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Flipped Classroom Benefits – My Summary

2013.03.28
education, Work
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Flipped Classroom BenefitsFor anyone who’s interested, here are the Prezi slides from my “Flipped Classroom” presentation in the Library this week: Flipped Classroom Benefits.

The 2010 University of Illinois study I refer to near the end of the presentation, shows final exam gains of between 10% and 18% after their largest physics course was flipped.

Here’s the outline:

“A flipped classroom is a reversed teaching model that delivers instruction at home through interactive, teacher-created videos and moves “homework” to the classroom. Moving lectures outside of the classroom allows teachers to spend more 1:1 time with each student. Students have the opportunity to ask questions and work through problems with the guidance of their teachers and the support of their peers – creating a collaborative learning environment.”

Benefits of the Flipped Classroom:

  • Students can move through the materials at their own pace. They can revisit materials they have not mastered.
  • Students learn through activity in the classroom instead of listening to a largely passive lecture.
  • This frees up the lecturers time for more 1:1 time with students who need the most help. Peer tutoring facilitated.
  • Can be implemented so that the instructor has a good idea who is prepared for class, along with which students are struggling and what concepts or tools they are struggling with.
  • Students who have mastered the material can be paired up with students who are struggling. Difficult materials can be reviewed.

Drawbacks of the Flipped Classroom:

  • Equity: all students need access to computers and internet (libraries can help with this).
  • Students need to be motivated to get the pre-class work done. If not they will struggle to keep up in class (much like with doing class readings now).
  • While flipping is a great pedagogical tool, it is not necessarily the best tool in all situations… But it is an excellent strategy for all teachers to have in their toolkits.

A Case Study: UVic Law Advanced Legal Research and Writing Class.

  • Was guest lecturer for Knowledge Management Tool class for 3+ years… decided to flip the lecture in order to engage students more fully and give them hands on experience with.
  • Show pre-class Zotero video from: http://richmccue.com/2012/12/13/a-flipped-class-knowledge-management-research-software/
  • Show Intro Quiz – Gmail question
  • Review Evernote Exercise – Install evernote on mobile device & desktop. Take picture of wite board with phone; sync to desktop; upload photo from desktop to Moodle (or Facebook if LMS not available)
  • Back to Prezi: Review feedback from students. Only 10% preferred the traditional lecture over the flipped lecture. 80% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they were more confident with the KM tools after the in class exercises than they would have been with a traditional lecture.

University of Illinois Physics experience:

  • Significantly better results on exams.
  • A – level students viewing videos gaining 15%. non viewers staying the same. B – level students gaining 19%.  C – level students gaining 10%.
  • Fewer students rating the course at very difficult.
  • Great study by University of Illinois Physics department to check-out: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/details.asp?paperid=130
  • Their method for large classes includes a multiple choice question or two after every video along with an open ended “why did you answer the way you did”, so the teachers can get a feel for why each student answered the question right or wrong.

A Flipped Class: Audio Recording Interviews

2013.01.29
education, Work
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Instead of lecturing and having a little bit of time devoted to using the Library’s audio recorders, we moved the lecture portion into 15 minutes of video, and then devoted the whole 50 minutes of class time to working with the audio recorders.  Enjoy!

______________

In this class we’re going to cover the basics of audio recording and editing of interviews. While it may seem like recording an audio interview should be straightforward, there are a number of things you can do to make your interview easier or more difficult to listen to. There is nothing worse that trying to listen to an interview with a lot of background noise, or to an interview that was not recorded at a high enough input volume.

To help you record the best quality audio interview possible, we will cover the following areas:

  • How to choose a good interview location.
  • Where to borrow high quality audio recording equipment.
  • Audio recorder setup options – when to use them and when not to.
  • Settings for Interviews, Meetings and Music.
  • How to effectively test audio quality immediately before the interview and why this is so important.

With all this under your belt you’ll be record a high quality audio interview. We’ll also cover the basics of audio editing in the Mac application Garageband, in case you need to splice together some audio, or trim the beginning or end of your audio files.

Lastly, in class you’ll be able to use all that you’ve learned by working through a short project with one or two of your classmates.If you run into problems, you can always ask for help at the Music and Multimedia counter in the library. Good Luck!

A. Introduction

B. Using the Audio Recorder

C. Editing with GarageBand

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Railroads, Libraries & Change…

2012.11.05
education, Work
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This weekend I thought back to a story I heard years ago about the railroad industry. As people and products started using highways for transportation, most rail road companies did not diversify into those new modes of transportation because they saw themselves as railroad companies, not transportation companies.

It’s never easy to make big shifts when technology opens up new opportunities. Looking back in time it seems obvious that big, successful railroad companies should have been able to make the transition (or diversify) into new modes of transportation, but generally speaking they did not. How come?

