Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

Step 1 – Click the File menu and select Open.
Step 2 – Navigate to the folder that contains your document.
Step 3 – Select your document and click the Open button.

Wouldn’t it be great if anything you ever needed to do on a computer could be done by following someone’s step-by-step instructions? When I was an undergraduate in the chemistry lab, we called this “cookbooking it”. When you had no clue about an experiment, you asked someone to write out the steps to follow. In the end, you could get the experiment finished without learning a single thing.

Unfortunately, my students want to cookbook too many computer skills. I try to communicate to them that the real world rarely produces problems that can be cookbooked. Here’s a typical project.

Create a graphical navigational tool for a web-based activity. Using the navigational tool, a user should be able to move through the site in a linear manner or jump to a specific page in the activity. Here is an example.

A student this week asked if I had a step-by-step guide for completing this activity. I answered with a question. “Which step?”

We learned how to create graphics in a multimedia class. The links were from an HTML class. Navigational aids were discussed in several classes… Integration, Multimedia, Telecommunications.

Too many times our students choose the cookbook method of completing a project. In the end, enough isn’t learned about the underlying processes involved and the knowledge cannot be used to synthesize more complex projects.

In my freshman technology course, I have resorted to assigning the creation of tutorials. There are certain questions that most of these students ask me during the junior year when they create the junior portfolio. They cannot remember how to put the things together from a course taken two years earlier. Anticipating this, I have them create tutorials in Word. This first one is simple. Create a tutorial showing how to capture the screen from the computer, crop the picture and place the cropped picture into a Word document. Each step must include a graphic with corresponding written instruction.

Two years after they create these tutorials, I point them back to them when they ask me how to cookbook the portfolio. Cookbooking is ok if you write the cookbook.

If you have ever wanted to know how to do something, look it up in wikiHow. This wiki is very comprehensive. You can learn to build a fire, write a song, hook an iPod up to a car sterio… just about anything.

One my students reported on the article titled: Use English Punctuation Correctly. It covers all the basics. It is a nice resource.

If you know how to do something that other people may not… share your knowledge. That’s what wikis are all about.

Today at lunch I was helping two fellow teachers with an administrative task. We needed to retrieve some information from a web site and email that information to someone. We needed the names, email addresses and ID numbers of all students in one section of a class. All that information is in our Blackboard system, in the gradebook. Blackboard has a utility which will convert the whole gradebook to an Excel spreadsheet which is immediately offered for download.

Once we had the Excel file, we had to extract the information (name, email and ID) from grades. Blackboard placed all three pieces of data in the first cell. We needed to send this information as an Excel spreadsheet, so Blackboard “helped” us by putting everything into the proper format. We highlighted all the columns after the first column and deleted the extra information. We did not want to include all the grades for the students (FERPA).

The last step was saving our work. We clicked save. Excel gave us one of those Yes-No-Cancel dialog boxes where only an expert can know what to click. It seems Blackboard’s definition of an Excel spreadsheet is different from Microsoft’s. Excel asked if we wanted to lose any formatting of the document. The options:

Yes – lose the formatting and save the file as a non-Excel file
No – change the type of document to an Excel spreadsheet and save the formatting
Cancel – the only option where everyone was clear on the meaning.

We wanted the “No” option. Whew! Fifteen minutes into this we finally had the file we needed. Now we needed to email it. Instead of typing the URL of our mail server (mail.findlay.edu), the person at the keyboard closed the browser (I’m withholding the names to protect the innocent). We happened to be at Panera. They have free wireless, but getting a browser going is at least a three step process. The person at the keyboard told me that when the browser starts, it goes to a page with a link to UF email. We were at

mail.findlay.edu

and we needed to go to

ufonline.findlay.edu

I would have just changed the first part of the URL. The person controlling the keyboard felt it was easier to shutdown the browser and start all over.

A couple of minutes later, we are back online. We still need to send that email. We go to UF web mail. Then we realize we don’t know the email address of the recipient. That information is on a corporate web site. The browser is closed again. Hmmph.

“Why did you do that?”

“I had to get out of web mail.”

“Why didn’t you use CTRL-N to open a new browser window?”

“Who has time to learn those shortcuts?”

Indeed, who has time to do anything else when it takes half an hour to copy a file from a web page and email it to someone? We actually had 35 minutes invested in this little activity by the time we finished.

In my technology classes I emphasize two points. Technology can make a teacher more effective at teaching some subjects and more efficient in completing administrative duties. It’s the title of my blog! Teaching more effectively by using technology is something that can take years to master. Becoming an efficient user of technology doesn’t take nearly as long. Efficiency is achieved by learning all the basic tools offered by a modern computer – copy/paste – keyboard shortcuts – moving quickly from one application to another – managing files – knowing what tool to use for each little job.

Today we spent an extra five minutes getting out of problems cause by an erratic mouse. It was a laptop with a touch pad. The slightest movement made the mouse jump half way across the screen. I was trying to make this whole process a “learning experience” so I wasn’t the one using the computer. Once I figured out that the touch pad was too sensitive, I pointed the user to the control panel and adjusted the sensitivity to a reasonable setting. For the last 18 months, the user had this jumpy mouse. It only took two minutes to fix. That little bit of knowledge paid for my lunch.

How many teachers or students do you know who use a computer in an inefficient way? How much time is this costing them? How much more time could we spend interacting with our students if we do become efficient users of technology?

One of my students is working on a video project using Synfig Studio.

It’s an open source program that uses vector based graphics to create animation. You can see sample movies created here. If you have worked with Flash before, you have created vector based animation.

Synfig is a little rough around the edges. The program is still in alpha (pre-beta). Expect it to get better with time. It is available in all major operating system flavors. Of course, the price is right… free.

According to an interview with Google CEO, the company is about to add a “presentation” component to the document and sheetsheet capability already in the mix.

I would think the Google Presenter will be compatible with PowerPoint. If someone cannot import an existing presentation from PowerPoint, the Google application will not be attractive to users with scores of presentations already in the can.

I am interested to see how the presentation mode works. The application will need to escape the browser, otherwise ever presentation will have the browser edges.

I understand the cost of Microsoft Office is unreasonable for many people. For me (and all my students at UF) it costs $12 through our MS campus agreement. At that price, another suite will have to be incredible before I can even think about switching.