Do unto others, the best rule for....well...everything!

Flickr: Originauk Moose

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This familiar proverb of Biblical origins is just as true in the 21st century as it was in the first century:

If you want to have followers, you need to be a follower.

If you want to have friends, you need to be a friend.

If you want people to respond to your tweets, than you should be commenting and helping others.

If you crave comments on your blog, than you should be posting comments on the blogs of others.

If you want a quick response to your emails, than you should promptly respond to the emails of others.

If you want your services to be recommended by others than you should be quick to provide recommendations for others.

If you want high quality service, then you should be providing high quality service.

If you want people to cite your work, than you should be citing the work of others. 

10 Tools to Help you Flip Your Classroom

Two years ago I "flipped" my high school Anatomy & Physiology class. Read my previous post for the full story. I  learned by trial and error. I have also found some very helpful resources that I would like to share with you.

1. Camtasia Studio: The leading screen casting software title on the market. Easily zoom, pan, and create call-outs on your screen captures. Accepts multiple audio and video tracks. Retails for $299, educators pricing is $179. See what Camtasia can do by viewing one of my screencasts.

2. Snagit: from the makers of Camtasia (TechSmith), this screen capture tool allows you to quickly capture a still image of all or part of your screen. Also includes a light-weight editor which allows you to annotate your captures. I use snagit to grab images of my screen which I then insert into my presentations. Snagit retails for $49.95, $37.05 for educators.

3. Google Docs: You will be creating lots of presentations and handouts in your flipped classroom. Google Docs lets you do the common word-processing tasks. The benefit of using Google Docs is that your files live in the cloud and are updated in real-time. Presentations can be embedded directly into a blog or wiki page. Any change that you make will automagically be changed for anyone who has access to the file, not matter where it is on the web. Here is a sample presentation that I created using Google Docs Presentation.

4. Wikispaces: After creating your recorded lectures and hand-outs, you will want somewhere to post them sot that your students can access them. Wikispaces is a easy to use wiki interface that allows you to create a website on which you can post videos, handouts, links, and files. Furthermore, your can you the integrated discussion feature to facilitate threaded discussions with your students. Here is the wiki site that I setup for my Anatomy & Physiology class.

The commercial version of wikispaces includes advertising. You can upgrade to a private-label wiki ($50-1,000/year depending on the option you choose), or sign up for the free education label wiki, a great deal!

5. Twitter: The internet has enabled like-minded people, scattered across the globe, quick and easy access to each other. There is a Twitter discussion going in on just about any topic you can imagine, including reverse instruction! If you are not currently using Twitter, I would recommend this overview post. If you are a Twitter user, make sure that you follow the hashtag  #flipclass. I have also assembled a list of educators on Twitter who are classroom flippers. Follow them here.

6. The Flipped Class Network: created by the fathers of flip, Jon Bergman and Aaron Sams, the Flipped Class Network is a social community for teachers interested in and currently using the flipped classroom model. This is the place to go for discussion, support, and ideas related to this instructional method.

7. Jing: the cousin of Camtasia Studio (see #1 above), Jing is a light-weight screencasting tool. Download and install Jing on your PC or Mac and then easily record the activity on your screen using video or still-photos. Jing is free as long as your videos are 5 minutes long or less and you are posting them to screencast.com. Jing pro ($14.95/year) is an affordable way to record and share professional looking screencasts.

Jing is not as full-featured as Camtasia or Snagit. It does include some simple annotating tools, but does not include the advanced features of Camtasia such as the zoom and pan.

8. YouTube: This might be obvious, but one of the best places to upload and share your recorded lectures is YouTube. Extremely reliable, universally visited, and easy to use, not posting your videos to YouTube would be a mistake. Consider grouping videos on a topic into a playlist that students can watch in sequence. You can also add videos created by others to your playlist, enriching your video library with minimal effort.

Here are some videos that I created for my biology courses featuring lab demonstrations and instructions. I created a special YouTube account just for these videos. This keeps my personal account account separate from my school account.

9. Blogs to Follow: The flipped classroom community continues to grow. I have assembled a list of bloggers who regularly post about the flipped classroom. You can add these blogs to your RSS reader by clicking here.   I will continue to add to this bundle as I come across more noteworthy blogs. If you have a recommendation, please leave a comment with the address to the blog.

10. iTunes: this mega-podcasting platform is a worthwhile location to post your audio and video lectures. Doing so requires a little bit of time, know-how, and perseverance. Unlike YouTube, Apple does not host user content. You must either purchase web space (something that isn't terribly expensive) or use a free media hosting service such as PodOmatic. Check out this post by Tony Vincent for instructions on getting your podcast listed on iTunes.

Surprising data on the growth of K12 online learning

I have been doing a lot of research on online learning lately. I've read several reports on the state of online learning across the country and around the world. Most of what I have read I had heard anecdotally from other sources. One statistic, however, shocked me:

Although online enrollments have increased by 40% in 2009-2010, two state virtual schools, North Carolina and Florida, account for 96% of the net growth meaning that the total enrollment increases and decreases in other state virtual schools amount to only a 4% increase.

Source: Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning, The Evergreen Education Group, 2010. 

I am now struggling to evaluate the complete dominance of the online market by FVS and NCVPS. Is this dominance a good thing or is it stifling innovation and competition? Why have FVS and NCVPS been so successful? 

An Introduction to the Flipped Classroom

Last week I was asked to present on the Flipped Classroom at the Troy University e-Colloquium.

Here is the screen cast of my presentation.