  1. Change is difficult and scary at the same time. Bureaucratic inertia makes it difficult to change the direction of most large organizations, along with the fear of dislocation and not knowing how to do a new job.
  2. Another major consideration is that the “new direction” that is obvious to us know, is generally not obvious at the time. Mistakes will be made in technological transitions. There will be ventures down dead ends, before the new best practices become well worn paths.
  3. In the case of academic libraries, we are a service “department” inside of larger organizations. Out of necessity we support the direction of the University in the best way we can, and do not necessarily have the power to change the direction of the university no matter how certain that our version of the future is correct.
  4. Lastly, larger, consensus based, democratic organizations (like Universities) generally change more slowly than smaller organizations that have strong central authority to dictate to their direction (like Corsera, et al.). This is a double edged sward. On one hand we are not as nimble as smaller start-ups. On the other hand we have resources and prestige that can allow us to be very competitive if we can create a consensus to move in the “right” direction in a timely fashion.

Trying to figure out what is the “right” direction is the tricky part, and what I think we’re headed towards in the Strategic Planning process at the library where I work. One point to remember is that railroad companies survive to this day, but they are much less important than they were a century ago, in large part because they were unable to recoginize the importance of new technologies, and integrate them into their businesses.

P.S. Here are two great articles on the future of libraries by Seth Godin & Clay Shirky as food for thought:

CALI Conference 2012: Create an eBook in 10 Minutes

2012.06.19
education, Work
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How To Instructions for the Conference eBook Seminar
June 21, 2012 – San Diego, CA

If you’re a more visual person, please watch the video tutorial that goes along with this blog post on YouTube.

Step 1: Open “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.docx” file in Microsoft Word.

Step 2: In Word, “File” -> “Save As…” -> “Other Formats”. In the bottom drop down, select “Web Page Filtered” & save to your desktop.  Close Word.

Step 3: Launch Sigil & open the HTML document you just saved.

Step 4: Cut top 4 lines of the document (from “Canadian” to the end of “… March 29,1982”).

Step 5: Select, “Generate Inline HTML TOC” (located at the bottom right of the screen). A TOC.html file will be created.

Step 6: “Edit” -> “Paste” on a new line at the top of the TOC document.

Step 7: “Edit” -> “Meta Data Editor” and add Title and Author information. Select “OK”.

Step 8: “File” -> “Save” to save the ePub file to your desktop.

Step 9: Email the ePub file to yourself, and then open on your eBook reader.

eBook Publishing Made Easy: Google Docs + Sigil + Calibre

2012.06.06
education, Google, Open Source, Work
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How hard could it be?  Those are usually the last words I utter before descending into a quagmire of technical pain as I work through how to use and master a new technology. Fortunately this time, making an eBook and related hard copy book turned out to be a straightforward and fairly easy process to master… once all the appropriate tools were identified and lined up, that is. An added bonus is that all the software is free to download and use on both Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

This project started a couple of months ago when a coworker kindly suggested that I write a paper based on a presentation I give to classes of law students on software tools for research and collaboration: Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: Creating a Modern Memex. With that encouragement I started writing with my current favourite writing tool, Google Docs.

Related YouTube Video: eBook Publishing Made Easy

Step 1 Google Docs: Google Docs is particularly good for collaborative document editing but it is also capable enough for academic writing. This means that it supports footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, tables of contents, inline images, and style sheets among other things. For the purposes of this project, it also does a great job of exporting all of these features and formatting into a HTML document, which is exactly what we need for the next step of our project… creating an ePub file in Sigil.  If you use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice instead of Google Docs, you can still save your document as an HTML file and then import it into Sigil.  Note, you should not proceed to the next step until you have completed writing, editing and revising your document. This is because if there are any changes you need to make after this point, you’ll need to redo steps 2 and 3 every time you “edit” your document.

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Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: a Free eBook

2012.06.04
education, Google, Open Source, WebApps
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I’ve just finished creating eBook and paper book versions of a paper that I recently wrote called, “Research & Collaboration Tools for Students, Staff & Faculty: Creating a Modern Memex“.  It should be helpful for anyone doing research, but especially for high school students, university students, teachers and faculty. At 55 pages in paper book format, it is a short but informative read.

As a personal learning project, I’ve made the book available in multiple formats, so that it is accessible to everyone who is interested in reading it. Feel free to send a link to this page to anyone who you think might find this short book helpful. I’ve published it using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you have an iPad, be sure to download the “iBooks for iPad only” version, as it is a multi-media edition, that includes embedded videos that unfortunately the other formats do not yet support.

Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, comments or suggestions for the book.  If you read a free version of the book, please leave a review in the Kindle Store, as I suspect this will help others discover the book.

Enjoy!

creative_commons_share_alike

QR Codes Make The Physical World Linkable

2011.08.09
education, iPhone, Work
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You can’t put a hyper-link on a poster, sheet of paper or bookmark, but you can put on a QR Code. It is a much easier and more accurate way to link to a web page than to type a URL into your smart phone.

