact that the flipped classroom is not quite the new black that everyone was raving about 3 years ago, but is still a useful umbrella term that has some great elements within, and am genuinely surprised that, after all the hype, Google Glass has been dissolved. This despite the fact that Augmented and Virtual Realities are constantly at the top of the ‘new, emerging and life-changing’ technological charts. But lecture capture has always riled me. The thought of filming a 3 hour lecture then slapping it onto a virtual learning system and expecting students to watch this in their own time seems more like a punishment than a good idea. I felt myself falling into a coma halfway through the first Lord of the Rings film…but then again, I’m not a fan of Tolkien. Learning should be at least a little bit active - passively watching a film of a lecturer reading PowerPoint slides on a Friday night when you could be doing something - anything - else is just cruel. And lecturers, by and large, are not natural performers. Nor did they go into the business of lecturing to perform or entrain. As Smithers says: ‘The technology does nothing to engage the student who instead of sitting passively in a lecture theatre checking their text messages will now sit passively in front of a screen at home checking their text messages.’ Furthermore: ‘Traditional lectures aren’t designed for online delivery. They’re too long. Their length is designed to fit in with the timetabling constraints of the buildings in which lectures take place not for any pedagogical reason. Why should this physical constraint be allowed to migrate its way into flexible online delivery?’ I also have a sneaking suspicion that staff and institutions feel; the benefit of lecture capture more than their students. By filming your 3 hour diatribe on connecting muscles in the lower leg once, you never have to repeat the lecture again! Just point students towards the film and bingo! Plus - you’ve ticked the all-important ‘I have met the needs of students in the 21st century by taking this online approach’ box. Hurray for you! That’s not to say that lecture capture is all bad - as I said earlier, I do try to keep an open mind and think critically, and the chance to watch a lecture in your own time that you maybe couldn’t attend at the time of filming is very convenient, as is the option to pause, rewind and re-watch sections that may need to be repeated for consolidation. And yes-in times of increased workloads and larger class sizes, lecturers need the time freed up by not needing to repeat ‘live’ lectures. In fact, they need any free time they can grab. But I do remember the first instance of a recorded lecture I saw, and it still makes me cringe. The lecture theatre had a built-in lecture capture system which could be switched on and off by the lecturer by simply pressing a button positioned conveniently upon the lectern. When the lecture was over, the film would be automatically sent to IT Services, where they would process it and send it to the lecturer as a film file compatible with the VLE. So far so good. I took a look at the film in question and was totally amazed. The camera used was static and trained at the lectern (which had a lovely bowl of roses perched on top. This is pretty much all I remember about the film). The lecturer introduced herself and the title of the lecture then immediately stepped away from the podium and towards the large screen displaying her accompanying PowerPoint presentation. The camera, being static, did not follow her. What ensued was a 3 hour film of an empty lectern and a bowl of flowers, and the disembodied and barely-audible sound of a lecturer who had stepped away from both the lectern and microphone. What a gripping learning experience it was… So, with this in mind, I invite you to read this: my second paper for the INTED2015 conference, looking at how I have developed a ‘bite-sized’ and more interactive framework for lecture capture. You can find it here.

In the few moments since I posted my rant about a recently posted article by a leading higher education newspaper publisher, I received a note from a colleague suggesting that perhaps it might not be such a good idea to...

I’ve made a few decisions in my career that have been controversial in my circle of academical aware people.  After all, years ago, I made the conscious choice to be a scientist, knowing being a woman in science would be hard.  I also knew being black would add to the mix, and its been very […]

