Learning On Demand

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When I first conceived the basic idea for this post it was in a more nascent state than I realized. My thought began with how to use technology to provide students the ability to learn anytime, anywhere, which I call On Demand Learning, similar to how many of us - and, especially, our students - have become accustomed to accessing our entertainment. I thought On Demand Learning could be a future model for our education system as a whole, or for individual schools or districts to adopt. The general concept is that students in a classroom have a personal device to use to access content. This content would perhaps sit on the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy where the cognitive stakes are low. The student and device are mobile, so the learning can take place in any space in the room, or in any space outside of the room. The content is delivered when the student pushes play, if you will, so the learning can take place at any time. In this model, the students can learn as a group as well. For example the teacher (or learning coach) can push content to the student devices for simultaneous playback for the purpose of group learning or introducing a group activity. The students can work in small groups or one-on-one to access the same content and learn together. On Demand Learning provides students with the ability to participate in their learning and have some element of control; it is not unlike models we already see out there in the realm of blended learning or hybrid models. I like this model of learning on demand and I do believe that it will be a cornerstone of the education delivery in our world, if not our country, in the near future.

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Since this earlier thought, as I continued to read and talk to colleagues my idea of learning on demand developed and expanded to include the elements of content. I came to realize that On Demand Learning lends itself well to differentiating learning. So now the idea becomes the technology providing students control of content access as well as the type of content they access. Where this gets interesting is when you begin to flesh out the potential of differentiating the learning. Imagine if instead of say 100 teachers in a region teaching the same math course, we change the model to have say 10 stellar teachers creating digital content for this single course that caters to different learning styles of students and at varying levels of comprehension and/or aptitude. Now we have the ability for students to be in the same course but to learn the content or concepts in a way that works best for their learning style. So, let's back up to the earlier example of the students in a classroom with a personal device. The teacher decides it's time to learn about the Pythagorean Theorem. Students, at their desks, can choose which of the 10 teachers they need to use to teach them the concept. (Maybe based on a preliminary assessment, one or two teachers are identified as being the ideal teachers for a student to select.) After the device activity concludes, the teacher in the classroom can then assign activities or problems for the students to work on together or alone and get help in person and begin to work on the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy with the students. You can imagine also that this can extend to outside of the classroom where perhaps the learning of the concept is a homework
assignment (flipped model) and the students come to class ready to participate in activities and solving problems.
This can morph into a national system whereby the best in class content deliverers (rock star teachers) can reach all students and provide the knowledge and comprehension, and our local educators become learning mentors and help the students make the necessary and appropriate connections to the material they are learning, focusing on the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. This last part is quite controversial, I know. But, imagine if...

Tips for Creating an Online Course

I recently created a tip sheet outlining a few key pointers to use while developing and creating an online course.

For a larger, printable version, please visit http://bit.ly/1gWW73D.

Thinking Outside of The Box

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Happy New Year! And welcome back to school.

For some of you reading this, you may have come to this epiphany already, but as I was meeting with a teacher this morning, we began to discuss the use of PowerPoint (PPT). Many teachers I know use PPT religiously - for presentations, to distribute content to students, etc. But I find that PPT has many limitations that do not enable it to work nicely in today's education environment. For example, if a teacher using an LMS posts a PPT presentation for students to access, the teacher is assuming that all of their students have PPT installed on their machines and are thus able to view the file. I believe as we move along the education technology trajectory we can no longer feel safe in this assumption. PPT is expensive and PPT is immobile. Both of these factors render the use of this application, well, limiting.

This particular teacher I was meeting with this morning wants to post a series of PPT presentations on the school's Moodle site. When posting to an LMS, I always counsel teachers to think about posting files that are platform-independent, OS-independent, and software-independent: posting files that fit this description enable students to be mobile in their learning, and able to learn on any device they choose. PPT does not fit this description. So, we moved on to thinking of other ways to provide this content for students, outside the confines of a PPT presentation. It then dawned on me: Moodle provides the perfect structure to present (or provide) content for students while remaining true to the concept of platform, OS, and software -independence.

