Office Lens - the only scanner you'll need

Have you ever been to one of these...



Any when you look around you, everyone is quickly taking pictures of the screens around you.

Or have you ever been at a presentation and quickly done this:

Welcome to Office Lens, an app for iOS, Windows 8, and Android phones.

Office Lens turns your phone into a document scanner, screen capture device and whiteboard scanner.

It's key features include:

• Integration with OneNote meaning you can capture material directly to your OneNote Notebooks.
• Integration with OneDrive allowing you to save captured material directly as PDF, Word or Powerpoint documents
• The ability to capture multiple pictures in a single session (e.g. the twenty slides of a presentation.
• The native ability to crop and clean up images

It is this last feature that makes Office Lens such a downright useful tool. If you are seated in the cheap seats like I did at EduTech a few years ago, you can use Office Lens to straighten the keystone effect in the image. Similarly, it will flatten the image, remove flash glare and other features common of pictures taking at conferences, presentations, and professional development days.

You can see below a recent picture I took on my phone on the fly (before). Then you can see how Office Lens processed this information (after).

Before	After

Of course, you can also do your own drawing on these images once they are in OneNote which makes annotating presentations a breeze!

And if, like me, you don't have a handy scanner at home, consider:

• Scanning your receipts for tax time or warranty purposes
• Keeping records of files and bills so that they are available in the cloud
• Keeping evidence of awards and certificates you've received

As you can imagine, this is a handy tool for both students and teachers. The best bit is, you don't have to even have the app handy at the time. You can take the pictures and then process them later. 

What I discovered at FutureSchools

In 2013 I went to EduTECH for the first time. I loved it.

I went with a specific project in mind. I wanted to delivery a blended learning option for my HSC students at St Mary's Maitland. I had already done my research and broadly knew what I was looking to find out. I spent two days investing myself in learning and walked away with direction, purpose and a number of ideas.

In 2014 I went to EduTECH for the second time. I enjoyed it.

I had flipped my classroom. I'd blended my learning. I was a master of online content creation. I went to presentations and thought 'I'm doing that'. I spoke to a few vendors, caught up with colleagues and came back with a few ideas, but no real desire to enact change.


In 2015 I thought I'd try FutureSchools for the first time. I was in a new role, with a much wider scope and far greater focus on technology in education.

And I loved it. I really did. But ...

There is something to be said for conference burnout. That apathetic feeling that you can get when you hear the same presenters tell you the same things that they have done each year. When you stare at presentation slides you've seen before.

It isn't just conferences and expos, but even professional development. I once attended a workshop for a large provider of PD, having enjoyed their previous offer. New presenter, apparently a new topic, but the same slides and - here's the kicker - the same bad jokes!

Here is what I am learning. Conferences, expos and large workshops serve a singular purpose - to raise awareness and present new ideas. When the ideas are no longer new or relevant, they become redundant and unnecessary. Similarly, if they don't match the frame of our own interests they can become useless ventures.

Next year I am going to have a purpose. I promise.

Apologies and multimodal interfaces

Firstly, apologies for a delay in the next post. It has been a rather busy time in the Hunter Valley! 

Exhibit A - "rather busy" in the Hunter Valley

Today I'd like to talk about one subject which makes for interesting discussion, yet remains a fairly dry topic: learning to type.

 Now, hear me out...

Late last term I was in a staff room where a teacher lamented that a particular boy had terrible handwriting. Two things immediately come to mind - would said teacher be equally critical of a student's ability to use other forms of communication and, secondly, I was and remain that boy with terrible handwriting.

Yep, that's right ... my handwriting has the style and form of a GP with a broken thumb. It is barely intelligible to me, let alone others. This is as good as it gets:

Exhibit B - my terrible handwriting

 However, I can proudly say that I am pretty good at gesture interfaces. I am also fairly handy in voice commands and voice-based communication (shutting me up is the trick). And with a fairly solid ego, I think I do well in person and and over video.

And though not stylish, I can solidly function at 65 words per minute (wpm) and 95%+ accuracy when typing.

Here's the kicker though... I almost never use a real ink pen at all.

Alright, alright ... so I hear you dragging out the Mueller and Oppenheimer research saying that typing is bad. First of all, that's not what it says. It states that students who use laptops (and specifically the keyboards) to record notes tended to be more likely to record verbatim, and had reduced factual and conceptual recall.

