This is the second tutorial in a series on ‘Using PowerPoint to manipulate images’. For people like me that doesn’t own nor has the graphical skills to use the high end graphics packages, PowerPoint is my primary image editing tool, even if the end location of the image is going to be somewhere else (Word, Excel, VLE etc.)
A lot of people when adding images to resources will find an image, and chuck it in without thinking about how the image looks, what size it is, what other images are visible alongside it etc. If I am using an image as a ‘decorative’ element designed to break up the text and to act as a ‘memory hook’ for the learner, then one technique that I sometimes use is to change the image to have soft edges. This (as the name suggests) softens its appearance, so it blends into the ‘page’ rather than having the harsh sharp edge that makes it stand out. If someone is going to be spending a lot of time viewing a particular screen, having soft edges can be easier on the eye than the harsh edge of a bordered image.
Here is an example of an image that I have used in a PowerPoint presentation:
Here is the same image that has been turned into an oval and had the edges softened (annoyingly the theme that I use for this blog, puts a grey border around the image that I don’t want!):
The following video shows how easy this is to achieve, note – it is possible to edit multiple images at the same time – if you hold a finger on the ctrl key whilst clicking on the images you can multiple select those images, and then any changes that you make is applied to them all consistently.
As a huge user of Excel, I am often entering dates into cells. Different versions of Microsoft have had date pickers as an optional add on, but they haven’t always worked for me with all versions or consistently.
Which is created by Sam Radakovitz , which does exactly what I want.
Once set up, if a cell in Excel is set as a date, clicking on that cell, will bring up a small calendar icon to the right of the cell:
Which when clicked on, will bring up the calendar tool, making it easier to enter dates, and not have to worry about the correct format, or whether the spreadsheet has been set up in UK or USA format.
Full credit to Sam for this one, I am just blogging about this mainly for my own benefit so that I can relocate this in the future when I change computers.
I use Excel a lot, not just for crunching numbers, but for creating teaching resources, lesson planning, managing my accounts and invoices and various other uses. One feature that I often use, is the ability to have the sheet name appearing inside a cell in the spreadsheet – so for example with my invoices – I rename the sheet name with the invoice number, this then updates the invoice within the sheet.
To do this I use the following formula below.
This may seem a complex formula, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t fully understand it (I don’t), you just need to copy and paste this into a cell in the spreadsheet, and the sheet name will appear. If you change the sheet name, the cell will change accordingly.
The only caveat is, that the workbook has to have been saved at some point for this to work – so if you do this with a new workbook, it won’t work until it has been saved.
This technique is unique to Microsoft Excel, it doesn’t work with other spreadsheet tools such as Open office, Google sheets or Apple’s Numbers.
iPads, Android devices and Microsoft Tablets have quickly established a place in society, and with that a place in education. Many schools are investing in such devices – some with 1:1 roll out and other with banks of devices. FE and HE has as always seen a hugely varied approach to this area of work. Some organisations have decided that if charging £9000 per year to study, to take a few hundred pounds out and buy each student a device as part of the course is feasible. Others have worked on the notion of allowing the students to bring their own devices (known as BYOD) and have actively created appropriate wireless infrastructures to make this happen. And of courses there are some who actively block the idea of these technologies being used in the classroom.
Whichever approach is taken (and those taking the last approach will soon have to change) – the underlying theme is giving the teaching staff the opportunity and time for staff development in this area. One of the problems with tablet devices is they are so easy to pick up and start using – this gets seen by some as removing the need for staff development. Yes the devices are generally easy to use – but to use them effectively in a teaching and learning situation does require different, possibly new, and at times outside-comfort-zone skills which do need to be learnt.
Many schools have realised (the hard and expensive way) that you cannot just buy devices, give them to staff and students and expect grades to rocket upwards – any benefits the devices bring will take time to materialise and usually only happen after well delivered and strategically planned staff development. The same is true for FE and HE, and especially if the BYOD model is being followed, as teachers have to think about the ways that tablet devices can be used in education, AND they will be presented with a myriad of different types, operating systems, apps, and screen sizes as well.
