R.I.P Zaption

And it's finally happened......

With the huge number of companies offering free digital tools in the online education space, many of
which offer paid premium versions, it was inevitable that at some point one would fail.

Sadly it is Zaption, the interactive video creation tool, a product that more often than not made the top of many teachers most useful tools lists.
Zaption hasn't failed as such, but been acquired by Workday, a large player in the HR and Corporate training industry. Workday it seems, agrees with educators that Zaption is a great technology and offered the company enought money for them to sell. Rather than share it with the world, Workday has made the decision to shut the stand alone service down so it can incorporate Zaption's features into its own product.

This is certainly a blow for the thousands of teachers that have developed content for Zaption and all the more harsh given that Workday will not continue to support existing Zaption Tours. As of 30 September Zaption will disappear.



What does this mean for those of you with Zaption tours as resources your courses? The short and tough answer is you will lose your work.

Looking forward, there are a couple of great alternatives that are available, Playposit and EdPuzzle being the two leading contenders. The TEEL Team will be comparing these two services over the coming fortnight and will report back on the pros and cons of each. Stay tuned for our take on the best approach for creating interactive video in the post Zaption era!

Blurring the Lines of Reality - 2016 Update

I was fortunate to attend Magnify recently, a two day Virtual and Augmented Reality conference hosted as part of Auckland Tech Week. Although focus was directed at the entertainment, media and marketing sectors with speakers like Academy Award winning stunt coordinator Guy Norris from Proxi VR, Ian Taylor from Animation Research, and New York advertising heavyweight Catherine Patterson, responsible for Dell Computers Golf the City AR campaign, I came away with plenty of ideas how this technology can benefit the eduction sector.




Vendors had plenty to show off. Nokia was unveiling its $100,000 Ozo professional VR camera and at the consumer end of the market Samsung's Gear 360 Camera and Headset could well be this Christmas's Hoverboard. To experience being inside a cinematic movie experience courtesy of Proxi VR film technology, where action is taking place all around you rather than in front of you and actors communicate to you as if you were actually in the scene is an unreal experience. 

Immersive technology is seen by those in the know as crossing over into the mass market this year.  There are big clues as to what is becoming possible for us in the education sector. True VR is still out of reach to most institutions but experiences such as the Quake History Demo developed by New Zealand company Sensorium, demonstrate the educational possibilities this technology will offer. 

YouTube, Vimeo and "visual expressionist" kings GoPro now support 360 video (to experience this, watch the example videos at the bottom of the post) and with Samsung investing heavily in consumer products, like it or not, the flood of user generated content is almost upon us. With its applications ranging from advertising, media, tourism, medicine real estate...... and yes education, VR and AR is being touted as a significant new development.


Quake History Demo from Sensorium VR on Vimeo.

Its easy to come away from an event like this and think that there is no way this will happen in education. Think again. It wasn't long ago that the idea of filming your own video resources and posting them online seemed like science fiction. AR and 360 video technology will appear first. Products the Gear 360 put surround video production in the hands of anyone and software like Aurasma assist with AR content and is already being used in schools. Stay tuned for the first AR resources coming to Waiariki Bay of Plenty Polytechnic in the next few months.


Here are three quite different examples of 360 degree video. I particularly like the Chernobyl example as it skilfully incorporates historical footage into the ruins of the former Soviet nuclear power station.

360 Degree Tornado - use the arrow controls to navigate around, or even better download the latest version of the YouTube app and watch on your phone




Primary School Age 360 Solar System Tour



360 Chernobyl Documentary Trailer


...... and as a first day of winter bonus - an amazing video of the soon to be released Omni from GoPro. Click here

Who Else Wants to Create Interactive Resources?

The TEEL Team are kicking of the first series of 30 Minute Tech Takeaways for 2016 with a fortnight of refreshers on three of the best digital tools for creating interactive resources; Zaption, Thinglink and Powtoon.
Why do we think these three are so good?
All are free, easy to learn and use, can add interactivity to existing resources and help increase course engagement.
First session is on Wednesday April 13th. Come along to The Qube in Rex Williams for a demo or refresher. If you can't make the scheduled times, get in touch and we can arrange a time to suit you or your team.

Three Ways to Ask a Question

Great teachers understand the importance of feedback as part of effective teaching and learning. Feedback allows teachers to check understanding, get a sense of student opinions on a topic and encourages decision making. Feedback contributes to stimulating, lively learning. One way to get feedback is with a great question and in this post we look at three different ways to do just that - ask a question.