It’s been a while since my last update. Sorry about that. We had some rough weather a while back and had not power for several days. The area is mostly back to normal now, though evidence of the destruction remains. Damage estimates for our area are still being formulated, I am betting the number will end up in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Fortunately in our area there was no loss of life. So it’s been a little hard getting back into the swing of things. Meanwhile, the clock ticks on… Before I became a teacher, I worked in the world of Information Technology as a Senior Business Analyst / Project Manager. That means I either designed or managed teams of people who designed information systems, in particular, Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) by Oracle. I was … a software engineer, essentially. One of the many skills I developed in that line of work was requirements analysis, a process that Wikipedia says "encompasses those tasks that go into determining the needs or conditions to meet for a new or altered product, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users." Well, it’s no wonder that software engineering is such a great foundation for a second career in education. Alas, I digress. I never thought I’d be designing information systems for use in my classroom, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. What’s  a Learning Management System (LMS) and why do we need one? LMS’s have been around for a very long time. At its core, an LMS is a database-driven website with information students need for learning. I’ve used LMS’s as a student, I’ve taught with them (for Walden University’s Graduate School of Education and elsewhere), but I’ve never BUILT one of any significance, for more than a small group of people to use. Self-directed learning is going to be big in the STEMLAB. Big, big, BIG. So, too, is the ability for students (in grades 2-3-4) to access learning material anytime, anywhere, and, if all goes well, on any device. Our LMS doesn’t have to be elaborate. But what does it NEED to help our students learn? Basically, to create the system, we need a list of features / functionality / capabilities. It’s one of my goals this week from last week. Using our LMS, students need to: Understand the goal - what they are being asked to learn, do, accomplish in a given lesson. Access information related to the task - instructional videos & screencasts, reference websites, interactives, Web 2.0 tools, etc. Interact with me and with each other. Store notes, digital images, perhaps movies, and other web content. Turn in "assignments" (or share links to artifacts stored online). Earn "badges" as they acquire (and can demonstrate proficiency in) core skills, particularly those related to the assigned task. And, they need to be able to do this on their own, at school, or at home. The Importance of Literacy and a Blended Approach Before we go any further with this idea, it’s clear that the biggest struggle we are going to face is literacy. My students are going to need to be able to understand the LMS user interface, process the learning materials, understand how to communicate using the LMS. I am still searching for examples of elementary classrooms where these kinds of systems have been deployed.  Have I lost my mind? We’ll see… That said, it’s clear to me that the LMS I build must to be part of a blended learning solution that combines teacher-led instruction and printed materials as well. This graphic, which as far as I’ve been able to determine (thanks, Jackie Gerstein!) was first used at http://www.testbagacademy.com/, summarizes it nicely: image credit: http://www.testbagacademy.com/ Possible LMS Platforms Right now, the clear front-runner is Edmodo, for a variety of reasons including we’re already using it at NCS. It appears to have the feature set we need, excellent support, a dead-simple user interface, integration with Google Apps, and much more. Other platforms I’m looking at include Haiku LMS, Moodle, WordPress with the Buddypress Plugin, and any others that are FREE and EASY TO USE. Which brings me back to the requirements. If the system isn’t easy to use, nothing else is going to matter. Time to start moving on to the design phase… This post is part of a series about our plans to "reinvent" my K-4 Computer Lab class as a STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology & Math) course starting in September 2012. By "thinking out loud" here I hope to keep stakeholders apprised of our ideas, activities & progress while I gain wisdom and perspective from anyone who cares to join the conversation.

In case you haven’t heard, The eLearning Coach now has a collection of free downloadable storyboard templates for both Word and PowerPoint that were graciously donated by the eLearning community. This is an ongoing effort, so check back if you want them all. If you would like to contribute to this collection, please let me know through the Contact form. Check out the Storyboard Depot. Post from: The eLearning CoachAnnouncing Free Storyboard Templates Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin Share this on Facebook Buzz up! Share this on del.icio.us Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Email this to a friend?

