Explain Everything & Quick-Loading Images

I like to distribute and collect student work during class using Google Classroom, for many reasons. Among the most important reasons are:

• I can distribute PDF files to all of my students instead of having paper printouts
• Students can return digitally annotated exercises in class for immediate review and feedback

However, there is at least one drawback with this approach: when making a copy of a Google Classroom assignment for each student, Google Classroom appends the student's name to the filename they are sent. So, there are potential privacy issues if I want to be projecting my computer (and their work) for anonymous peer review and feedback, if the whole class can see the filename as I open it.

There are some obvious and inelegant solutions, like blacking the projector screen while I open documents. But, I've devised some cleaner solutions. I've written about a couple previously:

• http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2015/09/stem-google-classroom-fostering.html wasn't really elegant, but it worked, and then
• http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2015/10/google-classroom-for-anonymous-student.html is also good, but suffers the drawback that students aren't working on a specific exercise that I've sent them, and also assumes that every student is comfortable generating a new drawing using an app on their mobile device

Now I have a third approach, which I've used quite a bit the past few semesters, and I really like it. Please view my five-minute demonstration video to learn more!

ExplainEverything Tips for Live Presentation

This post accompanies a workshop that I am leading on March 9, 2019 at California State University,  Fresno which is hosting the annual California State University Symposium on Teaching and Learning. A recording of the presentation will also be posted at my YouTube channel.

I have recently written on the use of the Stealth Zoom tool in the ExplainEverything app to create dynamic presentations with animation. The basic idea is that only part of the ExplainEverything digital whiteboard (which I'll call the "active area") on a mobile device screen is projected via video to an audience. Every digital object (text, photo, etc.) located on what other programs would call the pasteboard (the area outside of the working area) is visible and able to be manipulated by the presenter, but the audience doesn't see this. Thus, as the presenter drags an object from the pasteboard into the active area, the projection shows the object appearing from the edge of the screen. Objects can be moved by the presenter, and these motions are projected in real time, which can give the impression of a basic animation. My video tutorial here demonstrates this process.

My initial ExplainEverything presentation file

Today, I'm sharing more "best practices" for using ExplainEverything to conduct improv presentations, where graphic elements (photos, cartoons, drawings, graphs and charts, etc.) are added to a presentation depending on the direction that a conversation or classroom session goes, based on audience (or student) questions and comments. Above, you can see the ExplainEverything presentation I am using in my workshop: the white area in the center is the region that is projected to the audience. So, when I navigate to this slide in the presentation, the audience will initially see a plain white slide. Depending on what has happened previously in the workshop, I'll add one or a few graphics by dragging them into the white area.

Here's the genius part: my entire presentation will be based on just this one slide (and its surrounding pasteboard, to which I've already added all of the images I think I might need). So, if I need to call on a graphic, I don't have to spend time adding it from my Camera Roll (or from Google Drive, etc.), which takes a few "clicks" and thus can cause a brief but unnecessary disruption in presentation (see below image, which is a screen shot of part of the process of adding an existing image from my Camera Roll). In sum: I spend time before the presentation importing all of the graphics that I might use, so that the actual live presentation runs more efficiently.

Part of the process of adding existing photos from my Camera Roll

As a brief aside: for those of you who prefer not to pre-load graphics, as I did above, I suggest creating a new photo album (folder) to house only the images that you intend to use during your presentation. That way, when you are selecting an image to add (the process of which is projected to the audience), they only see all the thumbnails of images you want them to see (e.g. not also personal photographs of the family members at your cousin's birthday dinner last weekend).

The Album I created to contain only graphics to be used in my presentation

The other "Best Practice" I want to share today is how to leverage the graphic content of the pasteboard across your entire presentation. As I mentioned, the pasteboard (see below image) contains all of the graphics I think I will want to use in my entire half-hour workshop. I won't use all of these images on a single slide, but at the same time, I'm not sure in advance which combinations of graphics I might want to put together on a slide. That's the blessing and the curse of improv presentations!

Dealing with this issue is simple in ExplainEverything: instead of pre-making a series of slides with different pasteboard content, I just load all of the graphics I think I will use, and then I just duplicate that slide (which also duplicates the entire pasteboard) every time I want to add a new slide to the presentation. There's just one trick here: if I load the white (active) area of the slide below with some of my graphics at the start of my presentation, and then I duplicate the slide when I want to move on, then I wind up having a slide that already has content on it! So, here's the workaround: before you present, make a duplicate of your blank slide + all of the pasteboard content. This will become your "template" (untouched) slide for future use.

First, here's how to duplicate your slide. Select the slide button in the lower-right corner of the screen:

Step 1 of slide duplication

Then select the slide you want to duplicate (the slide icon will color, and a check-mark will appear) and the select the x2 button just to the top-left of the slide icon:

Step 2 of slide duplication

and now you have two copies of your blank slide + pasteboard content:

The final step of slide duplication

Now, the presentation proceeds thus: you start the presentation on the first slide, adding graphics as necessary using Stealth Zoom. Then, when you're ready for a new slide, you advance to the second slide. Now, before you start using the second slide, make a duplicate of it (generating slide 3)! Then you continue your presentation on slide 2 - with the new slide 3, still blank, being your new template for additional use. Continue making duplicates of your last (template) slide as needed, so that you always have one clean version of your original slide.

Of course, you could make lots of duplicate blank slides before you start a presentation, and that works just fine - as long as you have a good idea of how many slides you think you'll need! But that sort of diminishes the purpose of conducting an improv presentation, doesn't it?

