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Getting Your Money’s Worth: Introducing New Technology to Your Classroom

Every time I prepare to teach a class or run a workshop, I think back to one of my favorite scenes from an episode of The Simpsons. Principal Skinner has taken an almost-bursting carload of newspaper to the recycling center and is discouraged to see that a half-ton will only get him seventy-five cents. He complains, “That won’t even cover the gas I used to go to the store to buy the twine to tie up the bundles.” The hippie running the place tells him, “It sounds like you’re working for your car. Simplify, man!”

We laugh at this bit of humor, but honestly it’s exactly what many of us do when we are preparing to teach with new technology resources. We are very sure that we want to make use of this new piece of technology; after all, we love it, so surely our students will too, right? We cheerfully load our classrooms full of hardware, software, music and video players, document cameras, interactive whiteboards, classroom response systems, and other equipment focused on accomplishing a specific set of tasks, confident that we have the knowledge and proficiency with them to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re also sure that what we do with our shiny new toys is bound to revolutionize what we do in the classroom every time we teach this material.

In reality, each of us is driving around with a carful of newspaper and no idea of what kind of results we’ll wind up with. We forge ahead into the class intent on delivering exciting new content and too often are derailed by a host of unforeseen issues either with the technology itself or the unexpected effect it has on the delivery of otherwise familiar content. We put that half-ton of effort into making the class work and wind up with seventy-five cents of educational value when it ends. Therefore, it’s up to us to make sure we have the mixture of expertise, practice, and technical know-how necessary to make technology tools work for the class and not against it. Here are five steps to think about before you add that cool new toy to your class.

 

  • Do you know your stuff?

 

 

This seems obvious at first. “Well, of course I do! I’m teaching it, aren’t I?” However, to make sure students get the most out of the class, you should know your material well enough that you don’t really need any notes. I was told by a former professor long ago that if you can’t teach your entire class session with notes on one side of a 3 x 5 card, you’re not ready. This guy used to do graduate-level lectures that lasted two hours with no notes whatsoever; he was so familiar with the material that it was just a matter of recall. This idea is great to consider when you are thinking about bringing something new into the class. In case something goes wrong with the technology, you can go on autopilot, and you can focus not on the things you already know but on the one new variable, making your technology work and using it to enhance your instruction.

 

  • Can you make it work?

 

 

Again, this answer seems obvious. “Well, it’s mine! Of course I’ve mastered this stuff!” Then surely you know how to troubleshoot all of your wireless connectivity issues, connect your hardware to audiovisual equipment in the classroom, and make sure that any content that needs to be authenticated can be. (If you’re scratching your head right now, you haven’t mastered the technology.) It’s not enough to know how to do this one really cool thing that would be so fantastic in class; you’ve got to be prepared for the fact that it might not work at first and know how to fix the problem. Although it’s always possible to call someone from the Technology Support Center to fix technology problems, there is no guarantee that they will be immediately available or that their solution will be quick. If you’re teaching an evening class, that fix might not be available until the next day or even later. This also assumes that whoever comes from the TSC knows how to fix the technology you’re having trouble with, and if it’s your new toy from home, they might not have any idea. In cases like this, you have to be the expert!

 

  • Can you teach it with this?

 

 

Especially when adding new technology to the delivery of a lesson, it is extremely important to make sure that the instruction itself is well paced and makes good use of all available resources. It’s also important to make sure that you know exactly when, where, and how the technology piece will integrate with the lesson. Are you adding in a new delivery system to be used all the time, or is this only for one lesson? Is your new technology going to be a central feature of the lesson, or is it really just a cool “bell-and-whistle” feature that will ultimately distract your students and detract from where you wanted to go? Be sure that the “cool factor” of your new device will be outweighed by its instructional value in the classroom. Don’t think about the neat stuff it can do; think about how you can use it to enhance the quality of your instruction. Too often we assume we can enhance a lesson we’ve had trouble teaching in the past with that exciting, new piece of technology; it usually only makes things worse, because students get distracted by the cool stuff when there is already weaker instruction and lose track entirely.

