Screen Sharing with Your Students

I recently read a question in the LinkedIn group, techinEDU that I thought should be answered in a public platform, so here we go!

How Nearpod works, graphic from the Nearpod website

Here is the question:

Need software recommendation (online)

Looking for software that allows the teacher, from their computer, to pull up group work or group notes quickly.

Say its a group paper brainwork session and groups are working on chromebook independently and then the teacher wants to show off each groups notes to the whole class via a projector. Is there a "whiteboard" or note sharing type program made for this?

(The fall back is Google Apps and each group sharing the document with the teacher, but hoping for a more elegant solution.)

It sounded like this instructor wants to use this technology for a face-to-face learning experience, but you can also use some of these technological options for teaching at a distance. Here was my response:

I don't know much about Chromebooks, but here are a few recommendations for screen sharing. Some cost money and some are free.

1. Screen sharing with Skype.

Have all your students create accounts and then you can "call" them from your computer when it is their turn to share their screens. Read more about screen sharing with Skype.

2. Use Collaborate or another webinar/meeting software.

If your school has a Blackboard Collaborate account, schedule a Collaborate session during your class and you can use the screen sharing feature in Collaborate to project your students' work. You can also use other webinar and/or meeting software.

3. Apple TV with Airplay

If your students have Apple devices or if you school has Apple devices it can lend to your class, you can use Apple TV with Airplay. It's only $99 for Apple TV and I believe Airplay is free. It doesn't matter if the lectern computer is MAC or PC. It's just that your students' devices need to be Apple. You can read more about it in my blogpost, iPad Apps for Education Workshop Report. (This option only works for face-to-face sessions since I believe all students need to be on the same wifi network as the instructor.)

4. Nearpod for Apple or Android

If your students have mobile devices (Apple or Android) you can use Nearpod (a free download). Nearpod has reporting tools, the ability to control student devices (so they don't jump ahead or surf the net) and it works at a distance or for guided in-class learning.

Good luck!

The Next and Possibly Greatest Education Game Changer

There is an exciting movement that will truly be a game changer in education, and it is a movement towards openness. A key player in this movement is the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which brings together higher education institutions and organizations from around the globe in an effort to create educational resources that are free and open to all. Within this parent organization is the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), which was established to support community college participation in the adoption of open educational resources. CCCOER started in California in 2007 under the auspices of Dr. Martha Kanter, U.S. Undersecretary of Education, and joined the OpenCourseWare Consortium in 2011. While the majority of the participating colleges are located in California, CCCOER has grown to 200 colleges in 12 states and 1 province.

So what is OER really? In a nutshell, Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under open licensing so teachers can use them for their courses without having to worry about copyright infringement. The other major benefit to OER is that they are free to access, so learners are not required to pay excessive fees to study and learn from these resources.

There are entire textbooks available for student and teacher use. The licenses vary, but the most flexible of licensing allows instructors to edit the texts to suit their course needs; they can elaborate, cut, move, and add to the content.

As a teacher, this sounds like a dream! We no longer have to create course materials from scratch. Our students will no longer need to spend exorbitant amounts on publisher packs, course cartridges, or student accounts that expire too soon. They can even save on textbooks, which have the potential to be better than what publishers produce since they can be revised and edited by the course instructor, and may have been revised by several other instructors over time.

As an instructional designer and Blackboard support team member at Harper College, instructors complain to me about their course cartridges. First, there is no consistency in the process for accessing publisher materials. But the part that really bothers them is that they have so much cleanup to do since cartridge uploads are all-or-nothing, and many of the resources included in course cartridges are mediocre at best.

I am hopeful that OER will not only help instructors provide higher quality educational experiences to their students, but will also democratize learning. The disparity of access to education will lessen if we can provide free high-quality educational materials to students and schools that otherwise couldn't afford such resources. Perhaps an appreciation for education and the role of educators will grow as more citizens are given access to quality learning materials.

Stay tuned for a blog about the CCCOER movement and a few highlights recent accomplishments. Hopefully, the ideas will inspire other colleges to take on the mission of promoting OER.

iPad Apps for Education Workshop Report

Right now, I am attending the Online Teaching Conference held at Long Beach City College. Yesterday, I attended a great workshop taught by Sam Gliksman, who among other things is the author of iPad in Education for Dummies. The workshop went over iPad apps that enhance the teaching and learning experience. Here are some of the highlights. If there is expressed interest, I will delve deeper into any of these topics.

Technology does not replace experience but rather it enhances. A great example he showed was a student presenting a poem she wrote. She presented it orally, while a related artwork (created by the student) was being projected on a screen, and music she composed on an iPad using Garage Band was playing in the background.