Most colleges and universities will have in-house support teams who support CPD activity for their staff, and many will have the ability the support and deliver the required CPD activities, but I am experiencing a significant number who don’t have the ability (yet) or worse still – they think can support this area of work but they don’t actually the breadth and/or depth of knowledge and experience to support this work effectively.
For the last few months I have been working with a company called The Tablet Academy, who specialise in providing pedagogic based training in the use of tablet devices (they cover Apple, Android and Microsoft). Most of the work to date has been within the school sectors, but (with my involvement) are now supporting FE and HE as well. We have put together a catalogue of specialist FE/HE courses, as a sample of possible training that can be offered – but we specialise in tailoring sessions to an organisations needs and requests.
I think The Tablet Academy’s position of being device agnostic (supporting Apple, Android and Microsoft) without having an preference or financial interest in any of them, puts us in a very strong position, especially within FE and HE where the BYOD model is likely to be a significant player.
The idea that I am trying to get across, is that Office 365 isn’t just a slightly newer version of the Office Suite, instead it works in a fundamentally different way, but to get the benefit from these improvements, requires people to behave differently, and with the arrival and (I predict) rapidly increasing number of Microsoft tablets within the education system – and the mobility that these devices offer – getting Office 365 to work properly is going to be key.
The main behaviour change, is reducing the number of different versions of the same file that exist in different.
For example: If I create a Word Document, and save it to ‘My Documents’ on my computer. There is one version of the file. I then email this to a colleague. There is now the version in My Documents, a copy in my sent items, and one in my colleagues inbox – so thats 3 versions. My colleague downloads the file (4 versions) and then makes some edits, saving the file to their network drive (5 versions) they email this back to me (Their sent items and my inbox gives 7 in total) – I Download this (8 versions), and save a copy (with a new name) back to my Documents (9 versions).
So – the very simple example above with me asking 1 colleague to proof read and edit a document has created 9 files without me thinking about it. If I had collaborated with more people this number could quickly run into the hundreds – which makes no sense, there is a risk of ‘old’ versions re-appearing a later date, and the total memory used up on the system (especially if a large file) costs money and slows everything else down.
If I use Office 365 and OneDrive (the new name for SkyDrive) the behaviour would be as follows:
I create a file, and save it to my OneDrive. There is now a version on my computer and a synchronised version ‘in the cloud’, I email a link to this file to my colleague, they edit this via the web interface in the cloud, and let me know when complete. I can check their edits, and if unhappy with them I can use the history option to roll back to an earlier version or discard the changes. Ultimately though – we still have the same file on my Computer and a synchronised version ‘in the cloud’. There are no extra versions loitering in mail systems or download folders.
One of the reasons why this becomes so important with tablet devices, is they rely on files being transferred via wireless – so we need to make the whole process of file management more streamlined. If I am working with a class and I want them all to access an image rich PowerPoint file for example – for me to ‘push’ that file over the slightly ropey wifi in that classroom to 30 different devices could take 10 minutes or more, which isn’t realistic. For me to use the file sharing mechanism within OneDrive and the students to access this via the web interface will effectively stream the content, as the students view it, rather than pushing the whole file out up front.
In the previous posts I talked about the collaborative teaching and learning opportunities this brings, and with the extra mobility and battery potential of tablets over laptops or desktops, means we can use these devices in any environment including the sports hall, kitchen, on field trips etc.
As with many of my blog posts – the key to changing these behaviours is an investment in staff development. Because Office has been around for so long, Office training is far less common – there is an assumption (which is an incorrect one) that people don’t need to be taught basic office skills. With Office 365 – there is a huge need to reinvest in training in this area, otherwise its potential will not be unlocked.
At the moment I am working with a company called The Tablet Academy who provide training and consultancy around the use of tablet devices (Apple, Android and Microsoft) in education. If any Schools or Colleges in the UK (including Scotland) purchase 20 or more Microsoft tablets (including ones made by other companies) they are entitled to free training, provided by someone from the Tablet Academy (only downside is the current offer is only for training that is delivered before the 31st March 2014). If you work for a school or college in the UK and have purchased such device recently and your reseller hasn’t mentioned the free training offer then contact the Tablet Academy who will chase this up for you.
