chanced upon this tool via astro pro‘s fb feed. installed as a google sheet add-ons, it’s a very useful admin tool for teachers who are using google docs/drive to assign and monitor students’ work. there are a couple of videos on the official site, here’s one HOWTO video to start with:
tool – nearpod
saw on lookang‘s fb feed yesterday this tool, and meiyin mentioned it to me today. what a coincidence. decided to take a quick look at the tool and examine its functionalities.
it’s essentially a tool that builds interaction with live audience during a live presentation, somewhat like a PPT+Socrative 2-in-1. offline student-machine ‘interaction’ is available for a paid account that allows students to view prepared contents and answer preset qns (akin traditional e-learning **zzz**); click here for an example.
supports mobile apps on Android, iOS, and Windows phone. these apps would afford a teacher to ‘interact’ with students with access mobile devices w/active internet connections by gathering live feedback throughout the session/class. good for assessment for learning (AfL) (:
when a session goes live, control is only available from the main slide-to-slide view. if a slideshow is embedded as one of the slides, the teacher will have no control over the viewing of that slideshow.
besides pre-prepared content, teachers can also push website URLs, and Open-ended questions to students during a live session (somehow i got an error trying this on my droid).
teachers who would like to co-create presentation can do it through the Share via email function (not tested).
functionalities available to FREE account:
0. easy to navigate interface
1. create slideshow by importing PPTx files, images, PDF, and Google images search and insert directly
2. 50MB total storage & 20MB presentation size
3. export only PDF reports (per session)
4. 30 students per live session limit
5. UNICODE support (good news for CL teachers)
limitation of FREE (aka Sliver) account:
1. image upload size limit: 3MB
2. video upload size limit: 20MB
3. slide content eXcludes webpage, PDFs, live twitter feed, audio files
4. no self-paced homework/presentation mode
5. no CSV reports export, nor per student report
6. no export slides/presentation as PDF
paid account will set one back USD120 (annual billing). did not get to try the homework feature since i did not pay a fee.
to summarise, nearpod is a frontal presentation tool (~PPT) that affords teachers to build in feedback from students (e.g. for the purpose of AfL). students will need internet connected (mobile/laptop) devices to get this going. it may afford CoL where teachers/students may come together to co-create contents (not tested). however, using a free account, users would be limited to mostly static content #ithink (due to file size limit, and no linkage to external websites).
learn what vs. how to learn
during last week’s meeting, some discussions on course offerings for teachers based on what they need took place. having read this article on a History professor reflecting on whether the teaching of history should focus on content (“历史学什么”), or should it be how to learn history (“历史怎么学”), i can’t help but to analyse the discourse through the above lens.
(personally) sadly, the perspective taken still adopted an empty-container-to-be-filled metaphor. for example, if teachers have needs in grammar knowledge, we should conduct course(s) to fill the container(s) with the needed knowledge. there’s no right or wrong since different learning theories may apply, but the perspective taken would affect the way a course is designed. how different would it be if the “enabling teachers on how to learn” perspective is adopted instead?
we always say teachers teach the way they are taught (citation needed), or teachers teach the way they learnt (citation needed). if teachers are not allowed to become self-directed learner, but instead the assumption is empty vessels to be filled, how could s/he teaches his/her students to be a true self-directed, lifelong learner of the 21st century?
in this internet/knowledge age, there’s no lack of contents especially online. but the skill of understanding/applying/synthesising & creating new knowledge based on what turns up from the internet is what our students should be empowered with. but if a teacher does not learn this way, will s/he believe that learning takes place as such, and in turn design his/her learning activities where students learn ‘how-tos’ instead of downloading of (overloaded) data? there’s no lack of literature on how teachers’ beliefs affect his/her teaching.
asus n61jq windows 10 upgrade display fail
if you are here reading this post, most likely you have tried upgrading your good 5-year old asus N61 to windows 10, and was treated with a BLACK DARK BLANK screen? the problem is we are now treated with a generic AMD-ATI driver, instead of an ASUS customised one.
the generic driver is indeed working. the “trick” is to up your display brightness (Fn+F6), and you should find your LCD suddenly comes on!
took me 2 roll back to Windows 7 and reinstallation of Windows 10 in one day to confirm the above. happy windows 10-ing (:
a quote from accenture ceo’s interview
last week, accenture hits headline as the company is going to do away (90%) of their existing performance review processes. in short, accenture is going stop comparing one person with another (thus enables ranking), but to review a person as a person, on his/her job.
this morning, i saw a transcript of an interview with Pierre Nanterme, the accenture CEO who made this bold move. just to quote a para that i think works for me at least as an employee:
“What I learned is that leadership is about letting it go. Trust people. The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating. It’s all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.”
i have many bosses to thank for doing the above despite the fact that we were all involved in a system that accenture decided to do away with (: