i phone

This is what has been occupying my time for the last few weeks. A shiny new iphone. This is the most amazing gadget I have ever owned. It beets my PDA for on the go info and ease of use and it seems to synch effortlessly with my laptop unlike the PDA via windows mobile which regularly needs to be sorted out . I hardly ever use the phone itself I am just hooked on the apps at the moment - from Facebook to Skype; Tweetie to Trailguru; Wifi finder to Wikipanion; Docs to go to Audioboo; GPS to Stanza - they are all great fun, very useful, and of course time consumers . Don't remember what to do in an emergency? check the first aid app. There is amazing creativity out there in the app creator world - some of it a bit hard to understand - a magic toothbrush timer? a snow globe you can shake? I can do useful things like connect to the Blackboard learning site for my institute - though it is not always reliable.
The iphone is really a clever computer and even the minature qwerty touch pad is easy to use once you get used to it. Oh yes - the ipod is great too and I have an worldwide internet radio app to keep in touch with what is going on in the world - if I ever had the time!.

A few months on

It is interesting how some ideas take hold and some we move away from.

I have moved away from thinking I should be developing podcasts - where I deliver information to students and moving towards web 2.0 tools where students can construct and co-construct thier own knowledge in a community of practice.

This semester I have changed the course I teach to reflect the digital now. The tools I played with last year in the DIL project led me to reflect on how best to move forward with my students. I did a little informal research as to the types of DIL tools early childhood teachers are beginning to use: eg blogs, wikis, and google docs as communication tools and decided to build them into the assessments and therefore the teaching and learning for my course.

It may not sound like much to those of you who are more experienced than me, however it is only four years since I surveyed all our students and found that only half had a personal computer. This year everyone in my classes has access to a computer and only one can not access the internet at home or work - of course all can use the internet at the Institute. It seemed like an appropriate time to introduce these tools.

Only one student in my classes works in a centre where these tools (in this case google docs) are currently used as a communication tool for teachers, children and parents - so it is also an opportunity to provide leadership in this exciting area.

There is some fear and resistance about using new technology tools.
I started by requiring students to use the digital drop box in Blackboard for their first assignment due last week (week 3 of the new semester). It took me a while to convince everyone it was safe and that their assignments would not be lost in cyberspace. All except 2 managed to use it successfully - one handed in a hard copy - did not trust the computer, and the other had no access to internet at home so asked her partner to email it in for her. Of course using the drop box meant I had to learn some new skills - electronic marking is something I have been doing for a while - It gives me a permanent record of the feedback I have given to students and it is easier for them to read - however this is the first time i have done everything electronically and I needed to learn how to move all the assignments into folders on my computer instead of one at a time. I don't think I'll go back to requiring hard copies for written assessments.

The next task I set my students was to develop a wiki to document their group project work. There was quite a buzz in the classes when students created these - quite a few had great ideas on how they could use wikis in other areas too. We talked a little about cybersafety and how to protect their work from wiki vandalism. I found the youtube video "Wikis in plain English" very useful to help to students understand the basic commands - edit, save and link - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY (Thanks O, for showing me this). Every time they work on the wiki I get and email message showing what has been done. This is such a great way to get a feel for student progress. It helped to be able to demonstrate a wiki B and I have developed for a collaborative research project we are working on - field based teacher education - funded by AKO.

For the next assignment students will have the option of creating a blog rather than the more familiar PowerPoint or book form of documentation. Blogging has to be optional as students need consent from parents and the early childhood centres they work in for the documentation they produce. The documentation also has to be effective for their particular centre, and if parents and teachers can not access blogs easily then it would be ineffective for that community. I anticipate cybersafety will be a concern and have developed information sheets, consent forms etc to help the students negotiate this.

I have not quite given up on transmission as a possibility. I have also trialled recording parts of my classes and have put these as sound files on Blackboard. I will ask students how useful they are before taking it further by putting them on the institute media streamer. I have the feeling that I might be better pre-recording snippets on particular topics, or breaking up the classroom recordings into small sections. I have just got Audacity put onto my work computer so will give this a go next week. I noticed that I restructured my class so I spoke for longer periods - virtually a lecture because I wanted to keep the recording length down. I need to reconsider this delivery and break it down into smaller segments as I would normally do. This means I have to remember to press stop and record as needed. I guess I'll get better. While the sound quality was OK - next time I'll use a boundary mike.

If the students do not find it helpful then I will reconsider this approach. I need to know if and how they use the recordings and when they are useful.

My next task is to start using the Wimba tools that are now available through Word and Blackboard

End of a project

This afternoon marked the last meeting for our digital information project. It involved a focus group to discuss the project, our learning, and the nature of digital information literacy.
It was curious that all of us, though this was a project about digital information literacy, enjoyed the face to face contact with members of the group and wanted to continue building the community of practice that has developed over the last few months.

I used the metaphor of a children's advent calendar for my learning over the time of the project; opening a series of exciting doors to reveal what lay behind. I feel like I have been playing with many tools and many ideas for their use. Each new door led me to another set of ideas that I could put into practice. I felt that during the project I needed to learn everything that was on offer. Now the project is over it will be time to consolidate and close some of the loops on the active projects I have started on.

