HappySteve

Try Teaching Naked

I've just read an excellent article about stripping lecture halls of technology - http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/ (via @mitchsquires and @educatedlife)

Technology is sometimes equated with better teaching. The assumption is that technology is the road to improved learning.

It's much more complicated than that. Technology consists of a wide and varied set of tools that alter our relationships with each other and our relationships with the world. 

In particular technology tends to mitigate or overcome the limitations and tyranny of distance. It can also enhance, or hamper communication. It can hyper-stimulate. It can obfuscate. 

Teachers using technology blindly and without reflection are at best playing a hit and miss game. 

I talk with teachers who seem to feel guilty because they feel they should 'use technology more' - such a vague and general, and DAMNING statement. Introducing technology into a class for the sake of it, out of some general sense that technology = good, may only have the effect of undermining the best thing going for the class - the energy of a real life passionate teacher. 

A useful experiment for me would be to get rid of technology all together, at least for a certain period of time. This would help me notice afresh how technology changes things.

A few other ideas in the article made particular sense to me:

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1. That PowerPoint is the worst thing in the whole wide world. Don't. Use. It. PowerPoint is the violence of written word against the poetry of speech. (My words, and you can quote me!)

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2. That in some sense technology threatens to do away with the teaching role altogether - or to disrupt it. I teach online French. My students barely need me. And they perform better than face to face students doing the same course. My school offers lots of online courses, and we see the same pattern across the board.

So what's the new role of the teacher when the content of the course can be taught without a human being?

Again this is complex. We generally prefer interactions in our learning. We're not robots and it's no fun learning by staring at a computer screen. There's nothing like an informed, entertaining and persuasive orator. 

On the other hand, busing in 1,000 students into a High School, sitting them down in boxes and getting
 them to copy off the board can be done away with. As can sitting down students in a computer room and telling them to type an essay response. The teacher is serving no role except as dictator, director, baby-er, babying the students, spoon feeding them, rendering them passive. 

High School teacher Andrew Douch uses podcasts to deliver much of the basic content of the biology course. Students work through them when and where they want, at a pace that suits. They can repeat sections, skip other sections. His role is re-invented - and his face to face classes are for discussion, exploration, student-driven experimentation.

I've moved down a very similar path and never want to look back.

Now, stripping technology from the classroom seems to me to be an excellent experiment to see what teachers are still good for! 

Give me technology pushed to its logical conclusion, where I can learn unhampered, free from being bossed around by the teacher-king whose subject I am. 

Or give me a room with some peers and one or more enthusiastic experts in the field, and let's just see what we can do when we bring our creative energies together. I'll thank the expert on the way out for spending time in a room with me helping me to delver deeper into the field.

What purpose then, for classic 9am to 3pm schooling, in little battery boxes? I predict (hope) that the traditional school structures will break down over the coming years. It may be a slow erosion as students begin to outsource certain subjects to alternative providers, or it may come suddenly. I hope it happens.

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3. That students who are used to passive learning kick and scream when prompted to take an active role.

Our online students find online study difficult. My students find themselves backed into a corner. They have no teacher bossing them around. They have to take control, take initiative. They almost always end up rising to the occasion, gaining in the process entrepreneurial skills that will benefit them for life. 

But almost universally they don't like the switch! 

Don't expect your students to thank you any time soon if you start stepping back from a directing role and require them to start driving the learning process. 

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In conclusion, I see a very complex relationship between people, technology and teaching. Technology can be a tool for subduing students, pacifying them. 

It can also be a tool for liberating students from the constraints inherent in the industrial model of teaching. 

Getting rid of all technology sounds to me like a great way of finding clarity about just what teachers are still good for. 

Go the whole way and get rid of pen and paper, which is also technology!

Let me know if you have tried this. Let me know how you've observed tech tools being used to dominate or liberate. 

A Crazy Idea, All in One Lesson, & Blogged Directly from Class

As I type this, my Year 8 French students are working intensely on making comic strips by taking pictures within our virtual 3D world, which we call "Booralie Island". Now they're making comic strips. I'll paste the comics in amongst this text that I am typing.