A few weeks ago I provided technical support at a couple of online exams I’d been involved in. Keeping a long and dull story as short as I can, these exams had traditionally taken the form of paper-based tests, which were then marked individually and by hand by the course lecturers. I converted the papers into SCORMs, uploaded them to the university’s VLE, students then logged in, sat the exam, clicked on ‘submit’ and their results were calculated electronically. A nifty quick win - no staff time taken up with marking, no costly bits of ink-covered paper to get lost, students get their results immediately and the school looks a bit more cutting edge. Having just read that paragraph back, I broke my promise to keep a long story short. But hey, we all need a little context. This was the fourth or fifth cohort to work through the exam - and, as always, there were a couple of technical issues - thankfully, not with the exams themselves, but with students forgetting their passwords, etc. And that’s why I was there - to sort out these issues, and to fix anything that DID go wrong. My being there also meant that there was another invigilator in the exam room and everything went swimmingly. Apart from one thing. Another invigilator, on seeing that I had to help a student with an issue logging into the VLE wandered over to me and muttered, rather smugly: ‘Bring back paper exams. They never go wrong.’ I smiled politely, noticing an all too familiar pang of frustration in my belly, and started the arduous task of wandering around the exam room counting down the minutes until the exam was over and I could find coffee. A few minutes later, the same member of staff wandered up to me again. ‘And pens’ she whispered. ‘Bring back pens. Much better than keyboards.’ ‘I love pens.’ I replied. ‘In fact, I have a Waterman fountain pen that I use all of the time.  It’s got a gold-plated nib and everything!’ ‘Bet you don’t’ she retorted, that self-satisfied smile returning to her face. ‘I bet it’s never even seen an ink cartridge. Or a bit of paper.’ After a smattering of similar comments, the exam came to an end, and as I left the exam room to find that elusive coffee, a final comment - delivered at greater volume now that talking was allowed again -rang in my ears. ‘I still say technology is rubbish and we need to bring back paper and pens.’ Now, it has been a few years since the last time I felt verbally attacked by a member of teaching staff for liking technology.  The last time was back in 2009, when I was heavily involved in using Second Life for teaching. A colleague came into my sharted office, sat at a desk next to me and launched into a tirade about how I was setting a dangerous precedent because students with learning difficulties were being forced into using Second Life without understanding all the ‘sex and stuff that goes on there all the time.’ ‘It’s just a virtual knocking shop’ she humphed at me, eyes blazing and body language a bit too ‘in your face’ for my comfort. ‘And you are telling us that we have to use it in our teaching.  How do we assess anything? People like you are a danger to education!’  At this point, I must defend myself by saying that I had introduced Second Life to my colleagues as a possible addition to their teaching toolkit, to be used only if they had the time to learn how it worked and had an activity what would be more affective if delivered in a virtual world. So in 2015, why is this still happening? I would suggest that there are several contributing factors that are all linked, and in being linked, become impossible to disentangle.  Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you The Gordian Knot(s) of Technology Enhanced Learning.  Knot 1. Staff do not have dedicated time within their timetables to learn how to use technology effectively (let alone innovatively) as part of their teaching practice. On top of long hours and a massive workload asking them to, effectively, become fluent (or at least conversational) in a new language in their own time is pretty unreasonable. Knot 2. This has a knock-on effect. When staff use technology they have not had the time to really, properly learn, things often go wrong in the classroom and they feel embarrassed, flustered and vulnerable. Worse than that - they feel as if they have lost some of their ‘power’ over students. Because human nature means that we tend to avoid whatever it is that makes us feel powerless and vulnerable, they then decide to play it safe by not using any technology in the classroom or lecture theatre. Some even go a step further and start seeing technology as ‘a force for evil’. Knot 3. There are also a lot of members of the teaching community that will openly admit to feeling threatened by technology. Only a few days ago I attended a meeting looking at using lecture capture, and a lecturer who had been approached to trial some new software wondered: ‘if you film my lecture and I don’t need to deliver it again…will I have my hours cut?’ Here’s the rub. This has been happening for years, and the problem isn’t going away. Instead, it stands prostrate, like an ostrich with its head in the sand, being studiously ignored and stepped around, while every minute of every day, new technologies come and go, new buzzwords and terms become part of the educational zeitgeist (MOOCs and flipped classrooms anyone?) and our friend Brer Ostrich just stands there, head safely tucked away, sand in his ears, refusing to move until retirement. So what can we do to untangle these knots? Timetable in staff development time rather than expect teaching staff to find the time and motivation to teach themselves? This doesn’t work - for every one person that enthusiastically turns up to learn how to use Prezi, two more will attend but moan loudly about how busy they are, how Prezi just makes them feel seasick and how this time could be used more productively. Two more will not bother to turn up, but instead choose use the time ‘more productively’. Go behaviourist on their asses and offer rewards for attending sessions?  This doesn’t work either. I know a learning technologist who set up some breakfast training sessions.  Come into college an hour earlier than usual, and we’ll teach you how to use Prezi AND give you a bacon roll and a coffee as well!  Over the course of 5 sessions, just 7 people turned up. At this point, I’m tapped out for solutions.  Nothing seems to change, and nothing untangles the knots. I guess the only thing that will work is the march of time: eventually, naysayers will retire and be replaced with young, thrusting teachers who were born with smartphones in their chubby little baby hands.  In the meantime, this middle-aged learning technologist will just have to put up with the frustrations that continue to come with the job. Unless anyone out there has any ideas?

I received an email from Better Lesson today. They’re looking for master teachers in science to begin creating lessons and providing resources that align with the Next Generation Science Standards. (NGSS).  Although I’m not quite qualified for the position, I applied anyway.  Yes, I’m a member of the National Education Association (the sponsoring organization), yes, […]

This morning's blogpost is coming to you from the fountain-filled lobby of the Gaylord Palms Hotel, the site of this year's Blackboard World, Developers' Conference and Institute. Last week's news about Blackboard's intention to acquire web conferencing companies Elluminate and...