Hands Up

The tried and true approach since Grandma was a preschooler, hands up is great for all sorts of reasons, but may not give the most accurate responses. Students are inclined to vote with the majority, or at least with the first responders, and quieter students may not want to vote against the majority even though they are confident in their own answer.  If the question is based on a sensitive issue or involves students publicly identifying their personal beliefs, some may not feel comfortable displaying these in a public setting.

Clickers 

Clickers, which were all the rage a few years ago, and more recently polling software such as Poll Everywhere, can be feature filled and flexible, especially if class sizes are large (100+). The one major downside of clickers and polling software is that they rely on every student having either a clicker or mobile device. "My clicker's battery is flat", "I can't connect to the internet", What's the web address again?"..... you get the picture.

Plickers - Better than Clickers? 

Enter a really cool tool called Plickers,  the 2106 iteration of tech based mass questioning solutions. Yes, it has its limitations, but it certainly ticks many boxes for ease of use and practical features. Put simply, it's a polling tool that uses hand held QR codes and the teachers mobile device.

Why do we like it? Several reasons...

It's a low tech, high tech solution. Students do not need a device. Simply hand each student a printed QR Card from the free downloadable PDF on Plickers website.

Its flexible - Set up classes and questions prior to your lesson, or create them on the fly. Responses can be anonymous or tagged to individual students. Questions can be one-off or part of a running record. Results can be graphed, tabled and exported.

It's fun - Use it for assessment or just to add some competition to your class. You can display the results instantly, letting your class see how individuals answered, either anonymously, or if appropriate, by name.

It's Free!

How do you use it?
Hand out a QR card (they come as set in PDF form) with four response options on it to each student in class - get the students to hold the card up oriented on what answer they choose - scan the class with your mobile device using the free Plickers app - watch the responses get recorded on the screen as you go.

If you want to know more about this great tool, come over to The Qube and ask for a quick demo from one of the TEEL's or keep an eye out for upcoming workshops later this month.

A Snapshot of Moodle Usage

Our Learning Management System Moodle, is a key part of how we deliver online learning to students.
Google, through its analytics service, can provide us with an enormous amount of data on its usage, which allows us to identify patterns such as how many times users visit the site, what days and time of day are most popular, what the average length of each visit is and what type of device was used.

This data can help us make sure we are providing a service that fits the needs of its users. More importantly though, analytics can tell use about how successfully students are interacting with course content and whether they are progressing as expected or falling behind.

Here's a snapshot of a few statistics from 2015. Of interest is the 50% increase in mobile and tablet usage since last year. This increase is unlikely to slow in upcoming years and raises some interesting questions as to how we as educators, develop online communities and deliver online content to always connected, mobile learners.

You can hover over the image to see specific numbers. 

30 Minute Tech Takeaways: Round Two

Come and join us in The Qube for the second round of 30 Minute Tech Takeaways. Discover a new tool and create a new resource to use with your students.

Featuring over the next fortnight is Zaption, the interactive video tool, and a second round of Thinglink for those that missed out last week. For session times, check out the flyer below.

To see a simple example of what you can do with Thinglink, take a look at this one.

https://www.thinglink.com/scene/723634124148965378

30 Minute Tech Takeaways

The TEEL Team will be running several 30 minute sessions in The Qube over the next two weeks on a couple of cool and easy to use tech tools. First up will be the interactive image generator Thinklink and animated presentation tool Powtoon.

The aim of these sessions is to give you the skills to create a resource you can takeaway with you (virtually speaking) within half an hour.

Check out the info sheet for details. If you can't make the session times listed, come and see us anyway to schedule an alternative time.

The Qube is Opening

The new Technology Enabled and Enhanced Learning Space, The Qube, will open in the Rex Williams building on Monday 2nd November. We have a range of technology tools for you to try and we are here to assist you in any way to enhance your teaching with technology.

Look out for TEEL focussed workshops in upcoming weeks.

To kick things off we are running 15 minute familiarisation sessions everyday next week at 12.15 and 3.15, so come and have a look, or feel free to drop in anytime between 9am and 4pm. Chocolate and lollies on us!

Teaching to Large Groups

Wednesday the 14th of October saw the Teaching Development Seminar Series move to Bongard Campus with a focus on teaching to large groups. Anne Bradley and Greg Bold shared their experience with us and offered some great strategies for larger classes. Have a look at their presentations below.