Sharon Oviatt, however, paints a much richer picture. She draws a landscape that identifies that different modes of communication suit different activities and, there is specific benefits in a multimodal interface.

It makes sense doesn't it?

If I was undertaking a design project, typing wouldn't suit. The process of ideation requires one to use non-linguistic forms, such as drawings, diagrams, sketch and the like.

If I was undertaking a creative writing project, typing would suit. The process of linguistic construction is well suited to the keyboard interface for speed, accuracy and the secondary but more important benefits of creating modifiable product.

Further, Oviatt cites what is called the "Performance-Preference Paradox", which whereby there is mismatch between the interface people say they prefer (e.g., keyboard) and what best supports their performance (e.g., pen).

Sharon's work is well suited to start and form a discussion of BYO and 1:1 device programs and learning space design. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

I want to get back to the issue of learning to type.

The same teacher who had lamented the handwriting of her student, then proceeded to type an email with the style and form of a drunk heron. Her single index fingers dived one at a time, only to miss repeatedly (acknowledged by the irritated smacking of the backspace key).

See, once upon a time we did explicitly teach typing. But then it disappeared. Meanwhile my schools have free access to LUX Typing, an aged by serviceable product, and there are wonderful newer educational products like Ultimate Typing Tutor which are affordable (a few dollars per year) and powerful tools to improve typing.

That still doesn't address all the other forms of interface. For example, in many cases I hear a negative response to Windows 8 tablet devices. Yet I see dozens of touch based devices with mice attached to them. How many iPads have mice attached to them?! There are other ways to get around...

What about keyboard shortcuts? Windows 8 is arguably the best Windows for keyboard shortcuts ever made - just try smacking the ÿ key and a random letter and you'll find a whole lot of goodness. Meanwhile, if you have ever seen someone use something like Adobe Photoshop using keyboard shortcuts it looks like Clarke's Third Law in action.

Meanwhile gestures are increasingly commonplace for all mobile devices. Samsung's flagship phone includes multiple gesture points. The Kinect has for years used body movements as an input source. And there is no doubt that the next stages of augmented and virtual reality (tomorrow, not the future kids) will use advanced gesture interfaces.

And never forget the pure power of the voice. Civilisation started with the spoken world and is still, in many ways, ruled by it. Voice recognition was the wild frontier a decade ago filled with dorky headsets and US-centric voice algorithms. Today, Cortana and Siri are able to translate and communicate the world for us while the aforementioned Kinect and its Playstation rival, as well as a swatch of televisions, use voice controls.

And to be honest, we've always used different forms to communicate. Writing, in and of itself, is purely a linguistic communication. However, many areas of knowledge are not communicated very well in purely linguistic forms - especially the ever touted STEM subjects. Just as I might lament my skills in writing, I also lament my inability to sketch and draw. For ultimately, ideation is about the best of both linguistic and non-lingusitic forms. Even with a pen, the process of moving up Bloom's taxonomy requires more than just words (see Exhibit C).

Exhibit C - I cannot draw either

The simple fact is that most students use a range of interfaces for learning. Increasingly, students are using multimodal interfaces like smartphones where voice, typing and gesture interact. The stunning world being opened up by augmented and virtual worlds will tip the scales in favour of multimodal interfaces.

And while Oviatt and Cohen might state that “multimodal interfaces have eclipsed keyboard-based interfaces as the dominant computer interface worldwide (2015, p.169). Keyboards remain well suited for “relatively mechanical tasks, like email, text editing, and information search via the Web (Crowne, 2007; Oviatt et al., 2006; Oviatt and Cohen, 2010a)” (Oviatt, 2013, p. 39). That is, keyboards remain well suited to those tasks that each of us does on a regular day.

So I agree with the teacher who laments poor handwriting. But I suggest that poor handwriting is as equally problematic as poor sketching abilities, poor typing abilities, poor understanding of gesture based inputs, poor understanding of keyboard shortcuts, poor mouse function and use, poor understanding of voice commands and a general inability to interact with modern technology. Or, as a better litmus test, who is more employable - the person with fluency and accuracy when writing, the person with fluency and accuracy when typing, or the person with fluency and accuracy when operating in a multimodal environment?

