 So we're finishing up the first part of the book by looking at technology and kind of the do's and don'ts, broad do's and don'ts of how to apply technology to, it's in the context of an online classroom, but I think honestly it applies to any classroom, all these. And in fact, the vast majority of the lessons throughout the course right now from design, et cetera, I think really we can take these through, fingers crossed when we're back in the classroom, maybe even in May, but certainly in the fall again, knocking on wood that these rules I think are really, are generalizable to almost any situation. So I have, I've made a couple of slides again. I was gonna punish Patrick for not doing the last reading and make you do the presentation today, but then I forgot to. So I ended up punishing myself as a result of my own forgetfulness. So I just realized last night that I had, I forgot to tell you that you were doing it this week. So I had to do it. So anyway, so I've just made a couple of really quick slides here based on what we had before. Okay, so I have just made a couple of slides here that I think capture the essence of the discussion of technology and really that the key take home is a extension of the first couple of chapters of thinking about of your course in a holistic design perspective, moving towards particular goals. And if you're using technology, there's so much stuff available, especially now a million one things pop up through COVID. The technology should serve a purpose, right? So it should help you meet some kind of goal rather than just adopting some technology that you're like, hey, this is super cool. And then trying to figure out some way of utilizing it within the course, right? If it doesn't do something in the course it shouldn't be in the course. I think is one of the big take homes is this whole whole chapter. So don't add it just for the sake of adding it. Don't do that and do not do this, right? As well as a big cognizant of the impacts on students. And this came up later in the chapter both to think about universal design for learning, to think about all the needs that your classroom has in terms of students who might have visual impairments but also technological ability. So in my classes, for example, I'm teaching students who are doing the classes sometimes on their mobile phone who are doing it on satellite or dial up internet still because they're in rural areas. And so don't put technology on your students, especially if it doesn't serve a necessary goal. Don't put technology on your students that is going to put undue burdens on them. And to be cognizant of those possible burdens both in terms of the usability of the software from an interface perspective but also in terms of the needs of your classroom in terms of designing for universal accessibility. So this first do no harm principle. Don't bring anything in that is gonna harm your students. Bring things in in a cognizant in a purposeful manner and with a thoughtful reflection upon how it actually is gonna impact your students and the classroom as a whole. So that was kind of the first big number one. The second was a discussion of videos. And we've now done kind of an interesting thing where we've moved online videos like this where a lot of the instruction we're doing is video based live or not. So some of this stuff is pretty standard if you've thought about these things before but a lot of people I don't think have. We've just been thrust into a new world of the synchronous or asynchronous video engagement. And the science is pretty clear on the shortest better aspect. Although I do have a comment on this later on in the discussion I'll bring up. So ideally break your videos up into smaller segments if possible. And those smaller segments to get students to actually do things and to reflect upon it should be integrated with some kind of some kind of reflective exercise. And that could be multiple choice question in the LMS or it could be something like a reflect in a short paragraph or make a blog post something that shows that they've actually done it and also requires them to do otherwise they're gonna skip it. They can skip it, they're going to skip it. Use existing stuff where you can. There's so much stuff on YouTube and the stuff on YouTube is often more topical. Sometimes it's better production values, et cetera than the stuff you're gonna make. So I use, for example, a lot of short videos about news reports and things I'm talking about geology. Here's a quick little video of a storm or something. It's a two minute video and I can do that instead of me trying to explain the thing you can see it with a two minute documentary that exists. There's tons of this stuff. That said, in terms of production value, fancy is not better. In fact, if you just do things off the cuff which requires a lot less work on our part, there is an authenticity associated with that that some of the research presented in this chapter suggests actually improves learning outcome and improves engagement. You can also use these short little videos for doing what we would do in class ordinarily, catching a teachable moment. We see a miscommunication and we see an opportunity to reinforce something. And so you can do a quick off the cuff video, five minutes. It doesn't have to, you don't have to plan this thing out. You can just grab your phone or grab