Rewired Learning Blog

Making PowerPoint more effective

    Thinking about what I have mentioned concerning the use of powerpoints, I have created one about making them better, and shared it on SlideShare as well. The seven tips, as you can page through below, are fairly straighforward and to the point. It does mean more work, but the result is a more attentive audience and with more attention comes more retention of the material.

Making Excellent PowerPoints

View more presentations from Chris Jocham.

What prevents businesses from excelling, prevents education from excelling

    I’m going to steal something directly from one of my friends here. His name is Rohit Bhargava and is somewhat of a marketing/social media guru, who has written a book on his profession and is hired to speak with company executives about making their company have a personality. His ideas, along with research and readings about how the body and mind learn made me start this blog. I was shocked to see how similar certain elements of marketing/selling are similar to teaching. He mentions 4 items that can keep a company paralyzed and they are the same ones that paralyze educators:

1)   Success – “What we’re doing is already working”

No class has ever all scored a 100% on everything for the duration of a semester. There is always room for greater success

2)   Uncertainty – “We don’t know what will happen”

Creating new activities that are based on old frameworks still means that we have a predictable outcome but the “dressing” might be different. If you change the text on a PowerPoint from one year to the next, you are changing information but you know how the students will react.

3)   Tradition – “We have always done it this way”

This is possibly the most dangerous for education. Technology and science are revealing new things about learning and new learning techniques but forgoing them for what you used in the past makes you a non-adaptive and non-reflective teacher.

4)   Precedent – “No one else is doing it that way”

This is possibly the most paralyzing of these four. If you don’t risk getting ahead, you will never be in the lead. If you are in the lead and don’t take risks, others will pass you.

    All new lesson plans (and some old) should go through this checklist. Everything does not need to be the most innovative and a plan that is the opposite of these four items might not always be effective either since some lessons endure because they work. This past week I had my students get into groups and write down 50 facts from two American History chapters and create one lie. They were going to exchange their 51 slips of paper with another group to see how fast the other group can find the facts and detect the lie. If I go through the list above I uncover the following:

 

1)   Success – This is my first time teaching US History so I am not quite sure what success will be for me in this course

2)   Uncertainty – I had no clue what would happen and found out most of it blew up in my face because people copied numbers wrong or some other small game changing mistake was made.

3)   Tradition – It was a game for points on an exam which is a traditional manner of playing games in the classroom setting

4)   Precedent -  I have never heard of this game and after asking a few people no one definitely heard of it either

I’m happy with my lesson, even though it blew up a bit, because I saw students interested and trying to fix the problem. I’m going to add a fifth element for education:

 

5)   Confusion – “It is really complicated and there are too many things involved”

If the task is done properly, even if there is a period of understanding, because of the need to familiarize others with the material, they will get to interact and know the material better.

We all became a little confused with which one was a lie, but we discussed the lies and the facts they wrote. Quite a few in class won’t forget that the president following Jacksons second term was Martin Van Buren, and I cant think of a better way to get them to remember it than being unsure about it and figuring it out.

Stress removal and learning: Learning better by not feeling helpless

I have my homepage set to CNN and often go through some of the headline stories to get a gist of what is currently happening in the world. Maybe not the most important events out there, but at least some recent events are reported. Today, sadly, under the “What if” section was a story on dogs helping kids learn. The dog will sit there and just listen as a child reads to them:

 “The philosophy is simple. Children who are just learning to read often feel judged or intimidated by classmates and adults. But reading to a dog isn't so scary. It won't judge, it won't get impatient, it won't laugh or correct if the child makes a mistake. In a nutshell, dogs are simply excellent listeners. And for shy kids or slow readers, that can make all the difference.”

The child has the “power” of teaching the dog and telling them a story. This provides two things to the child; an environment with little outside stress, and they get to be the teacher who knows the most in the relationship. I recalled a book I recently read, Brain Rules, by John Medina, about the brain and its learning processes. I actually ordered this book for my AP Psychology class because it highlighted many principles we learn about through the course. There is a chapter about stress and learning. One specific part defined stress as being helpless, or having a loss of power. The group using dogs to assist in reading conquered these aspects by eliminating the judgment of others (Stress) and allowing them to have control.

This stress of not knowing does not disappear through time. If you are with a group of people that are all talking about football and you have no interest or knowledge of football, do you chime in? No, since you know you cannot add anything to the conversation or at the worst you will say something that will be wrong and be “admonished”.

One school technique is to put people of differing abilities in groups and let them work on a project or activity. What if you are the student that knows or comprehends the least of the group is with high achievers? It is the same thing as the football example above. Even if it is all brand new material, we know that some kids are always the “smart ones” and the intimidation and judgment is still an issue. The teacher has to use specific techniques to solve this or this method is actually furthering the stress and frustration of the slower learner.

