Pedagogy and the iPad

by John J. Doherty and Kevin Ketchner

Perhaps the hardest part of owning an iPad is trying to avoid the addictive world of Angry Birds, the favorite game app of the new British Prime Minister. For just $5 you, too, can attack pigs with hard-headed flying birds.

That kind of distraction is exactly what many faculty worry about when we ponder the place of tools such as the iPad in the classroom. We fear that our students will be more engaged with their games or Twitter feeds than with our lectures. But the iPad, the iPhone, the Droid, and the flood of other new tablets and smart phones finding their way into our classrooms are not the cause of student inattention. These gadgets are just tools, and student engagement depends on good teaching whether or not a cool gadget is present. In Technological and Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge (.pdf), Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler note that we need to understand not only various technologies but also how the technologies affect our pedagogy.

The iPad is a good case in point. Since the iPad’s launch in April 2010 some educators have begun to examine its place in education. Our experience in using the iPad for teaching is that it is useful in two distinct ways, consumption and production, although it currently is more useful for the former than the latter.

Consumption

The iPad is very obviously a tool for consuming information and media. Reading publications such as the New York Times or watching movies through the Netflix app seems to be a natural fit for the device. In the classroom, we have been using iPads as a way to deliver information to our students.

For example, in a course on Reinventing King Arthur, John used the Kindle app on his iPad to give his students access to some of the course readings. In fact, he chose the course readings based on their availability in ebook format, and in one instance, John was able to bring back into his course a text that had been out of print for almost 20 years! In another case, students who chose to download the Kindle version of a new book were able to do so several days before others were able to order the printed version (although this might have been an error on Amazon’s part). The students used their own devices, mobile or otherwise, to read the ebooks, which was possible because the Kindle app is no longer limited to the Kindle device. The app can be used on PCs or Macs, desktops or laptops, iPads, iPhones, Droids, and iPod Touches. One of its best features is that you can read the same book on various devices, and the app will remember where you left off. You can start reading a book on your laptop and then later switch to reading on your phone without losing your place.

Kevin has been using the iPad for an Honors course on the cultural impact of comic books. Marvel, DC, and other publishers have iPad apps (iTunes link) that present comics in sharp, HD-like quality. When you can zoom in on details of comics in high definition, the panels take on an immersive quality.

The following panel is a screen capture of the Iron Man (2004) #1 book, available in the Marvel app.

Students in the course can download the movies Iron Man (2008) and V for Vendetta (2006) via the iTunes Store or other media sources. By examining both the comic serial and the movie versions of these stories, students see how the superhero movie genre has reinvented the comic.

Students can also use reference apps such as Wikipanion (Wikipedia) to find out details about characters in these stories (such as Guy Fawkes, the original fundamentalist terrorist who is burned in effigy in the UK every November 5th).

The ebooks John uses in his course include built-in dictionaries that make it convenient for students to look up unusual words, which is invaluable for texts based on older versions of the English language. The iPad apps can also read the texts aloud.

Here are some other apps that we’ve experimented with and have found useful for teaching.

App	Description
iAnnotate PDF ($9.99)	Syncs PDF documents between your desktop and your iPad. It also lets you highlight and underline and add commentary, which is great for our e-reserve readings.
CineXPlayer ($3.99)	Delivers Xvid movies to the iPad through iTunes. Includes subtitles and TV/VGA output. The advantage to this app is that it supports more than just iTunes native formats.
Netflix (Free)	The app is free, but you need a Netflix subscription to use it. You get access to the Netflix streaming library. John has had his students view the BBC TV series Merlin (2008) and the movies Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981).

Accessibility

The iPad is opening doors for some differently abled users. Its built-in text reader can give voice to anything downloaded to iBooks. Dragon Dictation is a free iPad app that uses voice recognition to create text email messages and even Facebook and Twitter updates. The iPad’s magnification and closed-captioning features also make content available for a wide range of people. The New York Times recently reported on how an iPad elicited reactions from a 7-year-old boy who has a severe motor neuron disease. The same article noted that autistic children are also engaging more with this tool than a regular computer.

