- If I got to rewrite the Bible, I would add another plague. Hordes of misinformed teachers an principals wanting to do video conferencing. All thinking it will be easy, all thinking it will save them money, all thinking they can be innovative. Poor lost souls. May they be fortunate and come to realise the truth of webcams and video conferencing, or they will be forever doomed to roam the education community searching for the elusive education solution they were promised by the photo on the front of a $99 webcam box, of a child talking to their grandmother, both smiling.
- Like most things on the internet, cheap and portable webcams and video conferencing were made by the military, so a general could make sure he/she was giving his instructions to the right troops. Million dollar equipment and satellite phones worked, for at least a few seconds, to send a shaky video signal to someone else with equally expensive equipment. That was about it really. The military was smart enough to realise the limited potential of the technology, and they never thought of using the system to teach essential skills like firing a gun or driving a tank. Because that would be stupid.
- Then some idiot thought webcams and video conferencing could replace real life teachers in schools. Just beam in the teacher - because that's all education is - someone smart speaking 'information' to someone who wants to sit there and listen. Millions, and I mean millions of dollars, has been spent replicating this awful teaching model using webcams and video conferencing. Schools put a camera in a classroom on a spare student desk, and a "remote" student listened to the teacher and copied things from the chalkboard. I saw this happening two years ago. The two - way speaker system didn't work, but that was OK, as the actual on-site students just listened to the teacher, copied off the board and never said a word, so the remote student without a working microphone was at no disadvantage.
- Don't get me wrong. I LOVE webcams and online conferences, and know it takes teaching to a much higher level that is rarely seen in a classroom, when it is used appropriately. I've learnt my skills by sitting next to online teachers for a few years, being at the center of many failures, and witnessing many successes. I'll write a book on it one day. But essentially, here's the facts.
- It's all about the pedagogy. A massive, massive change in teacher pedagogy is required. The required change doesn't get any smaller if you invest more in your solution. A $7.50 webcam will give you the same learning outcomes as a $50,000 solution. Either it won't work, or it will work. The technology doesn't matter. The way the teacher uses the technology has to change.
- Webcams and cheap/free online conferences are a perfect match for how we want teaching to happen in our schools. Learning is continuous, students are engaged 100% of the time, feedback is instant, groups of students form for a task then dissapate, and students can bring in real-time experts to help out their group at any time. Even the free tools have the equivalent of what Tom Cruise does in Minority Report - putting things up on a screen, moving them around, adding, collaborating, checking, then exporting. I've actually seen a whole group of schools do this in 1998 with NetMeeting - a simple and free tool. It allowed incredible pedagogy to take place, and watching a skilled teacher work with a class of 20 students, who just happened to be in ten diferent locations, was a wonderful experience. When I do my sessions demonstrating how exciting, demanding, challenging and academically rigorous a well planned session can be, it really opens the eyes of the teacher participants to the possibilities. Finally, we can practice what we preach with video conferencing.
- The first couple of times you use webcams and video conferencing, it will suck. The 'talker' will get so nervous that they will never pause in their script (they write scripts) and get so nervous they are getting no feedback from the audience, that they will literally speak for two hours without taking a breath. The audience has been given informal permission to leave the room, walk away, read the newspaper or anything else they find more interesting that listening to a speech and watching a talking head. The only interesting thing is seeing how the head slowly moves down the video window, as the speaker loses their perfect posture and eventually ends up leaning on their arm, because even they are bored by the experience. The last web conference I ran, I didn't write any script. I got in trouble because I didn't 'hand in' my presentation for approval. Instead, I wanted the group to talk, to hear their issues, and to use the tools at our disposal for all participants to work together and come up with new solutions, innovate and improve on someone's established practice.
- We had a ball, and I felt a lot more like how I used to teach my Grade 4 students. And that's really the secret of technology - realising that your skills in teachng are good skills, and what you have learnt about teaching, students, curriculum and education is valid, it just has to be transferred to a new medium, be it a webcam with video conferencing or an iPod. When I was a kid, I never went to a mini Imax-theatre and saw a high resolution 3D projection of my teacher talking to me, because that would be silly. The only time I can remember a two hour speech was at my high school graduation, never during class, because that would be silly and a waste of time. But sometimes with new technologies, we forget to turn our brains on, and accept less-than-perfect pedagogies, becasue we're using a $800,000 piece of equipment.
