5 Ways to become an online teaching Ninja!

Unfriend, Unfollow, Unsubscribe: How to turn people away

As social media has gained popularity, many books and blogs have been written, many videos recorded, and many prezi's built on how a person can increase their friends, followers, and subscribers.

An entire mini-economy has sprung up promising to provide friends, followers, and subscribers, for a nominal fee.

However, to my knowledge, very little research has been done on how to get your current friends, followers, and subscribers, to unfriend, unfollow, and unsubscribe from you. There are many reasons that someone might want to do this:

• Peace and quiet
• Frustration at the amount of time it takes to maintain shallow relationships
• Simply don't like people

Here are my top five ways to get people to unfriend, unsubscribe, and unfollow your social media feeds:
How to get "unfriended" on Facebook:
1. Incessantly post about Farmville, MobWars, Fast Money, etc.

2. Write long, rambling status updates that would make your English teacher empty the ink out of three red pens.

3. Automate your Facebook account so that your Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, MySpace, and Plurk accounts post to your wall, but never actually check or use your Facebook account.
4. Post birthday wishes to the walls of "friends" you have neither seen, spoke to, or communicated with in years in an attempt to appear like you care.
5. Join a bunch of completely useless, pointless, and ridiculous groups/pages.

How to get "unfollowed" on Twitter:
1. Participate in every "tweet to win" scheme you can find.

2. Don't upload a profile picture or complete your bio.
3. Tweet about what you ate...for every meal.

4. Ask for help and advice from your Tweeps but never acknowledge them nor offer assistance when they need it.
5. RT Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher, etc on a regular basis.

How to get people to "unsubscribe" from your blog: 
1. Don't allow those who read blogs through an RSS reader to access the full text of your blog post-- force them to visit your blog every single time they want to read what you have to say.

2. Ensure that at least 1 out of every two posts is your most recent bookmark from Delicious, Redit, Stumbledupon, etc. Make sure that you forget to annotate your book marks as well, making them even less useful.

3. Repost things that we've already seen. Like the "Charlie Bit Me" video.
4. Add so many gadgets, widgets, and do-dads to your site that readers can't even find your posts.
5. Ask for comments, but never reply to them.

How Web Video is Driving Innovation

There has been a quiet hum concerning a recent TED talk presented by TED Curator Chris Anderson. I watched his talk this evening and was blown away (again) by Anderson's insight. His basic thesis is that web video is driving innovation at a pace never before seen.

Watch it, you won't be disappointed.

Flip your classroom through reverse instruction

Have you ever experienced the unique and rare moment when, after doing something the same way for year and years, you have an epiphany and wonder, "why am I doing it this way?" Most of the time the answer is tradition, that's the way we've always done it. At one time, there probably was a sound, logical, reasonable explanation for the decision to do it that way.

The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford

Take, for example, the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is one of the world's literary repositories and one of the largest libraries in the world. It has within its vaults every book published in the English language after 1911, and a lot of those published before that time. Almost entirely underground, the primary fixture of the Bodleian is the Radcliffe Camera which I had the good fortune to visit on a regular basis during my semester at Oxford. The stacks (shelves) of the Bodleian are closed to the public. To read a volume, you must request that it be delivered to one of the many reading rooms throughout Oxford. "Little elves" work underground to catalog and retrieve the books. Organization is key for such a large library. Ironically, however, the books of the Bodleian are organized, not by subject, author, date, or publisher, but by size. Yes, big books over there, small books over here. At one point, this probably made perfect sense, however now that the volume of the library has grown to over 11million titles, it might be time to consider a new method. Why is the Bodleian organized by size? Because that's how it's always been done. Tradition is good, to a point.

I stumbled across an interesting article in THE Journal a little over a year ago and had a moment like I described above. High School chemistry teachers Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergman were having trouble with their students leaving class early due to sports events. These students were missing lectures and because they missed important information, they were unable to complete the assigned homework later that evening. Sams and Bergman asked a fundamental question: why are lectures delivered at school and problems worked at home? It's always been done that way, but it doesn't have to be.

Sams and Bergman were the first people, to my knowledge, to suggest the idea of "reverse instruction." Together they began to record their lectures and post them on iTunes. The students downloaded them to their computers and mobile devices and watched them at home, at their convenience. When in the classroom Sams and Bergsma spent their time interacting with the students individually on "homework" assignments. When a student got stuck, they were there to help. They flipped the classroom to make it more flexible and dynamic, matching it with the needs of the students.

Last year I began implementing reverse instruction into my high school Anatomy & Physiology class.  It was the third time I had taught the class and I knew that I spent a lot of time lecturing. For most of my lectures I had already created PowerPoint presentations. I began the labor intensive process of putting them on the web for students to view. For some of them I created screencasts with voice narration. Others were simply Google Docs presentations shared on my classroom wiki. For each unit I provided a lecture note outline that I required students to fill out.





With class time liberated from lectures I was able to incorporate more hands-on activities, projects, and helping students better understand confusing and challenging concepts.

