Rewired Learning Blog

Using slideshare and student projects...again

With finals in December it has been quite a time since I updated the site. Back in the swing after a week it is time to start taking some time to look at tasks again to update them out of archaic manners to a more computer friendly sphere.

Last week my AP Psychology students were asked to create 6 slides on PowerPoint. Three were to be how they view their gender role and 3 were to be how they view the roles of the opposing gender. I asked them to email me their slides and I will compile them. I did one of my periods so far and it can be viewed at bit.ly/6qIm34. Then I used that period's slides and shoed them to all my other AP Psych classes as a reflection on how a sample of their peers viewed gender roles. They were pretty solid talking points and I would have to say that I had a much higher than average interest level in the classroom. Here is the easy way to do this task as a teacher:

1) Have them email their PowerPoint presentations.

2) Save all their attachments into one folder on  your hard drive.

3) Open PowerPoint, and use the merge presentation feature to combine all thier slides.

4) Using Adobe Acrobat (the one where you can create your own PDF's) or the newest version of Microsoft PowerPoint, change the presentation to a PDF file.

5) After you created a slideshare account, upload your file and present it to the class via projector, individually in a lab or as homework and have an assignment with it.

Now you can stop at step 3 and just present to your class, but the purpose of using slideshare is to introduce your student to the interactive web. Additionally slideshare enables others to view your presentations, publically or privately

 

 

A first step towards social media in the High School classroom (Part 2)

The slides presented to me were excellent. Some students really gave a great effort and a very few gave simple, dull back grounds with one picture, but all got the concept. I'm glad about that, they all got the concept of not being boring. What does this show me? It shows that if they cannot be boring about material, whay should a teacher?

In the future you will see a blog about teachers needing time to create, but what is creation if it is just "planning". I have labeled this blog "Rewired Learning" because not only does teaching need to rewire its ideas, students are literally rewired away from a tv to the internet. While we are trying to keep up with the internet, they are getting into certain levels of social media. Boring has changed. It is easier to be bored, like it or not.Now, every instance you see, has to be not boring. Every Powerpoint slide has to be different. Marketing presentations know this, educators need to know this now. Your 2005 presentations that you love are old and dusty. I have to take the time to redo all of mine.

Where are my students presenations going? They are going to be a review for the midterm in december. Each class will see the montage of the classmates in their period. I feel that they will get great interest out of this and lean the material even better, especially as a review. When I have a full classes slides compiled, I will post them to slideshare and post the link.

A first step towards social media in the High School classroom (Part 1)

Today, thanks to slideshare.com, I took a first step towards using a social media outlet in the classroom. My assignment can be found at www.bit.ly/4l48iu but briefly it is having students make Powerpoints that are much better than the average one we see in the classroom. They viewed an example presentation about social media (which served the dual purpose of presenting the material to them as well as looking at a good presentation) and then my presentation, shown in my blog below, about creating good Powerpoints. They are working on only 6 slides using 2-3 vocabulary words from the AP Psychology chapter we are studying but first results are great. They cant just copy information and spit it out on screen, they have to think about the term and convert it into something pictoral as well as written. The examples I have seen today are very good with interesting and proper graphics. Thinking about how to translate text into a different medium presents a different type of cognition which will hopefully sink into their minds.

At the end of this project I will gather all their slides and compile it into one powerpoint/slideshare presentation for each class. Kind of a class collaboration but not quite, hence the "first step" mentioned above. In the future I might have them all post their PPT's and have others comment on them. When I have the collaboration placed into one presentation I'll list the site here. I have good expectations of work coming out of this project.

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.

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.

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.