Animation in Live Presentation

I'm an academic who teaches (and performs research!) at a university. Like me, more often than not, everybody who stayed in academia to be a professor experienced numerous lecture-style classes as an undergraduate student (and beyond…) and:

• we already excelled at learning by listening and taking notes, or
• we learned how to excel in this style of learning environment

This isn't the best way to ensure high-quality and engaging experiences for all learners. However, given increases (at least in my department and university) in the number of students enrolling, and given the lack in funding for infrastructure upgrades (read: new rooms with more seats), we face the same issue we teachers always seem to face: larger enrollments in our classes.

Instead of complaining about situations that are usually perceived as sub-optimal (putting it mildly), I always prefer to take an optimistic view. I see rising course enrollments as an opportunity and a challenge to innovate how I teach. I will still make the best of the time I have with my students.

Today, I'm thinking about a topic that I've been thinking (and writing) about quite a bit recently: how to perform engaging lectures. Now, that concept will sound like a contradiction to many of you. Additionally, many of us already think we present the most engaging lectures already. Nevertheless, I hope you'll read a bit more for what I hope will be a new(-to-you) spin on one technique that might help you help students understand concepts in your discipline that involve processes, flowcharts, networks, and the like.

A brief tangent (or not…)

In the past, my posts on the topic of creating an engaging classroom have focused on a few observations I've made:

1. When students have your "lecture slides" (if you pre-prepare them), then they know what content you expect to cover for the class period, and so they don't ask as many questions because they know you want to finish that content before the end of class
2. I spend waaaaaay too much time "preening" my lecture slides to make them as awesome (I think) as possible before class - I could be doing other, professionally-useful, things with that time

With these two points in mind, I realize now that making a set of class slides in advance subconsciously limited me. I felt like I had spent so much time perfecting the presentation already, when I got to class, I really resisted deviating from all of the great things I (thought I had) prepared for my students. In retrospect, this limited me from following avenues of exploration and discussion that might have been more pertinent (and engaging) to my class populace. These, which some might call tangents, might be the opportunities we all should seize!

Thus, I've written about "lecture improv" and the ability to use mobile technology to assemble digital content on the fly to create more dynamic and (I think) engaging in-class experiences:
http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/01/digital-classroom-and-lecture-improv.html
http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/02/mobile-tech-and-pedagogical-innovation.html

TL/DR: the basic tenet of the above posts is that we educators should definitely prepare for class, but not by preparing lecture slides. Instead, we could spent that prep time assembling and curating digital resources (e.g. pictures, data, diagrams…) that we can draw on during class to support the learning objective(s) of the day. By not presenting them to students, in advance, in a strict order, I've since found that students are more willing to ask questions and to suggest new avenues of discussion.

A great tool for making engaging visual presentations on the fly

I love using the ExplainEverything app to present visual material during class. I've written extensively about this app, most notably:

http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2014/10/tablet-tech-and-blended-learning.html

After I wrote that post (five years ago now), ExplainEverything added a feature that I only began to appreciate in the last few weeks: Stealth Zoom. I learned about this tool when I became an Apple Distinguished Educator and attended a workshop hosted by the creator of ExplainEverything. That was over two years ago, but still I only just last week used it for the first time!

Brief background on this app: ExplainEverything lets you use a mobile device as a digital whiteboard. You can draw on your device and have that projected so that the entire class can see it. You can import existing graphics (e.g. photos, PowerPoint slides, PDF files) and annotate them. Meanwhile, the app can record the audio and video so that you can share a video file of your presentation afterward.

Stealth Zoom

Here's the concept for using ExplainEverything for dynamic in-class presentations: you can pre-load graphics you think students might ask about, or that you think might help you explain a complicated process/diagram/pipeline/analysis. In the app, while projecting your device to the class, you can drag-and-drop these items (and move them around).

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so this video explanation (5 1/2 minutes long) might be worth a million! Here, I show an example of what this type of presentation looks like, and I show a primer of how to accomplish this type of animation:

https://youtu.be/ZXZDC9rfn3A

In short, I like using Stealth Zoom in ExplainEverything because I can explicitly demonstrate decision trees, logic, and processes, so that students can start to understand the types of analyses and techniques that I use in my discipline. Further, I can change the graphics on the slide in a very dynamic fashion in response to student questions and to changes in the direction of conversation. This approach can be employed in any discipline. For example:

• Linguistics/foreign language: diagramming sentences / sentence structure
• Engineering: electrical circuit design
• Computer science: loop logic, syntax
• History: timelines

When I first learned about Stealth Zoom, I was encouraged to use it to make videos that exhibited the types of simple animations you saw in the video linked above. However, my spin on this technique is that we can present Stealth Zoom-based animations live, during class, to hopefully make a more engaging and dynamic live presentation for our students.

I'd love to hear how you think you could use the Stealth Zoom technique in your discipline - please leave a comment below!

To the doubters: why not try a more dynamic approach to teaching?

Many of my colleagues really don't like to improvise during class because they're more likely to make a mistake, have a technology disaster, or encounter a student question they don't know the answer to. I've also written previously about this issue before:

http://tabletpedagogy.blogspot.com/2015/10/be-bold-tell-truth.html

but, again (TL/DR): let's embrace such experiences as teaching opportunities that show that even faculty don't know all of the answers, and we're not experts in everything. It is great for student growth mindset to have their faculty model how to make a mistake and then correct it! Make it a teachable moment, which humanizes you and makes a huge (positive) impact on students!