I am very grateful for the support of the project leaders - O, L, & D and to all the team members. I learned so much just from listening to what everyone was working on.

YouTube Facebook and other distractions

The last couple of weeks have seen me become distracted from my goal of using digital literacy as a tool to improve my teaching. I have however, been building my skills on a much more personal level and have been investigating the internet's amazing ability for social networking. Part of this is about connecting to the types of things my students might be using and partly for my own benefit.

I signed up to friends unlimited, a UK internet network, and have already found one friend from the high school I attended. We have exchanged a couple of emails and though A was not a close friend at school we spent seven years together in the same form and took mostly the same subjects. Unfortunately A does not live in my home town so I won't be able to catch up when I go back to the UK next year.

I have been playing with my new camera and as well as creating a file of useful photos for my PowerPoint presentations -and I have used a couple already - I have also uploaded a video from the camera to YouTube. I discovered a little space on the side of my laptop to insert the XD card form my camera directly rather than using a USB cable. This saved me a little search time. It took ages to upload and then wasn't available for 8 hours except via the email link I sent - but it was worth perservering. I have already had several comments from family overseas and see this as another great way of keeping in touch.

I have learned a few tricks with my camera including panorama shots which I have never tried before - for once I actually read the manual after playing around without for quite a while. The menus etc are very easy to use on this Olympus ( http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1363) - much simpler than the Canon we had originally. Iwould recommend it to anyone. I took it out in the big storm a couple of weeks ago to photograph the damage done to our property by all the rain without worrying that it could be damaged. I also took it out for rainy walk in the forest. The phot at the top of the page is of a basket fungus I found .


I also got back onto Facebook after deciding not to use it because of the difficulty of deleting material. My brother in England and my husband, who often travels, have both set up pages too, to add to others in the family. My hotmail Spaces site was not being well used as most people seem to be on Facebook so I decided to go with the majority. My youngest daughter (20) has not accepted me as a friend. We discussed and agreed to this -there can be too much sharing. I am not concerned about what she has on her site - we have had several conversations about Internet safety and consequences, and I trust her. It is about maintaining privacy - just like I wouldn't read her diary.

Facebook is a very interesting and interconnected network and friends of friends keep turning up. I don't add them. my intentions is simply to use it as a way of keeping in touch with family overseas. I am sure it can be very time consuming - I know my daughter is on it most days.

I was discussing Second Life with a group of students last week and I was interested to find out that very few had heard about it at all. No one used it, though one student shared that her father was totally addicted to it to her mother's horror and spent a lot of time and money riding Harley Davidson's in cyberspace.

I have been involved in strategic planning this week and want to work towards more blended delivery of the two courses I am responsible for as well as the Degree I teach on as a whole. The shifting price of petrol makes this even more important as many of our students travel for over an hour to reach class. I also taught a night class last week and found several students too tired to engage. If there was more on line learning they could have the choice of when they wanted to study. Interestingly quite a few of the students said they preferred to attend a class which will need further study. I need more time to pursue this and so it has to be written into the strategic plan otherwise development resources will not be available.

During the last DIL session I tried Snagit software and liked the way it could capture a video of the screen as well as a still shot I want to install it on my computer and try it out. I also started to set up a wiki on PBWiki (http://pbwiki.com/). I can see how wikis can be a really collaborative creations and could last over several years (how permanent are such sites?).
I would like to set up one for each of my courses and also an alumni wiki to keep in touch with our students when they have graduated. For my creativity class I can see that the students would be able to develop an online gallery of the creative work they produce. I wonder if a wiki is the best thing to do? perhaps a website is better though I like the collaborative nature of the wiki. I need more information.

My reflection on my involvement in this project is that I have tried out may things - making and editing sound files; editing, downloading, and uploading videos; improving my PowerPoint presentations by adding video and sound files and decluttering the visuals, developing personal connectedness through the web, keeping a blog, investigating eportfolios, making a wiki, developing my skills with a digital camera amongst other things. What i have not yet done is actually complete the project i set out to do. That will have to be the next step. I have followed my curiosity and developed a much bigger toolkit than I had previously - and that has been fun.

Video in PowerPoint

I spent quite a session last weekend finding out how to download videos from you tube, editing them and then inserting small clips into a presentation. This all fits in with my aim of moving to a more graphic/visual presentation style in PowerPoint

The session involved putting firefox and a firefox add in on my Vista laptop (thanks for the information D) so that I could download useful videos from you tube to a downloads folder in mpeg. It took a couple of tries before I found a download that worked and in the end I put youTube catcher on. This let me convert the FLV files to another format -MOV which seems to be the standard quick time format. This involved a fair bit of trial and error. I really need a glossary of file types with what they are used for - it really is hard to work it all out. I just hope I have got the sequence right to do it again. I guess practice makes perfect.

Then I had to transfer the videos via a pen drive to a mac so that I could edit them easily. I tried the editing package on my laptop - windows movie maker - and found I had to split the movie into sections myself - which took too much time. With the apple package - imovie, this happened automatically and it was so much easier. I found I could insert a movie clip into powerpoint with a mac or my home windows computer. I had thought this was only possible on a mac at first.

