Mr Bass Online

On Thursday November 17th, I had the opportunity to do a presentation at ACTE in St. Louis on using Google Tools for Collaboration. The conference itself kicked off with Sir Ken Robinson’s keynote. As you might guess it was an amazing talk. I also sat in a session entitled The teamwork fallacy: not all teams get things done by Charles Johnson from Dalton State College.

This was my first ACTE event and I was definitely impressed with how it was run and the presentations that were there.

Today as I was looking through my reader, I noticed an old headline on the Presentation Zen feed that I continued putting off looking at because I wanted to be able to spend some time reading and thinking about it.  Today I finally clicked on the title “The Animated Sir Ken Robinson” and am so glad that I did.  I’ve been a fan of Sir Ken Robinson for quite awhile and was interested to see how Garr was going to write about presentations and Robinson’s work.  I was not disappointed.  The video below is one created by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) that takes one of Robinson’s talks and basically animates it.  Take a look, I find it fascinating to watch the artist work.

As far as the talk goes, I like the overall message and agree with it.  However, the reason I keep thinking about it is because of the combination of the talk itself and the visuals that were created.  It’s stuck in my mind for hours now and I can’t seem to shake it.  That’s a powerful presentation.  Here are a few things that I think are simply outstanding.

1. When Robinson is talking about the the current reality of schools the artist has placed the students on a conveyor belt.
2. Robinson says that we shouldn’t be boring our students and putting them to sleep, but rather waking them up.  I remember the teacher who “woke me up”.
3. I find his idea that education right now is about conformity rather than about learning interesting.

There are many other pieces of this talk that I liked and agree with but, for me, it was the combination of the two.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  I’m looking forward to looking at the RSA Animate video on 21st Century Enlightenment.

* The animation for this video is done by Cognitive Media and is also worth a look.

A version of this post is cross-posted to Tech4Practice as well as the Northeast Middle School Friday Flyer.

Today I was going through some papers that have been hidden in the depths of my computer bag and ran across some notes I took in a presentation I attended by Nancy Pearl at the NCTE Annual Convention (I think it was November 2009 but I’m not entirely sure). The reason I post these here is because

1. I don’t want to lose this piece of paper and have these ideas lost with it.

2. I think these are really smart phrases and want to share.

There are only five phrases written on this paper so it’s short and sweet.

The Pleasures and Perils of a Life of Reading
Pleasures

• “It is through books and reading that we can live many lives.”
• “Everyone can read the same book but reads a different version of that book.” – Shows the diversity of readers.

Perils

• “We might not know how to pronounce words.” – What a shame for us to not be able pronounce a word.

Other Points

• On educators having a “required” reading list. – “Do we want to, as a nation, create readers or people who have read a certain list of books.” – I know my choice.
• “Books give you clues as to how fast to read them.

At the end of January, I spent a week meeting with and learning from some fabulous people at the Midwest Education Technology Conference (METC) in St. Charles, MO.  In reflecting on the conference, I was thinking about some of the sessions I attended and I can’t help but wonder what conference goers want from a conference.  Is it to learn about the latest and greatest tools or is it more about strategies and concepts? As someone who presents at a variety of conferences and for a variety of groups, I spent some time watching people present and to a certain extent, analyzing their presentation styles looking for things that I might implement.

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about presentation styles and working with/leading groups.  I’ve read books like Presentation Zen and, while those have helped me think about techniques, it hasn’t really helped me think through my latest pondering, that being the responsibility of presenters to serve their audience. In one session, the speaker was describing the evils of filters and how filtering the web from students isn’t helping teach responsibility and ethics. Now let me be clear about this, I agree with this speaker. I’m not for filtering everything and I think that students miss out on a lot of information/experiences because of these filters.  However, I’m also a realist and understand that most districts are not about to completely open up the filter to the world. As a presenter, I feel as though I need another solution. What if YouTube is blocked in the district? Is suggesting breaking YouTube’s terms of service and downloading the video for use really the best idea? Sure it’s possible, but what are we then modeling? Certainly not ethical use. Is a school district likely to get sued? Probably not. Is that a good defense or justification? Definitely not.