COMIC 1, by Sarita, Danielle, and Rebekah

We're going to post the comics at http://nbcsfrench.wikispaces.com which is our website dedicated to publishing resources created by students. We categorise those resources by chapter and textbook, so any teacher or student who is using the same textbook can find resources that match exactly what they're looking at at the moment.

 

COMIC 2, by Connor, Joel and Ethan

I'd like to think that teachers who would otherwise use the textbook, might direct their students to check out our own special comics. I'd like to think that students will find it interesting to see the work produced by their peers in other places - perhaps it will give them a sense of connection with other French students. Also, it's a heck of a lot of fun. The fact I can find 3 minutes to type this shows they are intensely 'into' the activity. I can hear, right now, students discussing their camera angles for the comic shots! Students are asking for virtual money to buy virtual clothing in the virtual clothing shop to wear for the shots!

 

Comic 3, by Lee, Daniel D and Daniel MB

 

It's the sort of activity where, if you're not careful, the students will spend hours and hours getting distracted. I've been very careful to get them moving - keep the comics simple, but let's get them done here and now and have them posted by the end of the lesson. It's now 10 minutes after the end of the lesson, and I am about to publish this blog post and the comics below. This is crucial - I can't sustain uses of technology that take hours of my time. 10 minutes, I can handle!

AHHH We didn't all finish! Out of 6 groups of students, 3 groups finished on time - not a bad start considering I had to teach them how to position the camera in the virtual world, how to take screen shots, add speech bubbles, resize pictures etc. The frenetic pace to the class worked well because the students worked efficiently.

Next time we'll aim higher!

If you have 20 seconds, leave a quick comment and say which city/country you’re from – I’ll show the comments to the students. (I showed them the comments on the lolcatz blog post – you just can’t beat the effect it has on our class perspective!)

Voice Recognition for Teachers

Voice Recognition for Teachers

Summary for if you're busy: Voice recognition works brilliantly now, even in noisy environments. By far the best software is Dragon Naturally Speaking. Get the cheapest version "Standard". Click here for educational pricing. You're crazy not to buy a special microphone designed for voice recognition as well. Click here. Watch out! Even though it works fantastically, psychologically you'll find it quite uncomfortable, and if you don't work alone, consider privacy and annoyance.

Read on for a bit more detail:

Here's me dictating at almost 200 words per minute with 100% accuracy. I am using a headset designed for voice recognition, which I think is very important if you're going to bother buying the software.

But that's just a gimmick. In real life I don't each those speeds because I can't think of what I want to say that quickly!

I use voice recognition quite a bit to dictate emails and documents. Here’s some information for other teachers curious about it.

 

Why would I use it?

Not for speed. The claim that you can dictate text with voice recognition quicker than you can type it is not necessarily the case, especially if you can already type at a decent speed. I find that by the time I’ve made corrections, it is about the same speed as I type.

Because you’re sick of typing. This is my main reason. I just get sick of typing. My fingers get tired or sore. Or mentally I get annoyed at the effort and clunkiness involved with tapping each individual key for every last letter in every word.

Because you hate the paperwork of teaching. I use voice recognition mainly for the boring bits, e.g. writing teaching programs, giving feedback to numerous different students about the same task. Emailing various people on a similar topic. There is little creative fun in this sort of typing. It is repetitive and dull. Voice recognition is at its best for this. It lets me fly through it as quickly as I can talk, without getting tired fingers. Take, for instance, essay marking. Students make the same mistakes over and over again. It is soul-destroying writing “start each paragraph with a topic sentence” or “ensure you integrate quotes into your sentences rather than just putting them by themselves” over, and over, and over again. I suppose you could use macros for this. And of course typing these comments is easier than handwriting them. Easier than all these, is voice recognition.

You’re in danger of repetitive strain injury. Or some other muscular problem. Or perhaps it’s too late, you’ve stuffed your fingers but are still in a job that requires heaps of text-production. I enjoy playing computer games in the evenings, and it’s too much for my fingers if I’m also typing.

How well does it work?

Very, very well. The technology is much, much better than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Here's a less gimmicky demonstration than the one above:

Accuracy is not 100%, but it isn’t far off (there are some words it always gets wrong with me). You can speak as quickly as you want to without hurting the accuracy, providing you’re speaking clearly. In fact, speaking in phrases or full sentences is much more accurate than dictate one or two words, because it gives the recognition program a context to help figure out what you said.

