Work With Hope

As any of you who have heard me speak or read my posts know, I’m currently going through a “crisis of faith” regarding PowerPoint.

Don’t get me wrong, I still use is regularly and I know that it ultimately will have a place in my toolbox,  However, I worry that PP has become a Trojan Horse that never opens up.  It was a wonderful way to hook teachers and teach them to become comfortable with their classroom technology.  It was easy and only a small shift from what they have been doing for years.  In the early years it was also a great attention grabber for students.  I believed and hoped that as people became more comfortable with the platform, new uses and paradigms for instruction would emerge.

Well, if that’s happening, I’m not seeing it.  Rather it appears that we (and I include myself in this as just as guilty of non-innovation) are sitting on a PowerPoint Plateau (going to do something with that title in the future).  Even students have caught on with audible sighs as they see the beginning of a new set of slides that have to be copied into their notebooks.  I heard a teacher say “OK, has everyone finished copying from this slide before I go on…” and I knew that the PowerPoint innovation balloon was filled with lead.

In the midst of my despair I was reading a list  (which I can’t find at the moment, but if I do I’ll link it) of tools for teachers and I discovered prezi.com.  I spent an afternoon experimenting and I think that I may have found a multi-use tool that can break some of the PowerPoint malaise and help us to re-examine classroom presentations.

To fully understand the program I suggest that you go to the site and look at samples which are more effective than words, but in short, Prezi uses a single page rather than discrete screens.  Navigation moves from place to place within the page instead of following the direct outline.  The program encourages you to use space, size, and format to build relationships between the various element of the talk.

Prezi is free (with limitations of storage space and a small watermark in the corner of the presentations) or subscription based.  Presentations can be run on the web or downloaded and run in a flash format locally.  The Prezi page can have a preset order or can be navigated by mouse (a great solution to the “prestacked” determinism of PowerPoint).

Now could we fall into the same trap down the road, perhaps, but I am enjoying the challenge of losing my PowerPoint bearings and rethinking my talks as I move some into the new platform.

This may be a platform that could do that rare feat, encourage a new paradigm.

In his great blogpost, “The Search for Thirsty Teachers” on his site The Clever Sheep, Rodd Lucier points to the fact that, “Educators who are active participants in their own learning, tend to be the most engaging teachers I know.”

I remember that one of the most disillusioning realizations I had in my first years of teaching was how few of my colleagues were engaged in any sort of ongoing study, whether organized or informal, in their topic of study or anything beyond popular culture.

As I began to give talks and inservices, I ran into the well-established reality that teachers make the worst students; sometimes disrespectful, often inattentive, and sometimes openly contemptuous of the idea that they could (or needed to) learn anything.

In some ways, educational technology has helped to break through this with many.  I see a greater willingness to learn and an ability to admit ignorance.  There is even excitement as teachers grow in their abilities and recognize potential uses for the tools.

I hope that this is part of the definition of a great teacher, the ability to continue growing and learning with enthusiasm.  My school (and most schools I know) uses the term “life-long learner”  as a desired outcome for students.  The definition of this term must be lived out in the teachers they encounter very day.

Can we envision a future where the teacher coming home from work is greeted by a spouse who asks without irony, “What did you learn in school today?”

I heard it again this week, “How do you keep up with all of this?”

It’s a common refrain whenever I present a new program, online service, or piece of hardware.  While it’s flattering to be treated as an expert (clearly fooled another one), it’s simultaneously disconcerting.  When I hear, “How do you keep up with all this?” I also hear the unstated, “and I have no intention of keeping up with it.”

Another reason I am disturbed by this question is that it reminds me of the truth behind it.  I’m not keeping up.  While I can see the outline of objects flowing in the rushing river of tech development, I know almost nothing about them.  I read teaching and technology blogs and I’m overwhelmed with unfamiliar acronyms and confusing processes.  At times I feel like I started the game three turns behind and I’m in a constant struggle to catch up before I’m caught in a web of my own ignorance.

On top of keeping up with news, in starting two separate blogs (and accompanying podcasts) I have created a never-satisfied vacuum for content (not to mention my neglected Facebook page and my daily attempts to say something of value on Twitter).  I pined for invitations to Google Voice and Google Wave, but now that I have them, I don’ have time to sort them out (I think that Wave may take me the rest of my life).  This morning I received an invitation to participate in the new Twitter Lists program, and I all I could think was, “Great, here’s another tool I’ll feel guilty for not using.

Which brings me back to the questioner.  I don’t know how to advise him or her to keep up with technology since I can’t keep up.  I know I spend a good portion of every day reading, listening to podcasts and thinking about it, but I doubt that is possible or desirable for many people.  I sometimes want to say, “Start 15 years ago and follow the stream up to today, and you’ll still feel overwhelmed.”

We may have been born boomers or GenXers or Millennials, but we are all becoming Generation O’s…Overloaded!