References

Mueller, Pam A.; Oppenheimer, Daniel M.,  “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” Psychological Science, June 2014, Vol. 25, No. 6. doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581.

Oviatt, S. L., & Cohen, P. R. (2015) The Paradigm Shift to Multimodality in Contemporary Computer Interfaces, Morgan and Claypool.

Oviatt, S.L. (2013) The Design of Future of Educational Interfaces, Routledge Press.

Disruptive Innovation and the challenges of technology integration

Disruptive innovation is a buzzword these days.  Wikipedia remarks that:

"A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market."

The term was originally coined by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Christensen used the term to describe innovations that create new markets by discovering new categories of customers. They do this partly by harnessing new technologies but also by developing new business models and exploiting old technologies in new ways.

Disruptive innovation has become a popular buzzword and it's application has widened to include all forms of organisation and social systems.

So what?

In last week's newsletter I reminded schools how far we'd come in a decade. A decade ago we didn't have iPads, iPhones, NBN, DER (or post DER), 1: and BYO(D), Facebook, Youtube, IPTV, 3D Printers, tablets, eBooks or the cloud. A decade ago Kodak, Blockbuster and Borders were all visible brands.

Can you imagine going back to 2005 and trying to explain to your colleagues what changes are ahead of them?

If we look at some of the top ten disruptive innovations of the last hundred years, odds are most of them occurred in the last decade.

And the rate of change is not showing any signs of slowing. Self-driving vehicles will change how we transport ourselves in ways that we cannot possibly imagine. Drones will no longer bring death and invasions of privacy, but goods and services. Meanwhile augmented reality will entirely reshape the way we see and interact with our work.

Yet here is the kicker which every educational presenter worth their salt will tell you for a princely sum and transport expenses ... WHAT THE HECK ARE WE GONNA DO ABOUT IT?

How do we prepare students for a future world when the scope of our vision has been trimmed by accelerating innovation and change to a point where we are unable to even envision society a decade ago?

I am currently writing a position paper on technology integration which reviews the past, present and possible future.

I've suddenly got writers block!

I'd love to hear about the disruptive innovations that you know are right around the corner. Add your suggestions to the comments below.

To LMS or not to LMS, that is the question!

 The eternal question! To LMS or not to LMS.

A Learning Management System (LMS) is software (or a software package) or Web-based technology used to plan, implement, and assess a specific learning process. Typically, a learning management system provides an instructor with a way to create and deliver content, monitor student participation, and assess student performance.

With me so far? Good chance that if you're  viewing this blog you've had experiences with an LMS of some sorts. Good chance if you have, you've got some mixed feelings about LMSs.

The question of whether to LMS or not has long bugged me. Why? Because when you stack up the reasons for and against there is no clear winner.

Reasons FOR	Reasons AGAINST
It helps manage everything in one place It can often automate workflows (e.g. self-marking quizzes) You can provide a single training and support model You often get vendor support for an LMS You can share objects with others using the LMS You can have connections with other school software (e.g. timetable data) You can have single sign-on options and ease of use opportunities.	You are locked into a single system for managing files and workflows There are often better tools for workflows It makes people reliant on central training and support models You have to pay It stifles people with technical abilities who want to explore beyond the LMS The LMS often drives the pedagogy and not the other way round

So where do I sit? 

Well, let me tell you the story of the last LMS I implemented.

I wanted to do something different with Stage 6 Studies of Religion. I went looking at contemporary models of pedagogy and got stuck on the idea of delivering a blended model that employed flipped learning. So I then sought out an LMS which suited the pedagogical model I was attempting to employ.

That is, my pedagogy drove the LMS decision.

And that is not always the case. Actually, that's almost never the case. 

Very rarely do educators say "That's what I want to do!" and backward map to their reality. The start with "That's what I've got!" (often in exasperation) and move forward to their dreams. 

I am a firm believer that as educators we are, as Ian Jukes and Simon Breakspear were at pains to point out last week at FutureSchools, 'future makers'. We have an eye on a possible future and an eye on the ground in front and we map out the path to the future. 

However, when that eye on the ground in front recognises that not all educators are ready for a post-LMS world, the question of how to get there often brings us back to an LMS reality.

My hunch is that the LMS is the scaffold upon which a digitally rich pedagogy can be built. The question is how comfortable educators are to unlearn an LMS when it is time to leave the nest and fly solo. And of course we could add the further question of how willing systems, like mothers everywhere, are to push them out the nest when the time comes. 

