NOTE: this is not a lesson plan, review, or screencast. This is a reflective post. I recently decided to blog all in one place, so there will be a greater variety of posts appearing on this blog.
This is a busy time of year, and in many ways it feels like all of the other times of year. When you believe in what you are doing it seems there are always ways to do more of it. I have 5 blog posts in draft and another 10 on the to do list, and this blog post is none of those.
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| One of my Lego Robotics Teams, not relevant to the post, but cute |
I got to share the K-5 tech journey at my school with the school board last night. It was a reflective process as I had to build a slide deck that connected my goals (support skill building a differentiation, "level-up" existing curriculum, bring programming to ALL grade levels) and examples of the work we have been doing in class. Sitting here on the other side of the meeting I can say uit went very well and I enjoyed sharing my work, but prepping was a little stressful. Most people don't care for public speaking, but I really like it. The stressful part about the meeting last night was the fact that I was live testing a tool I had not used before.
The board meeting was held in a long and narrow classroom. The projector and screen are located at one of the far ends of the room. I suggested to my tech director that we us nearpod for the meeting. the conversation was something like this:
me: "We could use Nearpod."
TD: "What does that do?"
ME: "Broadcasts the PPT to the iPad in the audiences hands."
TD:"Sounds good, how does it work?"
ME:"There is a website and you upload the PPT."
TD:"Have you used it before?"
ME: "No."
TD: "What could go wrong with this? What are the pitfalls?"
ME: "I don't know."
TD: "Ok, so what do you need from me?"
My tech director was nervous about the fact that we had NO experience with the platform we were using, but in my classroom teaching I rarely "present" in a conventional way. Nearpod was a great match for the board meeting as it allowed us to put the high res pictures of kids actively working with tech directly into the hands of the audience and we were able to put videos in the presentation.
Nearpod allows you to insert web pages into your slide deck. So we started with some videos on the box web site and others on youtube. After a few test runs I migrated all the videos we used into my Google Drive account for 2 reasons: 1. the videos would not play from BOX (flash-based player?) and 2. the YT page had too much "noise" (suggested videos etc). Hosting the video on drive and then dropping the share address into Nearpod worked very well and the audience had the video in their control directly in their hands.
Overall the presentation was well received. Cute pictures of good work is a winning combination. There was at least one unintended consequence of the meeting. . . The board wants to use the iPads for all of their meetings, “Why are we using so much paper.” Coming soon to a blog near you My Paperless Boardroom.
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