 

  • Do you have a backup plan? Or, “What if it doesn’t work?”

 

 

Most of us remember back to those days when we didn’t have computers in every classroom, when we didn’t have projectors and interactive whiteboards, when we didn’t have iPods and iPads, et cetera. We still learned just fine, and our instructors taught us without all of the equipment we take for granted now. The question we forget most often when bringing new technology into class might just be the most important: what happens if it doesn’t work? There is no bigger disaster than having your presentation take a nosedive because you were counting on the technology and found that it didn’t work the way you figured it would, or refused to work at all. Just like with everything else, technology-integrated lessons need an emergency plan. Be ready to do it analog-style if the tech won’t work this time, and have a plan ready in case it never does. The students have to learn this stuff whether or not you wow them with fancy devices!

 

  • How will you evaluate your results?

 

 

In the case of technology, there aren’t always well-defined ways to assess the effects of your technology use on instruction. If you’re simply using new technology to teach old material, the only benchmarks you may have are students’ comprehension rates compared to you not using the technology. If you’re using a new tool to deliver specific content types that you haven’t taught before, you don’t even have a frame of reference to compare it to. In this case it might be useful to survey your students on their reactions to the new instructional tool to gauge its effectiveness before you use it a second time. If you’re using the tool to present material that they will be tested on later, test scores are a great measure of effectiveness; you can see right away what they did and didn’t get, and that can be directly attributed to your performance in front of the class.

I don’t in any way want to discourage anyone from experimenting; after all, that’s what my job, like my other stay at home jobs, is about! I think one of the most important aspects of being a good teacher is the willingness to explore and expand the scope of what instruction is and how to go about it. However, we have to make sure that whatever we do is backed by solid pedagogy, content knowledge, and a well-developed game plan. Armed with this set of tools, we can get our money’s worth for that half-ton of work!

Desire2Learn Primer

There is always a learning curve when it comes to making a major change. DePaul’s switch from Blackboard to its new learning-management system, Desire2Learn, is no exception, but don’t be afraid! With some knowledge, training from Faculty Instructional Technology Services, and a little practice, Desire2Learn skills are easily within your reach.

First, Consider the Metaphor

In Blackboard, course materials, whether for a fully online class or a hybrid course, were posted in a folder structure, with folders generally as buckets for weeks or modules. A syllabus, for instance, would be uploaded as a new “item” into a specific location, which was a folder.

Desire2Learn has a tree-structure, rather than folders. Navigation is across the top of the course, rather than on the left, as my colleague Eric talks about here. In Desire2Learn, a course generates with a more fluid structure in place, as opposed to Blackboard, which had a handful of set menu items. In Desire2Learn, you get to decide how you want your course to look and where your items should be.

Next, Decide How It Should Look

Think about how you want your course structured: Do you just need a place for students to access your syllabus and weekly readings? Are you teaching fully online in a weekly schedule? Do you use modules? Is your course ten weeks? Five weeks? FITS has a variety of templates for download, that, when imported into your course, will create a basic structure in which you can organize your course. The templates will build the empty “buckets” in which you can upload or create the course materials you need.

Then, Begin to Build

Once you’ve determined how your course should be arranged, you can upload files through the “Manage Course Files” section of your course (accessed when you click “Content” in the Navbar). Once you’ve uploaded the files you need in your course, it is easy to drag and drop them into the module or structure where you want it to live using the “Course Builder” tool. The Course Builder also allows you to create new pages, like a new “item” in Blackboard. You can copy text from Word documents (from, example, a syllabus) and paste it into a page.

And of Course, Ask for Help

Getting from your empty course shell to a fully built, fully featured course offering might not happen the first time you sit down in front of Desire2Learn. When you get caught up in a question you can’t answer, FITS is here to help. DePaul Faculty have access to on-campus training at Lincoln Park and in the Loop designed to teach the basics of course building, as well as proficiency with specific tools. FITS also offers an online, self-paced training course, which offers documentation, tutorials, and point-of-contact support.