Working with surveys

Surveys. Love 'em or hate 'em, they are everywhere. In way of a disclaimer I previously worked for a very large multinational cooperation that was arguable the largest private industry collector of data in the country.

In schools, surveys seem to pop up frequently. Yet more frequently than not the survey represents a destination rather than a question. And therein lies the problem.

Surveys are a form of quantitative data collection. Even in their simplest form, they are a form of research. And research is be definition a process of three steps

1. Pose a question.
2. Collect data to answer the question
3. Present an answer to the question

Creswell, J. (2012), Plannning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Pearson: Boston

The issue is that so many surveys are about "getting support" or "receiving a mandate". Perhaps we should blame federal politics...

The point is, all research - even the information question to parents, students or staff - should start with a question.

Collecting the data is the easy bit. However, this is also an area where people struggle. For most schools they can use the paper format, but today I'd like to look at SurveyMonkey. Its a fairly simple tool to use, but does cost around $300AUD for its most useful plan.

Alternatively, things like Google Forms are available and offer a simplistic yet effective way of collecting data. And there are several free online survey tools available. You can even create forms in emails (difficult) or use the paper based option (simple!).

Just remember the the following:

• How will your data be collected? If it's only online, will that create a selection bias?
• How will your data be stored? How long for? How will you maintain confidentiality? 
• How will your data be used? Is data aggregated or will individual data be used (E.g. comment data)?
• To whom will the data be send? What is the intended audience?
• Who is responsible for the data?

All of this needs to be clearly communicated to participants before they commence a survey. 

Furthermore, when creating your survey consider:

• The wording of questions and how that impacts an audience's perception (referendums!)
• The pacing and order of questions (consistency and clarity)
• The scales used (consistency and clarity)

There are plenty of online resources to help you out!

How fast is your internet?

In the increasingly 1:1 environments of our schools there has been a whole sale adoption of cloud based storage. While this presents a plethora of opportunities for security, safety and collaboration, it also has a few downsides.

Currently in Australia, if you live in a town like I do, the NBN is a distant dream. While I achieve slight-better-than-the-rest speed of 11Mbps, the national average is 6.9Mbps. What is worse, is that this figure is based on combined metropolitan and rural/regional data. Why is it worse? Is because the NBN (fixed line) and 4G (wireless) density in urban areas is significantly higher. Many students in our diocese are unable to get any kind of service that would qualify as broadband.

Late in 2009, an IT company in South Africa sought to point out the sorry state of affairs, It loaded up a carrier pigeon with 4GB of data and flew it 60 miles to its destination. In the same time that it took the bird to complete the journey, only a quarter of the data had arrived via the internet.

To put this in perspective, At the current 6.9Mbps that Australia 'enjoys', that same carrier pigeon would be neck and neck with the same 4GB at 60 miles.

Yet this isn't 2009.

And SD cards are no longer 4GB or even 128GB. They are 512GB!

What does this mean for the carrier pigeon flying 60 miles? The humble carrier pigeon has a transfer speed of over 800Mbps! That's well over 100 times the speed of our current internet.

Or better still, if you had 512GB of data to transfer, you could either use broadband to transfer it taking 6 ½ days or you could get the card, pop it into the new Australia post two-days-later-40%-more-expensive letter delivery service and still shave days off the trip.

Ok, all of this is just funny analogies. However...

This is the reality - long or short term - in Australia. Our average internet speed is 44th in the world, about where Thailand is. Even our cross-Tasman cousins enjoy better speed. What's worse is its slipping rather than gaining.

If you are expecting your students in your 1:1 device program to be able to be effective learners using digital tools and online storage and workflows, will the internet that they have be able to cope?

Equally, what structures and process will you have in place for students unable to access the internet or unable to access it in a suitable fashion?

And just in case you were wondering, if you were attempting to send that same 512GB data file(s) from Sydney to Melbourne, the carrier pigeon would complete the task in a touch over 10 hours. This is 108MBps, or 8 more than our current fastest NBN broadband.

Side note: The reason for this widening gap isn't bad policy. The bulk of the different is that internet speeds have not increased at the same rate as storage capacity. Storage capacity has been roughly working at Moore's law (doubles every 18 months) while internet speed is far more incremental.