a screen capture technology and just talk to your screen for a couple of minutes. If there are some missteps in there, you mispronounce something, that's okay. In fact, that actually boosts authenticity potentially. So the final discussion was kind of of specific technologies and Derby notes that even, having written it a couple of years ago, all the technology is changing all the time. But there are some kind of categories of technology that are worth reflecting upon. Things like collaborative documents using things like Google Docs or we can do the same thing in the Microsoft setup at CBU. So having students type together in the same documents or using various forms of quizzes and flashcards. And these can actually be even included within videos using things like H5P. It's a little bit more complicated, but you can and very simple video editing software. So if you use Screencast-O-Matic for example, it's what I use for a lot of my stuff is a built-in editing program super easy. And a reminder that we have tech experts at the university not just at the IT Help Center, but we have learning experts, instructional design experts at the CTL and at the library who can help you through find you a technology that's gonna work. But then final point here kind of going back and I put this as a block of text because I think this is so important. I'm just gonna put it up there for you guys to read for a second. I guess I'll read it to you, why not? Which is select technology tools that solve the problem you have identified and then align with the intended outcomes of a given activity or of the course as a whole. When thinking about using a new tool, stop and ask yourself, why do you want to use that tool? If you don't have a good pedagogically sound reason to do it, sound purpose, leave it out. Which I think really is a big take home. You've got all this fancy stuff you can use, but sometimes fancy actually detracts from learning. Too much stuff is going to distract students and can have negative, unintended negative effects. Anyways, that's what I took out, but let's throw it back here now to the group as a whole and see if anyone wants to add anything additional, the things I missed, things you want to reiterate or emphasize, anyone want to add anything to that? Patrick, you got some thoughts? Yeah, no, I thought it was refreshing. And as you said, it's changing so rapidly, but you mentioned that Screencast-O-Matic, and already Screencast-O-Matic, as you talked about as a built-in editor, and you can download any kind of a video file into it and edit it now, not just what you're capturing on the screen. So, this stuff will continue to get even easier to use, but I just thought, because I was someone who struggled with the perfect delivery. I'd have a little post-it notes around the video camera, so I can still kind of look, but I wanted it to be as smooth, but you kind of learn that as you go to it. It is, it's more authentic, but the research shows students pay closer attention when it is more authentic rather than slick and overproduced. So, I thought that was kind of counterintuitive, but I guess it's that relational aspect. They get to know you as a human being, and that's really liberating for people to know. You don't need to be a production designer guru to do this stuff, little chunks. And the last point is that I tell my students in the BED, we want to, every unit has to be an amazing multimedia experience. You burn yourself out if you try to do that. You do one this year or one this term, do another one next, and then you've got two. After a couple of years, you've got three, and you build over time without taking on this huge amount of tasks and saying, oh, I can't do this. So, I thought those were really interesting points. It brings the risk factor down and really makes it accessible, I think. That is, I'm just gonna riff off of that for a second, Patrick. That was something I forgot to mention. I was gonna mention, but Derby notes that in terms of the reuse of things and building upon, to make sure you think about that in that if you reference a particular due date for an assignment or something, or as you saw in the last lecture, we did this, but then the next year, you decide to cut that out of your course, then you're setting yourself up to have to recreate these videos. Exactly. So to be cognizant of the overall goals of the course, but not so specific that you can't reuse this material, because otherwise you can start building that database, and it can be plug and play, and you can put that time into doing other areas of your course potentially. Right, pulling, yeah. Yeah. Shona, it looks like you're thinking something here. Well, I'm agreeing with a lot of what is being said. I've got a couple of, I read it today, and I had a couple of thoughts. One, that idea that you don't have to be perfect, right? Like I teach communication, I teach public speaking, and I just sort of, I guess, three years because I'm also a performer, like I got used to watching myself. So I don't have as much of the anxiety about it, but that also means that I don't feel like it has to be perfect every time. And so that's been an advantage, but then I feel like I learned something new every time I do it, right? So how to add closed captions, I'm like not 100% always doing that in the way that might be the most efficient, or keeping it to