Production

As a production tool—that is, for generating rather than just consuming content—the iPad has plenty of potential, but it still has lots of room for improvement. Much of this post was written in the Pages app on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard. Or at least it was until we started getting annoyed when we typed too many extra n‘s and m‘s because those keys are uncomfortably close to the space bar for our not-so-nimble digits. So we just synced the iPads to our desktops and continued typing from there, using real keyboards.

The on-screen keyboard works well enough for some things: browsing the web, searching the App Store, typing things into Wikipedia. In our opinion, though, an external keyboard is an essential add-on if you want to use the iPad for serious writing.

In addition to Pages, the other two iWork apps—Numbers and Keynote— for the iPad are useful production tools . Each costs $9.99 from the iTunes Store. iWork will soon be available to the NAU campus through a site license, and it is a decent alternative to the MS Office applications. John developed some of his course documentation in Pages and Numbers.

Drawbacks

Some of the drawbacks to using these apps include lack of easy cloud syncing and inability to print directly from the iPad. That said, the MobileMe iDisk app does provide some access to the MobileMe cloud (which requires a subscription) or the beta of iWork.com. There are rumors of an about-to-be-released Google Apps app for the iPad and Android that will allow for editing of Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Apple is undoubtedly working on updates to their products to fix these and other shortcomings, and they are also exploring cloud-based computing, but if you want to take the iPad plunge now, you should be aware of these limitations. Syncing the iPad to your computer also leaves a lot to be desired, because you need to go through iTunes to make it work at all. The advantages of using the iPad over a netbook as a mobile production tool are currently few.

Recently, we discovered two note-taking apps for the iPad that let you use your finger or a stylus. We tested Penultimate and WhiteNote in meetings and in the classroom. The former is pretty slick but simple. The latter needs some work, especially in how it uses the screen and the writing space. But it offers the bonus of letting you browse and import from the web, PDFs, and other formats, and it also uses cloud-based resources for saving and sharing PDFs via Google Docs.

The iPad and some smart phones are beginning to offer access to learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle. Mobile apps are available for both of these LMS, but their functionality is quite limited, although the Blackboard Mobile Learn app syndicates content from that LMS quite well. For the moment, though, both Blackboard Learn and Moodle are best accessed on the iPad through a browser.

Lessons Learned and In Progress

The iPad holds much promise for education, but it is still in its infancy. Missing but available soon with the impending release of iOS 4.2 release are the ability to multitask (that is, to run more than one app at a time), print from the iPad, and even output information to other devices through AirPlay. The ability to easily display the content of your iPad on an overhead projector is essential for educators, and we hope Apple addresses that shortcoming quickly. Apple’s prohibition of Adobe’s Flash on the iPad means that some of our preferred media sources, such as streaming films available through our university library, are not viewable on the device. However, the Skyfire browser, which converts Flash video to a format that works on Apple’s mobile devices, might soon solve that problem.

The most obvious lesson we learned is that students like using the iPads for classes. It wasn’t at all hard to get the students to use the iPads. It was hard to get the students to give them back.

---

John J. Doherty is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center and an instructor in NAU’s First Year Seminar and Honors programs. He has been studying the Arthurian Legend formally since 1989, but has been reading and writing about it much longer. Kevin Ketchner is a librarian with NAU’s Cline Library and also teaches in Honors. His love of comic books has generated a strong interest in visual literacy and narrative.

 

Why You Shouldn’t Use PowerPoints in (Most) Online Courses

by Lorraine B. Elder

Sigh. Where to begin? There are so many reasons why using PowerPoint for online courses is a Bad Idea. PowerPoint is just a tool, of course, but it’s so often the wrong tool for the job, especially in teaching online. A hammer is only a tool, but in the wrong hands, well, it makes a mess of things. So it is with PowerPoint.

