Tomorrow night I have the opportunity to re-present a presentation with the same title as this blog.  In fact, it was the initial opportunity to present that inspired this blog (and the transformation from the previous blog).  I’ve modified the “My Journey with Digital Pedagogy” presentation to represent the thinking and experiences I’ve had since the first presentation, and am looking forward to the opportunity to share once again.

One of the great services I’ve had opportunity to gain access to through my employer has provided me a way to gather feedback on my presentation before it is given – and how useful that feedback has been.  And by doing this, I developed a little cross-program mashup that will allow teachers and students within my organisation to collaborate on presentations, which is handy as we do not have access to Google Docs.

Using the PicLens Publisher add on for MicroSoft PowerPoint, I converted all my slides to images.  The images were uploaded to VoiceThread, and I then recorded an explanation for each slide within Voice Thread.  Trusted colleagues were then invtited to view and comment, and I refined the presentation accordingly.  I then re-uploaded adn recorded the associated speech, and asked other colleagues to comment.  Truly a great learning experience for me, and a great opportunity to use a web service for my benefit. (I had to be careful the colleagues I chose would not be present in the audience when I give the presentation – would hate to bore somebody).

This process has me thinking though, anyone could do this and gather feedback on their presentation from within my employing organisation.  Certainly a process I will encourage my classes to use – imagine having multiple teachers provide feedback before giving a presentation?  Imagine other students providing feedback?

Which leads nicely into a problem I had with developing my presentation.  Comments from checkingboxes and onepaulo suggested audience members would be interested in seeing what learning looked like in my learning environments.  Initially I agreed and thought about what I could do.  Then I realised, learning in my environments is not an easy thing to capture.  It is in fact a wild, unpredictable beast that can turn any way.  In short, and to use a famous quote – learning is messy.  On any given day the students are completing multiple tasks in multiple ways.  How could I represent this?  Lets hope what I have decided on will suffice.

So what should learning look like? Upon reflection, I would like learning within my environments to look as if students are choosing what to do and how to do it.  Student negotiation is a powerful force to enhance learning, a force that should be harnessed.  It does not reduce the importance of the teacher, and in fact I think it takes a strong teacher to relieve themselves of the power in the learning relationship.  The teacher is still required to ensure validity of the learning as referenced by the task specific criteria and exit standards for the subject, however students can, and should, choose the path to get there.

Of course, the teacher also needs to be able to determine which groups of students can handle responsibility for their own learning management in such an environment.

Welcome to the first in a series of posts describing my personal learning processes. In this post I will deal with the easiest yet most underutilized way to learn (in my opinion), the help menu.

Every software program I have ever used has this great learning tool, generally located at the right of the menu options. The help menu is purposely designed to answer most questions regarding use of the software. Logically, it is in the software developers best interests to support people using their programs. Granted some help menus are not interactive (ie. You can’t ask it a question) but it will still provide you the information you require. Anything I’ve ever needed to know about MS Programs, I’ve learnt from the help menu.

What amazes me is how many people don’t think of this approach when they need to learn something. I’ve often answered a request for assistance by asking if they have accessed the help menu, then taking them through the process to teach them that the help menu can teach effectively.

When software help menus can’t help (pun intended), I turn to Google. You could choose any search engine

In a series of posts I am going to respond to a question I am commonly asked – How do you know all this? Many people beginning their journeys are intimidated by the sheer amount of knowledge that exists, and a never ending self comparison to those more knowledgeable. I learn through a range of media, and I’ll dedicate a post to each of these.

1. Help + Google
2. Listening
3. Reading
4. Connecting
5. Diigo
6. User forums
7. Playing

The most important message I can give is to not worry about not knowing. All of us need help throughout our journeys, and if you never learn you’ll never know.

So I encourage you to read on, stay tuned for the next few posts, and learn as much as you can any way you can.

Firstly, recognition of Toni Twiss who has posted using a similar title.  I liked it so much I’ve remixed and re-used.  Also recognition to Jarrod Robinson and Jonathan Nalder who explore mobile learning and blog about their experiences.  They’ve each provided inspiration for me.

I recently conducted a professional development session where mobile phones was a focus of mLearning.  I blogged about this here. To encourage particpants to explore the possibilities further I created a Web jog (using Jog The Web).  In my original post I did not provide a link to this, with apologies I post it here now.

Possible uses of mobile phones in education.

I was recently recruited to conduct a Professional Development session for a group of teachers working within an “Academic Excellence” department at a local high school.  There was little direction provided for the session, simply wanting to have their understanding of technology expanded.  I saw this as an opportunity to implement a session on mLearning.  It also allowed me to practice a presentation I will be basing a full day training session on next year.

When I think mLearning, I think of three things – devices, cloud computing and portability.

Devices

This section’s objective was to demonstrate the functionality of a range of devices for gathering data, then transporting this data back to a central recording point for presentation.  This group of teachers were relatively inexperienced with ICTs in education, thinking of desktops and laptops as the sole items that allowed integration of technology in education.  I distributed instructions and the participants had to complete the task using the devices provided.  As an extra challenge, I had one set of instructions stored on my phone (video format) and these were distributed via bluetooth.

As expected, the progress of the task became slower and more difficult at the point when particpants needed to return their evidence to a central point.  I had established my laptop as the central point, access to which occurred through cabling, bluetooh or card reader.

One device I am really enjoying exploring the educational possibilities of is the iPod Touch.  Screenshots (showing applications installed) are here and here.  Other devices included video cameras, still cameras, voice recorders, PDAs, netbooks and mobile phones.

Cloud computing

The conference participants were aware of general internet use, and could navigate through sites if directed, so this session was more an awareness raising session on web technologies that incorporated mobile devices for functionality, and web spaces that could be used for organisation of teaching materials.  The specific sites experienced are as below;

• Netvibes – use a public page to store RSS feeds and links to relevant places.
• Diigo – host a pre conference discussion on a relevant stimulus (eg. blog post)
• Dabbleboard – collaborative whiteboard that I used as a pseudo back channel.
• Poll Everywhere – audience response system uses mobile phones.
• Slideshare – locate existing presentations an instructor could use (with attribution).

These are all services I use when developing my learning spaces.  Blackboard is the system my organisation uses as a LMS, but I find these services too functional to ignore.

Access

Specifically, portability of work.  Many of us carry around removable memory with work files on them.  I’ve installed a suite of portable applications that allow me to continue my work on any computer.  Currently the portable suite only runs on Windows, so I need to find a windows emulator that can be initiated from removable memory on either OSX or Linux.

The portable applications I use are;

• Portable Firefox
• Portable Thunderbird
• Open Office
• Evernote
• IHMC CMaps (concept mapping)
• Kompozer (web page creation)
• Scribus (desktop publisher)
• FileZilla (FTP)
• Audacity
• GIMP
• AviScreen (screen capture)
• VLC media player
• xplorer2 (file manager)
• Keepass (password manager)
• 7 zip
• Synctoy

These applications (stored on a 4GB USB drive) allow me to complete all my work functions without relying on software installed on the host computer.  I lead my students through building similar suites to allow them to be more productive within the restricted system in which we work.

In 2 hours I raced through these sections, really providing only a tast of what mLearning can achieve.  I will build on this in preparation to conduct a full day training session in 2009 for teachers within my region.  My presentations are built using concept maps lately, and the maps for this session are stored here.