Ohio Educational Technology Conference 2024 Day Two

 

Valentine's Day at the conference started off nice and early with the session A New Library System for Ohio's Academic Libraries & New Opportunities for Student Learning by Thelda Schwing, the associate director for Ohiolink. The member institutions of Ohiolink will be moving to a new system and our institution should be on it by next year. The new system is Ex Libris from Alma, which looks to be nice upgrade from our current system. It is built with e-resources in mind and has an search interface similar to what students might see in Google which may make it a less intimidating experience. It will integrate with other campus systems as well. Primo is the search feature and will allow searches across all member libraries. It will also all patrons to better understand how soon they might get a resource. For example, if a student needs a book by Friday, they can determine if it will arrive by then or whether they should select an electronic resource instead. Leganto will allow us to integrate our LMS and make it easier for professors to make materials available for students directly in their course. There is also some metadata that will allow professors to see which resources are being used and to make adjustments to what they are offering. College Credit Plus should also integrate better and allow students better options for access needed materials. I was glad to hear that they are working on bringing AI features to Ex Libris which I think will be important to expanding the future benefits of this product for our students. 

Thelda Schwing

 Trendy Technology to be and Instructional Designer presented by Beth Schwartz was a series of resources and thoughts to help instructors navigate the changed educational landscape. One of her main points was to not throw out some of the things we learned from teaching during the pandemic. Accessibility for students if still really important and well need to keep that in mind as we educate. She gave a personal account of her daughter who is immunocompromised and can't always be in a physical classroom. Connecting to her class via something like Zoom gives her a chance to continue learning and not fall behind. Students may need to be absent from a physical classroom for many reasons and using technology to allow for flexibility can only help. Another thought is the personalization that technology allows. Learning is much more powerful if we can make it relevant for the learner. Her example here was where a teacher had students working on personal hygiene and the students designed their own toothbrush holders and 3D printed them. We have lots flexibility using technology to make things more individualized for students. They no longer need to write a paper but could do a video or a podcast to show mastery. 

Using Drones in Video Production presented by Chris Flanery from WOUB demonstrated how drones can be used to give perspectives in video that you can't achieve easily with a normal ground camera. He mainly uses a drone to "set the scene" which allows the viewer to understand the context of an area from the larger perspective. Starting up from the air and approaching the subject as you move through something like a city, can give the viewer a sense of location. A done can also be used to simulate something that you may not have easy access to. For example, moving along a train track can give the viewer an impression of a train, without having to actually get a train and attach a camera to it. Finally, filming large objects like outdoor art installations are easy with a drone and give you a unique perspective for the viewer. If you have ever gone to Flight of the Hawk park in Lancaster, Ohio you can see how a video done with a drone can give you a perspective you can't see from the ground.

Drone with cage

Artificial Intelligence for Educators by Rebecca Odom-Bartel from Cleveland State University was a session that focused more on AI and what it is rather than ten things to do with AI or 1000 AI sites to try. While the former can be valuable, I found her presentation refreshing in that it gave a better foundational basis of what we mean when we talk about types of AI and how we can use AI to complement what we do. Using a process such as seek, select, integrate, implement, and assess will help us use AI effectively. An interesting little factoid that I picked up here is that nowadays there is about 4 yottabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1024 )) per year of general information produced and an individual human is exposed to about 9 zettabytes (9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1021) per lifetime of information (I have not independently verified this ;-)

Our Robot Overlords

A modern Max Headroom

Happy little building

On Thursday I'll be taking a look at the following presentations: Embracing AI in the Classroom, How is Artificial Intelligence Changing the way we Learn?, The Bard's Tale: Google AI in Education, Design Thinking: A Hands-on Workshop, and Balancing Order and Innovation: Strategies for Effective Leaning Technology Leadership.

Ohio Educational Technology Conference 2024 Day One

 It's Valentine's Day (and a colleagues birthday :-) and that means it is time for the Ohio Educational Technology Conference (OETC)! I always thought this was a funny time to hold a conference, but it some ways it makes a lot of sense. It is before all the big tech conferences for educators and before the start of spring breaks at schools in Ohio. This conference focuses on instruction, information technology, and leadership. I often feel it is heavy on the K-12 side of things, but I am always able to find relevance for higher education in the sessions that may not seem as pertinent.  

