Learning Software

Earlier this week, we released DyKnow 5.3 (in case you've missed it, I've collected the posts about 5.3 here), and the past two weeks I have spent way more of my time in the lab testing the product than I have making coding changes at my desk.  This is a good thing as it means we've finished up development on features and known issues for the release.  It's also been good, though, to get reacquainted with some older features that I don't commonly see or hear about.

An interesting theme I see in DyKnow Vision has been one of providing students a way to participate anonymously.  In many ways, this feels like a terrible idea.  We've all seen what anonymity on the Internet has done to people, and introducing a veil in between you and between your students feel counterproductive to engaging.  However, someone must have realized and communicated to us that sometimes embarrassment can stifle engagement even more.  And I'll admit maybe I'm reading too much of this narrative into some of these features, but once I started seeing it, I saw it everywhere.

When testing you tend to identify a particular feature and spend a lot of time ensuring that all aspects of that feature are working, and the place I started this past week was in the Options dialog.  Perhaps the most obvious and most discussed of the "anonymous" features I recognized is the "Allow Anonymous Panel Submission" feature in the "Session" section of the Options dialog.  I mentioned this last week, but by checking this checkbox, students will be able to submit panels anonymously.  I recall back in 5.1 when discussing feature usage and importance (when trying to determine how to group and position features), several users called the feature indispensable when discussing sensitive topics.

Continuing my testing of the Options, I noticed on the "Popular" section options for the Session List.  

For those that don't know, the Session List is a list of all the students in your Vision Session.  The list displays their name as well as other additional information such as their status (how well they understand the topic), their submitted panels, their current work group number, and whether you have shared control (letting students demonstrate how to work out problems for the rest of the class).  When students have submitted panels, you can just click on the panel beside the student and it will open up the panel for you to see.  If you want to virtually bring a student up to the board, you click the students name in the Session List and click the Share Control button and they're in control.  

Back to the options, I noticed that there were all these checked options that said "Show Name/UserID on Session List," "Show Participant status on Session List," "Show submitted panels on Session List," etc.  Of course by default these were checked because it doesn't seem like it'd be much of a list if it didn't show anything.  But when I thought about it, if you're running DyKnow on a projector in front of the class (and not using projector mode), all your students would be able to see that Johnny's just not getting it.  Sometimes, this is what you want as it may encourage your students to help Johnny.  Other times, this will embarrass Johnny to where he shuts off or just stops updating his status.  So then there's an option to hide the different fields.  You can hide the user's name so you'll see that the students who haven't submitted panels don't get it.  If students are in work groups you can see Group 4 is having trouble.  If you want the names, you can hide the status (you still have the pie chart at the bottom to let you know if students are having problems.  

Continuing on, right above Session List options, you've got an option to Identify Users on Panels.  This is useful when students have submitted panels, but if you don't want it to show, there you go.  Later on in the day, I was running a session and sent a quick poll.  In 5.1 you were suddenly able to know how each individual student responded to the poll, but if you felt that would censor the responses, you can make the answers "anonymous."

So there's been this big theme throughout the product that I never noticed till now.  Only took me 7 years to see it.  So given my track record, is there something I missed for promoting anonymous conversation?

For DyKnow 5.2, as I often mention, we totally rewrote the DyKnow panel to be more stable and more WYSIWYG (specifically the rendering of text).  Because of a few of the technology choices we made along the way, we also saw an increase in performance.  In fact we saw a major increase in performance.  As promised (last year) I ran through some benchmark tests for drawing notebooks to share just how much performance we've gained in 5.2.  In my benchmark ink test, DyKnow 5.1 drew the panel in an average of 4.3 seconds.  DyKnow 5.2 however, drew the panel in an average of 1.7 seconds.  In my benchmark text and images test, DyKnow 5.1 drew the panel in an average of 4.6 seconds with a standard deviation of 3.1 (the range was 2.8 to 11.8 seconds).  DyKnow 5.2, however, averaged 0.3 seconds with a standard deviation of 0.1 seconds (the range was 0.2 to 0.6).



Additionally, 5.1 was much less responsive when performing actions such as zooming and scrolling around panels.  So 5.2 came out and we developers felt very good about the increased performance.  And then something very interesting happened.  Now that the client was running so much faster when dealing with lots of ink, we noticed notebooks that contained lots of ink.  Significantly more ink than what we'd seen in the past.  We're talking zooming the client to 250% zoom and writing as small as you can to cram in as much as possible.  These were not the usage patterns we'd seen before.  

Now we started looking at the time it took to save all this ink when saving your notebooks.  Based on some of your feedback and this new usage data, we found a few ways that really sped up save times and put out a server patch with these improvements.  But we haven't stopped there.  Following our initial stress test for DyKnow 5.3, we implemented changes to improve performance when submitting or retrieving very large panels in a Session.  We're also working on ensuring institution-wide scalability for our new file request feature (speaking of pushing lots of data).  For the past few weeks, it has been all about squeezing out as much performance as possible, especially under these high load situations.  And this is how DyKnow can be used to engage an entire lecture hall with hundreds of students.  It's a continual push but so worth it.

It's the beginning of January and that means everyone is talking about their goals for starting a new leaf which obviously means that you have to take a big step back and see where you're going wrong.  Me?  I'm a bad blogger.  To be sure, I feel that I write quality posts, and I do write at least once a week.  That's not the problem I'm talking about.  My problem is that I don't comment on other blogs.

So why does this matter and why should I (or you) be better at commenting?  It basically becomes a question of "what is a blog" and "when is it useful."  One interpretation of a blog as expressed on Wikipedia is that a blog is a website that contains regular entries of "commentary, description of events, or other material such as graphics or video."  This leads into the "when is it useful" question.  To answer this question, I'm going to employ a few analogies (stick with me as I promise this has some relevance).