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When “The Social Network” Penetrates the Rest of our Lives: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

When we learn something new, it’s natural (and often helpful) to reference previous experiences. In the trainings we’ve been holding for Desire2Learn, we’ve often found ourselves making comparisons to other Web tools in hopes of fostering connections to the new system.

With D2L, one of the first comparisons that comes up is Facebook. When we show people how to create a profile, they are entering information “as they would on Facebook.” Then, once they’ve added a picture of themselves, that picture displays in discussions “like it does on Facebook.”

I wanted to step back from this comparison for a moment, though, to ask, “How useful is this practice? What is the cost-benefit ratio?”

The Good: Familiarity Breeds Usability

In many cases, yes, using knowledge of other tools to learn a new tool is helpful. Usability studies (often from Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert I love to cite) show that features of websites that we can “learn” will make our experiences with a site better.

For example, on most websites, companies place their logo in the upper-left corner of the screen, and this logo serves as a link to the site’s homepage. This wasn’t always the case, but once this feature became available on several websites and users “learned” to click the logo to go back to the homepage, it caught on as a common feature across the Web.

Profiles and other tools operate in D2L do seem to be taking cues from social networking. It’s helpful to see a student’s face next to their discussion posts, and students in online classes appreciate the extra touch that “seeing” their instructor throughout the course provides. Since this is a familiar feature from Facebook, it can make the Discussions tool more usable.

The Bad: Identity Crisis

Unfortunately, something that we learn in one tool doesn’t necessarily translate to every other space on the Web. If the Discussions tool in D2L looks like a Facebook wall, will students have the savvy to switch to a professional tone when they enter an area whose appearance usually reads “social”?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I would argue that this is an important teachable moment. We are communicating more and more online or via text, and the ability to switch your persona and your tone in different scenarios is a valuable one. These can be the most difficult learning curves to overcome, since it’s harder to differentiate between two similar items than it is to differentiate between opposites. In this case, familiarity is at the core of the problem, but by setting clear expectations and modeling effective professional communication, you will help students learn a skill that is a “must” for their future professional lives.

The Ugly: Social Network Contempt = New Tool Contempt

I can’t say that I’m as big a fan of Facebook as others in my demographic, and I sometimes worry that making comparisons to Facebook can be problematic for our audience in trainings. Many people aren’t the happiest with Facebook right now due to some recent troubles with changes they made to privacy settings, so I don’t want to bring any negative baggage to the new system.

While these are negative experiences we may not want to associate with a new tool, I think they can also make us smarter users overall, which never hurts when we’re learning. Rather than encountering a rude surprise when we discover that our D2L profile information (where we shared our love for bubble baths and interest in YouTube videos of babies using iPhones) is available to everyone in our academic classes, we know to ask questions about information availability up front.

Whether you’re thrilled or horrified to see features familiar from social networking sites find their way into your learning management system, remember that you don’t need to use these features any more than what helps you as an instructor. There may be a trend toward social networking, but don’t let that force you into constructing 140-character assignments.

Blackboard and Desire2Learn

Having worked with instructors over the summer and during the fall quarter on transitioning from Blackboard to Desire2Learn, I understand the frustration and confusion many have experienced regarding DePaul’s decision to change learning management systems.

As one of the participants in the LMS review, I tested Moodle, Angel, Desire2Learn, and Blackboard 9. I’ll cut through all the pros and cons and just say that I thought Blackboard 9 would be the best decision because we were already using Blackboard 8. Obviously, the decision has been made to move to Desire2Learn, and that isn’t going to change.

Instead of talking about why I wanted to switch to Blackboard 9 or why we should all appreciate (or hate) Desire2Learn, I’d rather talk about the confusion and frustration in moving to Desire2Learn.

I am teaching a section of WRD 103, Composition and Rhetoric I, this quarter, and I am using Desire2Learn as a supplement for the course. I post my daily agenda, readings, assignment sheets, and other “stuff” on my course site. So far, none of my students have had any trouble accessing the course site or the materials there, and while some might give Desire2Learn’s usability all the credit for that, I’d say that my students’ determination and experience with networked computer interfaces helped them more.