In my last few posts I have been explaining some uses of Office 365 to create collaborative activities using PowerPoint or Excel. In this post, I am going to look at Microsoft Word. Word could be used to create a collaborative learning activity in a similar way to the PowerPoint example, but it is set so that only one person can edit one paragraph at a time – therefore careful consideration is required when designing such an activity. In this example I am going to look at the mechanism of student feedback following assessment and h the collaborative nature can be very useful.
If I look at what might happen in colleges, universities and some schools at the present:
Teacher produces an assignment brief and gives this to the learner.
Learner completes assignment and hands it in.
Teacher marks the work and fills in a feedback sheet, hands work and feedback sheet back to learner.
Learner fills in the box on feedback sheet where they reflect on the assignment and their action plan to solve any updates required.
At end of term, teacher realises learner hasn’t updated their assignment – contacts learner.
Learner has lost feedback sheet so has forgotten what needs doing.
Teacher re-issues feedback sheet (luckily they have a copy).
Student does updates, hands work back in.
Teacher remarks work, fills in anew feedback sheet with the additional feedback and final grade.
Although the above may sound like a tedious drawn out exaggeration, I am sure that many will see similarities with current practices – and whatever ones system, whether paper and pen or electronic there is almost always a significant amount of files moving from place to another and there is seldom an efficient loop where the students use the tutors feedback to help them with their updates or future assignments.
So here is one suggestion. We create a single Word document that is going to contain all of the information relating to that assignment – and this will be used by both tutor and student. This will contain the brief for the assessment, the list of criteria being covered/assessed, and area for the student to reflect on the assignment, areas for the teacher to give feedback, and space for them to add additional information if the work is referred and needs to be upgraded.
Once this document has been created – all the tutor has to do is to share this with the learner through OneDrive (the new name for SkyDrive). The learner and the tutor are now accessing the same document. If the tutor wants to have a situation where all of the students marked work is returned at the same time, rather than piecemeal – they can quickly remove the students sharing rights, mark all of the work and then re-share it.
Image showing the history settings within OneDrive
One of the key reasons why this technique hasn’t worked in the past, is the verification process needs to see the different versions of the work and the feedback given – which in turn lead to the notion of creating lots of different documents. The beauty of using Office 365 and OneDrive is there is a built in history and version mechanism.
With this you can see any previous versions including who made the changes and you can restore or download any of the versions at a later date if required by an IV or EV.
Image showing the option to restore or download a previous version of the same file.
Having one file to deal with rather than lots of files is easier for the tutor and the student to manage. There are less chances of error due to people using the wrong version of those files, and from a teaching and learning perspective having all of the information in one place for the student is far more likely for them to reflect on the feedback and change their behaviour as a result.
I hope that as organisations start to use Office 365 more and more, there is a real effort for people to think about what they are doing and why – and how these technical advancements can make a huge difference to our overall efficiency and effectiveness.
In this post I am going to look at using Excel to create a collaborative learning activity.
Many people struggle (some are scared of it) with Excel which is a shame as it can be a superbly powerful learning tool – and it can be used in any teaching area not just maths, accountancy etc. There are many possible uses that I could list here, but I will stick with a couple of simple examples.
If I was teaching research methods or statistics, and wanted to investigate the idea of 2 sets of data and what the correlation is between them, then a simple way to do this is for each student to work out their height (m) and their shoe size (European) record these in a table, then everyone plots a scatter graph of everyones results – and we look at the line of best fit, standard deviation etc. Yes the constructing of a graph on paper with a ruler is an important skill to learn, but on this occasion I want to focus on the way that the correlation changes as more points are recorded, and for that I want to speed up the plotting process, so I am going to use Excel to help me.
Example of an excel sheet teaching the principle of data correlation
So I have created a simple spreadsheet which has a data entry table – I have identified each student with the letters A-K, and I have colour coded the area they need to enter their data into with a green shading. I have unlocked these cells and then protected the whole sheet, so when the learners add their data, they cannot accidentally alter or delete any of the workings. On the right you will notice that I have pre-created a graph that will plot the data as it is added, and then underneath the table I have created some simple statistical functions to identify mean, mode, median etc of the data as it is entered.