A blog can be used like a diary.  You can write up your personal thoughts and lock it away where no one but you can use it.  A blog can also be like a newspaper.  You can broadcast your thoughts and make them available for anyone to read.  The more people who read it the more valuable it becomes.  In the former case, the utility of your blog is limited to how much you personally can get out of the blog.  

In the latter case, the utility of your blog is limited by the number of people reached by your posts.  This value of the network is described by Metcalfe's Law (if you're interested).  
It's also intuitively understood when you think about how useful your phone is if you had the only phone in the world vs if there were two in the world vs if there were ten in the world etc.  But I must correct myself.  Above I said your blog is limited by the number of people reached by your posts, but I should have said can be.  

Can be?  I say this because we're living in the Web 2.0 world (guh, forgive the cliche).  A blog can be a newspaper but it can also be a gathering place thanks to the ability to comment, rework, and discuss.  As part of a social network, the blog reaches not only individuals but also groups (described by Reed's Law if you're interested).  

Think of a group you're actively involved in and how each person brings a unique set of perspectives to that group.  This person in many ways is acting as a link to other groups.  But imagine how sad it would be if no one in your group ever talked.  Imagine if the group never engaged each other.  This is me.  This is why I'm a bad blogger.

I am a follower of many blogs, but I'm a commenter on almost none of them.  I do this because I feel a bit out of my league or that as a software developer and not a teacher/school administrator my experience and ideas are not welcome.  Sometimes it's to avoid sounding ignorant or amateurish.  All of these are bad reasons to withhold.  By not engaging, I'm not only hurting myself but I'm decreasing the value of the blogs I follow.  Plus, we're all learners regardless and chances are if they're freely sharing their blog posts with the world, they're there to help.  So this year, I want to do a better job engaging and challenge you to do the same.  There's a lot going on in technology, education, and in the DyKnow community and it's important we all do what we can to keep each other up to date and growing.  If you have a question, ask.  If you have a perspective, share.  After all, the least we can do for students is to model the engaged classroom with our own learning.

My old high school, where my dad still works, has jumped straight into Project Based Learning (PBL) by adopting the New Technology High School model. Each time I come home, I make sure to get the latest scoop on how they're adapting to this vastly different teaching model. In PBL content and standards are learned by students as they are necessary to accomplish the project at hand. Teachers must design projects that will challenge and engage students as well as cover the subject matter necessary, but after the planning stages they spend less time as instructors and more time as advisors for student projects.

My educational background has been filled with the traditional lecture and exercise models where classtime is centered around topics, content, and discussion. In this environment, I feel that DyKnow Vision absolutely thrives providing features for collaborative note taking, quick assessments, backchannel discussions, and lecture capture. Work Groups encourages group exercises and provides tools for students to collaboratively work together, but this is still centered around the DyKnow panel which may not be appropriate for every project. So from my silo (and I encourage anyone who knows better to prove me wrong), DyKnow Vision can be somewhat of a clunky fit for PBL. Yes, even in PBL the lecture is not dead, and there are going to be many times where a replayable example or class discussion would benefit the students' project objectives, but it is definitely not the everyday class tool that I used in college.

But I think Monitor is coming into a unique situation.  I've mentioned before that Monitor is not the favored son in my book, but many of the newer interactive features we have been and are currently adding to Monitor (including remote control, screen broadcast, and chat) are uniquely suited to providing this advisory role.  By switching the chat mode to be to moderator only, students can be working in their groups and can quickly chat you a question that only you see.  You can then send a quick reply back.  If there are technology questions, you can view the student's screen and even take control to show them what to do.  All of this can quickly and easily be done from your desk.  This means that the easy problems can be fixed easily, so you'll have more time to focus on more complicated matters (the kinds of problems where you really need to walk over and talk things through).  

As I've mentioned before, it's important for us here at DyKnow to recognize educators for their outstanding teaching strategies and integration of classroom technology.

This month we're recognizing Dr. Jean Adams of York University (Ontario, Canada).  I personally had the pleasure of working with Jean and her colleagues as they evaluated DyKnow to determine if the product would meet the needs of her and other business school  classrooms.  You can read her profile and why she is our Educator of the Month, but I want to discuss some of the specific uses of the software in her class.

• Engaging Every Student with Content Transmission -- Jean has a very large lecture class of about 400 each semester.  DyKnow facilitates engaging all of those students via the technology.  Jean knows that each of her students receive the lecture notes and can type additional information while in class.

• Working in Small Groups -- The small collaboration group feature was something Jean was very excited about when she first saw DyKnow.  With a few clicks she is able to separate the class into smaller groups of her choosing.  These students can work together even if they are not seated near each other.  In a way, this emulates interactive whiteboard technology for the small groups.  They now have a shared space to collaborate--and they can easily submit their work to Dr. Adams.

• Submitting Work in Class -- Speaking of submitting work, the students use the submit panel feature to send their work (either as individuals or as groups) to Dr. Adams.  It's then easy for her to determine if she wants to share those submissions with the class or review them afterward.  If she selects to look at them afterward, she can mark them up and send them back to students with the click of one button.

• PowerPoint Plug-In -- Jean was very excited to hear this fall that we now have a PowerPoint Plug-In.  She is able to create all of her content, including polling questions, ahead of time.  She can click one button to have it convert into a DyKnow file and is still able make changes once it's in DyKnow.

This is just a sampling of Dr. Adams favorite features in DyKnow (I'm sure she uses others, too).

According to a recent survey, college "students are spending nearly 12 hours daily, on average, engaged with some type of media".  I found this survey on the PRSA website.  So half of a college student's life is spent using technology.

While this article doesn't go into detail regarding when these gadgets are used to engage with media, I'd almost bet cash-money that some of that time is during class.

