Visual Teaching and Learning (2)

Classroom visualizers can become transformative tools for visual teaching and learning. If we are going to get really effective at using document camera, consider the following highly effective instructional practices:

• Fill your screen with large images. When showing pictures, photos, graphs, charts, or other visuals in class, be sure to fill the entire screen with your visual. Small visuals don't grab the brain's attention. Full-screen visuals do.

• Add color. Use color to show organization, relationships, hierarchy, or key concepts/vocabulary. But watch out! Moonlighting directly above your projection screen can wash out even the most vibrant colors.

• Add the creative storytelling. Some of the most effective teaching I have seen with document cameras is when the teacher combines a large immersive image with gifted storytelling. The multiplier effect is phenomenal. Try it out.

• Involve your students. Can you get your students to use the document camera more than you do in the classroom? Think about it. How could you do that?

Visual Teaching and Learning (1)

Document cameras are great tools for visual teaching and learning. If we are going to get really effective at using this amazing teaching tool, first we must get intentionally rid ourselves of some weak instructional practices:

• Too much text. Lose the outlines. Stop showing the syllabus. Remember the 6 x 6 rule for any text you put on the document camera screen: no more than six lines per screen, no more than six words per line.

• Not enough visuals.  Again, lose the outlines. Avoid death by text. Stop promoting text comas in the classroom. Use more visuals: charts, graphs, illustrations, photos, pictures, and visual representations.

• Black-and-white. That's right, lose the black-and-white. Color matters. What percentage of your document camera materials are in black and white? That number will be roughly proportional to your visual instructional effectiveness in a lesson.

• Too much teacher talk. When you're document camera is in use, consider who is doing most of the talking. If it is you, reverse that equation. Involve your students.

What's Missing?

The more I work with teachers in my graduate classes who have document cameras, the more I find that they really want to use document cameras more effectively than they do now. So what's missing here?

Transformative training, that's what!

Although it is certainly true that teachers rarely take advantage of some of the best and most powerful instructional features of these tools, the real key is using these powerful tools differently--doing new things--not just automating old practices. My national workshop "Powerful Visual Teaching and Learning with the Classroom Document Camera" is an example of what is desperately

needed. What matters is using richly visual teaching strategies, transformative student-involvement strategies, and fresh ideas. Those are the pillars of my workshop. If your school, organization, or company is interesting in leveraging these strategies and insights, please contact me. I am available to travel and present in your community, if interested.

A Teacher's Story (1)

I recently sampled a group of teachers enrolled in my graduate programs at the University of Colorado-Denver, soliciting some of their best-ever ideas for teaching with document cameras. Here is a two-part postings showing how one Colorado teacher used the classroom visualizer in fourteen different ways in a single lesson. The italics are mine.

Part 1. Imagine for a moment a math lesson on measurement. Jen Miller, a magnificent third grade teacher working in a Colorado elementary school, reads aloud the book, “How Big is a Foot”, showing the students the pictures under the document camera to ensure that all students can see the illustrations. As she reads, she quickly “captures” a few of the book illustrations to use the following day when reviewing the lesson, before moving forward to cover new content.

After reading, she shows the students the size of the King’s foot (12 inches) by displaying the ruler under the document camera. She continues to display other different measurement tools (string, protractor, etc.) under the display, for the students to see, relating them back to the book as she goes.

Next, she suggests to the students a few different examples of items in the room to measure and ask them to write down which measuring tool would make the most sense to use. She asks several students to come up to show their answers under the document camera. She places a graphic organizer under the doc cam for the final question, asking the students to come up and put their initials in the box of the correct tool to use. She then shows the class results under the doc cam for the entire class to see.

To find out what happens next in Ms. Miller's creative classroom, return for our next post, in two weeks.

Tech Eye for the Chalk Guy

Many educators among us are less technical, but greatly caring and effective in their work. This post is dedicated to you.

The classroom document camera is one of the best tools ever for improving classroom instruction. It’s really all about visual teaching and learning. And we know the current generation is really tuned into all things visual. Because the document camera is so easy to master, so uncomplicated to use, it is worth your time to learn how to use it well.

Here are some useful, well-travelled quotations that may provide a spark—that may move you to action—helping you to realize importance of brain-based visual teaching and learning, using visualizers:

“It is better to see something once than to hear it a hundred times.”