- Students don't need to see each other's faces to develop a 'bond' to enable teaching and groupwork. That's a silly fallicy based on no research whatsoever. Anyone born after 1970 knows that if they are using a phone, a camera or email, they are communicating with a person on the other end, not a silver crested goose. I can remember the first time I got a webcam working in an extremely isolated school, and connected one isolated girl to another. One girl asked "Hi, what are you doing?" and the wonderful reply was "Looking at you through this stupid thing, what does it look like?" And from that point onwards they turned off the videos (girls don't like their faces shown all the time) and got down to what any ten year old girls would so - talk about stuff and share photos. I don't particularly like showing my face during any type of conference online or in a real auditorium - I'd rather people focus on my slides, what I am saying and what I am asking participants to think about. Once you get over the fact I have two eyes and a mouth, there's not much else you can learn by looking at my face for the next hour. And I don't particularly want to see other people's faces when I am presenting. I see ten cameras low on desks projecting ten sweaty double chins, I get to see when a student knocks on the door and the teacher leaves, and I get to see the unconscious movements people do, like scratch in places. And maybe forget their camera is on, stand up, and then scratch in that same place. Well worth $800,000. This was exactly what happened at the last "SUPER HIGH TECH INNOVATION" conference I attended. The man doing the keynote set up his webcam in his laptop to film his face, then got up and stood for the rest of the session. Projected behind him on the large screen, and sent out to the hundreds of people watching, was 45 minutes of his crotch. And no-one said anything.
- Use video only if you need it. The best video is recorded video - people can watch it again and again, over and over. Record yourself doing something, play it back, and speak over it. Trying to make a real-time recording, while trying to teach, manage students, and keep the technology working, is just too hard. So if you are demonstrating some awful mathematics rule, record yourself doing it in a quiet classroom and with the camera in a good spot. You'll never have to do it again, and students never have to ask you again and again to do it. You can put it on your website, send it home or add it to your library. We don't need 'live' events. Students watching a film of magnesium burning believe that it is magnesium burning. You don't have to do it live and broadcast it in high quality internet video that one remote student might see if they are lucky and their computer works just at that time.
- I have another story. The time was 1997. Computers and video were just coming together. My employer decided it would be a good idea to capture a conversation between a sports specialist teacher and a regular teacher, about how to follow up physical skills training. Instead of seeing the faces of the people talking (which would have helped, as a third voice came in and out, I think), they decided to film the refrigerator in the staffroom. By the time I found out, our Department had distributed over 55,000 CD-ROMs of this wonderful bit of media. The file was broadcast quality. You could zoom in on that fridge and see every little dent. And everyone knew that at 31 minutes and 20 seconds, a child came in, took some milk out of the fridge, then two minutes later, brought it back. The rest of the 45 minute video was back to the fridge. Of course this file was HUGE as it was a high quality movie format - and to see it, some new Flash drivers had to be installed, which meant unlocking every school's computer security to put the new player file on every computer. Then systems crashed when people tried to play it, because at this time RAM wasn't huge. It took forever to copy onto a network computer, and a lot of people thought something was wrong, as they could only see a fridge. Sometimes we are so scared by silence and no imagery that we will do anything to avoid it - be it speaking without a break or using 'fill-in' video.
- Webcams should benefit from the investment you already have in your school's computers. They should just plug in. You have a computer, a processor, a screen, speakers, the internet, school cabling and an operating system. You've paid for it already. Use it. Just plug a cheap camera and a microphone into it. The more expensive units (which are always about $60,000 for the central studio and bridge and $50,000 for each (yes, each) other location where participants will watch) do the same thing. It's still just a camera and a microphone, but you are buying a whole set of doubled-up technology for it - more computers, screens, software, cabling.... a second copy of everything! At crazy prices, and these new computers are locked into one application only - the don't do anything else unless the company who you bought them from allows you to. That's the con. And still so many school groups believe a $800,000 investment in the high end technology is going to be a million times better than a little camera. Sadly, it isn't. Both techniques use the same electricity, the same internet connection, the same boring presenter at one end who doesn't know how to teach online, and the same innattetive students on the other end, who got sick of the novelty of the system ages ago and are bored silly.
- Its not just how you teach that has to change. It's what you teach. Your content needs to be digital so it can be shared, stored, passed around.
- The smartest advice that I'll write in a book one day is to run a video conference just like you would run a class. You ask students to raise their hands to speak. One person speaks at one time. You use organisational tools and charts to help students manage their thinking (PMIs etc). You give different students in different groups tasks. You let students talk to the whole class and present what they have done. Mind-blowing amazing teaching using a webcam and video conferencing is just good teaching, transferred online. And it works really well. It is fun, it is highly engaging, and it is a pleasure (yes a pleasure) to teach in that way. Your students really appreciate the level of interaction and recognition they are getting. You just have to find ways to deal with the expectation that every student will want to be acknowledged once a minute, when in a regular classroom you might have talked to them once per day.
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