Students are using technology in the classroom -- sometimes as a distraction and sometimes for good purpose.  The student could be surfing the web for classroom-related content, playing the "google jockey" perhaps.  Maybe the instructor uses online classroom software, like an LMS, to post additional resources and homework questions.  Students could be using their cell phones to send answers to polling questions via software for the classroom.

On the other hand, students could be playing FarmVille on Facebook or texting their friends about what happened at the weekend's big bash.

Whatever these students are doing, they are doing it with technology.  Sooner than later, I believe more professors will embrace technology as a tool with purpose in education which will better help them engage and connect with their students. 


**Photo from mediabistro.com**

So one of the themes I've seen in my reader the past few months has been the mentioning of cognitive load theory.  It might be mentioned in someone's paper or passively mentioned en route to some other point, but it was enough for me to sit up and wonder "what's that?"

Cognitive load theory(CLT) is the branch of psychology that gave us the 7-digit phone number.  It explores the capacity of the mind to retain information, something that is quite important to educators as well.  The intro to the intro version of CLT states that the mind can only take so much load and there are three types of cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane.  

Intrinsic cognitive load describes the inherent difficulty in the subject matter.  There is a greater load when reading Ulysses than there is reading Green Eggs and Ham.  Simple addition is easier than calculus.  It is noted that while there are strategies to manage this, intrinsic cognitive load is largely out of your control.  

Extraneous cognitive load describes the unnecessary cognitive load present during instruction.  An extreme example of this might be trying to learn a subject in foreign language.  While the translation exercise may be very good for practicing the foreign language, it stands as a barrier to learning the subject being taught.

The final type, germane, is described as the load present when constructing schema (the unit of learning in CLT).  These are (among many things) the connections and metaphors you might construct to explain and relate new information to past information.  The mind is working when learning which does increase load; it's only that this load is the kind we want to increase.

So in comes the Fire Story, Dave Berque's story about his earliest days of teaching and coming to the epiphany that technology could aid him in engaging his students.  As the story goes, Dr. Berque was forced to hit the ground running as an educator, teaching a theoretical computer science course.  He explained the material, copying his notes on the board, while students copied the board into their notes.  All the while, the class was disappointingly silent.  Then one day, Dr. Berque noticed seven hands raised in his class of 150 people and excitedly called on one of the students.  He was soon disappointed to learn that these seven students were only trying to inform him that the ceiling had caught fire after a light had exploded.

The extraneous cognitive load from furiously copying notes had become so overwhelming to the students that only 7/150 had noticed the ceiling was on fire.  It seems fair to say that if students' minds were too overloaded for their survival instincts to detect danger, there was likely little room for new schema acquisition.  

From this experience, Dr. Berque was inspired to create DEBBIE which later became DyKnow.  Now his notes on the board are automatically transfered to students and he is free to focus on active learning activities designed to increase germane load and creating a more engaged (and less overworked) classroom.  

It's important to note, in my opinion, that not everything Dr. Berque writes is automatically transferred to students.  I think one of the problems with many PowerPoint presentations is that they after oversimplifying concepts down to a few bullet points they spoon feed you those points one at a time, reducing your need to pay attention.  Additionally, I believe there is quite a bit of mnemonic potential in physically writing (in moderation).  Dr. Berque takes advantage of this potential by using what is called "private ink."  When he writes on the interactive whiteboard at the front of the class with private ink, students see what he's writing, but are forced to copy it into their notes.  This helps provide emphasis on key concepts, which in turn will hopefully lead to better schema construction.

In mid-October I had the pleasure of visiting Appalachian State University for the Tablet PC Tech Forum. What I found there was a hidden gem!

Come on - how many universities invite vendors to campus, take care of accommodation details, and ask for feedback and collaboration? I can think of many others that demand vendors to offer price cuts or giveaways without conversation, but App State is different in a very refreshing way. My hat is off to Corporate Relations Director John Krumrine and team for making us feel welcome during this engaging and productive visit. 

We were joined by representatives from Microsoft, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to see how App State faculty are integrating technology into teaching. The star of the day was Dr. Jennifer Snodgrass of the faculty of Hayes School of Music. We already knew Jennifer was great due to the DyKnow webinar she gave this summer, but seeing her and her students during actual classes on campus revealed her passion and technology competence even more!

I must say as a former music student I wish I could have taken music theory in an environment like Jennifer's classroom. Her energy matched with Tablet PCs and DyKnow software fit in nicely with the notation- and media-heavy activities in music theory. Students even reported higher classroom learning/mastery due to the technology and related teaching/learning practices. I think they have that quote on video - I hope!

The innovations in music are just the tip of the iceberg. A course sequence on the "physics of music" is planned for the future. This is the result of sciences and music faculty working together with a common technology to interest non-science and non-music major students, and it looks fantastic.

We also enjoyed meeting the deans of arts/sciences and music, as well as university IT director, chief of staff, and even the chancellor. This showed how high the commitment is to effective teaching with technology at App State. Stay tuned - some great things are happening there!

Laura (our company President) caught me while I was passing in the hallway not long ago and I have no idea how we got on this subject, but we started talking about theater and performance.  I mentioned that I had done several musicals as a high school student and one thing led to another and the conversation ended by jokingly suggesting that we put on a company musical.  No, we haven't discussed it since, but now that it's on the Internet we'll see if there are any YouTube videos in our near future.

Seriously though, in theater there's this notion of a fourth wall that is the front of the stage.  The audience is stationed in their area where they observe and enjoy the performers stationed in their area.  But during this time, there's no anticipated acknowledgement of the audience by the performers.  There are times, however, that a performer will "break the fourth wall" and address the audience -sometimes even coming out into the audience to do so.  The effect is a transformation in the audience's experience of the play going from passive observation to active participation.  

