So, have you noticed that your students are tuning out during your lessons? Are they constantly going to their devices in order to ‘stay’ engaged? Do you think that meeting students in their space would make the lessons more engaging? more authentic? or even more real for students?
Touchcast may be a new tool that may enable you to engage students with some of your own lessons, but also may provide a great tool for students to demonstrate their learning.
I have to admit, work primarily with Apple Products (I have a MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone) and was somewhat disappointed to see that there was no Desktop App for a Mac, as I find that I do most of my creation on my laptop. I am still trying to get used to creating on an iPad. Not only am I having to wrap my head around the complexities of Video Apps (Vapps), I am also having to learn how to create on the iPad. Nonetheless, I signed up for my free account today, just to try this tool out.
After spending a few minutes getting my account set up on the iPad, and then exploring my channel on the computer, I thought that I would be able to easily go about and just get started making something, just to experiment and explore. However, I quickly found that this tool is perhaps a little more complex than I originally thought. So, I stopped, thought about whether this would be worth my time to play around with for a while, and then found that Touchcast offers training manuals and suggestions for integrating touch casts into the classroom.
I guess sometimes you just need to go slow, in order to go fast!
Over the next couple of weeks I am going to try and learn this app, and will write about what I learn, as well as what I think about this tool. It is definitely not as intuitive as Nearpod, but at the same time, I think it is going to me so much more powerful! It’s just going to take time to figure it all out!
We have all sat through a bad Powerpoint Presentation – you know the ones…. you sit there as the lights dim and the title slide is visually hideous. All you can think about is How long is this going to take? When will it be over? Am I actually going to learn something? Having students present their learning to the class can be a very important part of the learning process as it requires students to have an in-depth knowledge of the content that they are presenting – it needs to be deep enough and thorough enough in order for them to effectively communicate their learning. And often I find that students will know their stuff, but they don’t know how to communicate it. It is a difficult skill. Thinking back to my early days as a teacher, I think I can easily admit to the same short coming – I knew what to teach, but I didn’t necessarily know how to teach it well.
The challenge with presentation aids such as Microsoft Power Point, Keynote, Prezi or even the presentation tool embedded in Google Drive is that there is little learning that goes into actually how to use them effectively. A few basic guidelines that I give my students for creating presentation tools include:
Use a simple, clean effective theme.
Where possible, use a good photograph or illustration that helps to reinforce your point. In art class, the image should be first and foremost on the screen.
Use the presenters notes as much as possible! I know students get nervous presenting in front of their peers. It is naturally. This is where you need to write down what you want to say.
If you need to have text on screen, write in short concise jot notes. Really there should be as few points on the screen as possible. What you write should be a key idea and you should be expanding on those ideas from what you are saying.
Use the templates that are provided – they mostly apply the principles of design – Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity!
These tools are to be visual aids for the presentation. They should help direct the presentation or seminar, and not ‘be’ the presentation. I try to reinforce in my students that what they have to say should be more important than what is on the screen. The visual is a touch point, a way to help the audience organize their notes and their understanding of the topic that they are presenting.
Last year I was introduced to a new presentation tool called Nearpod. It is a presentation tool that is unlike any of the others that I previously listed because it is fundamentally different. All of the other presentation tools assume that the audience is primarily passive – they sit, the listen, they write their own notes (hopefully). Nearpod turns the traditional presentation into an interactive experience by taking your presentation that is created in one of the traditional tools, uploaded to the Internet and then enhanced using their on-line interface (i.e. students can respond to questions as multiple choice, free writing, drawing, etc.). The best part is, when students are using a Nearpod Presentation you can complete checks for understanding in real time. As the instructor, the student responses are fed back to you and you can see their answers – who has completed it, what percentage of the class got the answer correct, who answered the question correctly, who had an exemplary answer or an answer that could spark conversation and debate. Student answers can also be pushed back to the class so that everyone can see an anonymous response.
The best part about the way that Nearpod has set up the platform is that it takes very little work to convert your old presentations into interactive presentations. The hardest step in the process is figuring out where you want to check for understanding, and how you want to check it.
Planning has always been a part of teaching. Not only is it necessary to figure out what to teach and how to teach it, but it is also important to be thinking about when you are teaching it. Planning and structuring the delivery of a curriculum is an art form in itself, requiring imagination, creativity and innovation. After all, we want the best for our students and from our students. Delivering a program that consistently builds upon prior knowledge and refines skills over the course of a semester will ultimately allow students to demonstrate their fullest potential.
The curriculum documents that guide our program planning in Ontario are detailed in their scope (i.e. we are asked to teach the creative process, the vocabulary and terminology of art, the critical analysis, art and society, art careers and community connections, etc.) through the overall and specific expectations. But once a semester gets rolling, and you are teaching multiple classes with similar but slightly different learning goals, keeping track of what you are teaching when becomes increasingly more challenging.
