First off, how do you manage to not run out of paper (the page) when taking notes?
Practice, mostly. The screen size is good for about an hour’s worth of a keynote or presentation-style talk. A lecture might take more space, because I’d want to take more detailed notes. A conversation takes less space, because there’s a lot more pausing and back-and-forth. Or, to look at it another way, since the space is the same (one screenful), it’s good for 1 hour of keynote, 45 minutes of lecture, and maybe 2 hours of conversation or meeting. Sometimes I don’t fill up the whole screen, and sometimes I do need to continue on to a second one.

I also break up my notes with larger headers and smaller images and detail text. If you compare my earlier work with some of my later work, you’ll see that it took me a few tries to get control of the sizing so that it’s consistent throughout the page. Sometimes I still don’t nail it ;-)

How do you manage to write the dot above the letter “i”? Every time I try to touch the screen with one finger, the menu shows up.
You’re not the first person with this question. It turns out I didn’t discover it because I don’t usually punctuate, I use all caps most of the time, and even when I use lower case, I don’t dot my i’s. You need to move your finger (or stylus) in a tiny circle, curve, or up-down motion to dot your i’s or make a period. It takes a little practice to break yourself of the tapping habit.

What zoom level do you prefer to take notes in?
I’m all over the map. The first thing I do is to make a sizing mark for my header — a little stroke at 100% zoom to show myself how tall to make the header letters. This varies depending on the number of words I want to write. Then I zoom in so that size is comfortable and I write the header. Then I zoom out to make sure I got it straight and didn’t switch sizes in the middle and so forth. Everything else kind of keys off that — topic headers are the next largest thing, but smaller than the page header, and detail text gets smaller in varying degrees. Sometimes I emphasize something by making it larger than the header. When I’m writing the smallest details I’m often zoomed in all the way. I move my screen a lot while I work. It’s one reason I hesitate to project from my iPad as I work — I’m afraid of making the audience seasick.

How do you color the background (the paper) and the inside of the letters? And do you do that after you’ve finished notetaking or while doing it?
I add a layer, drag it under the text layer, and use a wider brush to put the color where I want it. This way, I’m coloring under the outline of the letters so it looks neater. I usually have one layer for the lettering (the black text and outlines), one for the coloring of letters and objects, and another one at the bottom for the background colors. Sometimes there’s an upper layer with borders, and usually there’s one more layer with miscellaneous stuff that gets added at odd times. Layers are a great way to experiment with different coloring options, too.

I usually go back and forth between coloring and writing. Sometimes, there’s a rambly part of the talk or conversation that doesn’t need to be recorded, and that’s a good time to color. Other times, the speaker is so jazzed and spot-on that I end up doing all the coloring after the talk is over. Both methods work. I usually add the background coloring last.

Do you prefer using the stylus or your fingertip while taking notes (in Brushes)?
My fingertip, by a lot. I have a stylus, but I find that it gets in the way. Zooming, changing colors and brushes, and even writing and drawing come more naturally to me when I’m using my finger. This is very much a personal preference — I know people who are artistic geniuses with the stylus, but can’t do a thing with their fingertips.

Any other tips worth listening to before I try making better notes?
You’re assuming any of these tips are worth listening to :-) The best thing you can do is to practice and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Any time you can, whip out the iPad and take notes, even if you only end up filling part of the screen. Pixels are cheap :-)

If you’re not confident about your lettering, practice that. Just write alphabets or spelling lists or shopping lists or journal entries. I’ve changed my handwriting several times over the course of my life, just because I wanted to see different shapes in my letters. Takes a lot of practice to turn it into habit, but if you’re taking handwritten notes, it’s worth it.

Layers are really handy for experimenting, as I said; if you think something might not work, just pop up a new layer and try it on that. You can always merge it down if you like it, or trash it if you don’t.

To capture a lot of thoughts really quickly, just write enough of the word to remind you what it was and you can go finish it later. For instance, if the speaker is giving a list of five things, and she’s going really quickly, just write the first one or two words (or partial words) and leave space to fill in after she’s done with the list. It’s very unsatisfying to miss things because you’re still writing the first few words.

Thanks for asking, and good luck with your foray into visual practice!