Much has been written all over the Internet against the "sage on a stage" model of teaching (and if you haven't heard there are tons of opportunities for creating an engaged classroom with DyKnow Vision), but the wall I find interesting is the one created by Monitor.  DyKnow's classroom management product has the word "Big Brother" thrown around to help describe its function.  You as the teacher can impose limitations on websites and applications not to mention the thumbnail image of every student's computer in the class.  You can even view the screen of any of your students in real time without the student knowing they're being monitored.  

To me this is another fourth wall.  For Monitor 5.3, the main push is for features that bust through that wall to take Monitor from a passive observation tool to a classroom participation tool.  And I'm quite happy.  It's my belief that classrooms need technology to be used to create connections more efficiently and abundantly, so why should classroom management tech not fit that as well.  As I've mentioned before, we've been moving in that direction slowly with Remote Control and File Transfer.  I've already mentioned that Screen Broadcaster is being added to Monitor as well for 5.3.  But an interesting addition to the growing list of interactive features is Monitor Chat.  

For me this is the big one.  Chat's use has consistently surprised me on the Vision side, so I can only imagine the uses Monitor chat will get.  But excited anticipation aside, I think this is important as it helps provide for the first time a feedback mechanism for educators using Monitor.  Your students will be able to discretely ask questions or for assistance.  They'll be able to strike up discussions with you or with their classmates (as in Vision, you'll have the ability to set chat to off, to you only, or to everyone).  This is a different beast indeed, and I'm excited we're headed in that direction.  So let me know your thoughts on including chat in Monitor.  Is anyone planning on using it once 5.3 is released next year?  How will this change the way you use Monitor?

Today, Vince DiStasi, the CIO for Grove City College gave a webinar regarding integrating technology in the classroom in a meaningful way.  

Here's an overview from my perspective.  The first part focused on the hardware, infrastructure and why it's important to consider several perspectives.

• Don't underestimate what you need for your network.  Infrastructure is incredibly important.  You'll need more bandwidth than what you initially expect.
• Hardware that is reliable and quality is important to faculty.  They won't want to create a meaningful classroom technology plan if the hardware won't consistently work for them.
• Make sure there is enough work space for students (previously this meant actual work space, now that means enough screen real estate on their devices).
• Applications supporting the classroom experience are important as well.  Some are discipline specific; others will have campus agreements.
• Students won't always use the tools if they have them.  They must understand what they are and how they are used.  For example, students use MS Word to take notes, because that's how they've always taken notes on a computer.  Once OneNote is explained (more as a collection tool for gathering information, like note taking), they are more likely to use it.
• Why a Tablet PC? A Tablet PC is "a laptop on steroids."  It's particularly useful for when a pen/pencil is needed.

The second half of the presentation focused on DyKnow software. 

• With DyKnow, you're not asking faculty to change a lot about the way they teach.  If they write, they write on a Tablet PC instead of a chalkboard.
• If they like PowerPoint, they now have a PowerPoint Plug-In to use.  They can use existing PowerPoint, create polling questions during prep time, keep animations, and even launch a DyKnow session from PowerPoint.
• The DyKnow Suite has many layers -- like an onion.
• It's a good tool because most students today are not good note takers -- DyKnow makes it easier for them to understand what is important.  But the key is not to make them passive learners.  There are interactive tools in DyKnow to ensure students are involved.
• The software ensures that students are able to replay all of their notes after class.  If a teacher records audio during class, that stays with the notes from class.
• A very useful part of DyKnow is that it provides different ways to collect student work.   There is no handing out and collecting paper.  Everything is done in DyKnow.  For example, a quiz is sent to students, collected upon completion, reviewed after class and the graded quiz is sent back to students electronically.
• DyKnow is client/server, not peer-to-peer. So it allows student to connect from a distance.  They have students in France take a class with students in PA.  Students are paired up in a small group, even though they are not physically together.
• Another way to collect feedback is through a poll.  This way it is anonymous, but the results are there for the entire class to see.
• There have to be pedagogical goals (engagements, problem introduction, challenge artifacts, etc) with any sort of activity implemented in DyKnow.  Students will know if you are just giving them busy work.
• The idea of collaborative note taking is powerful.  Faculty determine how much information to give to the students.
• What's important to the faculty?  The finished product or the process the student took?  Replay allows faculty to see the process that the student took.  
• If you are using small groups, you only have to grade the groups' submission once and it will send the graded paper back to all of the students in that group.

In closing, it's not just about the technology.  The infrastructure has to be there and be reliable.  In today's world, everything is about access and mobility. The true reason to use technology is to leverage the power to help meet the objectives of the classroom and the school.

I'm sure you know by now that our interactive teaching software, DyKnow Vision, has a PowerPoint Add-In.  I think this is a great tool, especially for educators who already use PowerPoint in their classes.

I'll be honest: I'm not a huge fan of PowerPoint.  In my experience, PowerPoint wasn't used to necessarily make powerful points.  It was used more to rehash everything I'd read about in the text.  Often times, I was able to access the presentation beforehand with our school management software (an LMS to be exact).  I'd print them out, and then take notes on the side with anything else the professor would say that seemed important. 

Nothing to me in this situation was engaging or interactive.  It was the teacher talking at us (that's right, I wrote "at") and us trying to write down as much as possible.

I do, however, like the PowerPoint Add-In for DyKnow.  Why you may ask?

1. PowerPoint isn't the actual mode of presentation.  It's DyKnow.  And with DyKnow you get interaction, collaboration and, hopefully, some engagement during class.
2. The embedded polling tool is fantastic.  Now, teachers can prepare questions for this student response tool while they prepare for class.  With one click of a button the question for understand is sent out to the student computers for them to answer.
3. Clarity.  Now, when you convert from PowerPoint to DyKnow all of the text, links and images remain "live."  It's no longer a static image.  Everything is edit-able and move-able.  Which means more flexibility during class with last minute changes.