Correct by typing. The best way to use it is to have your fingers ready to correct bits here and there as you go. The program would rather that whenever you make a mistake, you retrain the program to avoid the error in future. Fair enough, but you come up against a law of diminishing returns. The program is already very accurate and it’s not worth me stopping to retrain every few sentences to push accuracy from 96% to 98%.

DANGER! DANGER! I often don’t notice errors. DANGER! DANGER! It is very difficult to accurately proof read your own dictated text. So many times I’ve reread my dictation carefully, and missed huge errors that make you look careless when your document is published, email received, or whatever. I was intrigued that a few years ago I noticed quite a few errors in a colleague’s emails, only to discover he was using voice recognition himself.

 

Which program to use?

Without a doubt, Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is miles ahead of any competition. The current version is 9.0 but they've patched it to 9.5 for free. There are three versions: Standard, Preferred, and Professional, but all have the same accuracy and the same speech engine, so you can get the cheapest version, Standard, and get the same performance, with fewer bells and whistles in the software.

The student price for the Standard version is as cheap as $60.

 

The teacher price for the Standard version is $100, and about for the Preferred version $200. That particular website offers to bundle Standard with a proper voice recognition headset (which I imagine is very good, like my recommendation below) for $179 or Preferred for $279. Read below to hear about how important the headset is. Don't bother with speech recognition if you're not willing to get a decent headset.

I recommend getting the Standard version for $100, and then buy the following headset separately.

 

 

Which headset should I use?

The microphone makes a big difference. Ah, now this is the important bit. Don’t use the microphone that comes with the software. Instead, invest in a proper microphone with built in Digital Signal Processing. This sort of microphone has circuitry built in that modifies the input even before it gets to the computer, isolating your voice and getting rid of other background noise. This improves accuracy remarkably. It also allows you to dictate in noisy environments, or even in the car! My wife and I drive to work together, and when she drives I’ve been known to dictate. Even against the noisy engine of our old Ford Laser, and Amy Grant on the CD player, accuracy is similar to in a quiet room by myself.

Plantronics DSP 400 The headset that I use, and can vouch for, is the Plantronics DSP 400. It works tops. My only criticism is that the joint at the top of it is fragile and breaks easily. Mine has been stuck together with tape since shortly after I purchased it. Look for cheap prices on this headset here. (As cheap as $70, although I don't necessarily recommend you order from the cheapest shop.)

My friends will laugh at this because I have a reputation for using sticky tape with just about everything.

 

How good a computer do I need?

Check the specs here: http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/preferred/sysreqs.asp. In particular you need a decent amount of memory, because on top of what you’re already using, the voice recognition program needs more. There is nothing worse than a computer that goes sluggish because it has been forced to use the hard disk for memory because it has run out of normal memory.

 

The negatives of using voice recognition:

Watch out! It feels very weird dictating. It is a very different mental space to typing. In casual conversation, it is normal to backtrack, trip up, reword, change direction, and even change opinion mid-sentence. And in conversation we tend to mumble, especially if we’re not absolutely sure of what we’re saying. To dictate properly you have to have in mind the next few words you’re going to say. Speech comes in bursts. To dictate they need to come in clear, confident bursts. I find I’ll dictate several short bursts of 7 or 8 words, and then go on a roll for a few sentences with no hesitation.

There is a process here of getting used to thinking before speaking, and then speaking with clear enunciation.

You become aware very quickly of which sounds you tend to mumble.

It can annoy colleagues. Some of my colleagues can block out sound and focus on their own work, even while I’m droning on in the background. Others can’t, and out of considerateness (or fear of retaliations!?!?) I avoid dictating while they’re around.

It can be embarrassing. For some reason, I find it very uncomfortable dictating emails when colleagues can hear me dictating, even if the emails are of a mundane nature. I think this is fascinating. I can only assume that, for me, composing emails requires a sense of private space. I tend to type emails rather than dictate them, if I have company in my staff room.

A funny video where a demonstration of Vista speech recognition stuffed up:

This video features a completely different speech recognition program, the one built into Vista. Even at it's best it is nowhere near as good as Dragon, but on this day it was definitely not at its best.