Comments on: Picking Up Gauntlets is Heavy Work

By: Graham Wegner

Graham Wegner — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:58:04 +0000

Tom and Alice, you’re both right. I need to get over myself and just wade in and “have a go” – all I can offer is an opinion and my own ideas. I also can’t expect anyone to critique my own handiwork if I’m not prepared to pick up a few gauntlets around the place. Doing so does mean setting aside some time – so I may get to putting in my POV in a less than timely fashion.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:18:05 +0000

Graham- I wouldn’t define it as butting in considering we’re begging for participation.

I’ve always considered blogs kind of like brainstorming. I benefit from other people throwing their two cents in. It makes my day. Otherwise, I’d just turn commenting off and go on my merry way.

We’ve got a storm of interactive whiteboards joining our 20,000 some odd laptops. It makes for a lot of interesting challenges. If you’ve got any prime examples of use, I’d be interested in seeing them.

By: A. Mercer

A. Mercer — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:53:39 +0000

Graham, I would urge you to share your thoughts. I’ve done another redesign project here:
http://mizmercer.edublogs.org/2009/04/16/thanks-tom/

You will note that not everyone giving suggestions was Dan Meyer, and they were very usable, as shown here:
http://mizmercer.edublogs.org/2009/04/23/running-with-it-the-proof-sheet/

I was happy to see Dan participating, and Tom was a gem with this. What I’m really happy about is seeing Lesley and Nancy pitching in. That portends a much more sustainable effort on this.

By: Graham Wegner

Graham Wegner — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:06:05 +0000

Tom, Alice and Dan … just wanted to butt in and say how much I’ve enjoyed the cross blog pollination on this slide redesign theme. I am very much a learner in this whole area of visual design and like Alice, I know that my stuff is quite a distance in front of most teachers I interact with on a daily basis. Unfortunately, that makes their design methodologies woeful because as your collective posts point out to me, I have a lot, lot, lot to learn before my own presentation stuff is as good as it should be. As interactive whiteboards have spread like the plague across Australian classrooms, concepts like excessive text, suitable fonts and colour schemes are all issues that teachers should have some interest in improving – or that great digital tool they are now wielding could become a tool of torture or even worse, patheticness (is there such a word?). Good job – I know I’m not confident enough to critique anyone’s work on the web – my easy beat opponents are not paid up members of the edublogosphere. Cheers.

By: Thanks Tom! | Reflections on Teaching

Thanks Tom! | Reflections on Teaching — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:20:37 +0000

[...] was one of my peers giving feedback that led to Before and After…, really went the extra mile, in Picking up Gauntlets is Heavy Work, where he basically went through the whole slidedeck for a preso, and offered some alternatives. [...]

By: A. Mercer

A. Mercer — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:42:00 +0000

Amen my brother on staff development. When I did this preso, one HS teacher talked about an admin who INSISTED on reading from text heavy slides for one hour in spite of the teacher (who taught PP to the students), you shouldn’t do it that way.

Nancy I hear you about too many pretty images. I was worried that I was making my stuff inconsistent visually overall by having text slides, but I’m thinking it’ll be okay.

Dan, on the staffdev stuff, it’s a whole different ball game in some ways presenting to folks in district vs. outside. Just like ed tech folks are in a cocoon, so are some of these teachers, but I’m running into more and more who have, thankfully, given up worshiping at the alter of our Language Arts text series.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:48:58 +0000

Dan-

Point taken. I have a tendency to over do things. Occasionally, I learn from my mistakes. I did in this case.

Staffdev is an interesting place. It’s important stuff but so often sucks so incredibly bad that it seems it must be intentional. I’d like to change that. I’ve had mixed results so far. Hopefully my success to sucks ratio will keep improving.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:12:44 +0000

This is cool. I’m a very visual person, I presented for years both locally and at NECC. I really took my presentations seriously spending hundreds of hours on them and ended up IMO with some great visual presentations. I think with some of the slides less is more–the rose/cupcake is a perfect example. Breathtaking photos one after another can loss their ‘umph’. I like the idea of interspersing text only slides with picture slides. Keep it up Alice, Dan and Tom.

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:54:05 +0000

It’d be fun to have a pretty reliable set of on-call “presentation redesigners” who could take “support tickets” as they came. It’s important, obviously, not to misapply the effort, though. I took on one of Darren’s slides hoping that, the next time he posts some slides, he will have modified his approach across the entire slidedeck, a workflow that assigns the right burden to the right parties. I think.

I have a lot of empathy for your paragraph about staff development. Daily, I wobble back-and-forth between enthusiasm and depression when I think about these blog things as outlets for professional development. Working the same magic in f2f professional development is, I suspect, another battle entirely.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:33:42 +0000

I agree. I over did things and in the end while it was a lot of effort, that effort was misplaced. It would have made more sense to focus my attention on key aspects and look at things more holistically. I should have addressed conceptual things and illustrated them with single examples. That would have made more sense and saved me a lot of time.

I like the idea of redoing a few slides from a deck. It’d be a fun option along the idea of Dan’s “What can you do with this?” or an aspect of the Iron Teacher thing (assuming it gains some traction). I’d love seeing what other people would come up with for the same concepts or questions.

I’m thinking more and more about how to do staffdev things with questions as the driving force like Dan’s doing with the Math stuff. It’s both really simple yet really hard for me apply in a way that I think will work in what I’m doing right now. I can think of lots of ways I could use it in the classroom with English or Social Studies but I get more uptight when thinking about trying to do this with semi-hostile/hostile adults.

I have faith in the model. It makes sense to me. I’m not sure where the block is.

I’m going to try it this Friday and see what happens. What the hell.