Required Photo of Arnold

As in past years, there are three keynotes for each day of the conference. I enjoyed the keynotes last year and am looking forward to the ones this year. Today kicked off with George Couros who is the author of three books The Innovator’s Mindset; Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, Lead a Culture of Creativity, Innovate Inside the Box, Because of a Teacher, and Because of a Teacher 2. He believes that meaningful change happens when you can connect to people. Valentine's Day is when Dr. Chinma Uche, a Mathematics and Computer Science teacher at CREC Academy of Aerospace and Engineering will be speaking on how educators can embrace Generative AI. The final keynote will be four educators from Chagrin Falls who will share their journey into making AI part of their education system. 

Eclipse Swag!

I started the morning with a session by George Couros, the keynote speaker for today,  Laying the foundation for Innovation in Education. He had a prepared presentation, but he said he decided that as he was talking to people coming in that he would change it up and try and make it more of a conversation. I felt he made several good points during the session.  For education, he defines innovation as new and better ways of teaching which makes a lot of sense and he used Scantron tests as an example. In some ways you can look at Scantron as an innovation, but is it something that deepens learning for the student? He addressed our need as educators to be able to adapt and learn, which I think is really important which helps us be innovative. Changing the way you do things is difficult and can be tiring but I think it makes us stronger and able to relate to students better. For example, my university is going through an LMS change right now and while it takes a lot of effort, I believe it will benefit the students in the long run and help the university as a whole. 

George Couros

Connect with Apple was more of an open session where they asked the participants for questions or issues that they wanted addressed. My position doesn't deal too directly with Apple products but I use them and we have academic departments that use them, so it's important to keep up with going on with the company. They did have a Vision Pro there, which was great because I haven't had a chance to see one. While the are instances out there of it being used in sort of ridiculous ways,  the speaker gave some examples of why this might work well in educational settings. One interesting use developed is to use it to simulate a room where moon rocks are kept. Students only have 20 minutes at a time to study the rocks in a special room. The Vision Pro or other such devices can be used to simulate the room so that students can be very familiar with the room and not wast time adjusting to the environment while actually in the room. You can book a demo of one at an Apple Store. I also learned some tips and tricks related to quickly finding network information on a Mac and getting a free developer account for educators that will actually allow you to develop apps without paying. I did ask them about Apple's push into AI and while they did not give any new information on what Apple might be planning, they did emphasize that newer products, such as the iPhone 12 and beyond already use AI and will continue to be platforms moving forward for doing AI related tasks. 

George Couros' keynote, Embracing Innovation to Help Every Learner Find Success in Their Own Way was a rapid fire full of stories of making connections and building relationships. Some of the main points I got out of it was the importance of relationship building and storytelling. Relationships take the fear and uncertainty out of approaching someone for questions and help. He talked about a teacher who wanted to be on Twitter and as he was talking to her, he asked her why. Her reply was that other people were on it and since he didn't think that was a good reason so he started to dig a little and ask her about her class. One of the projects the students were working on was recording the growth of plants, so they set up an Instagram account instead where they could post the progress of the plants. It ended up being very successful with students and parents involved in the project and turned the teacher into an advocate for innovating in her classroom. 

AI-Powered Education: Innovations in Instruction + Professional Learning, featured Melissa Solema and Jeremy Hunter from the Ohio Learning Community where they provide free technology courses to educators. This session focused specifically on a course they have for AI and gave a good overview of practical uses of AI in education, such as lesson planning and content creation. They also provided some links to sites for discovering new AI tools and a specific AI for lesson creation. 

In Game Design as a Lens for Learning, Drew Farrell gave a great overview of how elements of gaming can be used for education. While I didn't get much new information, the session did give me an opportunity to review the elements of gaming that make it a good educational choice. Things such as goal setting, flow, balanced difficulty, feedback, narrative, socialization, and fun can allow students to learn in a positive way. 

For Wednesday, some of the sessions I am considering attending are: A New Library System for Ohio's Academic Libraries & New Opportunities for Student Learning, The Power of Questioning in the Age of Generative AI, Using Trendy Technology to be and Instructional Designer, Using Drones in Video Production, and Artificial Intelligence for Educators. I am looking forward to what I will discover in these sessions!