I'm sure as I use the new tool more often, I'll find even more reasons why I like it! Until then, go download the latest version of DyKnow and see what it can do for yourself!
Photo from friendbeef.com

Okay, so there's nothing really exciting about being Pre-Alpha.  It merely means that we haven't even built an official version of the 5.3 code, but it definitely does not mean that we haven't been working (I can't believe you'd even think that).  Since everything is at such an early stage, I simply don't know what will be in 5.3 next year, but I do know what I've been working on lately so I'll talk about that.

This week I've been knee-deep in bandwidth issues as we work on adding a screen broadcaster feature to DyKnow Monitor.  Screen broadcaster has been a Vision feature for years now given the dividing line traditionally has been classroom management = Monitor and classroom interaction = Vision.  But many of our newer features in Monitor have begun to blur that line.  In many ways, I'm beginning (hoping) to see Monitor as a way to engage your students as opposed to merely ensuring they're engaged.  I'm getting ahead of myself.  So what does Screen Broadcaster mean for Monitor and why am I worried about bandwidth?

I'm glad you asked.

Firstly, lets define why anyone (Vision or Monitor) would want to broadcast his or her screen by looking back at my Computer Science (CS) classes at DePauw.  CS is a major that necessarily requires multiple tools.  Much of the theory and concepts were discussed using DyKnow Vision thanks to its collaborative notetaking features, but try as you might, you can't compile and run a program with DyKnow.  So in order to participate in class labs and paired programming exercises we had to use a compiler.  It would be nice if everyone was completely fluent in whatever program they're using at all points in time, but reality has shown that you have to show people how to use tools.  Broadcasting your screen to your class allows you to demonstrate how to do an action to your entire class at once without needing a projector (or students being in the same room).  

So why am I worried about bandwidth?  It's because images are very large.  Ted Stevens famously received the ire of the Internet by calling the "internets" a "series of tubes."  His metaphor wasn't entirely apt in the situation he described because he thought an email was being delayed by a matter of days due to increased network traffic.  Despite the famous faux pas, the series of tubes metaphor does make sense when talking about general bandwidth concerns.  Only so much water can flow through a tube before it starts getting congested.  The same is true with your wireless router.  If you try and push too much information through the router, eventually some or all the programs you're using for class will stop working (at least the connected ones).  

Additionally, we're not just talking about one classroom, but there will be some effect on your entire network.  On the other hand, you don't want to send too little data or you won't be able to effectively demonstrate (earlier today I ran and subsequently failed a test that looked like I was trying to redraw the screen in MSPaint).  One thing we do in Vision (and will also do in Monitor) is to allow the user to broadcast in a "Low Bandwidth" mode.  This way users are able to govern the wireless usage, but given that this also comes with a loss of quality, not many people will opt into this option.  

So obviously, there's a lot to think about still, but I am pleased with the progress we're making.
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Not long ago I was catching up with one of my old high schools friends who is now teaching high school English.  We were catching up about what we're currently working on and the lessons we each have been learning in the beginning years of employment.  And then we got to talking about educational technology and the like (it was a pretty easy transition given our circumstances) and she asked me about the problem of cell phones in the classroom.  Immediately, she noted that it was becoming more of a burden to write up students and collect the cell phones constantly.  

So obviously the solution is to find ways to use the phones positively to engage students, and there are hundreds of examples and ideas available online of teachers doing just that.  The iPhone in particular has gotten a lot of attention from edtech bloggers and tweeters for the simplicity of the user interface and the access of resources available (both apps and webapps).  

Which is really great if your students have iPhones.

A really good point she made was the fact that not all her kids have iPhones.  Yes some kids do have very powerful mobile devices but not all do.  You could purchase an iPhone/iTouch for all your students to use for class, but you're still competing with their phones and the original disciplinary issues that prompted the discussion.  On the other hand, it's obviously not an option to leave out students who don't have the phones capable of keeping up with the classroom activities.  

And it's not just about how nice a phone you have.  An additional concern is having a sufficient data plan for the phones.  This is particularly challenging as a data plan is going to be a monthly expense.  I can imagine in the worst case scenario some student coming to class with a huge bill from data overages because they weren't thinking about their cell phone plan when they were working on their class project.  

So in many ways this limits your pedagogy to the lowest common denominator for your class.  This could be a problem if you're wanting to take advantage of complex webapps that some phones may not be able to handle, but any phone that can text can take advantage of Twitter.  Simply set up the student twitter accounts to accept tweets from the student's cell phone number and then you can project the twitter feed from the class on the wall like I discussed doing with DyKnow Vision and DyKnow's chat feature.

I think using texting as the lowest common denominator might be okay since the student who doesn't have the ability to text or surf the web is less likely to be using the phone in a disruptive manner (snake only holds my attention for so long).  So with those students you could provide them an access tool such as a computer or provided cell phone to take part in the classroom activity.  There are additional consequences to handing out cell phones as well (for instance who pays for the data plan) which is why I like that the iPod Touch will connect to your wireless... or the full-blown computer option.

The interesting consequence of all my thinking along this line is that it all points to a seemingly inevitable 1-1 cell phone program necessarily being introduced in the same ways that 1-1 laptop/tablet programs are being rolled out now.  All of this is for naught if classroom activities using the phones are not engaging enough to lure students from the dark side, but knowing that they can be I wonder if it would be a workable solution to the cell phone problem.  The big scary part of all this is that classroom management software like DyKnow Monitor won't be a part of this brave new world which can be very intimidating, so it's jumping into the deep end feet first.  No matter which way things go, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.
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I don't know where it all came from, but it seems as if every day there is an exciting new tool available to use in your classroom.  But as these new tools become available, there's been an interesting and, in my opinion, unanticipated distinction made between them: public and non-public.  I've heard lots of different terms based on the tool and the market the tool is trying to speak to, but when it comes down to it some tools will let anyone join/share/access content while others enforce some means of access control. 