I used a couple of TED talks on you tube (originally from http://www.ted.com/) to trial this out, plus a section from a pasifika TV show on making drums in Raratonga, the Cook Islands. It all worked well though the pasifika show was rather low quality, and I now have a useful and interesting powerpoint to use in my teaching. I'll be interested to see what the response is from my students.

I also tried to connect a movie camera to my laptop so I could make and edit my own movies. Unfortunately, even though the camera is only about 3 years old the software "Sony" did not work with vista. I tried to get a download from the Sony website - could find the camera model but not a down load. my next step is to get an ilink cable, which the instruction book tells me will connect the camera directly to a mac. - I'll keep looking for updated software for vista though.

Through all of this I have really begun to understand what being a "digital immigrant" means. The language is so foreign, the culture feels alien, I feel incompetent. I am out of my comfort zone. This is even though I have been using computers as a teaching/learning tool since 1979 when the English High School I was teaching in had a couple of Commodore 64s - I even went on a Basic programming course that year (I have never attempted to write a programme since).

My three children, all in their early twenties, are on the other hand digital natives. The youngest was playing solitaire on a PC at 3 - and that's one of the ways she learned to count. My 20 and 25 year old daughters communicate daily with friends all over the world through facebook and Bebo. These sites are even more important to them than their cell phones. The eldest, with a job in marketing, is involved in emarketing and develping web pages. My 23 year old son composes music on his PC as well as design - he is doing a masters degree in architecture . My husband's business is mechatronics. It is easy to ask any of them for help. However I guess the only way to build my own skills is by doing - trial and error, and putting some time aside to play.

moving on

When I took one of my regular PowerPoints and analysed it, I saw that I could easily reduce the text content down. but then - what would I be left with?

Further reflection led me to a search for the meaning behind my presentation. I asked myself the question - "if students only remembered 10 things about my presentation what should they be?" Next I looked for the affective dimension - how to capture the emotions.

I decided to use photographs as backgrounds and limit the text to just a few words - essentially a single thought or comment. Pare everything back to the essence and match the pictures very carefully with the message I want to give. This was an interesting concept to work with - the visual and the text working together.

I spent ages looking through my own photographs and then started to look through the web. I found a wonderful site called morguefiles.com. This site stores photographs that are free to use - provided attribution is made. By combining my own and other photographs gradually my powerpoint took shape. This process took 4 hours one Sunday afternoon

I tested the powerpoint on various colleagues and the members of the DIL project and got great feedback. "I wish all our lecturers would make PowerPoints like that " said one of our student DIL project members, which was very encouraging. I can't wait to try it out with my own students.

I know that it will take a significant investment of time to change all my presentations to this style, especially as I will also have to produce handouts to go with them. I feel it will give me back the flexibility and creativity in my teaching that I have been craving.

Looking at my presentations in readiness for the next semester of teaching I was totally aware of how many times I was using the templates in powerpoint as backgrounds and how often i have seen those same backgrounds in my colleagues presentations too. On reflection how lacking in originality

Taking the text off the PowerPoints means that I can also be more creative in how I present the content information to students too. My aim is to produce a one to two page handout per powerpoint. I am going to look at "Course Genie" software to see how this might integrate.

One of the things I would like to know now is how to have the PowerPoint notes pages visible on my front desk computer and the slide show version through the data show.

I have bought a new digital camera to use - a shockproof, waterproof Olympus. I can safely carry this around with me - and already I am beginning to capture images that will provide backgrounds for my future slide shows.

end of death by powerpoint

I spent some time reflecting on how to make my PowerPoint presentations more engaging.
What I have noticed is that I, like so many teachers/presenters, seem to have fallen into the trap of making my powerpoints full of the content of our presentation - with endless text and bullet points. I have heard some of my colleagues say that they don't need a lesson plan because it is all in their powerpoint.
I have reached this point in my thinking because of several factors

• a presentation on brain based learning I attended last year where I came across the phrase "Death by PowerPoint" for the first time
• a desire to teach more from a conceptual rather than a content perspective
• thinking about the "crowded curriculum" and who makes it crowded - often me
• reflection on the number of slides I sometimes have in a presentation - mostly of content
• the linear nature of powerpoint - start at the beginning and work through to the end
• a desire to make my presentations more flexible so I can respond to the direction of my students without someone complaining I have missed somenthing out not finished
• a desire to make my presentations more memorable
• an intention to make the talk parts of my classes shorter and have more time for classroom exercises and discussion
• a desire to make more use of images to connect with student emotions
• a reflection that printing powerpoint handouts is not the best way to communicate content with students

I have been watching quite a few TED Talks on the internet and looked carefully at the powerpoint presentations. Many of these were graphics rather than words and the presenters spoke for their alloted 20 minutes without reading from text on the slides. The talks are full of emotion, enthusiasm and interest and I thought I would like to try it

So I took one of my regular powerpoints - mostly text and some images. I analysed it