So having created the above sheet, all I need to do is save it to my OneDrive (new name for SkyDrive) – share it with my learners (see previous post), and then allocate each learner a letter between A-K. They edit the sheet in the web browser, entering the 2 pieces of information against their letter. All of the students will be editing the same resource at the same time, so they will see the graph and the numbers change in real time as the amount of data added grows. The beauty of this is that by speeding up the capturing and plotting process, I can spend more time helping the students to understand the significance of what the graph and the numbers mean, and I could reuse the same template to add my own dummy data to show the effect of anomalies, different types of correlation etc.
Any form of class experiment which involves the capturing and sharing of class data can be achieved with this method. If the data entry is more complex than my example, then you could create a sheet within the workbook for one student, then duplicate this lots of times so each student has their own sheet.
Another useful feature is that it is possible to embed sections of the file (e.g. the results table, or the final chart) back into a piece of web space (e.g. the VLE, or a blog) – so below is an example of the final chart – as the file is used and data is entered this will automatically update.
With the above example all students could see (and potentially alter) all other student’s entries into the resource. This may not be desirable – e.g. if you are capturing sensitive data (e.g. if working out Body Mass Index and asking students for their Weight and Height) or you could ask students to feedback what they have learnt, what they have found difficult, what they would like to recover in a revision session etc.
What you could do is create a single Excel file asking for the data that you want. Once happy with this, you duplicate that file however many times you have students. You then share each file with the individual student. This may sound complex but is a lot easier and quicker than you would imagine. You now have a mechanism for students to give individual feedback to you – you as the teacher can see all of the files, so easy for you to see the information – and if you are really keen, then you could create an ‘overview file’ which uses simple excel formula to pull the data from each students file into a single dashboard type file. This last suggestion doesn’t update the data live as it is entered, but everytime that the file is opened it will pull through the latest data at that point.
In my last blog post, I explained a simplification of how Office 365 and One Drive (formerly known as SkyDrive) work together to make collaborative learning activities possible. In this post I will give an example of how and why PowerPoint can be used for such an activity.
One of the programmes that I provide training for is the ITQ for Accessible IT practice as part of this programme I have adapted an activity where the attendees collaboratively discover accessibility features of Microsoft Windows that many don’t know about. To create the activity I have set up a simple PowerPoint presentation as follows:
Example of a PowerPoint Template for a collaborative activity
Basically I have a list of different accessibility features that I want the attendees to research, and for each one they have to summarise what the feature is and how it could be useful from an accessibility perspective. All I have done is created a simple slide within PowerPoint with 2 text boxes – 1 for each question. I then duplicate the slide numerous time and all I have to do is change the title of the slide to each of the accessibility features.
Looking at the left side of the image you will see 3 such slides of this nature, and you will notice that on this occasion I completed the first one as an example. All I have to do now is make a copy of this file (so that I have a clean master for next year) and to share this activity with my students (which I will explain later), allocate a topic (e.g. slide number) to each student and away we go. An old pack of cards is a useful way of randomly allocating a topic to each person.
The advantage of this activity for me is it is very quick to set up – once I have thought about what questions I am asking and how much space on the screen I want to allocate them, it is very easy to create the actual mechanism. When using this in class – all the attendees are editing the same document at the same time, so I can view that document and see what is going on – this means that I can see what people are doing, helping them if necessary, without having to walk around and look over their shoulders, it also means that if I had a student at home for example they could also partake in this activity either in real time or later on. If a student is doing something really good, I can pause the activity and show their slide on the screen and point out the key points, without having to mess with screen sharing, transferring files etc.
After a period of time I may stop the activity and ask people to then look at a different slide and edit what the previous person has done or to look at the points and identify the most important etc. At the end of the session, each person can take their own local copy of the file which may be useful to them as part of an assignment.
The beauty of this technique especially if using it at the start of a topic, is students get to see other students points of view – which can help when constructing an assignment to use other peoples opinions and not just ones own.