Now, planboardapp.com is making the whole process of planning each day, week and month a much more fluid process in which teachers can easily track their coverage of the curricular expectations. At the same time, it is important to remember that the curriculum expectations are a guide as to what to teach, and we are to address all expectations through instruction, but only are required to evaluate the overall expectations in Ontario.
planboardapp.com is a free service, which makes it highly attractive for me. As well, it is available on a variety of platforms. You can access this digital daybook on your desktop by logging into the website, or you can use the app on your iPad (visit iTunes). Once you have your account, you can customize your timetable so that the app recognizes what classes you are teaching on any given day (e.g. Monday I teach AVI2O0, AVI4M0 and AVI3M0 and Tuseday I teach AVI4M0, AVI3M0 and AVI2O0), and you can even search the on-line database of “standards” to link to a specific course. While planning you can actually identify what curricular expectations you are addressing on a given day. As you progress through the course, the software keeps track of what expectations are covered and how many times you have addressed each expectations.
The added benefit of using planboardapp.com is that we all know that our best laid plans are forgotten. School is a highly energetic, busy and ever changing landscape. We need to expect the unexpected, which means that we are constantly needing to revise our plans, and shuffle dates. Planboard has a simple and intuitive ay of copying / moving a plan from one day to the next, making it east for adjusting your plans on the fly.
planboardapp.com also has a useful feature for our own unexpected absences. There is a share function, like any good social media site, that allows you to export your day’s lesson as a PDF, email it to a colleague, or even embed it into a web page.
For a free app, Planboard has got it right. It is a very simple and intuitive tool to use, and has made my planning a much more fluid process. I would highly recommend it as another tool to use to make your day in the classroom just a little bit easier! The only limitation that I have found is that you have to have an internet connection in order to use the app!
Over the March Break my wife and I wanted to go to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto with our two kids who are now 7 and 5. Admittedly, it has been way to long since either my wife or I have been able to get down to the AGO to take in an exhibit. This trip was not to see anything specific – it was literally an opportunity to get an art f’ix. Both my children love making art – and they should because we are both art teachers (my wife teaches K-5 and I teach high school) – and have started their first acrylic painting, so seeing some art would be a great way to inspire them. And we all know that looking at photos in a textbook is never the same as seeing the actual painting itself. There is something about seeing the texture of the paint on the canvas that influences and stimulates our creativity us so much more.
Before heading down town last Sunday morning my wife was browsing the AGO website to see what was going on, and came across an app to guide ourselves through the AGO called Time Tressures (see the AGO web page for this app to get more details). Essentially the premise behind the app is that you are to assist two you biology students vanquish their evil biology teacher by going on a treasure hunt throughout the AGO permanent collection. The app is $2.99 on iTunes or Google Play and is a pretty good by for any parent and perhaps an elementary school teacher who wants to get their students into the gallery on a fairly limited budget (provided they have an iPhone or Android phone for their parent volunteers). For the three dollars four different treasure hunts are included based on various themes (e.g. war and weapons) that take you through different gallery spaces within the building. Each hunt has six specific objects that you need to find using clues and directions. For example, you need to find artworks and artefacts in order to find your way to a specific room, and then other artworks are used to guide you to the treasure. Once you have found the specific treasure you must verify with the app that you have found the right object or image by completing a timed ‘test’. Some are multiple choice questions about the object that are traditional text based, while others require you to compare the silhouette on your phone to the pose and gesture of a figure, while others require you to use your phone’s camera function to ‘scan’ a painting and select figures that have infiltrated the painting (on behalf of the evil biology teacher Ms Bugly).
We were at the gallery for well over two and a half hours and were only able to complete three of the four different treasure hunts because my children became so enthralled at looking and learning about different artworks that were highlighted in the app. But because the app had them looking closely at the artworks, there were many different pieces that were not included in the game that my children started to ask questions about. Overall, this was a good buy, and for us will help us get back to the AGO sooner rather than later. I just hope that perhaps the AGO would be willing to create similar apps to continue reaching out and getting young children into the gallery on a regular basis!
Stelarc is an interesting artist that I came across several years ago while investigating new media and ‘what it is’. His work incorporates robotics within an artistic context to comment on the blurring of the human and the machine. He sees human beings as slowly integrating and fusing with the machine, and creates pieces that explore this potential.
The “Exoskeleton” created by Stelarc is in contrast to the animals created by Theo Jansen (see the post for Oct. 18, 2011). While Theo Jansen creates similarily complex and visually rigid ‘animals’ the difference between his work and that of Stelarc is the fluidity of movement. The “Exoskeleton” is a large pneumatic machine that lumbers across a stage while Jansen’s animals appear to glide over the beach. Jansen’s animals are autonomous, while the human future of Stelarc is captured and confined.