If you'd like to click on the live links, use the presentation below.

Challenging Educational Technology

I'm a big supporter of educational technology. This blog is primarily dedicated to sharing tips, tricks, and ideas on how to successfully use technology to increase student engagement, critical thinking, and mastery of learning objectives.

From time to time I think it is important to examine my assumptions on life, to ensure that I'm not missing something. To this end I have begun to read and follow several critics of educational technology. While at first glance these individuals may seem to be critical of technology in the classroom, or technology in general, a closer examination reveals that they really aren't. Each of them is deeply committed to encouraging critical thinking and evaluation amongst students. Their concerns with educational technology tend have more to do with with mindless and mis-informed application of the technologies as a panacea for educational reform, rather than a problem with the technology itself. This is evidence by the fact that each of them maintain blogs and several are active on Twitter.

Jerrid Kruse

Jerrid Kruse is the author of the blog "Teaching as a Dynamic Activity." A former middle school science teacher, Kruse is now teaching at the college level. He is quick to call out the assumptions that many educators make regarding the use of technology in the classroom. To get a sense of Kruse's philosphy on Ed. Tech. I would recommend this short post.
Kruse is very active on Twitter on regularly posts comments on blogs that he subscribes to. If you are lucky enough to receive a comment from Jerrid, you can be sure that it will be insightful and well reasoned, even if you disagree with it!

Larry Cuban

Larry Cuban is a former high school teacher, school superintendent, and college professor. Now retired, Larry blogs about his research on 1:1 programs and other education topics. Cuban is not anti-technology, but he does not see it as a silver bulletin in solving the problems in the American system of education. In this post, Cuban spells three errors that he has observed:

1. The first error that technology enthusiasts make is to overemphasize the importance of students’ access to technology in schools and underestimate teachers’ influence on students’ learning.
2. The second error technological enthusiasts make is seeing public schools as only about learning. They want schools to socialize the young into the workplace and community, provide for their personal well-being, and produce civic-minded, engaged adults.
3. The third error they make is to indulge in magical thinking. Researchers have failed again and again to show that students using computers in classrooms will improve test scores, lift graduation rates, and reduce dropouts.

Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is not an educator, but has written several books regarding the impact technology is having on society. I've put one of his books The Shallows, on my reading list for this summer.

John T. Spencer

Recently John T. Spencer put up a nice post regarding the peer pressure of using technology in his classroom. It's definitely worth a read.  His primary point is that the use of technology has bred an elitist group of teachers who believe that their technology prowess makes them better than everyone else. You may not agree, but it will get you talking!

Dan Rezac

If you think the iPad (or any other idevice) is the answer to life's questions? You need to read Dan Rezac's post on the "deification of iDevices."

Where do you go to challenge your assumptions and ideas?

Book Review: Wikinomics

[Note: this post was written in April of 2010. For whatever reason I never finished it. While browsing through my archives I found it and decided it was time to publish!] 

For the past several months I've been working my way through Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The book was different than I expected and not quite as applicable, yet there were some key ideas that I'd like to share.

The thesis of the book is that industry is changing because information is abundant and cheap and connecting with people is easy. The old system of top-down decision making and closely guarded company secrets is over. The new system is one of collaborative relationships, transparency, and generosity.

I say that Wikinomics was different than I expected because it is written (IMO) to help large existing companies adapt to the demands of the 21st century. It is not written for an individual who is trying to better understand the forces currently shaping society. Despite this, there are several important lessons and principles that I thought were useful.

1. Give people tools to create, remix, and share your products.

2. Be very careful about exploiting the creations of your customers. Figure out a way to give them a piece of the profits.

3. The person who can best help you probably isn't an employee.

4. Figure out what your most valuable contribution is and focus on it while resourcing the the other components to others.

Infograph Your Life

I like infographics, the cool artistic designs that display statistics. I've blogged about them both here and on the EdReach Network.

Friend and fellow blogger Daniel Rezac sent me a link to Ionz, a neat little tool that will build an infographic representing your life. Answer a few simple questions and Ionz will build an infographic like this:

While it's neat, the information collected isn't all that useful or in depth. For instance, you will be asked to choose your favorite social network (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc), but after answering, no analysis of your use of that social network is performed. I would be interested in seeing stats such as total number of tweets, number of followers, most popular tweet, etc.

Similarly, there is lots of public data about me on the web that could also be included into this infographic. This information can be gleaned from my Google Profile, Blog, and Facebook profile, etc. Utilizing this information would provide a much richer summary of my life on the web.

If you like tools like IonZ, I would recommend that you check these digital footprint sites as well:

• Personas (created by an MIT graduate student to show the harshness of web search)
• Spezify (builds a search-cloud based on the tearm that you enter)
• Digital Footprint Calculator from EMC2 (must be downloaded and installed)

The concept of a digital footprint is a critically important idea that needs to be explained to this generation of students. Few of them realize that what they do on the web will impact them in the future. I highly recommend this short video for an explanation on the impact of one's digital footprint. 

Are You an Artist?

Flickr Via Tomroid

Are you an artist or a day-laborer?

A day-laborer does the bare minimum, follows the rules, doesn't go outside of his job description, clocks in on time and clocks out on time. 

An artist goes well beyond what is expected, rarely follows the rules (in a good way), extends his role, creates unexpected value, and doesn't keep track of time because he loves what he does. 

In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin further describes art as:

1. A personal act of courage
2. A personal gift that changes the recipient. 
3. A free gift. 
4. An act of human expression. 
5. Original
6. The product of emotional labor