Sometimes, we work really hard to get some press coverage. Sometimes, it just happens. This time, credit the terrific accomplishments of these two students.
Archive for Communication
Visiting Reed
Four of us spent the morning at Reed College, asking questions to CTO Marty Ringle and members of the Computing and Information Services department. In my career, I had never previously spent an extended period of time with college-level IT staff. The differences were striking. The college has 140 faculty members and 300 staff, the reverse ratio of our school. These 440 employees serve just 1400 students. Our 200 employees serve 730 students. Reed Computing has 32 employees. We have six. One possible conclusion: employees require a lot more IT support than students!
I was really impressed with the department’s governance process. They have seven different organizational groups that meet regularly to facilitate the process of democratic decision-making. Top-down decision-making is rare. We may bemoan the number of meetings we already have, but I left Reed thinking that we need to have more—we just need to structure them better. Our hosts also spoke to the benefits of meeting regularly with faculty members, individually or at “brown bag” lunches, building trust and familiarity that pay dividends later.
We also left feeling good about the program we run at Catlin Gabel. We have reached an enterprise level of service with our help desk, wireless security, intranet website, deployment, and other services. It is always refreshing to gain an external perspective on our program. Spending too much time at our own school sometimes leads to myopia.
I learned about the Collaborative Moodle Liberal Arts Project. Reed is one of a number of colleges working together to improve aspects of Moodle particular to needs they share. While the improvements look useful (bulk assignment downloads, better gradebook), I was disappointed that none of them pertain specifically to online learning environments.
Marty summarized the new report on Reed’s Kindle project. Their experience confirmed our initial reaction that the Kindle and similar devices are not yet ready for education enterprise deployment. The annotation, highlighting, and navigation features do not yet replicate enough of the features of writing in the margins of a book with a pen.
I’d also like an assistant and a conference table in my office!
Whither the virtual audience?
We successfully broadcast Catlin Gabel’s workshop to design the school’s next community event(s). I had the uStream working smoothly, the facilitator played his role perfectly, and we included the contributions from virtual participants in the real workshop. In the two weeks before the event, we made at least eight announcements in newsletters, email messages, and online articles that people would be able to attend the workshop online. We have some 3,000 alumni and 500 current families from which to draw a virtual audience.
Only five people showed up, and two were my IT colleagues.
What happened? What is the potential of live web broadcasting in a school?
I have seen uStream used most successfully in an educational setting to live broadcast major speeches and conferences. I recently tuned into a great presentation at Castilleja School. A Stanford professor was explaining how all websites, but social networks in particular, are vehicles of persuasion. I was the only virtual attendee.
Broadcasting educational technology conferences seems popular of late. The audience is large, widely dispersed, and technologically savvy. Still, having been a virtual participant before, the presentation quality is poor enough that it makes difficult to pick up everything that is going on. Our virtual participants on Saturday made the same comment.
I don’t feel compelled to live broadcast major events at our school. I would rather record with videocamera and then publish the next day, in higher quality than uStream and as a permanent addition to our site. Just last week, I recorded our Martin Luther King, Jr. community meeting (elementary), published it to a private page for our community, and already it has been viewed 70 times.
Perhaps people are just too busy to attend a live, five-hour online event at a specific time. They can play recorded online video at their convenience. Maybe for this event, we should have eschewed live participation in favor of making a highlight reel of the major points in a recorded video format. Or maybe the gesture of opening the meeting to virtual participants was a sufficiently important to justify the work involved.
Perhaps we were competing for audience against ourselves. If the 100 most interested people actually came to the event to participate in person, how many more did that leave to participate virtually?
Have you seen the new Cisco ads showing telepresence in classrooms? Who really thinks that schools will be able to afford high-end video conferencing of this sort? Grocery stores have far more flat-panel televisions than schools these days, and they sell food.
I would like my next attempt at live broadcast to involve a sports event. Sports have the immediacy of experience that demands a live broadcast, color commentary could be fun and interesting, and the project would involve students. However, we would still be competing against ourselves for audience, the potential audience is relatively small, and a lot of people might feel content to just find out the score the next day. It’s worth a try, though, as students studying at home could easily tune in and follow the game.
I could imagine a schoolwide event during which we partnered with one or more schools elsewhere to pursue the same agenda and discuss similar topics. However, I would choose Skype for such a broadcast, so that it would be equally bidirectional.