One of the first stories like this was between MySpace and Facebook.  MySpace saw an initially much higher success rate by being completely open (to join as well as to view pages).  Facebook, on the other hand, would not let you join unless you were a student/faculty at one of the supported colleges and would only let you see the information of your friends or fellow classmates.  Eventually Facebook started letting anyone join, but the information is still available to only your friends and those in your "network."  Then there's Ning, the exciting make-your-own-social network tool, which gives the best of both worlds by offering the ability to keep your network public or make it private to members only. 

Twitter requires an account to add content, but anyone can access the tweets at anytime.  The hundreds of options for hosting a blog have privacy options allowing you to setup allowed admins, authors, and readers.  And one of the tools I've discussed earlier called Noteflight has a feature set aimed specifically at classrooms.  This feature set is designed to be private.

And it all surprises me as to why there is a push for privacy controls.  In a lot of ways, I would really anticipate the interest and momentum to be outward towards public, open discourse.  Isn't the crux of Web 2.0 tools to establish connections on a scale never before possible?  Is there really less value placed on interfacing with experts and establishing your voice in a global arena? 

Don't get me wrong.  My friends and I have our own private blog where we share and discuss items of interest.  By making the blog private, we have a level of intimacy possible only by the assurance of a familiar audience.  In a lot of ways, in retrospect, this has enabled even the more timid in the group to share openly as they only have to get past the theoretical judgements of us instead of the whole world. 

I do not undervalue this.  In fact, drawing the parallel to my work, I am always very encouraged when I hear teachers talking about using the anonymous panel submission feature in DyKnow to encourage a more open discussion of sensitive matters.  I agree that it's critically important to find ways to engage all students.  Also, it's admittedly hard for me to understand all the issues related to public sharing of content since I'm not in a position of support of such a system.  DyKnow was designed to be a classroom-focused, centrally managed system, but there are no separate classes in a public forum- just the forum itself.  So naturally my experience with the very real concerns of a pubilc system have been vicariously through blog posts and articles I've read. 

And of course I understand that there are real problems that must be overcome.  There's a very real need to be cautious when putting student information online.  We all know that if a student isn't safe, they won't be able to learn.  There's also a need to be cognizant of potential legal liability on the school for content published (although this could lead to an excellent discussion of freedom of speech and libel).  And there's going to be a question of parent and community buy-in (where applicable): if parents don't want their kids' content publicly posted there is a responsibility to respect that.  Finally, there's the extra diligence that is required when moderating comments, etc that may be coming from the outside world.  After all the main advantage of a public system, other than sharing with the world the accomplishments of your students, is the ability to open up the discourse to the outside world.

But in the face of these concerns, I wonder if we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and I wonder (and would really appreciate thoughts on this) if the opportunity to legitimately and authentically engage in a global discussion is worth finding reasonable answers to these concerns (for those that appear to be more than trivial).  And does the sense of ownership and pride that would come from publishing overcome any theoretical comfort the walled garden can provide (and does, as I would expect, the real-life social pressure from classmates to contribute keep any concerns in the periphery). 

Finally, I wonder how this applies to DyKnow.  As I said before, DyKnow was created to be centered around the idea of the classroom.  Roles are defined along educator/student lines and all users are organized into classes.  This has let us be a centrally manageable and well-organized solution thus far, but in our greater mission to help increase student learning through technology, is this a leap we need to take?  What are your thoughts on challenges implementing public content vs the walled garden variety?  Do you feel that classroom technologies should all move towards an open/public model?

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Beautiful image of walled garden taken by BinaryApe can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/binaryape/276620094/
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History of 1:1 program at CCDS:

• In 1996, they were the first school to go 1:1 and did so by working with Toshiba and Microsoft. 
• In 2003 they started using Toshiba Tablet PCs in their program. 
• Now every student and teacher in 5th through 12th grade has a Tablet PC.
• They have deployed Windows7 to about 200 computers and have been very happy with its performance.

Machines are used in the classroom and out.  Every single person has a Tablet PC.  Baker says that a laptop is a subset of the Tablet.  Unlike many who say a Tablet is a laptop with a pen.  It's NOT about converting handwriting to text -- it is about so much more.

His job is to create the most powerful teaching and learning environment available.  It's not about the computer.  It's about pedagogy.  He has to make integrating technology in the classroom as easy as possible for both teachers and students.  There is trust in the faculty they they understand what they want to do in their classroom.  He's there to facilitate it.

How DyKnow changes the classroom (or at least how it did at CCDS):
Note taking -- for Rob, there are two camps of teachers:

1. Those who write as much as possible and expect the students to write all of that as well.
2. Those who use AV (videos, audio, etc) and aren't really engaging the students.

Rob, however, wants it all.  DyKnow software helps him engage students in the learning process as well as give them the opportunity to be active learners (and note takers).  He wants to know:  Who knows what and when do they know it. 

DyKnow focuses and motivates the students because they know that they may be asked to answer a question, submit their own work or share something with the class, at any time.
There are a number of features that Rob integrates with his teaching strategies to get the most out of class time:

• At any time he can collect the students' work -- from one student or from the entire class.
• He can see the process of how the student solved the problem.  DyKnow automatically "records" each step that the student took so you can replay each student's work step-by-step.
• It's easy to make a student the teacher so they have control to share their ink and text with the rest of the class.  One student could lead class or several could be chosen to share the space at the same time.  Rob equated this to giving every student interactive whiteboard technology.
• For those who are familiar with clickers, DyKnow has a polling tool built in that can accomplish just about the same thing.  Rob said that this is a nice way to see if the class understands the topic.
• Students can be encouraged to work individually.  The purple ink only appears on the projector so that he doesn't write over what the students have done.
• Students can replay this information outside of class as well.  If the lesson is recorded, students can listen to the audio as well. 
• The chat feature is useful as well. Rob even utilized this outside of the classroom when he had to be at home for the school day and his students were taking a test in class.
• He uses the classroom management software, DyKnow Monitor, not just to keep students focused, but to be able to watch their screens in real-time.
  