It is amazing how works that share such a visual affinity can speak of such different visions of our world. What is it about each artist’s work that takes the meaning in entirely contrary directions?
I have no reason to doubt Sir Ken Robinson’s statement that education goes deep into a person. However, I would stipulate that there is a possibility that education can penetrate depending on a variety of circumstances: student interest, student talent, what is available for students to learn (within the public education system) and perhaps most importantly how the classroom teacher decides to organize and implement curriculum. Fundamentally I believe that we are at a cross-roads in education in which the paradigm for what is expected from us as teachers is changing. In the Peel District School Board, our Director of Education Tony Pontes has made announcement that students are advised to “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device), and has made a substantial financial commitment to honour a new role for technology in the classroom. I consider myself a progressive teacher and am willing to try a variety of pedagogical strategies, and I welcome this innovative approach. However, at this time I see two problems: first is an equity issue and the second is pedagogical.
First, we live in a society in which there are people living within different financial means. Some students have tremendous access to technology while others do not. In my grade 9 art class I have a student bringing in an iPad2, approximately 60 percent of students have smart phones, and the remaining students do not have any interactive technology. By promoting students to “BYOD” there is concern that we are going to create a 2 tier system within the classroom between those students who have the technology and those who do not. I can only hope that with the promised funding that there will be some monies set aside to provide classroom technologies to supplement what is owned by the students.
Secondly, my second point is that millions of dollars is being invested in the technology infrastructure without training of teachers. If students are invited to have access to this technology, we as teachers need the capacity and knowledge of how to stimulate real learning by using this technology in effective ways. The number one complaint that I have heard about the personal technology in the classroom is that it is going to be distracting for students, to which my reply is simply this: The only reason that it is going to be a distraction is because we as teachers need to design our lessons in such a way to engage students in learning with the technology. As I have already stated in one of my earlier posts, this is a learning process for teachers just as much as it is for students. We need to have the resources in order to pull it off. Marc Prensky’s vision of a partnering pedagogy is just one example of how technology can be successfully implemented, but it takes practice.
Sir Ken Robinson clearly states that education takes us into a future that we don’t know. Therefore how do we educate for the future? This is a very difficult question to answer, especially in light of the Youtube sensation video “Did You Know?”
The world is a rapidly changing place, and if we don’t change how we teach, what we teach is going to be quickly irrelevant. Prensky has stated that many students learn more outside of school than they do inside. In order to genuinely assist students in their learning, we need to recognize that education is no longer the gatekeeper of knowledge, but rather the facilitation of learning. We are not teaching subjects, we are teaching students. We are no longer teaching content, we need to be teaching transferable skills and ways of thinking. To prepare students for the future we need to be changing teaching practice and look at transforming the systems that we have in place. We need to create a space for students in invigorate their capacity for innovation and provide a safe space for students to explore both their passions and their talents, and restructure the hierarchy’s that exist within the school so that talents are not squandered. Perhaps this is the greatest challenge that we face: there is a prestige that is associated with a particular knowledge set that does not necessarily support the talents that students have nor the diversity of talents that society requires to grow and to be healthy.
What talent is it that we are looking for in order to gauge the health of our communities? We currently esteem literacy and numeracy as fundamental skills, which we should as they are very important in todays world. However, literacy and numeracy without context is useless. This is what the arts brings to a variety of skills. The arts can provide purpose and a new way of expressing our ideas. Creative thinking requires not only an individualized approach to looking at the world, but also a wide range of skills for analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing knowledge and experience in meaningful ways. A creative thinker needs to be able to read (a variety of texts) and to be able to manipulate numbers, just as much as a literate person needs to be able to think creatively with the text forms that they are using and a numerate person is able to sift through the numbers to see them from a variety of different angles. In order for students to be able “to do meaningful stuff” with the words that they read and the numbers that they write, they need to be willing to take chances and allowing themselves to be ‘wrong’. They need to see that being ‘wrong’ is not bad, nor a punishable offence, but rather an opportunity to gain new insight into their own learning and their own knowledge. Not every experience the students has needs to fit within the schema’s that they have developed. Accommodating existing schemas with new experiences allows the seeds for innovation to grow and new ways of looking at the world. If every experience is assimilated we would only ever be able to form generalized understandings that conform to our current world view.
In many ways, the education system itself is set on the premise of having students ‘fit the pieces together’ in their educational years. Through strict scaffolding we encourage our students to assimilate the knowledge and information that is presented to them. In so doing we are educating students out of their creative capacity and are not recognizing the dynamic and interactive dimensions of intelligence. When we start challenging what students know and don’t know, then we are inviting students to form new ideas, ask new questions and to try and find new answers. Creativity is at the centre of success in the 21st century and we need to find ways to foster its growth.
Before heading down town last Sunday morning my wife was browsing the 
Brian Leichnitz 