My out-of-the-box epiphany is that a PPT presentation can be broken apart and presented to students in bundles of material. Imagine, if you will, that a PPT presentation is a closed, opaque box filled with information you would like to give to a student. In order for the student to be able to see the information, he or she must open the box and he or she must have the exact tool required to open it. If the student does not have access to the tool, he or she will not have access to the information. Furthermore, if the student would like to quickly access a piece of the information, he or she would have to sift through all of the contents of the box to pull out only what is needed. In a world where we break open the box and make the content accessible regardless of tools available and reveal the topics of the content openly, students have a much better experience with the content and accessing the information. To achieve this, a video can be pulled out of an original PPT presentation, to be followed by a set of reflective questions one of the presentation slides may have contained, but now in the form of a quiz, complete with instant feedback from the teacher! This really opens the concept of "presentation" and gives us the opportunity to present anything, not just the elements that a rigid software application like PPT restricts us to.

So, the teacher and I have decided to conduct this experiment. We will take a more complex, mutli-media rich presentations and blow it apart to create an LMS experience that will provide more flexibility for both the teacher and the student. I am looking forward to this and anticipate that it will open me up for future epiphanies to come!

Thanks for reading!

Two Other Projects for the Year

Interestingly enough I left off two other major projects I'll be working on this year. First is our conversion to a new student information system. We decided last year to go with Veracross as our SIS and the implementation begins now. Our initial meeting with the project management team was last week. This should be interesting.
Second, I am taking a course with the Online School for Girls called Charting a Direction for Your School: Online Learning. This is basically a year-long course that will help school leaders determine a course for implementing online learning into the fabric of the school. I expect this to be an incredible learning experience and fully expect to increase my knowledge base about online education.

The one-on-one meetings with teachers have been progressing fabulously! I admittedly was initially skeptical that teachers would want to be obligated to a class period with the technology integrator one day per week, but I am happy to say that I have been pleasantly surprised by not only the response to the time commitment but also the desire to learn! Many teachers come to the meeting with lists of topics and questions they'd like to cover, and others are so very open to learn what they don't know to ask about. One-to-one instruction has always been a part of the total technology integration model, but I have not experienced it to this magnitude before now. The time required of me to be able to meet with everyone has been considerable. I have begun to consolidate meeting times by scheduling a least two teachers in one period and with the plan of possibly alternating each appointment every other week. In the off-weeks, the intention is that the teachers will work on projects and goals we've set up together either on their own or with another teacher partner. Currently, we are still in the start-up stage and in the process of establishing the goals and projects.

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The iPad program is expanding almost exponentially! We have added three library skills classes to the "pilot" and will soon make an all-school announcement that the iPads are available for any class if they are available. Additionally, we are adding 5 new iPads to enable more teachers to get their hands on one to explore and consider for their curriculum. Because there is one set of iPads that students share, we needed to establish some standardization of the organization for the iPads. I created a "page" for each subject area and placed the app icons in the same locations on each iPad. This way students will basically know where to go on the iPad to locate the apps they need regardless of the specific device they pick up. With the announcement of the iPad mini last week, perhaps we will test a few of those out in the near future to see how they fit in our environment.

Using Moodle to Conduct Professional Development

Moodle (or Blackboard, Vista, Haiku, etc. for that matter) is a great tool to use to deliver learning content. About a year into my role as an academic technology integrator and as a Moodle administrator, I decided to use Moodle not only to administer my classes to students, but also to deliver technology training to my faculty. I've actually used Moodle to teach...Moodle! Course delivery systems provide a great way to augment the classroom experience. In the same vein, they also provide a great way to deliver content, interact with participants, and assess learning. I upload short videos to demonstrate how to execute a specific skill, or I link to videos I find on the Internet. Any instruction sheets that I create I also upload to Moodle for my faculty to access.

This year I am going to try something new with my faculty - we are going to actually try running a course. In the past all of the content has been up on Moodle for reference. This year I am going to interact with the teachers as if they were taking an online course. I plan to keep the learning online, but to offer as much contact time as possible. I welcome any comments on experience you have had or any advise you'd like to give me!


iPad Pilot Update:
We finally got the covers in and we are still waiting for the cart!!! We've had some problems with inventory being available (covers) and we changed our mind about the original cart we bought and changed to a desktop model (as opposed to a rolling cart). This put our project back a bit, and we had to return the original cart and purchase the new one. Oiy!