I personally haven’t had any major headaches in using Desire2Learn. I never taught in Blackboard so I can’t compare the teaching experience, but I have built and provided support for about a hundred courses in Blackboard in the past two years. Fundamentally, the process for building “stuff” in either LMS is the same. You click buttons, point to files or areas in the course, type, and click more buttons. I’d argue that an instructor who knows how to build course content in Blackboard could do the same in Desire2Learn once he or she finds the appropriate buttons in Desire2Learn. I think Blackboard users are having a harder time finding the appropriate buttons in Desire2Learn because it uses a horizontal navigation instead of a vertical navigation like Blackboard.

Desire2Learn:

Blackboard:

     

Neither navigation is inherently better; it’s a matter of becoming familiar with one or the other, or in my case, both. I think a lot of faculty and staff are initially confused that there isn’t a menu along the left-hand side of the screen, and out of this confusion arises frustration.

Sometimes, confusion and frustration can be productive. But in the cases I’ve seen faculty experience frustration and confusion with Desire2Learn, they tend to manifest in negative, unhelpful ways. It generally follows a script something like this: “Help, I can’t figure ‘X’ tool out. What do I do? Desire2Learn is so dumb/hard to use. Why did the university even decide to switch to this? It’s so stupid. You know, there have been schools or departments where the faculty refuse to adopt a new LMS.”

I certainly sympathize with this sentiment, but I tend to think it’s a waste of time. My advice would be to just forget about how you did thing in Blackboard, Angel, or whatever other learning management system you were in before, and just think more generally about computing. When you get some new software, you can rely on your prior knowledge to expect that the “File” menu in the new software will be similar to the “File” menu in other, similar software. So the “Content” link in Desire2Learn is going to be similar to the various course content areas in Blackboard, like “Course Materials,” “Readings,” and “Instructor Information.” So when I said that it’s less about Desire2Learn and more about my students’ determination and experience with networked computer interfaces that has helped them with becoming familiar with Desire2Learn, I’m hoping you can find a similar determination and can call on previous general computing knowledge to help you.

I leave you with a flowchart to help with figuring out Desire2Learn: (ref)

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Keeping it on the Web

Our department fielded a question from a student recently about a Blackboard app for the iPhone. The student saw the app in the Apple App Store, but when she tried to use it, she found that it had to be enabled by the university, which it hadn’t been. Now, this is a bit of a moot point now since our university is transitioning from Blackboard to a new learning management system this year, but it got me thinking about the trend of apps for mobile platforms.

I got my first smartphone not too long ago—an Android device—and like anyone who gets a new smartphone, the first thing I did was download dozens and dozens of apps. How exciting it was! Games, maps, video services, content delivery! For the next few weeks I kept my eyes peeled on all of my most frequented websites. Does this site have an app? Does this company? Does this service?

But when the excitement wore off, I looked at some of the content-delivery apps and thought, why does this app exist? Couldn’t this information just be displayed in a mobile-friendly Web page?

Web pages—you remember those, right? The pages that display content by coding it into universally standard, non-proprietary HTML code. The pages that can be accessed from any computer or Web-enabled device with any browser and look and behave mostly the same. The pages that are not subject to any kind of approval process. I’ve seen an unfortunate trend lately where smartphone owners see their platform’s app store as their primary portal to the Internet and forget about the Web browser. If you’re on the look out for great websites to visit, you may use directories like 세상의모든링크.

More and more people, especially young people, are carrying a smartphone, and I think that trend is only going to continue. And as online educators, it’s going to be hard for us to not accommodate the one Internet-enabled device that students have with them at all times. In the next couple of years, departments like mine are going to have to start testing how usable educational Web tools are on mobile devices before recommending them to faculty, considering potential challenges related to internet crime.

Diving deeper into legal specialties, the expertise of cyber crime lawyers like this criminal lawyer Milton is increasingly relevant. These professionals, skilled in navigating complex internet crime legal challenges, play a pivotal role in today’s digital world. Their understanding of both technology and law helps in crafting robust defense strategies. It’s essential to have access to such expertise in our tech-centric society.