I would not say that my first year was a complete success. I have not mastered the art of reverse instruction, but I've made progress. Here are some of the lessons that I've learned:

• Make sure that you clearly and carefully explain the purpose of reverse instruction to students. This is a radical idea for students as well as teachers. I did this in a class "commercial" which I show at the beginning of the year

• Stress the importance of the lectures. Students cannot "zone out" and simply copy down the notes in five minutes and be done. They must be actively engaged as they view the lecture notes, writing down questions and fitting in the new information with what they already know. 
• Hold students accountable to the lectures. I did a credit/no credit lecture notes check at the beginning of each class period to ensure that students were actually viewing the lectures. Another idea (which I haven't tried yet) is including a secret word or number somewhere in the lecture and asking students to write it down in class the following day. They only way to find out what the number/word is, is to watch/listen to the lecture. 
• Beware of technical problems. YouTube is a good way to share videos, but my school blocks YouTube. I ended up posting my screencasts as both YouTube videos and Google Docs presentations.
• If students don't have internet access at home (this is becoming less and less of a problem), you will need to pre-load your lectures onto an iPod, print out your slides, or burn them to a CD. 
• Create a portal for students to go to watch your lectures, download lectures notes, and converse with one another. Google Sites and Wikispaces are both viable options for this. I've used them both. Posting lectures on iTunes is also an option. It is free (you have to provide the hosting), but takes a little while to setup and configure it correctly. 
• Use Google Docs! If you're like me, you are always updating, tweaking, and improving your lectures and presentations. Making sure that the most updated copy is available for students can become a nightmare. If you use Google Docs to share all of your presentations and handouts, when you make a change, all of the public copies are automatically updated throughout the web. What a time saver!
• Now that you've freed up class time, you need to use it productively. This can be a challenge. You've spent all of your time and energy developing your lectures and now you don't have the time/energy to develop new, innovative, interactive classroom activities. This is where I need to improve. It takes a while!

Reverse Instruction Resources: 

• Research study on college students downloading habits of online lectures (PDF).
• Teacher Vodcasting Network (Ning)
• Educational Vodcasting site created by Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergman 
• Twitter user? Follow the hashtag #revlearn

Helpful Reverse Instruction Tools

• Camtasia Studio: the best screencasting software on the web. Free 30 day trial, $179 for educators.
• Jing: a web-based screencasting service. There is a free version (limited filetypes) and a subscription version. Made by TechSmith, the same company that makes Camtasia. 
• Google Docs: a great way to create presentations and share them with students. You can even upload and convert PowerPoint files!

Do you have other resources or tools that should be added to the list? Have you been using reverse instruction in your classroom? Please leave comment briefly describing your experience. Or, if you've written a blog post about it, include a link!

"Google: More than Search" published in MACUL Journal!

I'm happy to announce that the article I submitted to the MACUL journal was published in their Fall issue (see pg. 14-15).

The original idea for this article stems from the video podcast series [iTunes link] that I published on the MI Learning channel of iTunesU K12. Most people think Google is just a search engine, being unaware of the other innovative products they have produced. I have come to love and rely on many of these products (such as calendar, Docs, and iGoogle) and wanted to share them. I also wanted to introduce some of the more obscure, but equally innovative, Google tools such as Google Squared, Alerts, and Custom Search.

Getting published is no easy task and I am pleased that the editors of the MACUL journal found my contribution to be valuable enough to share with a larger audience. I hope that you find it useful as well.

iTouch Success!

Every once in a while I have an idea that turns out as well as I envisioned it. Today was my lucky day.

Today was the first full day of school. In my 9th grade biology class I gave an overview of the year using PowerPoint. While I was talking about the various units, projects, and assignments for the year, I asked the students to complete a short survey using my iPod Touch.

I began by demonstrating how use the iTouch using my document camera. I took an informal poll and found that about 20% of my students have their own iTouch or iPhone and roughly 50% have used one before. This made things easier.

The day before I had setup a very simply survey using the Forms feature in Google Docs. This survey was only four questions and was designed to help me gauge the attitudes of my new students toward Biology. Google Forms play very well with the itouch making it a great combination.

After demonstrating how to take the survey, I passed my iTouch to the front row and let them pass it around the room while I lectured. I expected the students to have trouble restarting the form for each new person, accidentally pressing the home button, logging out of my Google Docs account, etc, but they didn't have any issues. The iTouch went around the room quickly and I was able to collect the data that I needed while reviewing my expectations for the year. It was a smashing success.

At the end of class I took a few minutes to show the students a summary of the responses. They thought the graphs charts were cool and enjoyed looking at the short response answers. I will be aggregating the data and assembling it into a infographic later this week.

I would like to give a shout out to my friend and fellow educator Kit Hard who demonstrated this idea at the MACUL conference in Grand Rapids. He inspired me to try it out and it was a success!

I can see the iTouch survey becoming a semi-regular part of my classroom. Here are some potential uses that I can envision, please help me come up with others!

• Identification of review topics before a test
• Collection of student birthdays
• Survey of study habits
• Collection of lab data from lab groups