Role-playing with Prezi
Although perhaps suspiciously similar in theme to the Fallout series of games (in fact I’d used a screenshot from Fallout 3 for the wasteland graphic), there’s little in common aside from the nuclear holocaust theme. Still, I figured it’ll be a fun activity to get the whole class actively thinking and speaking (arguing, objecting and defending).
I used this activity for my recent lesson observation and although refinements could have been made to link it more tightly to the learning objectives, it was generally well-received from both the observers as well as the students. I was inspired mainly by the concept of using games in lessons – since I don’t have the resources to produce a full educational game right now (and that would probably not have allowed for as much talking), I figured that I could instead augment existing role-play methodology with an ‘introduction sequence’ that might seem like one from a (very low budget) computer game.
A PowerPoint presentation, however, would probably have been able to do this as well. How then did Prezi achieve this better? Here are some reasons that led to my final choice of Prezi.
- Cool transitions. That’s essentially a cheap visual gimmick, but as Godwin once said, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.”
- Infinite canvas. I appreciated being able to lay out the videos and pictures in a space, ideally I would have placed a picture of an underground bunker within the picture of a vast wasteland, and zoomed in on it, but due to time constraints was unable to do so. Still, it is good to be able to position (in two-dimensional space) where the various elements go, hopefully to contribute to the mood of the scenario.
- Web-based. Similar to slide-based presentation alternatives such as Google Docs and Zoho, presentations created on Prezi can be viewed online and even embedded into websites, which I’ve found to be an excellent way of allowing students to revisit the scenario outside of class hours.
As mentioned earlier, the students did take to it rather well, so I’ll say it was probably a success. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with something similar next term!
Department Facebook page?
Slightly more than a month ago, inspired by the idea of engaging students semi-anonymously via Facebook, I decided to try setting up an (unofficial) Facebook page, with the hope of turning it official should it take off. In my mind, the main advantages of using Facebook were that…
- Many students are already on Facebook, and check it rather regularly.
- Publicised events would (by default) show up on (subscribed) students’ news feeds.
- Teachers who participate in maintaining the page should be able to remain anonymous (I think).
A month on, student participation rate has been extremely minimal – although to date it’s managed to gather a whopping 200 followers, the only interaction I’ve had from them is approximately 5 people ‘liking’ certain posts I’d made. Given that I’d hoped for more interaction and discussion, it’s kind of disappointing that the page has been relegated into a mere noticeboard for department-relevant events and competitions (and a weekly read, though I’ve no clue if anyone’s really following those). On the other hand, at least it’s not a total white elephant!
Any thoughts on what I could do to improve the page’s utility? Should I just be satisfied with the current status? Ashley had suggested some (of his students’) ideas in a previous post, but those seem to be more about specific projects than long-term Facebook-based interaction.
‘Open source’ education
Unlike what might be expected from a blog dealing with educational technology, this post isn’t so much about using open-source software in teaching, but instead about my thoughts on the sharing of information between teachers.
It distresses me somewhat when teachers talk about protecting their intellectual property when it comes to teaching materials. It’s probably not all that surprising, given that we exist in a system that rewards based on individual merit – it’s even worse when schools actively encourage teachers to work on their own rather than sharing ideas and resources. I’ve heard that such places are really competitive, cutthroat environments to work in – I’d hate to be working somewhere like that!
Personally, I think that educators can take a leaf from the “share and share alike” philosophy adopted by some open source software designers. If everyone were willing to share their work and to borrow from other existing work, wouldn’t this result in benefiting all parties involved? Students would likely end up with superior materials being used in class. Teachers often seem to be lamenting their lack of free time – won’t the easy availability of quality material help to address that? It’s not like teachers aren’t already adapting material from off the internet, won’t a formalised sharing system help to make that even more efficient?
For a more specific example, I refer to a wiki created by someone in my NIE Physics class who also thought it’d be good to share materials during our training practicum – I ended up sharing my PowerPoint slides on General Wave Properties, and at the same time learnt from a classmate who’d used motion paths in PowerPoint pretty well to demonstrate simple Kinematics concepts. Unfortunately, the site’s since fallen into disuse – possibly because, like myself, a number of them aren’t teaching Physics anymore; though I suspect the more likely reason is that people have become jealous of their intellectual property once more.