five or six minutes has not always been my strong suit. Though, of course, you can edit them and break them down. One of the things that, so I'm lucky that my life partner also teaches communication from a different perspective, and he's mostly focused on education, actually, but he also teaches public speaking. And so we're both teaching these public speaking classes at different institutions right now, but the principles don't change, right? Like rhetoric is rhetoric is rhetoric, whether you're in Nova Scotia or ancient Greece, or, you know, and some of those key principles have remained the same. And so we recorded some videos together, talking about some, like some of them are a little bit more of the skill variety, and then some of them are a little bit more like, here's what we mean when we say communication, here's how we define the field and things like that. And we were careful to make them so that they wouldn't immediately go obsolete. So that's been really amazing. We did that mostly beginning of fall. And so I just, you know, copy them over to my new Moodle for my class this term and they exist there for us to use. So I think that's, again, it took a little bit of time investment to do them, but now we have them and we don't have to do it all the time. Yeah. Jeff, do you want to weigh in? Oh, I mean, I could be now an absolutely appalling teacher and just start talking and talking and go on for an hour if nobody shuts me up. I was gonna say we have a total of about 10 minutes to go on. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Right? Because what she's talking about in this chapter, almost everything she's talking about in this chapter is stuff that I do extensively in my own teaching and have done for years in face-to-face courses because years ago I basically said, okay, I'm sick of my students having to shell out 250 bucks for an intro physics textbook. I'm gonna make video lectures, except I increasingly don't like calling them video lectures. I'd rather call them a video textbook because that's the role they're playing in my courses, right? But I mean, the thing with it, she talks about making it small teaching. The way I did it is absolutely definitely big teaching, right? It took enormous amounts of time to put those together and I'm still modifying them. And I think the thing I really struggle with is that, yes, I try to make them off the cuff. They're generally a PowerPoint with me talking over them and then parts with me working problems and things like Khan Academy style almost. But as I've gone on, my PowerPoints have gotten more and more sophisticated with diagrams that have annotations that start coming in on them and stuff like this. And then I find when I do something where I'm writing instead of doing a PowerPoint, those I find still fairly time consuming because I find that there's a lot of, there are a lot of pauses as I'm writing and I miswrite a lot of things and I have to take multiple takes and do a lot of editing. And so I haven't come to a good small teaching, low effort way of doing my videos. They're huge productions. So that's something I have to work on. But Jason, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, I was just gonna say, I was actually, I'm glad you brought this point up because this is the whole point of this book is supposed to be small interventions. And I know when you first started doing your flip classroom stuff, that was your entire life. And that was terrifying. That's the biggest teaching possible to do with the beginning, right? Yeah, yeah. And in theory, it's a one-time investment. In reality, it's not because you don't do it all the time. But so I've had this discussion back and forth with students where I've, I mean, the easiest thing to do is to just talk to a screen while you are going through the PowerPoints that already existed for your class. I use Epic Pen, which is a tool where I can draw on the screen so I could do what I would normally do, which is draw on the whiteboard that I'm projecting onto and circle things and it becomes interactive. I can underline words that I want to emphasize. Now that's the easiest thing to do when I ask students actually, both in straight up conversation and anonymous surveys. What do you prefer? Do you want me to break into little bits or keep it long? And what's interesting is that in most of my classes, students are actually in favor of keeping it long. And I think the reason for that is, is that they're all watching it on YouTube and they can start and stop when they want. So they actually are watching it in little bits. But this is, so I've had some students though who've said, no, no, it's a bit overwhelming. Can you break it up in some way? And so I've adopted a compromise. Just now I'm still integrating it right now. But it's a new thing I'm doing, which I think is pretty effective, which is I've built a series of points in my lecture where I have stop and reflect questions and I embed them in there. And then I've told my students that I'm literally just gonna take those stop and reflect questions and those are the exams at the end of the course, right? That's my thing. So they're just, so I'll have it, I'll sit there and I'll say, stop and reflect. Can you explain this concept or can you explain how this would happen or whatever? And I invite them to pause the video and think about it, even write