In another session I attended, the presenter was “shocked” that sites like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter were blocked in schools. I was amazed. “How can you be shocked?”, I thought. “Are you ever in a school anymore?” More often than not, these kinds of sites are blocked for “safety reasons”. I’ve even heard of districts who’s filters are so locked down, the school website isn’t even accessible inside the district. Ridiculous.

However ridiculous, this is a reality. I hope it’s not a reality forever, but I also understand that many times, teachers have no control or say over what is blocked and unblocked. Rather than looking at them with incredulity when they ask what to do when a certain tool or site is blocked, I think it’s important to understand the plight of these teachers who desperately want to give their students access and try to help them by giving them alternatives or avenues to help them help those who make decisions to see the benefits of sites such as YouTube.

As I more time comes between me and the classroom, I’m going to try to keep my perspective and understand the limitations that teachers have based on the decisions of others.  I want to continue to work inside of schools and not just with teachers but with students as well. It’s important for those of us who are “spreading the word” to also live that life and get inside the classroom. Currently I’m working on three different presentations and will continue to keep revisit the responsibilities and understandings that I need to have about my audience so that I can answer those questions. I don’t believe that filtering online content is the way, but I also don’t want to rattle on about it with only one solution, to un-filter everything. I will be continuing to think about alternative solutions or approaches and welcome conversation about how to address the needs of classroom teachers.

As I was going through my reader this morning, I ran across this post, Presentation Zen: Tokonoma and the art of the focal point.  About half way down the post there are some examples of ways to change the presentation of information.  I’ve been thinking/working on a number of presentations for this year and I’ve been really trying to move away from text heavy sites and use pictures to illustrate my points rather than relying on text.  This isn’t new information and I don’t know that I necessarily do it well yet, but my thought process has definitely changed.

Here is an example of one of my slides.  I don’t have  a before, but what I wanted to do with this is create interest without overwhelming with text.  I went on to talk about the importance of story when it comes to video creation in the classroom.

Here is another example from the same presentation. In this one I decided that rather than list all the next steps in regards to our upcoming film festival, I wanted to illustrate stepping stones as I discussed them.

I’m not convinced that this is necessarily the best way to approach this, but I definitely like having less text as a part of my presentations and having my explanation be what drives the content.

Here is the entire presentation.

Today was the first day of the Midwest Education Technology Conference in St. Louis, MO.  I’m actually on the board for this conference and really enjoy being a part of the planning process.  The day started with Will Richardson’s keynote.  I’ve always enjoyed Will’s writings and presentations.  Imagine my surprise when he referenced NCTE’s Framework for 21st Century Literacies, a document that I helped to author as a part of NCTE’s Executive Board. After the session I went and introduced myself and had a nice chat before another session.  One thing that he said that I really liked was that his kids were his lens to his involvement in education.  Since my kids will be attending the school district in which I work, I have a similar feeling and a vested interest in the district as a whole. I also presented two sessions today.  The first, “Cool Tool Duel,” was a collaborative effort of 6 technology integrators in which we all presented 2 tools to the audience.  Unfortunately, Animoto chose the time I was presenting and showing their site off to do a little server maintenance.  After I logged in, the site actually said, “Went to get a beer, brb.”  This got lots of laughs and completely lightened up the mood.

My second presentation, “Instructional Strategies for a Digital World,” was one that I’ve presented in the past about my time in the classroom and my efforts to create a “paperless classroom.”  I changed the presentation considerably this time because I wanted to tell a story about my experience rather than just explain the concept and how “I” did it.  I wanted my audience to understand “why” I did it that way.  I think it went well and I enjoyed the session. I ended my day in another of Will Richardson’s sessions and then a brief sharing session with Meg Ormiston.  After dinner and drinks with DEN and some new Twitter friends, I finally braved the snowy roads and made my way home.  School is canceled for tomorrow so after dropping off the kids at childcare, it’s back to another day of METC with one final presentation.