But locking content into a specific platform with an app isn’t the way to go. It isn’t ethical, because we shouldn’t be telling students they’ll be at an advantage buying one brand over another. It isn’t practical, because we would have to keep up with all new developments in mobile operating systems. And it isn’t necessary, because these devices have perfectly capable Web browsers.

This isn’t to say apps don’t have their place—there are many things a Web page just isn’t capable of. But for content delivery, let’s spend our time developing mobile-friendly Web pages rather than making apps.

Notes from the Field: Migration to Desire2Learn

Back in June, in “Resistance Is Futile: Embracing an LMS Migration,” I wrote about the challenges of SNL Online’s migration of about eighty fully online courses to Desire2Learn. I’d like to revisit some of the key discoveries and thoughts.

Time Is Not on Your Side

How much time do you think you’ll need to implement the learning management system, get all the stakeholders on board and trained, and successfully migrate your courses? Double that. Then double it again. You’ll thank me later.

It Won’t Happen That Way

As mentioned before, the migration tool that was supposed to make transferring courses from Blackboard to Desire2Learn easy didn’t work as advertised, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s sat through any vendor demo and then worked with an actual instantiation of the product. What was billed as a relatively seamless and problem-free process has been anything but, with a difficult and ongoing integration process with PeopleSoft making our production timelines irrelevant. Key tools, roles, and functionalities we’d relied on having either aren’t yet available or never will be, putting our design specs constantly in flux and making our production workflow reactive and inefficient. It’s certainly not the end of the world, but even our conservative estimates of production time and costs have proven overly optimistic in light of the D2L/PeopleSoft integration difficulties.

Did I Mention You’ll Need More Time?

We have a lot of talented people working really hard to make sure everything works as it should and ensure that this migration is a success for students and faculty. And they’re discovering on roughly a weekly basis that things we thought would work don’t. They need more time to test everything, and so will you.

An Ounce of Prevention

Our course design specs are the result of an iterative process that included a couple of rounds of user tests with students and faculty. As a result I’m able to rely upon real data when I work with faculty to explain our new design and protocols. I’m pleased to say that most seem to understand and appreciate what we’ve done and why. Some don’t though, and a disproportionate amount of time and energy is expended trying to sell them something that has already been made departmental policy. You might avoid this uncomfortable situation by bringing stakeholders to the table at the beginning of the migration planning. Of course, that will likely delay things, which will require yet more time.

Pain Is Growth

It’s really easy to get caught up in the stress of things and lose sight of the goal and its rewards. Disruptive and maddeningly frustrating as much of this process has been, we should ultimately have a much better learning environment for students and faculty. I’m learning I can juggle more cats than I’d imagined, and I marvel at the talent of my co-workers and the grace they show under pressure. Because of their dedication we’ll have a shiny new LMS ready to roll out in January. I’ll keep you posted.

To Act or Not to Act

For the past twelve years, I have worked in academic technology at an institute of higher education (with a brief eight-month corporate stint that taught me that my heart and soul truly is in education). However, my academic background is not instructional design but rather in communication arts and theater. I have to say this pairing of work experience and academic education has served me well, as the two routinely go hand in hand with my job.

 



Toronto – Wintergarden Theater by Cannon in 2D (http://www.flickr.com/photos/16462767@N00/3286021531/)

 

If you think about it, teaching can be seen as a performance. A performance occurs when there is a performer and an audience and there is communication between them. Sometimes it’s unidirectional coming from the presenter to the audience, and sometimes it is bidirectional with feedback coming from the audience, so the communication cycle is completed. This is the topic for this academic year’s Teaching and Learning Conference at DePaul University—the play and performance found in teaching and learning. The keynote speaker, Nancy Houfek, head of voice and speech for the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, will focus her presentation on the “act” of teaching. She will present specific skills that can be used by instructors to be more effective.