Strategies for Teaching Speakers of Other Languages

At our recent lunchtime Teacher Development Seminar, the English Language Team gave an excellent talk on strategies for teaching students who's first language is not English. They made the interesting point that these students are not necessarily international students studying English, but also New Zealand citizens and domestic students who grew up speaking another language.
Take a look here.

The Qube is Coming....

Teaching and Industry Interface

The focus of the presentations from the lunchtime seminar session held on 16 September was the importance of the teaching and industry interface and the importance of developing and maintaining strong relationships with local industry.

Have a look at these videos to see what Betty Ormsby, Brian Dillon and Lee Pearce had to say about the importance of industry liaison for their programmes and their students.

Data, Data and Storing it in The Cloud

Our ever expanding personal libraries of documents, photos, videos and music has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of data we store. In Part One, we looked at the history of computer storage. Today, more and more individuals and businesses are choosing to store this content somewhere other than their personal computer, hard drive or phone.  

Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive; the names are familiar and they essentially all do the same thing - store files remotely for you. Add in social networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for photo and video storage and you the have potential for a significant amount of your data being stored in "The Cloud" 

No, your files are not orbiting somewhere in the stratosphere, but stored on enormous facilities full of hard drives spread around the world in what is a global scale computer network connected by the internet. In essence, you files are sent along a pipe, and filed on someone else's hard drive, then backed up on other hard drives in different locations around the world. If you have an active internet connection you now have free (or very cheap) data back up solutions available to you. 

 But hang on, is my data safe if I store it in the Cloud? 

The simple answer is yes. Sort of. Everything is hackable and nothing is breach proof, however if you follow standard precautionary rules like choosing credible providers and using strong passwords you are much less likely to lose data than by using home grown methods. After all, rates of personal data back up is very low. We've all been there - laptop gets left on the bus, flash drive gets put through the wash, or phone falls down the toilet and you don't have a backed up copy of that important presentation or precious photo. Syncing your data with a cloud solution can avoid these potentially painful experiences, not to mention making your files more accessible when you are away from your computer.

The investment in storage and security by big players such as Facebook and Google in security and infrastructure is vast. As an example Google has a dozen data centres around the world, containing an estimated 900,000 servers using 260 million watts of power. Facebook's most recent facility pictured below (note the trucks for scale) is built on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, in an attempt to keep energy usage lower. Amazon is currently building a similar facility in remote Northwest China for the same reason. All those targeted advertisements on web pages and in your Facebook feed are there in part to pay for this infrastructure.

It is estimated that 2016 will be the year that a mind-blowing one Zettabyte of data will be stored online, that's enough for a 22 billion year long music playlist and remembering Moores Law this amount will only continue to rise.

So whats next? In part three we look at streaming services and productivity in the cloud and answer the question, how much data fits into the human brain.

Data, Data and Where to Store It.

Part One - The History of Data Storage.

Since the time when computers became a significant part of our lives, the need to save and move data has existed. In the first installment of this three part series, we take a look at the history of removable data storage.

Prior to the invention of the floppy disk in 1971, computer storage existed in several mediums

including punch cards, magnetic tape and even rope. The original floppy disk made it possible to move data easily from one computer to another and on release had a grand total of 80KB of memory, enough data for a ten page word processed document or approximately 1% of a modern digital photo file. Floppy disks went through various iterations in physical size and capacity over a twenty year period and maxed out at 1.44 MB of storage before newer technology superseded them.

In 1987 (Walk Like an Egyptian anyone?) Toshiba invented flash storage, a new type of technology that uses printed circuit boards rather than spinning disks to store information. It wasn’t until the turn of the century though, when personal computers began shipping with USB ports, that removable flash storage in the form of thumb drives became widely available. Although expensive in its infancy, flash storage is now cheap, reliable and has enormous capacity compared to its floppy predecessor. 

In keeping with Moores Law that suggests computing power doubles every two years, Samsung have just revealed a flash drive with 16TB of capacity, enough for over 1000 HD copies of the entire Star Wars Series (or about 16000 HD episodes of Game of Thrones if that's more your style). Most recently, with the adoption of smartphones, cameras, GPS, etc, flash storage is everywhere in the form of SD cards. While other storage mediums like CD ROM have come and gone, flash, with its tiny size, large capacity, high speeds, 10,000 write cycles and great reliability have meant we've come a long way since the humble floppy disk of 40 years ago and it would be unusual for a person to not use flash storage in some form in a typical day. As always with all technology however, even a 16TB flash drive will soon be obsolete. Tech companies Intel and Micron are working on a new type of storage called 3D XPoint that is 1000 times faster than flash and ironically shares some concepts with the 1960's rope storage technology that was used on the Apollo Space Mission.

