Category: Presentations in Education

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Seven Recent Workshop Wikis

Here’s a few of the workshop wikis I’ve used recently, which I thought might be worth sharing here.

Intro to Tablet PC – This is the latest version of my Intro to Tablet PC workshop. We had to do this in three hours, though, and only got through the Education Pack and Experience Pack.

Tablet Sharing – This page is for Tech Lead Teachers who meet every other month as part of a Tablet PC Pilot project. This included my previous sketchcasting workshop and then some. There’s a few more example sketchcasts in this outline. We also covered Jing… and because there was time left I showed them a document camera and then ZiPhone – and how to jailbreak their iPhones. :)

Document Camera Workshop – This is a new workshop for me and it went well. The wiki isn’t terribly rich yet, but it provides a structure for training teachers of various levels how to use a document camera in the classroom and includes links to several quality resources for additional ideas and inspiration.

Projector Workshop – CUE does projector workshops from time to time (either 3 or 6 hour versions) and I used to wonder how on Earth that time was filled, even though I understood it was more about how to teach with a projector rather than how to use a projector. This wiki represents my first go at running a projector workshop myself. It was 90 minutes of interactive demo followed by 90 minutes of practice time where teachers got to team up and work on the things they most wanted to try. It went well for me, and there are lots of links on this wiki for anyone else attempting something similar.

Google in Education – This is the outline of my short Google Workshop, which is largely delivered as a demo that the participants can follow along with hands-on. I most recently delivered this to teachers in Redondo Beach, and wished I could do all three days of the Search, Learn, Share training below.

Search, Learn, Share – This wiki was originally created by Chris Walsh and I to support a workshop based on the original Google Teacher Academy. I recently expanded it into three half-day Saturday workshops for private schools, which you can access in the sidebar. I’m very happy with how this worked out, and think there’s enough structure here for other professional developers to put it to use without much work.

Images, Impact, and Interaction – This is another new workshop for me… rather than how to use Powerpoint, this is how to design better presentations, with a focus on creating interactive experiences for the students. It went well, and again there are plenty of links to good resources here.

I’d love any feedback you might have on any of these workshop wikis. And, of course, feel free to contribute to them or put them to use, as long as you respect the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. ;)

UPDATE: See my Workshops page for a more complete list of workshops. Most are wikis, and several are newly updated.

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NECC Sessions DUE October 3rd: Time To Dream It All Up Again

The deadline for submitting a session proposal for NECC 2008 is October 3rd, 2007 – next Wednesday. Edubloggers have already started writing about this… Warlick before anyone else I think (though I couldn’t find the post with a quick search); he seems to plan ahead more than most. I also saw someone (somewhere) post about how hard the NECC application is and I completely agree. A few other posts prompted me to comment tonight, and my comments have been shaping my thinking about this year’s submissions. Here’s two of the comments I left this evening that capture my thinking – influenced by many others of course.

In response to Will’s post Thinking Disruptively About Conference Presentations, I posted the following (note: I’ve added hyperlinks to compliment the original comment):

Great post, Will. I think you’ve captured something that a lot of us have struggled with… how to model this new kind of two-way learning while still getting the point across in 50 minutes – not to mention still getting selected by the conference planning committees.I like the 15 minute preso followed by discussion format. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Dave Winer’s hypercamp idea. I’ve wanted to see an educational hypercamp for a long time, and the edubloggercon was very close. It would be great to bring the format to NECC as a grassroots movement – however small it might be.

As for the formal submission process, I don’t see why we can’t be a bit subversive (as Tom March might say [streaming media link, NECC Live 2006]). We can still submit our topics with just as detailed a submission as we might usually… and then run the session in the format we prefer when we get there (if we’re selected, of course). Eveyone expects that the content of the session will be updated to account for the intervening nine months (despite the flaw ddraper points out in the system)… so why shouldn’t the format of the session also be modified to account for the lag between something like the edubloggercon and a formal box to check in the NECC submission process?

The remaining problem might be (and Draper didn’t touch on how NECC apps are worse than many other similar conferences) that NECC online applications are just too darn detailed.

In any case, I hope you (and many others) take the ideas you posted to heart and that there is a whole new breed of session at NECC in 2008. :)

A great conversation has developed in the comments to Will’s original post, so click on over and check that out, too, for greater breadth of perspective.

Then, in response to Vicki’s post Declare war on the Ruts, Boundaries & Comfort Zones, I wrote the following, which in my mind compliments the thoughts above:

Vicki, the most striking part of this post (for me) was the quip about buzzwords. With the NECC deadline approaching (and the CA CUE deadline just past), I’ve been feeling like my own workshops were in a rut. I’ve moved from slides to wikis for the most part, but often with the same basic structure. And even the workshop titles/content are feeling old (at least to me). So this post has struck a chord with my resolve to lead all new sessions this time around.I also look forward to seeing what everyone else imagines in the next week (and the following nine months), too. In some ways, this week is a very important one in our field, isn’t it? Educators around the world will define what ruts we stay in and which new paths will be explored. Hopefully the good new stuff gets accepted…

So this week it’s time to go away and dream it all up again. I hope the edublogosphere, and educational technologists (actually educators) in general really bring it this week. ;)

UPDATE: Just this evening (perhaps because of Will and Vicki’s posts and others) folks started twittering about putting together panel presentations for NECC. As I read through all the tweets I found myself wondering if collaborative planning for sessions will play a big roll in this year’s NECC – and if it might not even be an essential element of the “new” NECC session. I know any session I could submit would be very dependent on others’ work and contributions (standing on the shoulder of giants, as they say), but I wonder if I’ll wind up including more of a collaborative planning element myself…

And yes, that’s a U2 reference and an Oasis reference in the same post. :)

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Pecha Kucha as an Exercise for Students (and Ourselves)

Why Haven’t We Heard of This? (Via 2 Cents Worth.) A few days ago David Warlick offered several links to a budding new phenomenon (which we edubloggers are discovering a bit late):

Pecha Kucha comes from a Japanese term that describes the sound of conversation — or chit-chat. It also describes a brand new medium for communication that was originally invented by Tokyo architects Mark Dytham (born in the UK) and Astrid Klein (born in Italy). A Pecha Kucha is a presentation with slide show, utilizing 20 slides, each lasting 20 seconds. So a single Pecha Kucha presentation will last six minutes and forty seconds.

I just read David’s post this morning, but discovered Pecha Kucha yesterday… in a WIRED magazine article (in the print edition). The article doesn’t seem to be online yet, but last December one of their commentators wrote this bit online:Pecha Kucha: Design Virus.

Practicing this new art form (something like the Haiku of the 21st century) would not only help those of us who teach using powerpoint (or keynote), but would also help students. What a great exercise to give students to help them develop their 21st century communication skills – and to help relieve the tedium of classroom presentations. Final products could even be shared online to save classroom time, or to allow students to browse and view at their own pleasure in a lab (or on their own machines in a 1:1 environment). Alternatively, there could be a sort of red carpet unveiling during (or after) class. Creating an evaluation rubric would be easy, and then the class could evaluate and vote on their favorites – and, of course, justify their choices.

On the other hand, Gary Stager, of course, would disagree. See the comments on Dave’s posts for details.