Chinese proverb

"Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time."

Chinese proverb

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”

Unknown

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

Da Vinci

VIZ Worldview 2013

The Future-Talk VIZ blog serves a diverse international audience. Our readers might be interested in seeing which countries were our top ten blog visitors during 2013. Based on web impressions for the 2013 calendar year, here is how the data shape up:

United States

Russia

Germany

China

Ukraine

France

Poland

UK

Are there any surprises here? Or are these just “the usual suspects?” What do you think? Please comment.

Of course, this chart only represents the top ten. Many hundreds of other visitors have frequented this blog from countries all over the world. I want to thank you for your deep and committed interest in visual learning and teaching. Please write me, let me know what you are doing in your country. I would love to feature some interviews in 2014.

Visualize Better Messaging

At conferences, document camera companies often do a nice job with their exhibit hall booths, offering friendly and welcoming spaces for educators passing by. With their print messaging, not so much.

Here is the experiment I undertook: I procured the literature from each manufacturer’s table, reading each one through. The ‘featured’ sales messages were enough to scare an educator right back into their classrooms. Here’s a sampling of the offending core messaging I found in my pouch:

“[It’s] a great pass-through camera…”

“HDMI Input & Output – ideal for integration…”

“Perfect for retrofitting any room.”

“VGA/USB Dual-Mode”

And, of course, my favorite:

“[Now] UVC (USB video class compliant) with the latest CMOS 3.4 sensor…”

Whatever that means. These manufacturers need to understand that this style of “technical messaging” is gibberish to K-12 folks. Say it in English. Say it simply. Or talk about effective visual teaching. Come on—I know you folks—what’s with this? It looks like the technical department certainly beat the marketing heads on this one. Most of this seems written in the cryptic lexicon of university buyers or RFP junkies. Are you trying to sell to educational customers, or just advertising to outshine your competition? This type of technical messaging will never reach into the hearts and minds of educational customers. 

This message is tough love in nature, but you know I love you. Don’t you?

An Open Letter

This is an open letter to visualizer manufacturers everywhere. I hope you are listening.

Your product—the classroom document camera—is a wonderful tool. We simply can’t live without it in a classroom. Many IT folks and administrators despise document cameras, but teachers love them.

But one of my pet peeves is something I that have seen both commoditize and degrade the digital camera market and other AV-product markets over the years. In an effort to stay relevant—to keep one step ahead of your competition—companies strive to constantly improve their products. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Or is there?

See it from our point of view. Features constantly changing. Overly rapid feature creep. Every six to twelve months. Perhaps a perceived advantage for your product over your competitors, but for schools it’s just frustrating. Schools feel the unwelcome ogle of forced obsolescence gawking over their shoulders. If the changes are too frequent, it’s enough to make them want to wait. Or enough to make them bemoan their past purchases and give up on future or replacement purchases.

The bottom line is that feature creep forces your marketing to focus on small gains, the trivial advantages over your competitors. What about featuring great teaching in your literature or booths? What about shouting the message of visual teaching and learning strategies? Why not emphasize the effectiveness of brain-based teaching, which really works?

My advice is this: slow your product improvement cycle down to two years, like other successful technology industries; create a sense of industry stability, making each new product announcement worth its weight in gold; and start talking less about features and more about what really matters—powerful visual teaching.

Legend of the Donkey Cam

Improve your Donkey Cam Kung Fu by following this blog.

In the previous post, I suggested that one of the names given to classroom document cameras is that of "donkey cam." Where did that notion come from? I assure you, it came from the hearts of students. Here's the simple genesis of that phrase: 

In a brightly lit Colorado classroom,  a teacher moves from behind his desk to a small table holding his document camera. A student cheerfully cries out, “Are we using the ‘donkey cam’ today, Mr. Allen?"

I chose this story because students really appreciate the visual allure and conceptual clarity provided when document cameras are used well in instruction. Lovingly calling this modern audio-visual device a “donkey cam,” it is clear that this young lady was extremely pleased that the day’s lesson might be forthcoming using the visual approach that reaches her best as a 21st century visual learner. This blog is really about richly visual 21st Century teaching and learning--using a document camera.