The Virtual, Socially-Networked Classroom

Students are just as likely to be completing degrees by distance as they are to be completing diplomas in the classroom in 2011.  This is certainly true at my own place of employment.  Two of our degree programs are completed entirely online, with no classroom visits at all.  I have had the privilege of teaching courses entirely online for most of my tenure, and believe me, online classrooms, virtual class units, and teaching "rooms" available through software such as Elluminate Live are becoming a significantly larger part of what a 21st century educator must know about, and in many cases build lessons for.

The virtual classroom is a very different type of environment for the educator.  Asynchronous teaching, familiarity with discussion-based websites, and attentiveness to daily maintenance are key knowledge areas for building an online environment for education.  Educators used to using a computer to prepare lessons can, with the addition of the new endpoint "software appliance" released by Cisco Systems, Inc., turn that computer into a much more powerful device for creating a virtual classroom.  Students are able to communicate device-to-device, facilitating electronic interaction on a very different scale than sites such as Facebook and Google+ are able to manage. 

Cisco's product, with information here, is meant to virtualize the classroom environment by turning a "traditional PC into a media-capable virtual desktop client" (Meyer, para. 3, 2011).  My own experience with virtualizing the classroom is still limited to text-based educational software, called Desire 2 Learn, an application with limited, though powerful, functionality.  I have recently begun to investigate Presenter, a multimedia integration platform that can create videos and record live, real-time teaching for students in virtual classrooms, but have not yet integrated it into my classes. With the increasing intake of international students in Canadian universities and other post-secondary institutions, the capability to interlink a class over vast distances of earth, sea, and sky in a real-time, virtual environment is becoming a key factor in education.

The ability of an educator teaching online courses to communicate with students in a real time, virtual environment, along with the capability to share data and examples with Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Virtualization Experience (Cisco terminology) capabilities cannot be underestimated.  Products providing endpoint services, like Cisco's, are key components of creating a virtual classroom that shares the dynamics of a traditional classroom while operating in a digital, high-speed environment.  Educational experiences that integrate technology and networking are becoming the model for the new classroom; staying on top of these trends is crucial.

Meyer, L. "Cisco to Ship Virtual Desktop Clients With Enhanced Voice and Video". THE Journal. (October 13, 2011). Retrieved October 13, 2011, from http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/10/13/cisco-to-ship-virtual-desktop-clients-with-enhanced-voice-and-video.aspx

Im // Prezi // ng your Students

Prezi.  It's out there...no, it's in here...no, wait a minute, it's going all over the place.

Prezi is an online (Web-hosted) presentation software that adds creative dynamism to tired old PowerPoint slides and breathes life into new ideas for teachers.  For a preview, you can visit Prezi's website.  You only need to know three things:

• Lessons are deliberately-designed links between concepts; Prezi makes these links visual.
• You can Prezi it up anywhere you have Web access, so lessons and information are readily accessible to a) traveling instructors, b) mobile education platforms, c) smart classrooms.
• Prezi zooms!!!

Prezi can make it easy for students to visualize links between concepts by zooming in to specific words, phrases, video introductions, and pictures to emphasize points.  It integrates what many tech-savvy educators, professionals, and laypeople call Web 2.0, which is the social-media driven datasphere the Web has become, into lessons, seamlessly embedding YouTube videos and web-accessible images into a presentation with creative and unique font choices.  It's shareable, so students who complete online learning just need to be given the address of the presentation, and can even be sent an archived version of a complete presentation (limited only by the size of the bit-rate caps your institute has placed on e-mail communications).  I've only just begun to integrate Prezi presentations into my classroom-based education, so my experience with it is limited.  However, 5 million users can't be wrong about its power and utility.

Centre for Teaching Excellence. Prezi. Retrieved Oct. 13, 2011 from http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_with_technology/netsavvy/prezi.html

Observation 360

First up, an iPad app called Observation 360.  The world of apps has grown exponentially with the wide distribution of tablet computers.  Steve Jobs, we thank you for your vision and commitment to seeing integrated platforms become widely available to the consumer.  Rest in peace.

Observation 360 (created, maintained, and published by School Improvement Network, www.schoolimprovement.com), is kind of like a direct-to-destination flight through a huge sky of information. It's mainly an administrative tool, used by management and academic observers to create a profile for a specific instructor based on a classroom visit.  It can link directly to videos available on School Improvement Network's PD 360 site and tailor an observation report by including those videos as part of the report made available to the instructor. These are, of course, linked to videos taken of the instructor in action by the iPad user, which makes for a highly-detailed and useful professional development package (at least to the instructor willing to accept constructive criticism).

Adapting this app to a digital classroom should not be too significant a leap of the imagination.  Picture, for a moment, a class of business professionals responsible for completing a presentation to classmates and colleagues.  The instructor, manned (or womanned) with Observation 360, makes notes on a student's performance in the presentation, and includes some helpful hints for improvement from PD 360.  The student is able to instantaneously access the feedback the instructor generated by logging on to the website and viewing content. This is, of course, even more helpful if the student in question has his or her own iPad running the app.  The problem, of course, is that not everyone can yet afford an iPad, nor can just anyone use the app.  The content will only be available to students or instructors with an account in PD 360, and may not be easily accessible to students.

I have not had the opportunity to use either PD 360 or Observation 360, but the concept itself intrigues me, and since I like Macs, I'll be investigating the iPad uses in more detail.

School Improvement Network. Observation 360. Retrieved Oct. 13, 2011 from http://www.schoolimprovement.com/products/observation360/

Introduction

Well, hello there, and welcome to The Digital Instructor.  You'll find posts about education topics, including educational media and technology integration in the classroom, the 21st century learner, knowledge transfer in institutional settings, evaluations of new advances in teaching and learning, and a lot more.  I'm an educational professional, so you'll be getting "on the ground" reports and blogs, as it were.  The first three entries will be evaluations of technological trends in education, as well as some background information and discussion of how one might integrate these things into the "new" classroom.  Enjoy!