…IF the panel is selected. As you know if you are a SXSW veteran, the community has a 30% say in the selection of panels. All you have to do to vote is create an account on SXSW’s PanelPicker, which right there gets you some solid geek cred, and then you can vote for mine or any other panel that you like, whether or not you’re able to go to the conference. (If you can’t go, pick the ones you want to read about afterward, ’cause they will be all over the blogosphere.)

Oh oh oh AND there’s this neat little tool that links your Twitter account to your panel choices. Check it out! It’s called FriendsPanels, and it lets you tag panels you’re on as well as panels you like. It doesn’t automatically “like” panels you vote on (yay), so your votes are still cast in confidence, but you can specifically “like” a panel if you want to call attention to it. Nifty!

Um, what are you still doing here? Go vote for my panel! (Please.)

(Note: In the movie, AirSketch is attributed to “Grayon,” but the company’s name is actually “Qrayon.” My bad.)

How’d I Do That?
I started with a sketch of the outline of my talk:

initial sketch for my talk

While making the outline, I tried four different apps (Adobe Ideas, Qrayon’s AirSketch, Brushes by Taptrix, and Autodesk SketchbookPro). I made a quick, entirely subjective list of pros and cons for each one, using each app to make its own list:

Next, I transcribed my notes using Brushes, which automatically records the strokes as you go. I then sent that file to myself via email, opened it in the Brushes desktop application, and saved it as a Quicktime movie. This became the base content for my how-to video.

While watching the animation play out in Brushes, I recorded the narration using Audacity. I broke it into pieces so that I could match it up more easily with the different sections of the movie. I also filmed myself making the test sketches, using my Flip Mino camera mounted on a mini Gorillapod. Finally, I put all of this into iMovie, which let me split up the video from Brushes, add freeze frames to allow the narration to catch up with the drawing, speed up the drawing as needed to keep pace with the narration, and so on. I threw in a couple of still images and some lovely, Creative Commons-licensed music (Somewhere by Robin Grey), and there you have it.

Here’s the final image from Brushes:

Visual Recording on the iPad (in Brushes)

I used Illustrator to not suck when I drew this

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at Adobe with NMC CEO Larry Johnson. We talked with folks from Adobe’s higher education division, and we saw some really, really cool stuff. One thing that I loved is Adobe Rome (see the video demo of Rome from MAX 2009 last October). Rome is going to be a fantastic tool for K12 mediamaking and collaboration, I think. It makes it easy to pull together different kinds of media along with text and drawings, and then to output the project in different ways. I really want my son to play with it, because I’m curious about how the tool will feel to a young person. It looked very intuitive to me, but then I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator longer than my son’s been alive, so it’s hard to say how a new, inexperienced user would see it. The demo just blew me away because of what could be done with it in schools, if the Big 3 Issues are properly addressed (what does it cost? can I make the kids’ work private? do I need to install and maintain it?). I have high hopes.

We also saw some of the new features coming up in CS5, but I’m not sure which ones have already been revealed so I’ll just say this: Wow. I am so excited about what I saw. Photoshop in particular has some new powerful features that I look forward to playing with, and there are some other treats coming out as well. Keep an eye out for CS5 and Rome!

Point Lobos landscape

At the NMC Summer Conference this year, Larry Johnson, Alan Levine and I tried something different: we actually attended a preconference session. Crazy, I know! It was a photography workshop led by Bill Frakes (Sports Illustrated) and Don Henderson (Apple), with Bill Hanson (Apple). The session was planned and organized by Larry and the three of them, and included a full day walk along the California coast at Point Lobos State Reserve near Carmel, California, followed by a half-day post-production workshop using Aperture.

It was an amazing day. Larry loaned me his Nikon D70 and some killer zoom lenses. I filled up 3 memory cards with the 1,038 pictures I made (the best of which are in a set on Flickr). The whole experience — the scenery, the company, the exploring and learning — was so moving. Partly out of gratitude to Bill F. and Don for leading the workshop, and partly out of reluctance to let go of the experience, I started a Voicethread piece and invited the other participants to comment (please feel free to add your comments, too, if you wish).