It’s not that PowerPoint—henceforth referred to as PPT—can’t be used effectively for teaching online. It’s just that most people have developed deplorable PPT habits and now believe that textually dense PPT slides, cheesy animated transitions, and gaudy 3-D graphs are de rigueur for teaching in the classroom and therefore are the perfect choice for online courses, too. To that I say “Nuh-uh. Not. FAIL!” Who else says so? Well, these guys:

Don McMillan, Life After Death by PowerPoint

This video humorously highlights the problems of bad PPTs.

Guy Kawasaki, The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint

Although Kawasaki is targeting entrepreneurs rather than educators, his points still generally apply.

Edward Tufte, PowerPoint Is Evil

Information design guru Edward Tufte has long decried the evils of PowerPoint, even going so far as to suggest that “stupefying fragments” of reasoning split across multiple PPT slides might have contributed to a space shuttle disaster. The following image is from his commentary on the Columbia explosion. Click the image to see a larger version.

The gist of their criticism is that too many people use PPT poorly even in the situations for which it was designed, namely in-person presentations. The slides tend to serve as a crib sheet for the presenter rather than informing the audience. Now imagine those problems multiplied when a PPT presentation that was awful enough in person gets posted online without the benefit of an instructor to explain the lacunae. Online students assaulted by bad PPT can’t even pelt the instructor with tomatoes.

The Crux of the PPT Problem: Missing Information

A PPT slide, when used to good effect in the situations for which it was designed, contains a single important bit of information. The individual giving the presentation in person is expected to orally set the context, explain the rationale, fill in the details, identify nuances and counterpoints, extrapolate, and draw conclusions from the nugget on the slide. The problem with posting such slides online should be immediately obvious: without the presenter, the slide is next to useless because all of the supporting information is missing.

“Ah ha!” you say. “That must be an argument in favor of putting full paragraphs on slides.” Um, no. If you feel the need to write full paragraphs to explain whatever it is you’re teaching online, fine. But don’t put them on a PPT slide. Put them on a web page. Web pages are pretty good at handling lots of text, as well as audio, video, and other media. PPT isn’t.

Basically, a PPT presentation that was well constructed for an in-person presentation is inadequate for an online course. And a PPT presentation that sucked in person will suck worse online.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at these:

Robert X. Cringely, If We’re in Trouble, Its Probably Because People No Longer Really Listen

A highlight of Cringely‘s post is this paragraph:

PowerPoint is supposed to play the role of the nerdy kid from the A/V department who keeps all your slides straight and makes you look good. But more often than not, I get the stack without the presenter, and no matter how smart or informed I am, any solo effort to expend that stack into an adequate proxy for a 10,000-word document is simply bound to come up short.

Olivia Mitchell, New Evidence That Bullet-Points Don’t Work

Mitchell describes a presentation given by Chris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist who delivered an 86-slide presentation (ack!) on how to design slides that work with the human brain instead of against it. Although I imagine the presentation was fascinating and informative if you were there to see it live, clicking through the slide deck leaves you feeling that something (clue: it’s a person) is missing. Dr. Atherton’s slides are adequate (if overly abundant) for in-person delivery. But posted online without the benefit of her descriptive explanation and insight, they are not entirely helpful and certainly aren’t substantive enough for a student to learn from and be tested on. BTW, if you’re sick of reading this blog post, see Dr. Atherton’s slides 51–54 to get the quick and dirty summary of the point. Slide 71 is also pithy.

Why Are Instructors So Eager, Nay Insistent, about Putting Their PPTs Online?

Lots of reasons, but mostly these:

• Instructors have a large library of PPTs they’ve built up over the years
• Instructors already know how to use PPT and don’t want to learn a new tool or process
• Instructors think their PPTs are crystal clear (r-i-i-ght…)
• Instructors’ sense of self has become scarily entwined with their PPTs
• Instructors have gotten bad advice
• Instructors don’t realize that not all students have access to PPT

I’ll address each.