A recording of the CCDS webinar will be on the DyKnow Video Library soon if you missed it!

In my last post I wrote a very cheery description of how we can now import animations from PowerPoint allowing you to reveal content at a controlled pace in DyKnow.  Now, a skeptic might frown upon all this activity, and it's true that adding animations isn't guaranteed to create a better learning experience.  In fact one study in the International Journal of Innovation and Learning I read about on Ars Technica concluded that there is a possibility that using PowerPoint animations to disclose information in a slow controlled manner may have negative impact on comprehension.  But this is where DyKnow is different from simple PowerPoints.  

Firstly, all the content is delivered to the students allowing them to write directly on the PowerPoint slides during the class discussion.  Our antagonist now astutely points out that this is the equivalent of printing out your PowerPoints and passing them out to students before class, an interface that is significantly less complex than ours.  I am a firm believer, however, in the advantage of our lecture capture and replay features, having used them on many occasions during college.  

Secondly, DyKnow offers interactive possibilities that PowerPoint does not.  I think it's meaningful in Dr. Berque's whitepaper that he defined progressive disclosure as a pattern of “pause, practice, and disclose.”  I said before I believe the power in progressive disclosure, is not in the controlled reveal of information but in the active practice and engagement that occurs during the practice portion of the pattern.  And this is where DyKnow is different.  In between your "disclose" steps, you can have students work on sample problems individually or in groups.  You can have students submit their solutions and have then entire class discuss them together.  You can have a student work out their solution and all the other students would be getting that solution automatically via shared control.  

Slowly revealing information to students runs the risk of trivializing that information.  If it's so simple to follow that it barely takes engagement, why would you engage?  Adding active-learning activities to lectures is so important to counter-act this tendency.  Hopefully by adding functionality such as importing editable PowerPoint content and animations for images and text, you will find it much more natural to integrate these active learning activities into the flow of your PowerPoint lecture content.
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I've been talking a little about the coming PowerPoint integration that is currently in Beta and have already discussed Polls (probably my favorite part of this integration).  I would also like to touch on another important part of our enhancements to our PowerPoint import: animations.  

One of the terms that I hear a great deal when discussing pedagogical strategies is "progressive disclosure."  Dr. Dave Berque discusses this technique in his 2006 whitepaper evaluation of DyKnow usage at DePauw on page four: "DyKnow teachers often share prepared content with students following a 'pause, practice, and disclose' pattern that we call progressive disclosure."  When talking about a topic, you introduce a topic, have students engage the topic through some activity, and then reveal a sample solution.  The critical part of this, in my opinion, is the engagement through the activity, but another important element is that you are able to choose when students are given what information.

Control of information has always been available from panel to panel, as Dr. Berque was discussing.  The moderator in a DyKnow Session can choose when and in what order your prepared panels are shared with students.  And on a given panel, you could always delay writing with your pen on the panel.  However, to delay textual information or images, users often had to go to more elaborate lengths such as using white ink to cover over text and erasing at a certain time.  

With the coming integration, DyKnow will convert your PowerPoint animations to help facilitate progressive disclosure of text or images on a given panel.  
Then when you're in your DyKnow Session, click on the Append Prepared Panel/Advance Animation button (the page with squiggles and the green plus button you use to bring in your next prepared panel) and it will bring in the next animation.  Additionally, we realized many users are used to advancing animations by hitting the space bar.  Now, the space bar is hooked up to this button to give a very natural way to move through your panels like you might have in PowerPoint.  Finally, after the collaborative notetaking experience, students can replay the notebook with all the animations and their own notes synched up with the audio from the lecture (provided you choose to use it for that class).  

DyKnow is sponsoring a free webinar on September 15th at 2 pm EDT.  Rob Baker, Technology Director at Cincinnati Country Day School (CCDS), will be leading the session which will discuss their 1:1 computing program and the importance of integrating technology in the classroom . 

In particular, Rob will focus on CCDS's use of DyKnow software for a variety of classroom activities such as student responses and interactive whiteboard software.  While I believe CCDS also uses the classroom management system, DyKnow Monitor, Baker will focus on engaging the students in active learning activities not the need to keep students on-task.

You can register for this webinar on the DyKnow website and also learn a bit more about Rob Baker as he was our June 2009 Educator of the Month.

I'm looking forward to learning more about classroom technology integration with the 1:1 Tablet PC program and how teacher's are utilizing the features of DyKnow Vision in their classroom.

In DyKnow 5.0, it was common practice to write a poll question on a reserved panel.  Then during the DyKnow Session, you would bring up a quick poll, select the appropriate answer choices, and that would be that.  This was a very simple and elegant way to alert students to the poll choices and simultaneously prepare the poll ahead of time.

In 5.1 you were newly able to send out a full question and answer selection that your students would see in their poll selection window.  This made it abundantly clear what the question and answers were even without projecting the panel or sharing it in your Session, but these questions and answers were not preparable before class.  This means that anytime you wanted to send out one of the types of polls, you had to take the time to type (or copy/paste) everything in.

   
For the PowerPoint integration, we combined the best of both worlds by allowing you to insert a new poll object into your notebooks.  Now you can prepare full question/answer polls (and even specify them as anonymous for potentially-sensitive discussions) before class.  During class, you can send that poll to the students for them to answer by clicking the Launch Poll button on the poll object.  This will then send the poll complete with questions and answers to the students for them to answer.  In addition, since the poll is part of a panel, the question and answers will be sent to all the students as part of their notes.  This will be a big time saver when it comes to creating these custom polls and will more easily allow reuse of polls as they can be copy/pasted between different notebooks or panels.