In the post-production session, we each selected our five best photos (give or take); the selections were to include one landscape, one flora/fauna/nature shot, one portrait showing emotion, and whatever else we liked. Bill Hanson created a video slideshow of the photos we picked (see the Quicktime version here) that was aired during one of the plenaries at the conference. What a thrill to see them up there on the big screen!

reaching

I spent the morning at Big Rock Ranch, which was once and may still be part of Skywalker Ranch (yes THAT Skywalker Ranch) and which is where GLEF makes its home. Marin County teachers and multimedia enthusiasts gathered to talk about multimedia in Marin’s schools. The event was sponsored by GLEF, the Marin County Office of Education, and the Marin Learning Conservancy.

The program was short — 8:30 to noon — but packed a big punch. Kristina Woolsey kicked it off by telling us all about the Golden Age of Multimedia and specifically the MacMagic Classroom, which started in 1991 at Davidson Middle School, and ran right up until last year. She showed a video of kids in the program that was just amazing: using multimedia in a collaborative environment to create projects that showcased learning and included student reflections on the process and on their own personal development.

Afterward, there was a panel discussion featuring two of the teachers from the 1991 MacMagic classroom (Karla Kelly and Steve Arnold), Kristina Woolsey, Reed School District Superintendent Chris Carter, and 8th grade teacher Anthony Armstrong. We talked about how technology tools can help kids get past learning blockages, and how teachers are really working on the same things now that they were then, although the tools have gotten more diverse and plentiful.

Anthony Armstrong spoke next, and he totally knocked my socks off. This is not to say that Kristina didn’t; I think my socks have been so repeatedly knocked off by Kristina that I just check them at the door when I go to hear her speak. Anthony teaches 8th grade history in Marin and he talked about how he uses Wikispaces in his classes. And he really uses Wikispaces. He knows it inside and out, and he pulls in videos and polls and Wordle diagrams and all kinds of other tools too. His students have to use primary source material that he pulls together and links from the wiki — including texts, videos, images, and everything you can think of — to construct their own understanding of events in United States history. Anthony is very firmly off the stage in his class, and the students are on it. His kids work collaboratively to understand why people made the historical decisions they did, to argue for other options that might have happened, to explain the context of events… they debate and write and record videos… and they do the wiki work as homework. In class, they work in groups using their own pencil-and-paper notes to have conversations about what they have discovered in their research. In short, at the end of his talk, all of us in that room were ready to enroll in his class. I know I was.

When he was done, the panel came up again to talk about how that kind of teaching and learning can happen in more classrooms. Anthony credited colleagues (in particular, Jennifer Carrier Dorman) that he met through their blogs for giving him ideas and helping him along the way, and pointed out that a lot of this work exists, because other teachers have put together things for their classes. He encouraged other teachers to reach out and contact someone whose projects they admire or have questions about.

All in all, it was an amazing morning. I came away with some practical things I can use, too, even though I’m not a teacher: a new angle for Smart Objects, which I’m struggling with for the K-12 Horizon Report right now; ideas for how to work on projects at home with my own son, who is in 3rd grade and not bored by learning, and who won’t ever be if I can help it; and a renewed desire to help public education be something more than what a lot of it is now, instead of just turning my back on it as I am so often tempted to do.

Thanks to all who organized and spoke at the event today. I am so glad to have gone.

These are the voyages of the ed tech speaker. Her continuing mission: to explore strange new presentation tools; to seek out new ways to keep her audiences awake; to boldly go where no PowerPoint has gone before.

I just finished putting together the presentation on the 2009 Horizon Report that I will be delivering tomorrow at Sonoma State University, where they are kind enough to ask me back every year around this time. Last year, I crammed at least 90 minutes of information into about 55 minutes, accompanying my speed talking performance with a respectable, if uninteresting, PowerPoint. Those poor people.

Later in the year, I gave a keynote at the Midwest Library Technology Conference 2008 along with my colleague Alan Levine. Spurred by a mutual desire not to use PowerPoint, we created the presentation in the beta version of VuVox, which was fun but a little frustrating because of a couple of bugs. (You can see that preso here.)

THIS year, what should drop into my lap but Prezi, a Flash-based presentation tool that I can only say is yummy. It’s also in beta, but Alan had a log in and said I could use it. (Thanks, Alan!) So, having prepared the back up PowerPoint just in case (I’m adventuresome, not stupid), I went in and started messing around.