Have you used uStream in a school with more success? Did you draw an actual audience? Please tell us about it.
Category: Communication |
Tags: cisco, conference, school, skype, telepresence, ustream, video, virtual
The Rummage effect
Last week, our famous rummage event took place. Check out the effect on our website. I don’t know how Google really knows who is a new visitor to the website, but that’s great if it’s true.
Does anyone read our emails?
Our school switched from paper to electronic newsletters some years ago in order to reduce paper consumption. Since that time, the question has lingered. “Does anyone read the newsletters?” As teachers struggle to keep up with a rapidly growing inbox during free periods, and parents sometimes appear unaware of information distributed to them, it’s easy to reach this conclusion.
Thankfully, we have found a way to collect some data to allay this concern. We installed the Drupal module Simplenews Statistics on our site, and now our main newsletters include an invisible image that sends a request back to the website each time the email is opened. Our kindergarten email newsletter, sent to 40 families, was opened 108 times within 24 hours! Although opening an email does not guarantee that a person reads it or digests its contents, it at least it suggests that email is effective at putting the news in front of our readers.
If you store email addresses for newsletter subscriptions in your website, this module will even tell you which individuals opened the newsletter, which didn’t, and whether they clicked on embedded links. We don’t seek that level of resolution of data, since just the total is a relief to see, and we subscribe a Mailman listserv address to each newsletter instead of individual addresses.
We learned another lesson from this investigation. Data can really help soothe anxiety over changes that involve technology. Looking at our website statistics helps in a similar way. Data won’t answer all of one’s questions, but it helps challenge some deeply held assumptions about the perceived ineffectiveness of some forms of electronic communication.
Your website or listserv platform may include a tracking feature like this.
Sharing Is Good
In my previous blog post, I shared a video produced by second grade teachers and students about the brain study project they just completed. I also posted a link to the article to Twitter. Two days later, I received a comment from the All Kinds Of Minds CEO congratulating us on the video! She shared it with her organization’s leadership staff and board, bringing our school a lot of attention and rekindling our relationship with All Kinds Of Minds. We circulated the notes around our school, giving the teachers who worked so hard to assemble the project deserved recognition and building more excitement for brain-based curriculum development.
Publicly sharing student work can lead to unexpected, positive consequences!
Amateur Video On Your School Website
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth a million. Motion picture and audio better simulate “being there” than a long article or photo gallery. Video may capture the subtle cues of emotional expression and the energy of the moment that help a viewer understand the intangible values of your organization. Now, it is possible to capture video with a small, portable device and transfer it to the web with just a few clicks.
Why isn’t online video more popular on independent school websites? One reason may be the apprehension of some about posting “home videos” on your school website or social network site. Given all the care that we put into our print publications, we may wish to hold videos to the same standard. That would be nice, but It takes many hours (and/or dollars) to create professional-quality video. Perhaps we should hold video to a different standard than written articles. Could a new standard for school website video include amateur content?
Authenticity
In the new web, content has trumped style. YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter have demonstrated the greater value to users of authentic content over quality of presentation. YouTube is the fourth most popular site on the web. The President of the United States addresses the nation via YouTube. Cellphone reports of political unrest and natural disasters run on major network news broadcasts. At times like these, the value of amateur video is the authenticity of the content, not its production quality.
We may apply the same test to school events, even though they may not convey the same impact as mass demonstrations and natural disasters. Take the following video. I shot this at our annual homecoming event, a varsity soccer game attended by alumni and long-time faculty. It may well capture essential aspects of our school better than highly polished writing in a glossy magazine, especially if you studied with these teachers 20 years ago.
Choose to film school events that naturally capture the special qualities of your institution.
Edit as much as time allows
While you may not have the time or expertise to create professional-quality video, you can still produce video of reasonable quality. Depending on how you learn best, you may benefit from attending a beginner’s training for iMovie or Adobe Elements Premiere. Consider using a tripod to stabilize the picture and an external microphone to capture good audio. Develop a basic sense of composition, and timing. Learn to add just enough transition effects that your clips smoothly link together. Cut at least 90% of your original footage, keeping just the very best scenes.