I mentioned earlier about sharing the file – there are different ways that I can do this, the easiest is to share a link as follows:
Sharing a link using OneDrive
On OneDrive, choose the ‘Share’ menu
On the left you could invite people if you know who they are, or you can get a link
There will be an option of whether they can ‘Edit’ or ‘View’ – choose ‘Edit’
If using the get a link option, you can copy the link as is, and email it to students or add to the VLE. or you can shorten the link and put it onto the board for students to type in manually or convert to a QR code.
At the end of the session I may revert the sharing settings back to view rather than edit, so students can view what has been completed but cannot continue editing it (in case they try to be funny and write rude things about me or other students in the document!).
In my next post I will give an example of how Excel can be used to create a collaborative activity.
Last week I was at the BETT show, working for The Tablet Academy who were running the interactive classroom on the Microsoft stand. We ran a series of 15 minutes interactive sessions, with one of my sessions being on the use of Office 365 to create collaborative activities. This session turned out to be very popular showing the interest from educators in this way of working.
The principle that I demonstrated wasn’t new – it was something that I have been doing for 8 or 9 years using the collaborative functionality of Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs) which I have previously blogged about, however many education organisations are nervous about using Google Drive in this way, and the example that I used in my blog post, did involve the work being potentially visible to anyone in the World, which didn’t matter for what I was doing, but for other subjects would be an issue. If an organisation has adopted Google Apps for education then it could all be kept safely enclosed within the organisation, but most places don’t have this – but if they do have Microsoft, and now that Office 365 offers a real time collaborative functionality – I can easily set up similar activities in a way that the IT/Network manager will be happier with.
Before we progress we need to understand a bit about how Office 365 works in conjunction with OneDrive (Microsoft’s cloud storage option – formerly called SkyDrive). When a teacher creates a file using Word, PowerPoint Excel or similar – they can save this to their OneDrive – this will appear on their computer just like any other network drive, so behaviour wise it is very easy for staff. If they are offline, it doesn’t matter the work will save, and as soon as they are online again it will Synchronise with the OneDrive server.
The files are now stored on the computer but also in the cloud – this means that I can access them from any internet enabled computer by going to the OneDrive website and logging in as me.
Example view of the OneDrive web interface
You will see in the image that there are 4 options highlighted with the red rectangle:
Download – allows for a local copy of the file to be downloaded onto the computer.
Share – Is what we want here, as we can give students access to the file, without having to send them a copy.
Embed – allows for files to be embedded into something like a website, blog or VLE – this could be very useful for displaying a graph or chart following an experiment or survey.
Manage – allows options such as renaming, but also a version history – so if someone sabotages a collaborative file, you can roll back to an earlier version and find out who did the sabotaging.
These different options can be applied to individual files, multiple files or even folders. The folders options could be very useful, as you could set up sharing options with individual students at folder level once at the start of the year, then any file that is added into that folder will automatically be visible to the student – I can see lots of potential here for giving feedback after assessment, and an ability for students to make comments etc. on their feedback all with the same document. The history functionality gives me the data integrity that I need for assessment purposes which in the past caused us to produce lots of inefficient different files with no information moving between them.
If I were to set up a collaborative activity using these tools, there are 2 options for the students. They can either edit the file in the web app – this is great if accessing this activity via a device that doesn’t have Microsoft Office on it (e.g. an iPhone or iPad), and allows for real time synchronous editing (lots of people editing same document at same time) – but you don’t get the full Office functionality. Or students can access and edit the file in Office, which gives the full functionality and great for small scale non-synchronous collaboration.
The key to making any of this work, is changing the way that we behave with files – which will take time. Email although a great tool, has created a culture of sending files as attachments – which creates multiple copies of the same file in different location which then leads to problems. If a single file is stored in one place and a link to this file is shared then there is only 1 file and therefore less problems.
In the coming days I will release posts, giving examples of different collaborative activities using PowerPoint, Excel and Word.
In my years as a teacher and then as a freelance consultant/trainer I have been very much at the forefront of the use of technology in education, and I have always been excited by the potential that effective use of technology can bring to education, but nothing has been as exciting as the potential that tablet devices brings to learning, and in particular Apple’s iPad – which has been designed beautifully, and is really easy to use, so when I run staff development in this area, I don’t spend most of the time talking about which buttons to press – instead I can focus most of my efforts into the pedagogic considerations of the training, and that is a very liberating feeling.
