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Gather.Town

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Blended teaching? Want to more fully integrate those at home?

Gather.town. You got to try it. It is like Zoom and Google Meet but has the added component of a the virtual “room”  attendees are occupying.  These participants have the ability to move around and interact with other participants based on your locations in the room, just like real life.

I LOVE this tool.

It may seem “cheesy” at first glance, but if you want to put kids in breakout rooms and have a more authentic feeling virtual classroom, I hands down prefer Gather.town to Meet or Zoom.

Here’s how two of our colleagues use the tool.

 

Digital Humanities

amcdonnell Faculty, Uncategorized

 

I have come across two amazing examples of digital humanities in which traditional content, in particular Hamlet and the Canterbury Tales -can’t get more traditional than that-  is shared via fundamentally new interfaces. The way this content is styled allows for the viewer and reader to interact with these classics in almost startling new ways.

The Canterbury Tales and tech? Chaucer’s 14th Century classic ? Yep, there’s now an app for it. And it’s amazing. Plus, it is a great example of how embedding print within multimedia can enhance understanding.

VR is another medium that shows great promise. Thus far, it seems that the military and gaming industry are using it more than anyone else. Artists, scholars and writers really haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.

Last year pre-pandemic, I looked at a lot of VR so I could filter the junk and share the good stuff with all of you.  To be honest, much of it wasn’t very good. So, I was thrilled to come across this 360 performance of Hamlet. When you return to campus next week, grab a Google Cardboard headset or get an even better VR headset from the tech suites to watch it. You haven’t really seen anything like this before- At least I hadn’t.

(Watch the video below on an iPad or smartphone to get some sense of the 360. This won’t work on a regular Chromebook or laptop).

 

Here’s what the NYT had to say about it.

Both of these are stunning. Check them out! I urge us to think more about teaching kids how to begin to do things like this. It will be sloppy and messy. For instance, how do we grade such work? It takes us far out of our comfort level and areas of expertise.

But wouldn’t it be fun?

Padlet into Canvas

amcdonnell Faculty, Uncategorized ,

Padlet is an easy to use bulletin board page that can be used by students and teachers to post notes on a common page. One can configure a Padlet in many different ways. Once created, the notes posted to Padlet by teachers and students can contain links, videos, images and document files.

I’ve embed Padlet walls right into my Canvas assignments. The big pluses are that it is instantly interactive for students and I can see all the student work on one page instead of having to scroll through Speedgrader.

 

Here’s a Padlet Wall of tech resources. You can see what a Padlet Wall looks like and perhaps learn an additional tech tip.

Made with Padlet

 

 

Interactive Tools for Teaching

amcdonnell Faculty, Uncategorized

Teaching is hard. I mess up every day. Teaching is a complex, multifaceted, and dynamic. New ideas, new best practices, new tools, and new strategies are coming at us all the time. On top of that, there’s the challenge of the pandemic which has compelled us to change.

Trying to keep up is like drinking from a fire hydrant. There’s so much that it is hard to swallow anything.

With this in mind, we’ve been hesitant to share too much more in the way of tech with teachers this year. We get it.

I am prompted to write in spite of this because I’ve come across two tools that have made my online and blended teaching more productive, Gathertown and Perusall.

  • Perusall, invented in part by Eric Mazur,  is a social annotation tool that integrates directly with Canvas. Perusall allows students and teachers to collaboratively markup . pdf documents, videos, and more. Instead of reading a document and discussing it, Perusall brings the discussion to the text.

    https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/ph.pdf 

    Using discussions in your class can be critical to increasing students' enjoyment of the class and strengthens students' understanding of concepts. Perusall as an annotation tool that allows students to annotate PDFs and share comments to each other within the document, Perusall can be used to replace or continue the use of a discussion based on PDF readings.

    I've been using it for a few weeks now and have found it to be very useful. At the very least, it offers an easy change of pace. 

  • Gather, also known as Gather.town, simulates buildings and classrooms on campus where students, professors, and teaching assistants can interact with one another through personal avatars during office hours. Its main feature, "Interaction Distance," launches a video call between users whose avatars are within five steps from each other in the virtual space. As the users' avatars walk away from each other, their video and audio quality decrease, simulating an in-person interaction.

    Deb Skapik, Alex Pearson and I have all vetted and used Gather in our class. For small group discussions, it is far superior to Meet and Zoom. A teacher can easily embed all sorts of things into the Gather room such as assignments, videos, padlet walls, readings, and more. 

    Gather features 1990s style 8 bit graphics that have a certain retro cool to them. Be warned that at first, students will want to explore. There will be distracted at first by the interactive features. I've found that if I am giving direct instruction, Meet (and Zoom) is my go to tool. But when I want student interaction, Gather is fantastic.

     

 

Google Meet Updates: Coming Soon and Already Here.

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Flipsnack and other Digital Presentation Tools

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Digital Literacy, a dream deferred?

Everything has changed and nothing has changed. Tech is ubiquitous and central (Canvas, Veracross, Gmail)  yet at some level has barely infiltrated teaching in regards to the type of tasks we ask students to do. The assignments schools give to students haven’t changed all that much. And as a practitioner involved in ed-tech, I read that a major component of digital literacy is recognizing the changing cultural constructs and contexts of our work and to consider these changes in the tasks we ask our students to do.  If that is so, can I/ we point to those changed contexts in my/  our own classes?

The dream was over-hyped and in hindsight quite naive. For it didn’t answer an essential question of where does technology enhance teaching and learning? Do these presentation tools I point to below engage a different type of thinking, enhance age-old types of thinking, or do neither? Good, profound, bad and silly were jumbled together.

Still, there’s something about a well-done multi-media presentation that is greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s an awfully vague answer to the questions I ask above. So let me offer an example.

This amazing map of the floods of 2019 along the Mississippi does more to explain the floods than a text only article ever could. I make no claim to produce anything so amazing, but one of my favorite digital tools- a real go-to tool for me- is Adobe Spark Page. I made  the sparkpage embedded below for my history students. It originally was just a google doc. But in about 40 minutes I was able to make this. I am using it with my class this week. To me, it is more engaging than a Google doc and I expect it is for students also. What is it modeling? That’s an open question for you to decide. 

War of 1812

 

Recently, Deb Skapik reminded me of a tool I first used in 2017 and then forgot. It is called Flipsnack . Here’s a recent project done by a student of mine made with Flipsnack. 

Here are the two reasons I use these tools.

  1. If well done, they enhance a presentation and allow students to demonstrate knowledge beyond using text and speech.
  2. We are reaching a point where digital literacy will be expected in the workplace. They do not need to master it; but they should know how to approach these tasks. Since they share a similar visual vocabulary, exposure to one helps one learn others later.

Here are a series of digital tools you may find interesting. I am happy to work with anyone to show you how to use these tools to teach or to assign to your students to use.  ( To view full screen, click the middle of the embedded booklet below.)