Track your success
Following the progress of your new videos is essential to inform your own publishing choices and convince others that the experiment is working. Social media websites track the number of views of each of your content items. This allows you to track the number of video playbacks, one potential measure of success.
If you use Google Analytics on your school website, check out the “time on page” measure. Larger values suggest that more viewers actually watched the video all the way through.
Determining perceived quality is more difficult. Comments may provide some clue. If hundreds of people view a video and only one person complains about video quality, then you’re probably on the right track.
Start on your social media sites
You may not want to post your first video experiments to your public-facing websites. Facebook and YouTube are chock full of amateur video, so people will expect to see work of lower production quality there. The community pages on your school website may be another good place to start. Yet don’t stop there. Collect data on these first experiments in order to make an informed decision about whether to extend the experiment to the public-facing pages on your main school website.
On perfection
A founding faculty member at a well-regarded school recently retired. In his farewell remarks, he cautioned the community to resist perfectionism.
We are all under the illusion that we can and should be perfect all the time. If we don’t do “excellent” work everyday, then we don’t “measure up” to [our] standards. An awful lot of us impose these unrealistic expectations on our selves, and it’s not healthy. [...] Our school culture unduly puts pressures on us to look perfect in the eyes of everyone else. Stop!
Training pays off
Training is one key success factor for our new website. Since June, I have personally led 15 group training sessions on how to post content to the new website, and a handful of us have worked with individuals to answer questions and help them accomplish their website goals. Divisions heads have required teachers to update certain parts of the website, such as classroom pages and our curriculum map.
49 users have been trained as “content managers.” I required employees to get this training before allowing them to edit core pages on the site. Teachers could gain access to classroom pages without attending a training, though many benefitted from doing so. The carrot worked, as many users got a more thorough introduction to the site than might have been the case had I not required it to gain access. Incidentally, I allow trained content managers to edit just about any part of the site — the more eyes, the better!
86 users have posted 1,500 pages to the website, not including me! (I have posted another 7,000, mostly by migrating our curriculum map and school archives into the site.) Most of the 86 users are employees, but a handful of parents (volunteer coordinators, parents of athletes) and students (science project and honors arts bloggers) have been active.
I feel like one has a limited window of opportunity when launching a new technology to hold people’s attention, build their skills, and solve issues with the setup. Today, people largely find the site easy to use and like the appearance. A limited number of exceptions exist, of course.
The website tour video has been viewed 437 times. The video outlined the main features of the site for users. Not everyone can attend a training, especially parents. We promoted the video through a home page badge and by reference in school newsletters. I can’t say how much the video has helped parents and students learn to use the site, but I imagine it has helped some.
Social Media In Education
Thank you to Alex Ragone and Vinnie Vrotny for hosting me on EdTechTalk. Here is the audio recording. As a follow-up to the CASE webinar on social networks and school advancement, we talked Facebook, Twitter, and school communication strategies.
Length: 30:07 minutes (13.82 MB)
News Versus Spin
Yesterday, I stumbled across twelve minutes of video from the Obama-Clinton event in Unity, New Hampshire.
After watching all of it, I concluded that the two campaign teams had designed a tightly scripted event in order for Clinton to provide as much support to Obama as possible. I paid particular attention to the themes evoked by each during their speeches, deciding that their speeches were mostly about supporting each others’ reputations and expressing moderate policy positions to appeal to undecided voters.
Then I watched “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN last time, something I rarely do. There, I learned the real story. “Do Hillary and Barack really like each other?” “What does their body language tell us about them?” “Where is Bill?” Ironically, they showed only a minute or two of actual footage from the event! The network devoted the bulk of their presentation to “analysis” of the event, when they had a rich source of primary footage that they could have emphasized instead! We would never teach our students to use primary sources in such a manner.
Last week, the New York Times bemoaned the lack of success of Google News, which has apparently captured only 8% of the online news market. The leader is Yahoo!, whom I left last year when they buried actual news in favor of “infotainment” lead stories. I see Google News as the Craigslist of news sources. Their mission is to remove the middleman between consumers and the news, which I appreciate. Less spin, more reporting.
Edtech bloggers are excited about the potential for Wikipedia and Google News to change the way in which students become informed about the world. However, with the powerful marketing forces of major news networks and the capitulation of former innovators like Yahoo!, it is going to take a lot of effort to encourage good habits of news consumption among our students.
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at