For the last few months I have been working with a company called ‘The Tablet Academy‘ (formerly The iPad Academy) and I have been going into schools and running iPad training – but now that the company has changed its name, they are also offering support and training for Android and Microsoft devices, and as such I have been experimenting with the basic Microsoft Surface RT device – and even though it has received some negative press, I think it (and its successors) are going to make a huge impact on education.
A Surface Tablet
If you compare an iPad alongside the Surface, then the iPad is going to win in almost all areas – it is built better, there are more apps, the battery seems to last longer, it is more intuitive etc. however if we compared a new iPad to an iPad 1 (which is the best way of thinking of the Surface) then the gap between the 2 was huge, so we have to take that into consideration as well. The Surface has some key considerations which the iPad lacks and that is the purpose of this blog post:
Many schools and educational organisations, have IT support systems which have been built around the Microsoft model (rightly or wrongly), so for them adopting Apple’s iPad hasn’t been an option. The Surface will just slot into their existing mechanism – and that makes it a possibility for lots of organisations who have so far closed the door on tablet technology.
Where the iPad works really well is when there is a 1:1 deployment, and each learner has their own device, they then set it up with their email account, their cloud storage (e.g. dropbox or similar) and apps that work for them and their subjects. What some organisations have done is buy a bank of iPads to use in class, but these aren’t individually owned so you cannot set up these individual services – and it then becomes harder for learners to save and export work they have created. With the Surface, this is designed around the notion of having a Microsoft account (Skydrive) and everything is based on that – so if you pick up a device, you log into your Skydrive once – and this connects to all your services. At the end of the session you logout once and the device is ready for the next person. This to me is one of the Surface’s main points regarding its strategic use within education, and if I was going to set up a bank of devices for a classroom, I would go Microsoft over iPad.
I let my kids use both my iPad and the Surface to see how they got on. I expected that they would hate the Surface (having used the iPad for much longer) but they didn’t – in some respects they preferred it. As my 9 year old quoted – “The Tablet is really clever, because you can use it with the keyboard and it is just like a computer, then when you take the keyboard off it turns into an iPad*”. As a device for my kids to do their homework, it is so much easier to use than the standard computer, as it fires up quickly, we can use it in any room in the house, it easily connects to our printers, and it has what the kids need for most of their work which is the internet, and access to office tools such as Word and PowerPoint.
Personally I hate flash, and always have done, and it is a technology that is well past its best before date – but there is a huge quantity of legacy material produced in flash especially within education. It is well known that the iPad doesn’t support flash, and Android doesn’t really (although there are work arounds for both). For the moment Microsoft does flash no problem. Many schools have entire maths and science departments based around the use of flash based resources, and if these schools have gone down an iPad route – they are finding this tough.
The cost of the Surface is significantly less than the iPad or Android equivalents. Over the summer of 2013, the surface could be bought for £133 + VAT, which is a much easier number to work with when buying potentially tens, hundreds or thousands of these devices.
Although the Surface may not have the wonderfully creative apps that the iPad has, it does have Microsoft Office – which gives us Word, Excel, PowerPoint, (and OneNote) – which are still the main tools used by many educators and students. Although I love my iPad, and I use a mac as well as a PC, and a mixture of Office, Open Office and iWork – when I want to do serious office based work, I still revert back to the PC as I find the Office suite works better for me than the others.
The surface is only going to get better. If we look at how the iPad has evolved in a few generations, then in a few years time the Microsoft devices should be much closer in performance. The iPad seems to have reached its own plateau – whereas Microsoft is only just starting.
I think the arrival of the Surface tablet is a very positive thing for education – there are now 3 viable options for education (iPad, Android and Microsoft) and choice has to be good – people can choose what is best for their situation, and the competition should keep all 3 providers on their toes, and prices competitive.
*Obviously the Surface doesn’t actually turn into an iPad – but these were the exact words of a 9 year old, and their perception on technology.
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