Find the goal.

These last two weeks have proven exciting in the TTL. More students are coming in for the digital story, and it is very fulfilling because I feel like I get to do more of what I really like doing: helping people solve their problems. One thing I've found to be a good idea: talk to the students to get an overview of what they want to do with their digital story, and take some time to get ahold of their perspective, rather than just helping them with the technical issue that they are having. Why? Because it seems that it is not uncommon for students to assume that they need to do something that is difficult, or sometimes they've chosen a solution that is impractical for what their final goal is. A counter-example:

A student was having an issue with WeVideo. When she uploaded her movie clips, the browser would freeze, and Shockwave stopped working. So, I tried to solve this issue by updating ShockWave and trying different browsers and computers. This approach ultimately took a lot of time and produced no result. So we tried rebuilding the movie from scratch. Turns out that one of the movie clips was responsible for crashing shockwave (and, in turn, the browser). So we tried changing the format of the video so that it might not crash the browser...and that failed to. Finally, I thought to ask, "what is your goal with this clip? what do you want it to do for the viewer?" She responded, "I wanted a globe, and for it to spin." Suddenly the solution was simple - to upload multiple snapshots of the globe movie in progress. This took about five minutes to do.

This made me realize that using technology is so much simpler if we start with the end goal. How do we want this technology to impact the people who will be using it? What do we want it to do for them? This can bring us to solutions that are easier to accomplish, and have the same or nearly the same effect.

After that particular student came in, I decided to put increasing emphasis on conversations that start with, "Tell me about your project. What do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish with it? How do you want your project to accomplish its goals? Why do you want to use that particular way?"

This can help with finding the quickest solution for the end goal, and prevent the student from getting lost in needless technical tasks.

In other news, this week the dean of Teacher Education and a few Social Studies professors came in to learn about using iPods and Swivls for new teachers to use to document their capabilities. For that story, though, you will have to wait until next week.

Something old, something new, somethings yet to do - A reflection

Something old: I was not really sure what to expect working in the TTL. Mostly, I anticipated helping students who come in, updated websites, etc...My primary challenge in the beginning was knowing what I would be expected to do, and how to get it done. Having Katie and Janet to help has been a fantastic asset, and made it possible for me to move forward when I was not sure what to do. So, the challenge of knowing what needs to be done seems conquered for now, how do it is being mastered one bit at a time - with a few exceptions.

Something new: The task list is a great resource for me, and I use it to mark progress, etc... it is dawning on me though, that I need to put more effort into uncovering, establishing, and following an unwritten set of priorities. As a TTL novice, I tended to look at the task list, and ask, 'what can I do on this list with my current set of skills?' I used this to establish my priorities. Unfortunately, the needs of the AI's do not have any relationship to my current set of skills. So, I have been reminding myself that I need to look at the list, and ask, 'what needs to be done first?' Knowing this, though, is tricky since I don't know how long the tasks will take. Fortunately, most of the high priority items for the TTL are re-occurring tasks, and so it is only a matter of time before I have no need to...
 

Something new: creating training material for the next TTL lab workers