An interesting consequence of having the prepared poll be an object on a panel is that students can make them as well.  Only moderators can actually send the polls to be answered, but students will have the ability to insert a poll object on the panel and then submit that panel to the moderator.  Then you, as the moderator, can look at the polls that are submitted, append them to the Session or to a new notebook, and then have the students take the poll by clicking the button.  

I remember one of the most interesting exams I ever took in college was the exam where I was tasked with writing my own exam questions and answers.  Despite the fact that I clearly knew all the answers to the questions, it may have been the most difficult exam I took.  There is a different level of critical thinking necessary to come up with difficult yet not impossible questions about content.  For one you are obviously required to know enough about the subject to produce several questions, but more so you have to determine what questions demonstrate an adequate understanding of the subject.  This higher-level critical engagement with the content is what makes e-Portfolios such a powerful method of assessment.  I think there may be a lot of potential for very exciting uses of this new feature.  As I hear about them, I'll of course excitedly blog about them, but feel free to add your own ideas/feedback in the comments as well.  

Michael beat me to it.  Although, to be fair, the What's New in 5.2 page beat both of us.  I'm finally going to talk about my thoughts on the PowerPoint integration we've been working on for later this Summer.  I've been saying for a long time that I would talk about, mentioning it here and there throughout (and to be honest, I haven't covered all the topics I'd hoped to cover before getting to the PowerPoint integration), but the PowerPoint integration is currently in Beta and it's probably time that I say something about all the work we developers have been doing.

I want to start off by saying that I loathed the idea when it first came out.  (okay, I was always cool with the new progressive disclosure abilities and adding polls but I'll talk about those later).  I immediately had a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that we would be guilty of contributing to Death by PowerPoint.  It seemed to be a step backwards where we would be encouraging teachers to be content with simply throwing knowledge at the class instead of engaging.  I'd heard in the past arguments that PowerPoint was created to make powerful points and that the soul of the application was fundamentally skewed towards presentations with a speaker/audience relationship.  My fear was that we were either selling out on the vision that classrooms (even large lecture halls) should be intimately connected and engaged with the teacher and each other.  

After many conversations with different people in different departments and roles, I came to understand the value in this integration comes not from bringing DyKnow down but in bringing PowerPoint up, and as best as we can we want to help users transition from the PowerPoint classroom to the DyKnow classroom.  But this wasn't just about new users, some teachers that have been doing amazing things in DyKnow do their authoring in PowerPoint for its advanced authoring capabilities.  This integration will help these teachers out as well.  For now I want to talk about  two main needs we wanted to fulfill: editability and comfortability.

Editability
The one lament all educators have across the board is insufficient time.  There's not enough time to get through course material, grade student work, attend meetings, and explore new pedagogical practices.  It becomes somewhat problematic with a time deficiency to reconvert all existing course content from an old system (like PowerPoint) into DyKnow notebook format.  To alleviate this pain, we've always (it predates me at DyKnow) had somewhat of a PowerPoint integration where DyKnow would take a .ppt or .pptx file, flatten the slides into a background, and use those slides as your prepared notes in DyKnow.

But if it's a flattened slide, the content is a preserved specimen of those classnotes.  Things change, classes are updated, and sometimes typos slip through.  Now, your text box in PowerPoint is a text box in DyKnow instead of part of a background, so if you need to make changes (before or during class) you can.  Additionally, hyperlinks in PowerPoint are converted into DyKnow to the point where you will be able to click them.  I think the added editability combined with PowerPoint's more advanced authoring features will allow the more advanced of you out there to create the prepared notes you really want without having to go through some of the tricks you must go through currently.

Comfortability
As painful as it is to admit, PowerPoint has a very robust and usable interface for authoring presentations.  The feature set is richer, the controls are a little nicer, and even with the authoring enhancements of 5.2 PowerPoint sometimes makes us look like Paint for notebook creation.  PowerPoint is also one of those ubiquitous products that, for the most part, everyone knows how to use.  Going back to the no-time conundrum, many new users look at all the possibilities DyKnow adds for an interactive classroom and can easily get overwhelmed.  I get that, big time.  You can't expect to explode overnight into the ultimate interactive classroom where you and students work together to create a rich set of class notes as you constantly assess student understanding through polls and panel submissions all while students enrich the lecture through engaged backchannel discussion.  That sounds amazing but each part will take some mastering.  

With our new DyKnow plugin to PowerPoint, you will be able to plan out your lecture and add in polls (prepared ahead of time... I know!)  that you want to help with some of the student assessment.  Then when you're ready for class, you click Start Session and DyKnow will open up, ask you to sign in, and you're ready.  Our hope is to get you from point A (hey there's this PowerPoint I want to share with my students) to point B (hey I'm sharing this PowerPoint with my students) as quickly as possible.

Additionally, you're already on your way towards an advanced DyKnow classroom as you're sharing your prepared notes in real time for students to annotate, and since you authored your polls ahead of time in PowerPoint, it becomes a trivial single click to send the poll to help assess their understanding.  That's a fairly interactive class mostly from interactions within PowerPoint.  Hopefully, when you get time to explore, you can spend less time exploring the authoring features and more time exploring the other interactive features like panel submission, shared control, and screen broadcasting.

So in the end, I'm glad we did this integration.  Even without PowerPoint in the mix, there have been some really cool added features such as being able to click on links in text boxes.  Later, I want to talk about the new polls and progressive disclosure possibilities from text animations we're now converting as well.  Lots of stuff to talk about and I've already written a long post.  
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Welcome to PowerPoint photo from garethjmsaunders