How can I use QR Codes?

Using a QR Code reader on your smart phone (like the Google App on an iPhone or Android phone) you simply take a picture of the QR Code and the reader redirects you to a mobile web page or some other resource on theinternet. Depending on what you download, you’ll be able to:

  • Read a web page with text and pictures
  • Watch a video
  • Listen to an audio file
  • Download an app
  • Register for an event or buy tickets

QR Codes are commonly used on posters, in print ads, on bookmarks, on business cards and even on web pages.

My current favourite QR code reader for the iPhone is the Scan by QR Code City (search for “Scan” in the App store). For all other smart phones, I’d suggest trying the free Neo Reader.

Enjoy!

P.S. Here is handout with QR Code information. Here is a bookmark sheet to go along with the handout.

The Future of Text Books (and e-Books)

2011.06.30
education, iPhone, Work
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No matter what you think of Al Gore’s politics, his latest book, “Our Choice” points toward the direction that authors and publishers should be heading. Text combined with images, video and interactive graphics, make this e-Book a much more compelling product than a the equivalent physical book. I personally enjoy reading on my iPad, but all of the books I read in my Kindle reader are identical to the print copy (except that I can change the font size, and have a built in dictionary). The price is also right: $5 for the e-Book compared to $17 for the a physical copy.

My first reaction to the Our Choice app (for iPad and iPhone only at the moment) was that it reminded me a lot of CD Rom products from the 1990′s. Call me crazy, but I loved the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia because it not only included text and pictures, but added videos and interactive charts. I enjoyed the media rich CD Rom products that came of of the mid 1990 confluence of CD Roms, color monitors and speakers all shipping standard with PC’s.

So what is different this time around? For starters the form factor of the iPad make for a much more pleasant reading experience than sitting in front of a computer screen. In addition, the navigation interface that the iPad’s touch screen makes possible is intuitive and natural.  Push Pop Press is the company that wrote the software for the book, and from what they’ve said, they hope to make their tools available so that others can publish media rich tools. Watch the video below to see how the “book” works

It was a wonderful experience reading Our Choice. Not all books, especially novels, need videos and interactive charts, but for some books (like school text books in particular) these bells and whistles make a huge positive difference. I hope to see more book in a similar format in the near future.

Creating Ebooks is Easy & Free!

2011.06.28
education, iPhone, Work
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I recently returned from a Law School Technology conference, and while there I learned how easy it is to create ebooks from documents in Microsoft Word or HTML formats.  Elmer Masters lead a session called, Creating eBook Version of Your School’s Law Reviews Using Open Source and Free Tools (see the video here).

The ebook creation process was so easy that during the session I download, installed the tools, and created an ebook of my conference notes before Elmer had finished his talk.  For anyone interest here is the process:

  1. Download Sigil, the free and open source ebook editor for your operating system.
  2. Install Sigil on your computer.
  3. Open the word document that you’d like to turn into an Ebook.
  4. Save the document as an html file by going to “File” -> “Save As” and then selecting “Web Page (htm)” in the drop down box. Then press the “Save” button.
  5. Launch Sigil, and right mouse click on “Text” folder in the left hand column, and select “Add Existing Items…” Add the html file you just “Saved As” from word.
  6. Now press the “Save” button on the Sigil tool bar, and you are done!

You might want to go to the Sigil “Tool” -> “Meta Data” menu to add a title and author to the book to make it look a little more professional looking, but other than that, you’ve created your first Ebook!  Congratulations! If your document is long enough, you can insert chapter breaks to make it easier to navigate.

You might be wondering how you get this ebook on to your iPad or iPhone.  All you need to do is either email the ebook to your self and then open it on your mobile device, or if you use Dropbox, move the ebook into Dropbox and then open it from Dropbox on your iPad or iPhone.  If you’re a kindle user, you should have an email address than you can send file to in order to add them to your Kindle device.

For your reading pleasure, here are my CALI 2011 Conference Notes in ePub, PDF and Google Doc formats. Happy reading!

YouTube & Facebook: Educational Distractions or Learning Tools?

2011.01.12
education, Family, WebApps, Work
2 Comments

Do YouTube and Facebook distract students?  Of course they do!  On the other hand, can YouTube and Facebook help students with their school work?  Until recently I wasn’t sure, but after my partner’s experience with a professor who wasn’t a good teacher, and seeing how YouTube and Facebook saved her and her classmates from poor grades, I’m convinced that these “digital distractions” can be, if used intelligently, excellent Learning Tools.

Being the father of two teenagers, the husband of a partner that has recently gone back to college, and Systems Administrator at a University Law Library, I have a front row seat  on how technology is used and abused in the service of homework, research and education in general.  When my partner found herself in a college class with a teaching challenged professor, I was amazed at how she, along with her classmates, used technology to compensate for the poor classroom instruction. Her learning process for each class was as follows: Read More

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