I have to agree that these skills are important for any instructor who lectures. The “Sage on the Stage” model of instruction will, in my opinion, always be present somewhere in our classrooms. There has, however, been a move away from a full “sage on the stage” model to a “guide on the side” model, where the instructor is more of a facilitator than a lecturer—a director rather than a performer. So how does the concept of theater play into this type of a classroom? Are the ideas and skills learned in a theatrical setting still useful?

Yes.

The classroom moves away from instructor-based play to student-based play. The students are the ones who experiment, create, and play with the content in order to present the material. They construct their learning like an improv actor would construct the scene or a playright would construct the script. The instructor needs to be well versed in the skills necessary to present, create, and perform in order to guide the students. He or she needs to be proficient in all of the beneficial performing and theatrical skills in order to be effective models for the students.

Theater skills in the classroom are twofold: for the instructor to use himself/herself in presenting content and modeling techniques for the students as well as for the instructor to teach to the students as they construct their own learning and become the “actors” in the room. While not every encounter needs to be worthy of an academy award, the basic skills of vocal projection, blocking, storyboarding, subtext, and storytelling, just to name a few, are skills that all students, regardless of disciple, will find valuable in their own teaching and learning.

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Foreclosing on Face Time: Online Learning and the Housing Crisis

Richard Florida is perhaps best known for his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class in which he proposed that the future fortunes of modern cities would depend on their ability to attract innovative, white-collar professionals. He labeled this group of workers the “creative class” but noted that this group extends far beyond artists and designers to include scientists, engineers, and other problem solvers who use outside-the-box thinking to overcome challenges in their fields. 

This spring, Florida published The Great Reset, which focuses on the current recession and its impact on urban development. Florida claims that the recession presents a valuable opportunity for the U.S. to scrap failed policies and move in a new direction to meet the demands of a changing economy. One of the key theories he presents is that the government subsidizing of home ownership (through tax deductions and low interest rates) has severely limited the mobility of the American workforce at a time when workers desperately need to move to find work. For expats dealing with similar issues abroad, you can read more here to understand how these factors may impact you in Thailand. Florida believes that rather than continue to encourage Americans to buy homes and put down roots in one city for the long haul, our post-recession economy should encourage renting and mobility and embrace the natural cycle of boom and bust that allows some cities and regions to thrive while others wither and die. To facilitate this shift, the availability of services like a full service residential moving company becomes crucial, making it easier for people to relocate as job opportunities arise.

While I don’t believe that we’re going to become a nation of renters overnight, I know firsthand that the housing crisis has left many members of generations X and Y questioning the value of owning a home. For the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who are unable to sell their homes and unable to find fulfilling jobs close to those homes, the carefree and unattached life of a renter certainly has a renewed appeal.

All of this is good news for online learning for obvious reasons. Distance education is designed for people who want to learn without being bound to a particular place. If the recession is forcing Americans to appreciate the value of being mobile, many people might also reevaluate their views on the value of spending years stuck in one place just to get an education.

But what if Florida is wrong? Surely many people put down roots in one place for a host of reasons that outweigh their desire to go wherever jobs are plentiful. With that in mind, it seems likely that employers will be forced to make some compromises in order to attract the best talent. One compromise that seems likely to continue to gain traction is telecommuting—allowing workers scattered across a city, region, or country to work wherever they please.

A friend of mine in Seattle runs a consulting firm that helps companies manage geographically isolated employees. In talking with him about his business during a recent visit, I kept thinking about how valuable the experience of being an online student is for anyone who ever needs to work from a distance. Online courses teach students much more than just how to be good accountants or nurses or programmers or teachers. Online learning also teaches students how to communicate, collaborate, build relationships, and solve problems without being in the same place at the same time. The future of the housing market might be difficult to predict, but it seems clear that technology continues to make working remotely a more viable option for more workers. With that in mind, I can’t think of a better way to prepare today’s students to be flexible, mobile workers than through coursework that transcends geographic boundaries and even the occasional upside-down mortgage.

