Always looking to make our Thursday nights better, Christopher Nyren of Educelerate (far left in the photo) managed to round up a posse of of Chicago's sharpest shooters in the world of tech-equipped K-12 classrooms. Who knew that Chicago was home to at least three of the world's top mobile K-12 edtech platforms for the iPad? The event was hosted in the snazzy confines of the tech incubator 1871 in the Mechandise Mart (we keep ending up there for some reason...). Repping their wares were: Andrew Rowland, founder of Classkick: "Classkick brings real-time feedback and teacher-made assignments to the iPad." David Vinca, Founder of eSpark Learning: "eSpark enables teachers to bridge the gap between engagement and academics on the iPad. Their platform curates the best iPad educational apps available and personalizes a plan for each learner's unique needs." Christopher Hull, Co-founder of Otus: "an easy-to-use, yet powerful classroom tool that brings the best iPad and Chromebook education features together into one secure environment, and uses a single login." Dealing out the questions and weighing in with wisdom as moderators were K-12 consultants Lucy Gray and Marci Goldberg. In the room were the founders of Edmodo, an older app (from way back in the stone age of 2008), and they offered more wisdom on getting your technology into classrooms, and making it be more useful to students and teachers. And to top it all off, the view was pretty nice, too As I learn the process of Instructional Designers, I've read numerous times about the steps in creating a course or module, but I've learned in execution, that there's a plethora of steps that can be taken to get to the final product, and the final analysis of what your product achieved. Not every project requires all of these steps, and not every designer or consultancy works in this linear progression. As noted on the right, adherents to the Rapid Development model skip steps that are considered redundant or unnecessary.
I plan to show all of these steps in my portfolio of skills, but I have to admit, skipping paperwork, and getting to iterative stages of prototyping looks like a more productive way to keep your client in the loop, get to a workable product, and in the words of IDEO founder David Kelley, “fail often, to succeed sooner”. I've come across a contentious little spat in the world of Instructional Design, over which authoring software is best and most helpful. Is the reigning champion Articulate, Lectora, or Captivate? There's even a bit of a David vs Goliath dynamic; a handful of independent software companies have found themselves up against the brawn of Adobe, and it's massive product line and legions of loyal, dependent users (some for over two decades). Well, while this quiet little melee was playing out, in stepped another 300 pound gorilla: Microsoft. PowerPoint is already used extensively by learning developers and teachers, and even the authoring software companies try to make it easy to import PP files and turn them into interactive multimedia learning experiences. Articulate Studio actually operates within PowerPoint, allowing you to add animations, videos, screencasts, and testing features right inside the belly of the beast. This obviously looked like a great idea to the Redmond crew, so they've developed a downloadable plug-in that adds those very features to PowerPoint, right in the toolbar. They call it the Office Mix, and for now, it's not very feature-rich or powerful in the way the big authoring softwares are, but Microsoft is obviously just getting started, and they've effectively already landed a stunning blow: It's free. Now, sure, many digital education tools are free or cheap, but not so for the big toys. All of them are upwards of a grand or more to own outright, and if you already own MS Office for all those other tasks, a free downloadable plug-in is VERY tempting, considering you likely already know how to use the primary interface better than you know how to operate your web browser. Even in it's current infant stage with all it's limitations, I think many educators will give it a whirl, and if it turns out to be good enough for the job, it could start taking chunks of market share away from all the heavyweights who thought the ring was all theirs. If you're ready to get into the Mix, click here: https://mix.office.com/ |
Carl BoydMusings from the world of eLearning Development and Training. Archives
October 2020
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