So where to next?

In part two we examine cloud computing and why Facebook is building data storage facilities in the middle of ice fields.

Ten Tips for Developing a Teaching Portfolio

Mike Scott, Senior Academic Staff Member and winner of a 2014 National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award, put together this excellent short video recently on how to create a Teaching Portfolio in support of a teaching award application. For those of you considering an application, or even to just document your teaching career to date, this video is a must watch.



10 Tips For Portfolio from vim eo917 on Vimeo.

Our second series of  lunchtime PD sessions started on 9 September with the theme being 'Facilitative Teaching'. This is a shift from what is often viewed as traditional teaching to one of the teacher adopting a facilitative role, which is a student centred, flexible approach to learning. We had Donna Dinsdale, Allister Field and Graeme Jeffrey sharing their experiences of how they adopted a facilitative model of teaching in their programmes. Here's what they shared about their experiences.

Teaching Development Seminar 2

The second Teaching Development Seminar focussed on Alternative Assessment, with Tracey Clissold, Lindsay Skyner and Amy Raymond sharing examples of how they have re-designed assessments to support learning and engage learners. Here's what they did!

Geek Spot - Did you know?

Over 200 billion emails are sent every day. What type of information do you send in emails on a daily basis? Are you confident that your emails only contain information that you would be happy for anyone to read? 

If not, you might like to check out the Confidential CC Android and iOS app which features self-destructing, encrypted email that can be viewed only once and can't be forwarded or printed. Very 007! 

Check it out: http://www.confidentialcc.com/

Any other Techno Geeks out there who would like to share their 'Geeky Stuff'? Let us know and we might publish you on our TEEL Blog.

Tech4Learning

The first of our Teaching Development Seminars kicked of with a focus on Tech4Learning, presented by Lesley Mochan, Anne-Marie Simon and Dennis Keys.

The theme of all three presentations was the the use video to provide students with a range of resources they could revisit anywhere, anytime, to confirm some of the key learning points from their classes.

Lesley was looking for a resource to support her students learn the propagation process for a new type of rootstock. She found a programme on eTV, which was just what she needed. However, she didn't want to simply provide a video for them to watch but a resource that would engage them in the learning by adding some interaction. So she ran the video through Zaption, added some key information and some questions for students to answer to confirm their understanding. Click the Zaption image below to see what Lesley produced for her students. 

Anne-Marie wanted to produce some learning resources to support students to learn numerous techniques. She wanted to provide a range of resource options with written step-by-step instructions, physical sample and QR code, linking to video. By adding QR codes to the machines students use on campus, they are able to scan the QR code on the machine to see how to do a range of things such as threading or setting up the machine. Students can review the video as often as they need until they have mastered the technique. Check out this example of what Anne-Marie has developed for her students by clicking the image below.

The Carpentry Team decided to produce videos to provide learning resources that would allow students to revisit the operation and health and safety practices when using the range of machinery in the Carpentry Programme. When demonstrating practical skills in the workshop students can miss some of these essential key points however, these videos would allow students to watch them as often as they needed. By adding QR codes to the machinery, students can scan the QR code with their mobile devices and watch the videos in the workshop if they are uncertain of any aspect of the operating procedures. With the help of Mike Scott, they have also produced a number of ‘60 seconds of safety’ videos. Click the image below for an example of what the Carpentry Team have produced.

Strategies for Engaging Youth Videos

Kylee New, Phil Grimmer and Mariana Tapsell from the Hospitality, Trades Training and Foundation Studies programmes spoke at the recent Teaching and Learning Seminar that focused on strategies for engaging youth. Each tutor spoke of the challenges they faced, how there was a need to be flexible in their approach, and their strong desire to see the young people on their courses succeed.

Some common themes emerged including the importance of building a community of learners, the need to develop trusting relationships with students and the long term benefits of making the effort to spend time with each student to check on their progress both as a student and young person.

Take a look at their talks below. They were filmed on a self tracking camera called a Swivl. If you would like to have a go using this device in your classroom, get in touch with the Teel Team.