What I would like to do, but I have yet to figure out excatally how, is to eliminate all the grades of some students half way through a semester. The ones who cannot do the material will still fail, but there are certain students that give up at that point because they realize that they cannot improve and the stress is one of learned helplessness. Unfortunately there are issues of fairness to other students and the student who worked hard all semester earns the same grade as one who had half their grade eliminated. Those issues are unfortunate since school is for learning and if one learned better with that second chance, teachers would actually be doing their job better by promoting learning not grades.

Implementation of the digital age in the classroom is haphazard

  

  "We're experiencing a revolution in education like the one we went through in the 1800s when we went from an education system based on apprenticeship to one based on universal schooling...We're not saying schools are going away. It's just that the people who are using technology for learning are really doing it outside of school. Just as in the 1800s -- when the industrial revolution was starting in America -- this again is a time of flux because of the digital revolution." -Allan Collins

I ran across this quote the other day and had to include it here because of its pertinence to the gap between technology and current learning systems. We have Web 2.0 (the movement from static web pages to interactive ones where conversations can happen) now we need to start with a comprehensive Learning 2.0. We see it coming, it is not taking us by surprise, but we are reacting to it like a car headed towards us at 2 miles an hour. "Oh no! We are going to get run over very slowly, eventually"

Going to college in the early 1990s, few students had computers, computer labs were good but, especially to today’s standards, not powerful and almost no one had cell phones. Fifteen or so years later PC's are everywhere and cell phones and smart phones are nearly ubiquitous, even at high school levels. While computers have been placed in the classrooms, cell phones have been expelled. The digital revolution that is here is limited in many educational facilities. I feel it is because we don’t know how to use it. PowerPoint is easy and can be learned and used just like over head notes, there is no real advancement (ooh a picture). Collins would possibly describe this level of technological development in the classroom as “willy-nilly”

  We need to find a way to use the new materials and not expel them from classrooms. PowerPoint for notes is not advancement. Twittering students questions to be answered on line, or having the first 10 that twitter the response back get an extra point or two might be valid (interval reinforcement, instead of cramming knowledge into someone over 55 minutes and hope they read the book). It seems that the digital revolution is getting lost in education not because of the access to technology, but the need to teach the teachers (and administrations) methods of implementation for these new technologies (e.g. Facebook, blogging, Twitter).

Emotion and learning fit together perfectly

Yesterday I attended a meeting with other U.S. history teachers from my county. We are part of a federal grant that was initiated to increase the level of knowledge and the styles of teaching U.S. history is presented in our high schools. Our speaker is a professor at Georgia State University and his presentation focused on the constitution and citizenship. Admittedly I was interested in the topic, but I became more and more drawn in to the presentation. I looked at our speaker and I realized why, he loved his topic…or he was a good actor. His eyes widened and subsided, brows arched and furrowed and every non-monotone sentence was accompanied with a positive, engaging demeanor. He did not want to share something with you; he wanted to share something great, or at the least interesting, with you.

    I’m going to point out many times in this blog that new media is one of the ways to go in high school and college education, but the other point of this blog is the personality and biological part of learning. The brain learns better under certain circumstances and one of those is an elevated level of emotion. We remember great vacations and we remember extreme hardships because we link them with extremes of emotion. An average day does not have many extremes of emotion (which is probably good because some of them would have to be bad) so when we hit something that triggers this, we tend to remember the event.

    Recently I’ve read many ideas on how to bring social media to the high school and college classroom and there are some ideas I am trying to develop to use in a public high school setting. This will not mitigate the need to bring forth some emotion in my students. “Wow, cool!” is an emotion and challenges for that are all around. I have yet to see the “Wow, cool!” for learning the Articles of Confederation (what existed right before the U.S. Constitution). I would love to see it. If I could “Wow, cool!” at least once in every class, that means I have their full attention about five minutes before and five minutes after the WC event. A PowerPoint with just words and a speaker talking about them plaintively presents no WC moment, and your chance is gone. Many advertisers know this but not many teachers.

Climate change with reduction of paper via mobile communication

Today is blog action day, where bloggers go and all try to talk about one subject. This year it is climate change. This reaches in easily with my goals at this site: to use social media and moble communications to enhance education.

Why cant I test remotely? Why cant I twitter quiz? A facebook quiz posted at 6pm and you have until 10pm to respond? I know there are security and proper assessment obstacles to overcome but beyond those it could benefit all. Tesitng in a less stress environment, testing in a certain window not on command and testing with immediate results...and of course, no paper.

I dont have all the answers on these matters, actually, I have most of the questions. Yet when we see students using their most frequent means of communication and their most beloved devices as items of assessment, reams of paper will not be the only thing saved.