it down if they want. And then I've just discovered, this is not new probably to you guys, maybe it is, that it's super easy to add chapters on YouTube. So I upload everything on YouTube and I'll put a little video on after this of how to do it. But you can really, just by typing a little bit in the description, you can tell YouTube to automatically put stop and start points throughout the video. And so then you can have students just jumped each one of those questions, right? And so then they can go and if they want to use it as 10 little mini videos, you can just do your one big video. You don't have to plan out starting and stopping and all logistics of doing it. You don't have to upload 10 little baby videos. You just make one video, edit one video, put one video online, but it can be utilized both as a full document or as a series of micro videos if you want to and want. So that's my compromise I'm working out right now. We'll see how it works by the end of the semester, but it's been an evolving story. So I wanna throw it back just to general tech. I mean, there's a lot of things you guys can do. We all teach very different subjects. Have you guys had a really positive or really negative technological story, something you tried to use that either like, boom, it totally worked or it was a crash and burn failure and you want to warn people away. I have a strong, go ahead. I was just gonna say to sort of shout out CTL, something that worked really well for me that's I guess technological, but in some ways not really, it's just using Moodle. My students, particularly the first year students, but really all of them love the checklist function. Like if I had one comment that I'm getting the most is when they say like, I'd love that you lay everything out as a checklist for each week. And I'm like, okay, I will keep doing that then. Which of course is a workaround in Moodle in a way, but it's worked for me and people have liked it. And I was like thinking everyone was doing it because we learned it in CTL. And of course, very few people appear to be doing it. And so I don't know, that's an interesting one to me. I'm gonna hit you up on how to do that. I tried at one point and I just didn't know what I was doing. So I gave up on it, but I wanted to, the benefits I think are pretty obvious there. Do you do badges and things as well? Like do you do where they have to, anyone do that where you have to jump by the? Sort of. So I mean, the one use of badges I, so I have played around with making badges in my own courses and I haven't really particularly done it. I just use various, completion requirements for specific activities, right? But of course a badge would allow you to do something like say, well, you have to do this or this or this to earn this badge to then get access to these other things, right? But I'm not doing anything that complicated with completion. But where I do use the badge is the badge they get, it's called the academic citizenship badge or the CBU academic citizenship badge, which they get for completing the academic integrity module. So that's available, that badge is just available to use in any course. And so I in fact make absolutely everything in the course require that they have that badge. So basically they're not even in the course until they've finished that academic integrity module. And so I embed that into, and this was the recommendation. So here's my strong recommendation. It's going back to Jason, your point about do no harm, right? And make sure that you don't give students requirements to use software and stuff that they're gonna have trouble potentially using. So what I do is at the very start on Moodle, I make what I call assignment zero. And it's actually not an assignment tool, it's built using a lesson tool, but whatever. But it takes them through, A, pointing them out at the academic integrity module to complete that, get the badge and so on. Asking them some questions about the course outline to make sure they've actually read the course outline and pointing them at some of the weird things I do in my course. But one of the other things I use it for is I say, okay, here's the software you are absolutely going to need in this course, right? So for example, in the labs, you absolutely cannot get away with not having a spreadsheet, right? And so give some recommendations on free spreadsheets and they have access through Office 365, but actually the online version of Excel can't do several of the things we need it to. And so we point them at Libra Office, but whatever. So I have them, I give them a list of software that they need to install and it's partly to make sure that they do it so they're then ready, but also to catch them so that if they're having trouble, then they'll ask, right? And we can work something out. So that's a strong recommendation I have for online teaching that if there are bits of software the students need have some check at the beginning of the course that runs them through the installation partly so they'll do it and partly so they'll ask for help if they have trouble with it. Yeah, I think that's an important point, Jeff. And it speaks in to the accessibility issues as well in that not only do they have the opportunity to have feedback with you, but potentially they have the opportunity to not take your course. If they simply don't have access to the hardware