It's about the Experience...

Who goes to a movie theater with a good movie showing only to find wooden seats, mono sound, and a tiny screen? If you want content delivered, it's technically classified as a deliverable method, but if you want to create an experience, something to engage your audience, it's going to take a lot more effort on the content part to overcome the lacking environment. Presentation is an art. Granite, it's easier to talk about it then do it, but a lot of it is common sense and makes sense when you think about it. Environment makes up how you feel when surrounding yourself with the content. Indirect lighting often creates a relaxing feeling, it "lightens the mood" so to speak, so a calm happier feeling can be set loose. I found this when entering a local supermarket. Suddenly the stress of hurry up, get in and get out had left me, and I thought to myself, "Wow! This little entrance of indirect lighting can be powerful!" If I lost my hurry up, get in, get what I needed and get out feeling, they could capture more of my time, and possibly more of my money as I slowly wander from isle to isle.

Let's say you're a student, maybe of a primary or secondary level. You are the taste buds of the society that will make up the future. Now not everything in life can taste like sugar and be healthy for you, but if you had to eat a full meal that makes up your day of strictly health food with out any variation/spices for flavor, you're bound to burn out or lose interest in what is technically good for you. Enter the spices.... Presentation of any kind is the art of finding what indirectly engages your audience and capturing that to use in your advantage to gather the focus and engage your audience in the content. Add a little butter or nacho sauce to the potato, cream to the corn, peanut butter on that celery, a soft chair and surround sound when I'm at the movies for goodness sakes. It doesn't have to be a sugar fest, but at least give it something...

The little things are what count. (unedited)

Working in the electronic field, I always love finding a new feature on an item that I didn't know when I purchased it. Although, there have been some not so great ones too - like the econo printer that prints invisible ink for free (plus the cost of paper), of course it stored all the ink in various parts of the printer in globs for use later I guess..... Anyways.... was out on the web shopping for some decent projectors with enough light to not require lights off in the room, and eventually I did (needless to say it was cheaper then the more expensive dimmer ones we've been buying). Digging through the menu we found that they have a user logo mode, so if you disconnect your computer, or mute the video on the screen, or even turning it on it had a custom logo that you could upload from your computer. This allowed for each room to have a unique classroom logo with a "welcome to english" or "welcome to 4th grade" on it maybe surrounded by fishes or books. After showing a teacher or two how to change it on their own, we did find an ornery teacher or two that would change their neighbor's to a rival sports team of that classroom's teacher. We all laughed eventually, but this got me thinking about what little things mean to people, and how they can become big things later. It's the same as holding the door open for a person having a bad day, or saying hello to a student you don't even know the name to. Things you don't think matter, matter! Every little thing builds an environment and enhances life in the intended way and in the subliminal way. There may not have been some of the fancy little features 30 years ago, but that was a different environment then. Now days, if a new car didn't come with power steering, people wouldn't buy the car and would deem it unsafe to drive. In this world, things are changing so fast, and just like a car maybe needing to suddenly swerve to miss a pedestrian, that power steering suddenly can become a life saver. With the world moving so fast, we need little things to help us out and if details can enhance anything in anyway, then don't dismiss the little things in life!

Teaching in an Assembly Plant

Today I decided I was going to fill up gas cans for the lawn mower, so I headed on over to the local gas station about two blocks away. I then whipped out my plastic debit card, slid it in the machine and started filling up with gas, then headed back home. Five minutes later I checked my bank account balance and saw the amount was debited from my account already, this got me thinking - Our ability now to instantly pay for stuff now without ever touching so much as a physical penny, yet in education we rely so much on pencil and paper and physically having that text book in front of us. With businesses now having the ability to transfer the money from my bank to the gas station through using the visa as a bridging link in the connection, why can't we have teachers bridging the connection through the source of knowledge and to the recipient of the knowledge? In this world there are so many sources and variations to the same information so widely available; from wikipedia resources to re-enacting it in Second Life, why are students being spoon fed information from one specific source only to site it on paper again? Why should every student have the exact answer in order to correctly pass a test? While many teachers try hard to do their best, they are yet required to teach students specific information by a specific date. Teachers are becoming more and more like factory workers by assembling specific parts to each student as that student makes his/her own way down the line until they reach graduation. Automotive plants are being shut down because they were making vehicles that people didn't really want, so how is school different if they are sending students out into the world when they have been trained to so called "take the test"? In my own humble opinion students need to be their own teachers, and teachers need to be those of guard rails, the ones to keep them on the path when students start to wander off. But so long as teaching to the test remains the same through no child left behind, teachers become those left behind, affecting the future of students in silent ways.........

How are you making a dent in the teaching trend?

I'm always interested to hear your thoughts..