What makes your heart race? Coke, Pepsi or the War of 1812

    Boring is bad. Marketers have known this for years. If it wasn’t, then every TV commercial would just be a picture of a product with someone telling you about the product in the background. Unfortunately that is what most PowerPoint presentations do in the classroom.

 

    Soaring mountains, white water rafting, fast cars and the ever present sultry female, inspire some type of emotion that we can link to a product. They get us excited in some way. I can’t, easily, justify placing a bikini model in my PowerPoint for my classes to stimulate emotion, but I can use other things. Delta waves are large and slow brainwaves. In my PowerPoint, before I mentioned them I showed a picture of a Delta luggage terminal, Delta Burke and an actual geographical delta. All of which are large and slow (apologies to Mrs.Burke and Delta airlines but the purpose of emotion and laughter was achieved). Compare that to the plain description and a picture of a brain wave. This is much more exciting and apt to be remembered.

    Brian Steinberg wrote an article for the Boston Globe concerning the new research of body reactions in tandem with advertising:

“Advertisers really want to see you sweat. Or smile. Or bat an eyelash. Or anything, it seems, that might demonstrate a new commercial or program has enough of an effect on you to prompt a physical reaction”

If you smile at the presentation of a product, you might want to buy it. If you smile at the presentation of a fact or concept, you should be more able to remember it. Do you remember the day, date or place you first learned of the Civil War? Do remember the day your whole class laughed at something. We remember the exciting and not the mundane. Work is currently underway to measure emotions and physical reactions during commercials. If we can take that same research and “borrow” it for education, we might get some interesting results.

Social networking vs. age and socio-economic status

 

    It is easy to say every one today is “connected”. Yea there are many communities that do not have near the average income of the United States that might be at a disadvantage of being wired to the world, but they are diminishing. An old John Stossel report had in interview with a person self-labeled as “poor”:

 

Stossel: Do you have a tv?

Man: Yea

Stossel: Do you have a telephone?

Man: Yea

Stossel: Do you have a refrigerator?

Man: Yea

Stossel: Then how are you poor?

Man: Everyone has those things.

 

So our definition of poor has changed and it is quite possible that tomorrows definition will put mobile communications in the list above, if it has not already.

 

Wired is a bad term since it means you have a wire to the internet. Internet searches and bazillions of documents are available and with all that information “wired” seems like an easy term, simple to use. If it is, go to a library and find this: F230.J4 1955.  Many college students, educators and recent college grads know that it is the numbering system for college libraries. Take some one 10 years out of school or never been to college and they will be lost finding that information (Which happens to be Thomas Jefferson’s 2^nd most important work Notes on the State of Virginia. And a library is much smaller than the information found on the internet and has much greater order.

Breeanna Hare wrote an interesting article for cnn.com about the demographics of different social networking sites. While it does not list who has access to what, it does mention the socio-economic levels of their users. Twitter and linkedln has the greatest population of users making over $100,000 a year while MySpace has some of the fewest. She also discusses the migration of MySpace users to Facebook as they get older. Less busy content and a more professional look from Facebook draws an older crowd.

Who has access to what technology is a constant argument in education equality, but when having the access, you cant throw them all in the internet pool and expect them to swim. Pick the social media that targets your demographic the best. For high schools it looks to be MySpace and for college it appears to start heading over to Facebook. In time these might change or have other equally popular ones, but marketing education is not much different then marketing items; if the material is in a format they understand and the client is interested, you got’em.

Twitter: Between High school and social media lies learning

   Whenever we see a teenager with a cell phone we automatically start thinking they are texting/ calling their boy/girlfriend, looking up a song or having a moment where they need to find "an app for that". How wonderful would it be to see 9 seconds of that phone stare comprised of a small piece of info from one of their classes?

Twittering provides students with the ultimate anti-cramming learining place. Nine seconds of looking at a sentence because you are interested in it clobbers the hour of studying beacuse you "have to" even if you love the subject. In many ways, in many classrooms, each class is really a cram session where homework is given in order to reinforce the "cramming".

Where your 6-iron was the holstered medium of choice in the old west, todays survival method is the clamped on smart phone. Even the basic kid has one of these. Why are educators not taking advantage of the most common and most accessable piece of equipment...ever? Fear, learning curve, old material "works" so why change it..? Possibly but we see it as a medium that should be banned and not controlled. Regardless of the policy, we know HS students have them around somewhere in school.

Hundreds of years of learning words and for many, flash cards are the top choice. Why? Portable, fast direct and to the point for the learning needed. That is exactly what twitter can do. A teacher giving a list of words to students to memorize is fine, but what twitter does is emotionally "highlight" the works. Which word is more important of the list? Hard to say sometimes, but if twittered by the teacher, the teacher is taking time to say, this is an important one...that is why I am twittering it.