or they don't have access to the bandwidth to be able to handle the software, then maybe they'll make the decision not to take it. Especially if we're in a situation with COVID where you can put things off for a while potentially, but I know that's a problem we ran into in some broader discussions on committees that was on and things is that people were coming in halfway through and then realizing that they couldn't actually complete the course on their tablet, whatever they were trying to do and putting that stuff up front, putting it in your syllabus in your first lesson, et cetera. Patrick, I'm throwing it over to you. Do you have any success stories or failure stories? Yeah, no, I've tried a lot of, it seems so cool and this looks awesome and I haven't really used this one. I was in a voice threads for a while, I'm familiar with that. It's kind of a synchronous video chat students get a gun. I became a level one video thread instructor. I did the pro, but it's just kind of, if it's useful, it will find its way into your course and you'll run. If not, it just kind of dies, dies on the vine. I had a couple of apps where students could watch videos together, but it was a little bit conky, it seemed like a really good idea. So I've got my staples that I kind of go to and I use them. One thing I'd like to try and Rob Power talks about this, now that I do have some rudimentary video editing skills and feel more comfortable just doing this is to give students video feedback on an assignment. You just put up your rubric or whatever you're using, talk students through it, whatever it might be, you know, design a website or whatever it might be, and you just talk to them. Apparently, students love it. It brings that whole other level of connection. You can do it in a couple of minutes, you don't have to knock yourself out over editing and you just push it out and students pick up your actual comments and apparently they just really, really value that. So I'm gonna try that one, haven't done it yet, but I think I might try it with a smaller class at some point. That's a great idea, Patrick. I'm gonna actually, I think I'm gonna steal that. I do wanna note on that note, this is another thing that Derby talked about is the use of quick videos for general classroom feedback. And I've been doing, you can do them within the LMS, put them on there, but I also, for some of my classes, I run WhatsApp groups. The international students all have WhatsApp installed because they use it to talk to family back home. The domestic students don't seem to have ever even heard of WhatsApp, which is interesting. I actually had a survey where I asked them, what social media are you using? Nobody uses WhatsApp apparently. Apparently it's old people in international students. Yeah, I wasn't aware of it until my mother pointed out. Everybody used it, but not apparently no. It's all TikTok and whatever. Anyways, but the nice thing about that is you can just hold your phone up and you can just do a quick little message. And I use it and I ask people, they can pose a question on the thing and then I can respond in real time with a selfie style video. I'm only just using this a little bit, but it seems to be kind of effective. But again, it requires uptake of a social media thing and there's lots of privacy issues associated with it, et cetera. So you obviously gotta ask your class and get feedback on whether they want and don't push them on them. I'm still a little bit on the fence for that one, but it's neat. All right, so that brings us to the end of our thing. I really do wanna keep us on track for the three minutes, but does anyone, three minutes, 30 minutes, does anyone have a closing thought they wanna throw out there? No? Just on videos, right? And that keeping them short. And your solution of putting embedding questions in them, I do the same thing, but I do it by breaking my videos into small chunks and ending each chunk with a question and begin the next one with the answer, but in between these are built into Moodle lessons where they're actually asked the question in the lesson. But building those things is very time consuming. We're back to big teaching. I think we're remembering. Do it and feel free to, I'll put a little thing down in the block of how I do it. I'll put a little examples there, but it's so far it's easily working pretty well and it was a compromise based on student feedback, just directly because I had most students seeming to want to do these long videos and I obviously wanna do them, it's easier for me, but I did have some students who said, well, can you please do something to break it up there too long? And I went, ah, and then I think it was actually a student who suggested, can you put a little break spot in the middle or something? You know what I can, and I can also leverage this to, I can leverage this in a pedagogically useful way as well as just not having to stop, but have you stop and reflect. It's what I'm doing in a classroom. Anyway, thank you guys so much and Jeff is gonna take next week's, or not next week's, on Friday. Does anyone wanna volunteer for Tuesday? Patrick, you're up. I'm up, I'll do it. I'll let you know if my schedule gets real hairy, I'll let you know beforehand. Fair enough. All right, we'll see you guys in a minute. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. See you guys. See ya.