Instructors have a large library of PPTs they’ve built up over the years

So what? I have a large library of audio cassettes that I recorded years ago from my vinyl record albums and then lovingly hand-labeled with a calligraphy pen. They are stashed in a drawer, representing cherished memories, especially since I sold all the vinyl at a yard sale. But do I actually listen to them? Heck no! Like most people, I’ve upgraded to digital recordings from Amazon, iTunes, and Magnatune. I also listen to compilations on Pandora. The digital versions sound better, are more easily organized and searched, and they don’t degrade the more often I listen.

If your PPTs are more than two years old, you probably need to update them anyway so that the information reflects the current thinking and latest research in your academic discipline. And it wouldn’t hurt to root out those typos and embarrassing spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. While you’re at it, get rid of the illegible tiny type and the annoying SCRIPT IN ALL CAPS. Also ditch the ugly lavender-on-pea-green color scheme and the not-as-cute-as-you-think animated clip art.

Illegible

Ugly and Hard to Read

Not Cute

My point: musty old PPTs aren’t as valuable as you think. It’s time to move on. And since you’re gonna have to update your material anyway, you might as well do it in a new way.

Instructors already know how to use PPT and don’t want to learn a new tool or process

Instructors seem to forget that they weren’t born knowing how to use PPT. They had to learn to use it, and now it’s time to learn how to use something else. Some instructors think they’re too old, too tired, too busy, or too important to learn new stuff. Others are technophobic and afraid to ask for help, thinking it would signal weakness and vulnerability.

But if you don’t update your skills, you’ll fail to connect with your 21st-century students and will get lousy course evaluations. Online instruction and Web 2.0 tools differ from in-person instruction, and if you don’t learn the differences and adapt your teaching methods accordingly, you’ll hear about it from students. Many new tools focus on ease of use and time savings, so you might discover that new approaches are easier than you imagine.

My point: you owe it to your students (and yourself) to make time to learn new skills, and you don’t have to go it alone. Seek assistance from the faculty development, educational technology, or online learning department on your campus.

Instructors think their PPTs are crystal clear

If your PPT slides are well designed for an in-person presentation, they are too cryptic to post as a standalone online presentation. Terse one- or two-word slides often are understood only by the person who wrote them or by experts in the field. To students, who are novices, more detail is needed to provide a fuller explanation. In person, you provide that detail by speaking. Online, you still need to provide the detail that the slides lack.

If, on the other hand, your PPT slides are an outline of lecture notes or are chock full of explanatory text and complex diagrams, then PPT is the wrong medium for posting that information online. Instead use media that work well online: web pages containing embedded links, images, audio clips, video clips, and the like.

My point: slides that seem the model of clarity to you are likely opaque to your students, and chopping lecture notes up onto multiple online slides won’t help. Instead, use the right tools for the job.

Instructors’ sense of self has become scarily entwined with their PPTs

You are not your PPT. If your PPT were as valuable as you, we wouldn’t need you to teach at all, would we? But you should have an inkling by now that posting a PPT online does not constitute a well-taught course. Online courses need active participation from a genuinely engaged instructor to make them successful.

My point: unlike you, your PPTs don’t have brains, insight, and something to contribute to society. Don’t give up your seat on the bus to your PPTs.

Instructors have gotten bad advice

Swept up in swine flu fever, some universities are recommending that faculty post their PPTs online, but they fail to warn instructors of the pitfalls of that approach, and they don’t all offer guidance about good ways to make material available online. Just as swine flu propagates through close contact and bad hygiene, bad PPT mythology spreads infectiously. Instructors see other instructors using PPT poorly and assume that’s the way it should be done. Don’t fall for it.

Many universities have departments whose job it is to be expert in instructional design, information design, and educational technology. Avail yourself of their services. Get some guidance and training in how to teach well online, how to design your materials for online delivery, and how to convert your PPTs into something more useful for online courses.

My point: just because other instructors use PPT badly doesn’t mean you should too.