I know there are problems with sharing – as alluded to earlier, there’s the problem of proper attribution, of giving credit where it is due. There’s also the risk that with such resources available, people will become lazy and stop creatively contributing to such a pool of teaching resources. Yet another problem would be that the bigger the network of sharers, the more materials there would be – which might not seem like a bad thing, until you realise that you have hundreds of possible lesson plans and it’s impossible to go through all of them to see which ones suit your classes best.
On the other hand, I’m sure that solutions to these problems could be worked out, such as a rating system of some sort to deal with large amounts of material. Also, I might simply be hopelessly naive, but I believe that there are enough serious educators in the industry for such a sharing concept to reap benefits – the skivers would probably not have contributed much on their own anyway, so won’t the improved materials at their disposal just end up benefiting their students? The largest stumbling block right now, I feel, is really the negative attitude towards an open sharing environment.
Things are picking up, though, with more sharing sessions and all, but I still notice many teachers (and schools) holding on to certain ‘prize materials’ as theirs and theirs alone. On my part, I’ll attempt to share my own experiences in implementing technology into my English lessons on this blog. They’re not all success stories (quite a number of failures, in fact), but I think that such failures would still be worth learning from (people would know what to avoid!), and I could stand to learn from others’ suggestions as well, so – why not?
Using Glogster?
I’ve been hearing/reading quite a bit about Glogster lately, especially with the more recent launch of Glogster EDU, an education-optimised version, so I set out to figure out what exactly it was all about.
This is where I tried tapping upon the power of Twitter – I didn’t really have the time to look into it in detail then, so I sent a short tweet out requesting for help, receiving a response a few hours down the road. The site was a little too comprehensive, though, so I ended up curiously resorting to trusty old Wikipedia. Essentially, it’s a multimedia poster creation site.
While exploring further, I’d stumbled upon a certain misterchan’s (a fellow Singaporean, I suspect) Glogster site, and though he’s done attractive posters for his students, I don’t think that’s what I want to be doing with mine – I think it’ll be more useful if they’re the ones who get to create their own content. It seems interesting enough, and I kinda wish I’d known of its existence back when I’d asked my students to create advertisements of their own last term, but at the moment I can’t really think of any other applications for it.
Seems to me it might be more relevant for primary school students or perhaps lower secondary students. Any other opinions?
Teaching and elitism
(Elite Teachers Supply would probably be a rather unfortunate name for a Singaporean company)
Reading the blog post From an elite school really stirred a chord in me. I’ve been recently thinking on a similar issue myself – I am currently teaching in an ‘elite school’, and have had a fairly ‘elite’ educational background all my life. If I were to be posted to a neighbourhood school to teach, would I be able to handle it? Would I be happy there?
It bothers me the amount of criticism the beginning teacher is receiving, since I can see where he is coming from. Teaching at a neighbourhood school and an ‘elite school’ is a different ballgame altogether, with a greater emphasis on classroom control and pastoral care in the former, and a somewhat more academic focus for the latter. I find it quite understandable for a teacher to prefer one over the other, and his statement didn’t seem particularly judgemental to me – “我是XX初院出身的，不能适应这种环境。” I am from XX Junior College, I would not be able to adapt to such an environment (of course, the printed word fails to convey tone, so I can’t judge if he was indeed being condescending with that statement, but that’s probably beyond the scope of this entry).
So I have been thinking about this issue recently, and I think that if I do intend to stay in education for the long-term, a stint in a neighbourhood school will certainly be a good experience for me, at least to better understand what happens at other schools that I am less familiar with. However, I do have reservations about being unable to connect with the students, and being rather frustrated at the nature of teaching I might need to focus on (e.g. pure drilling for the O-levels). Even on the pastoral side of things, would I really be able to offer much for the students? Would I be able to advise them if they are embroiled in gang problems, for example?
Although it would probably be a beneficial learning experience for me, would it be a beneficial learning experience for my students?
If a teacher’s personal interest and aptitude do not tally with his assigned posting, I think perhaps the blogosphere should avoid such harsh judgement when he expresses his preferences. Somehow I suspect if it’d been a non-’elite’ teacher expressing his personal preferences, the responses would have been much less harsh.
Implementing social networking
Yes, educators can’t afford to ignore Web 2.0 anymore. I believe this. I would dearly love to integrate Web 2.0 into my lessons – social networking in particular. But when it comes to actual implementation, I’m stumped.
Why is this the case? I consider myself relatively IT-savvy, and I have been officially trained as a teacher, so it would seem that this shouldn’t be a problem I am facing. Using social networking for education, however, is not a particularly intuitive exercise. If we look at the more popular services like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, we can see that they weren’t really built with the classroom in mind. From observation and experience, the average student seems to use Facebook primarily to share photos, comment about their life, and to play online games – homework isn’t quite in the equation.
I suppose social networking is still useful as an extended form of interaction with/among students, but I would really love to throw some learning into the mix as well. I’m currently looking at using Facebook groups and pages, and am toying with the idea of using Ning, but overall I’m still rather unsure of how to get students interested and involved in such exercises, other than simply making it mandatory to do so (which, at the same time, usually decreases their interest levels somewhat).
Any ideas?
My very first Prezi
Completed my very first Prezi! Intending to use it for committee sharing tomorrow. I should probably mention that I’ve utilised David Warlick‘s material quite a bit, but since the purpose was really to recap some of what he’d said, I figure it’s within reasonable limits. No?
iCTLT 2010
I recently attended the iCTLT, an international conference revolving around the use of technology in education, and since I’d been tasked to share with my colleagues in the ITWC about my experiences there, I figured I might as well pen an entry onto the new blog.
All in all, I’d say that the conference was (for me) a mixed bag – since there were many sessions running concurrently, choosing which one to attend was kind of like taking part in a lottery – but the person that most clearly made an impression on me would be the first keynote speaker, David Warlick.
His first session, just after the opening address by Mr S Iswaran, focused on the flat classroom – or perhaps more accurately, the classroom in the flat world. The content wasn’t really anything groundbreaking, but Mr Warlick is an excellent presenter (his use of Prezi probably helped – definitely a presentation tool I’ll be experimenting with sometime later) and he managed to help reignite the interest I have regarding the use of technology in education. Some key points I remember him mentioning, or thought of based on his input:
- In 2002, a mere 0.01% of human information generated made it to paper. Why then is so much emphasis still being placed on pen-and-paper learning?
- There is a generational difference in attitude towards information – in the past, information was treated as a product in itself. Now, information is treated as a raw material, ready to be used to create new products.
- The arts are important. Engineering and technology are important too, but they merely pave the way for the creative arts. For example, with games and movies, technology is required to achieve impressive visuals, but ultimately consumers are still really buying into the content, and it’s not the engineers who are responsible for that!
- Given the vastly different nature of today’s world and today’s students, should we be crippling them by imposing our old expectations and attitudes upon them?
The next day, I attended his talk on personal learning networks. I was actually rather unprepared for the content – I’d assumed that it would be something about networking the students in your classes, but instead it was the educators that he was suggesting needed networking. Being an introvert, I’ve never really loved networking, although I have more recently started appreciating its benefits. Still, I had never really thought of it as a mode of professional development, nor had I ever considered doing it via the internet.
So it turns out that there are many geeky people on the internet who are not only interested in the use of technology in education, but even actively blog about it (what a shocker). By following the updates of such people (or even joining a community), I could indeed stand to learn a lot. In fact, I’ve spent a nice huge chunk of time reading the older entries on Tara Seale‘s excellent blog (on the use of technology in an English classroom), and I’m pretty sure I’ll be adding more sites to my to-read list in the days ahead.
And of course, there’s this blog now, in case I might have anything that I could contribute to others as well.
In sum, though not every session I’d attended was of immense use to me, I have certainly gained from having attended the conference. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it was a nice change of pace from the typical school schedule!
Introductions
I’d been blogging on a personal basis for some time now, but recently I’ve decided that I’m past that and should attempt to write on more professional matters. Since education and technology are both matters that I enjoy and care about greatly, I’ve decided to try writing on those matters (and interactions of the two) on a semi-regular basis, perhaps a minimum of once per week?
Will this work? Who knows! I’ll just give it a whirl and see how it goes.