Prezi gives you an endless (well, not really, but near enough) artboard, like Illustrator. There’s a lovable little menu, with a limited (but not really limiting) set of choices, that takes about twenty seconds to get the hang of. You drop your content on the artboard, and move it around; Prezi takes images and videos (flash only), and you can add text blocks. You group the content using “frames,” which helps with navigation. And that’s about all you have to master, except for the underlying concept that scale doesn’t matter.

Prezi will zoom in on objects or content groups when you click them, so your presentation can have a huge range of scales. I LOVED this once I actually got the hang of it. My first instinct was to lay everything out as though I were going to print it as a poster, with only the range of sizes that are visible all at once. But that doesn’t really take advantage of what makes Prezi so interesting. You can nest content areas, so one frame can contain multiple sections that are too small to see at first.

A finished Prezi can be used two ways: either you step through using the forward and back arrows (you set the path as you create the content, so you zoom where you want in the order you want), or you just click frames and objects that interest you. Either way, whenever you go from one thing to something that’s a different scale, Prezi zooms in or out, centers, and tilts whatever you are seeing so that you can read it.

What I really liked:

• It was incredibly easy to make something that looks really good.
• It was fun to use!
• It autosaves. You can save manually too.
• The zebra wheel lets you tilt, size, and move any object just by clicking it.
• The zooming and tilting looks really cool when you step through a presentation.
• Almost everything I wanted to do was do-able, and the stuff that wasn’t, wasn’t really necessary.

What I didn’t like so much:

• I could not find a way to attach a URL to an object. The only way I found was to type out the whole URL, and then that text becomes a link. But I wanted to link pictures and things.
• There are not many design schemes to pick from (yet?). I like the basic one, but I wanted a white background so I could hide the white background on some of my images. I had issues with transparent backgrounds (i.e. they didn’t work).
• I wanted to be able to choose my own set of fonts. You get three per design, which is perfect, but I wanted to change just one of the three in the design I used.
• Although there’s an option to download your presentation so you can play it without the Internet, it doesn’t seem to be working.
• Prezi spawns windows at an alarming rate. When I saved & closed my presentation, there were three Prezi parent windows open. I have no idea where they all came from.

On the whole, I have to say that I like it a lot. I used it for hours and was having fun the whole time. No angry frustration, no puzzled pauses, no “is-it-this-software-or-am-I-just-stupid?” moments. My professional, unbiased opinion is YAY-I-LOVE-PREZI!!

Take a look at the presentation. It’s text heavy, but I did that on purpose so that it can be used without me standing there talking.

You can try Prezi yourself, even without a beta account, by playing with their demo at www.Prezi.com. Go on. It’s fun. And work should be fun.

Now, if my iPhone could only do Flash, I could carry this around with me. I’d be the life of the party!

Back in the mists of time (technologically speaking) I wrote about learning objects, and one of the things I wrote is that learning objects should be designed to make it easy for the creator and others to reuse or repurpose them. This was the conventional wisdom of the day, but I don’t think it holds true any more.

The important thing now is not reusability. The important thing now is customization. It needs to be easy — really, really, ridiculously easy — to create something new. To reverse engineer. To change your mind, customize your message, substitute a different flavor, get the sauce on the side.

Back when I preached reusability, it was hard to make learning objects, and the amount of effort that had to be put into one justified the claim that reusability was desirable. But it needs to not be hard. We need ways that people — and not just geeky people — can decide one afternoon that they want to make a learning object (or call it what you will) and have it ready by dinnertime. It needs to be point-click-drag-click-clickclickclick easy. The tech isn’t there yet, at least not for everyone, but it’s getting very close.

Like Brian’s mashups, these things will have little existing pieces of other things pulled into them. This means the barrier we face isn’t just technological. We need to rethink ideas of ownership, permissions, fair use, and copyright. We need a model that works, so people can grab stuff, make stuff, and share stuff, and assemble it into a learning-object-of-the-moment. These things don’t have to last forever. I want something that responds to my instant need to communicate information by letting me pull words and sounds and clips and pictures and stuff together instantly. Let’s call it the Teachable Moment Authoring System.