Instructors don’t realize that not all students have equal access to PPT

Students don’t all have Microsoft Office, or they might have an older version that isn’t entirely compatible with the one instructors use to create presentations. PPTs created on Windows-based PCs don’t always display well on Macs, and tools available for Mac users aren’t on par with those for Windows users. These issues don’t matter when you project slides from your computer in an in-person classroom, but they matter a LOT when you post your PPT file online and then make the fallible assumption that students will be able to open it on whatever computer they use and see exactly the same thing you see on your computer.

Even more importantly, students who have disabilities and use assistive technologies such as screen readers might not be able to get at the information in your PPT at all unless you’ve carefully made it accessible. If your school receives federal funding, you need to be aware of Section 508 requirements to make information accessible. By posting inaccessible PPTs online and making them a required part of your course, you might invite a lawsuit.

My point: use tools that make your information available to all of your students, regardless of their preferred computing platform and need for assistive technology.

Any Exceptions?

The comments here generally apply to asynchronous online courses, those in which students can work on the course at whatever time is convenient for them, and there’s no expectation that everyone enrolled in the course will be online at the same time.

If you teach a synchronous online course, especially one that uses some kind of web conferencing features, then—assuming you’re going to be online in the course at the same time as your students and will be communicating actively with them—of course you can use your well-designed, nonboring PPTs, as long as you address the accessibility issues and fill in the gaps by using either audio or textual chat.

If Not PPT, Then What?

Ah, that’s a subject for more blog posts to come.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tips for Teaching Online

by Lorraine B. Elder

Dr. Judith V. Boettcher has written Teaching Online for the First Time — The Quick Guide. She lists ten best practices for designing and teaching a course, and most are spot on, with the possible exception of

Best Practice 5: Use both synchronous and asynchronous activities

Using both kinds of activities works only if your online students know up front that’s an expectation. Many students think online inherently means asynchronous, so be clear in your class description about whether synchronous activities are included in the course, and be sure to list the dates and times of the synchronous activities on a class preview page so students can figure out even before they register whether their school, work, and life schedules will permit them to be available at those times.

To Dr. Boettcher’s list, I’d add a few more implementation tips that the e-Learning Center has learned from years of working with faculty in preparing online and hybrid courses.

1. Don’t try to create an online course on the fly while you’re teaching it. You won’t like it and neither will your students.

If your in-person teaching style entails glancing at your notes—or not—a few minutes before class starts and then winging it by speaking extemporaneously, you’ll be tempted to approach online teaching the same way. Don’t do it. You’ll fumble with the technology (or it will go down at an inopportune time); you won’t have an adequate list of resources and supplemental materials available for your students; you’ll forget to include important details in your assignment instructions, confusing your students and sparking a flood of emails or discussion posts asking for clarification; and in an asynchronous course, your students will be irritated if they’re ready to proceed but you aren’t because you haven’t yet built out the course. They’re busy people, too, who don’t want you wasting their time.

2. Posting PowerPoint presentations online does not constitute an online course, no matter how many slides you include.

A bunch of bullet points out of context and lacking a speaker to fill in the details isn’t what students need. Neither are slides packed with overstuffed paragraphs. If you need to write paragraphs to convey your information, put them on a web page, not on a slide. Put the bullet points on web pages, too, and also write the information you would have said aloud in a face-to-face presentation. Or include an audio recording (with transcripts!) of what you would have said to accompany the slides.

Don’t expect students to intuit what you meant by your cryptic, one- or two-word bullets. What’s obvious to you—an expert— won’t be obvious to them—novices. Explain yourself.

I’ll have more to say on the evils of PowerPoint in a future blog post.

3. Make your course accessible to all students, including those who have disabilities.

It’s easy and desirable in an online course to include clips of rich instructional media, such as videos and audio. Be sure to include captioning or transcripts so that all students get the full benefit of the media without having to ask for special accommodations. Even students who don’t have disabilities often appreciate captions and transcripts. Also make sure your course can be navigated easily with a keyboard, not just a mouse, and check with your campus Disability Resources office to be sure that screen reader software can interpret your course material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.