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Introducing Prezi: Go Fancy for the Right Reasons

I recently came across Maria Anderson’s presentation Playing to Learn? while browsing through her Teaching College Math Web site. The layout of the presentation mimics a large game board with a flowing channel formed by consecutive progressing squares. Each forward click triggers either a panned movement or a zooming effect, which gave me the illusion of being in a video game.

 

Playing to Learn? on Prezi

The tool Maria used to create this presentation is called Prezi. It is a one-year-old Web tool created by two Hungarian designers. The fact that Prezi was brought into the United States by TED, the global advocate of creative ideas, says a lot about the value of this new tool. It allows presenters to break the convention of slide-by-slide creation; instead, it offers users a drawing board—a canvas—on which to present all the information, either all at once or piece by piece.

I was thrilled by the zooming effect between the big picture and the tiny details within it because it helps prevent viewers from losing track of the overall structure as they maneuver deeper into the presentation. This is usually the problem with PowerPoint presentations—a problem I have been trying to resolve by including the main structure on every slide or adding a quasi-zooming effect by highlighting some areas and dimming the rest.

Besides keeping track of the big picture or concept, what else can Prezi do? With this question in mind, I started to explore the Prezi site for more examples. The site has a very clean look, and it’s very easy to navigate. However, as I got into the middle of the third Prezi show, I started to get motion sickness and feel light-headed, as if I was watching a home-made video shot without a tripod. I wanted to bypass some zooming and panning transitions to see the next slide, but it wouldn’t let me.

As my excitement cooled down, I started to look at it through my instructional designer’s lens. Prezi, like all the other tech tools, was invented to serve some purposes but not every purpose. It will work well in some situations, and it may not work at all for others.

After spending a few days testing this tool, I think the following scenarios may be suited for the use of Prezi:

  1. Presenting a complicated structure or a concept map
    If you need to present a large illustration of multiple concepts that are interconnected, Prezi can be a good choice. It is the best tool I have seen yet for toggling between big and small areas of one image. It also allows the flexibility to zoom in and out during a presentation based on questions or concerns raised by the audience.
  2. Presenting graphic works (developed in other graphic applications)
    At this point, Prezi’s drawing and designing tools for content creation on the canvas are very limited: although you have a few design templates to choose from, you can’t change the font color, pick the font type, put in a new background color, or add objects (beyond the limited options given). Adobe Illustrator would be a much better choice for content creation, or you can simply draw it on paper and scan and upload it into Prezi. The most attractive Prezi shows are cartoonish presentations, and those drawings were certainly not done in Prezi.
  3. For audiences of the video game generation
    I realized that many of the Prezi presentations were created by K-12 teachers. The viewers of these presentations, I would assume, are more used to moving and rolling images on a screen. Animated transitions, when they are not used too excessively, may help young people focus.
  4. For marketing and reinforcement of a key word, a main concept, or an image
    I am preparing a presentation for our new faculty orientation. I know that during this two-day event, new faculty members will receive tons of information from various departments, almost all of which have acronym names.  Client Verge Inc’s services are tailored for your success. They probably won’t pay attention to any of those, but if one gets retained in their memory, I’d want it to be FITS—the new name of my department—because FITS was presented with Prezi:

 

FITS on Prezi

Arc of Activities

I recently found myself composing an e-mail to one of DePaul’s Desire2Learn (D2L) beta testers. I am working with her to design and develop her online course using D2L.

I’d sent her a template for her module content—a word-processing document—and she didn’t understand what exactly an “instructor’s introduction” might look like. I should explain here—for those not acquainted with Desire2Learn—that D2L encourages a linear path through online content.

I explained to the faculty member: an “instructor’s introduction” is an overview of the module. It’s where you explain why the topics are important, connect them to the real world through examples or problems, and point out how this week’s content is connected to last week’s. It also might, or might not, include the module learning objectives, and, if not, they should be an item of their own.

My e-mail began sounding like an overview of Gagne’s nine events of instruction.

I determined a more visual approach was called for! So, I did some finagling and came up with my own “Arc of Activities in a Learning Module.” With some input from colleagues, I expanded the Arc, and the current version is attached for your review.

Feedback is appreciated!

Arc-of-Activities (pdf)