Apple TV combined with AirPlay is a great resource! If students have Apple devices, the instructor can use Apple TV with AirPlay to share student work on their local device by projecting on the board. The lectern computer can be any device, Mac or PC, laptop, iPad or desktop.

Socrative.com is a free resource that can replace the need for clickers and all you and your students need is Internet access on your device of choice.

Flipboard is an amazing and free curating app for iPhone, iPad and Android; it takes the news, RSS feeds, social media feeds, and any other online resources you choose and puts them into a beautiful streamlined e-magazine so that each day you can get the information that is important to you, in a single digest. Teachers can curate resources for their own research or for sharing with students, and students can use the software for sharing resources with one another and for doing their own online research.

Pocket and Diigo are apps, which allow you to save and categorize online resources so that you can reference and share them online or offline. Pocket has a nicer interface but Diigo is better for collaborative work and highlighting specific text.

Book Creator costs $5 and is the best app available right now for publishing small simple e-books, which instructors can use to make resources for students, but also students can use for creating final projects for class. If your students all publish to a single Dropbox account, you can combine all books into one. For longer books, Sam recommends  iBooks Author, which is a free download for Mac computers and can be used to create books for free distribution or for sale on the apple iBooks store. A benefit of using the iBooks store is that when you publish an update to your book, like apps purchased in the app store, the book is automatically updated for all users who purchased it.

Haiku Deck is a free app that helps students or instructors create stunning image-focused presentations (as opposed to PowerPoint, which emphasizes text).

Explain Everything costs $3 but is well worth the cost. It is a screen capture app that combines audio and interactivity for creating presentations. The creator can talk through a presentation using slides, and while showing the slides, annotate and animate. You can pull in resources, such as Haiku Deck presentations, images and video, and publish to your YouTube channel, Dropbox, LMS, and more. It can also be used for assessment.

I'll have more to report soon!

Using Pinterest for Education

People use Pinterest for a number of reasons, but we will focus on the reasons that lend themselves to educational repurposing. 

Pinning

Pinterest offers a platform for people to become curators. People process information through categorization and classification, which is the ultimate function of Pinterest. Users find resources and pin them to thematic boards, thus allowing them to group, segment, compare, and draw connections between separate resources.

As Pinterest users accumulate online resources, Pinterest gives them a visual means of organization.  For visual learners, this helps them brainstorm, process and organize their thoughts and preferences. As a visual learner myself, having an image reference for each article improves my rate of recall; I have a much better memory for the details of an article when I have an image to reference than simply a title and description. 

Many Pinterest users curate collections of items for review by their peers. For comparative analysis, it helps that one can see all items on a single board rather than having to jump from one website to another.

The “Like” and comment functions allow students to share their thoughts on their peers’ collections.

Pinterest allows users to invite others to pin to their boards, which is great for collaborative research projects.

Following

I have to admit that I was put off by the fact that I was forced to follow boards right when I made my account, but what this did was it showed me how easily I could collect information and resources that normally I would have to go out of my way to find. Rather than spending time researching the best articles on marketing or teaching ideas, in a way they come to me. In creating my account, I was not very thoughtful about the boards I chose to follow because I just wanted to get through the process. However, after some time, I have come to realize who I want to follow and appreciate the resources I get from those individuals.

For those who are busy and on-the-go, it’s nice to have the latest and greatest on the topic of interest. A designer can follow the newest trends in design. A techy can find out the latest on software upgrades. Business and marketing students can review the latest advertising campaigns that have been making waves. I like looking at marketing infographics and repin my favorite ones to my own marketing boards.

I find myself spending the majority of my time working with my own boards or looking at specific boards curated by individuals, and only occasionally look at the “following” board because I tend to value Pinterest for its curatorial potential and thus seek out specific topics and information at particular times. This is where I see the most potential for educational use of Pinterest. I am not as interested in the stream of consciousness-like flow of the following page. However, many people like that they have the newest ideas (related to their interests) in a single glance right at their fingertips, and once they choose to repin some of those resources, they are able to put those items into more organized structures.

Side Note: There are ways to control the amount of email you receive from Pinterest and you can follow or unfollow anyone at any time. You can also have private boards for your eyes only.

Additional Resources

• This article will give you some concrete ways to use Pinterst in education: Educators Guide to Using Pinterest in Education
• For those of you teaching business, Pinterest has become a very effective social marketing tool. Check out this great podcast to learn more: How to Use Pinterest to Market Your Business
• Here is a Pinterest Board about using Pinterest successfully for education