Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech Podcast, Season Three episode 20: Wrapping up the Season

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us today. So end of the semester, end of the season, no, anything new happening for you, or just finals?

Brent Warner
Just finals mostly? You know it? Well, that’s not totally true. We’re trying to do a little. Remember, Tim, last year, we did that summer send off, which was a pretty, pretty good PD event on campus. And this year, we’re doing a small version of that, just as we wrap everything up. So if anybody’s interested on campus, reach out and reach out to me and I’ll, I’ll get you set up with the information on it. But yeah, other than that, we’re just wrapping up, we’re gonna have our first commencement in person in a few years. So that’s nice to see people again, and all that. But oh, and then the final thing I think, for us, Tim, is we, we’ve kind of had a little mess ups with all of our seasons, and we haven’t quite gotten the numbers exactly right. And this year, we planned to have 20 episodes for the year. So 10 and 10. And, and guess what we lived up to our plans. So that’s kind of nice. It is absolutely. So I like the 20 number and then taking the summer off, I think that’s kind of a a good way for us to work it. This is not planned out yet, but I’m just gonna throw it out to you, which is possibly, we might do some rerun episodes in the summer, I’m thinking about running nice just to like, you know, throw them back in. But we’re gonna kind of talk about that with today’s today’s topics, which is very light. And we’re going to keep things fairly short for for the goodbye episode because other people got to great papers and work. All the things that they need to do. So let’s jump into it.

All right. So Tim, four of you know, for the final episode, we kind of thought we’d do like a little commercial, I guess. It’s a, you know, end of semester, let’s bring this back to school terms, right? A study session, a review study sessions, right? What did we cover in the year what was important? And, you know, we know that not everybody can listen to every episode. And so sometimes people miss things, or you know, whatever else happens. And so we thought, we might just briefly kind of say, Hey, this is what happened in a number of episodes. And so if you’re interested, during the summer to jump back into things, and listen and check some of these things out, we think that they’re still useful. And so, so it’s just kind of a, hey, we talked about this. And so as you listen, you might go, Okay, I want to check that out. And they’re all quite easy to find on the website, too. You know, all you have to do is just search for the keywords that we’re saying, and you’ll be able to figure them out. So. So Tim, why don’t you guide us through some of the things that we did over the last year?

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So let’s start with interviews. We had four different interviews. First one with Dr. John Hernandez, the president here at Irvine Valley College, just as he was completing his first year. And so we talked about his goals for what he wanted to accomplish and his passion for equity. It was a pattern what that meant. It was an incredible episode, I heard lots of people came up to me and talked about that episode, specifically, which I don’t usually have people do that, you know, as I’m walking down the hall, especially when there weren’t that many people on campus.

Brent Warner
That was great. That one I remember at the end, we sat there and like, after after he logged off, you and I are like wow, that was like that was you know, we kind of had a process. So yeah, it was really, really great episode.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And then, in September, we talked to Nick Wilkening, the IT Director of IT for for Irvine Valley College and he talked about different changes in technology that people would be seeing as they’re coming back. And we’ve seen a lot of that happening. Because people have been coming back now for six months. And still some people aren’t back on campus yet. So it’s there’s going to be a lot of changes for people. And there there were at the time as well. So that was a good episode that way too.

Brent Warner
Oh, big time. And you know what, Tim this – today was my first time using the printers on campus (laughter).

Tim Van Norman
which is one of the things he talked about I

Brent Warner
finally finally, you know, I obviously don’t use printers very often. But when I finally goes like, okay, here, I need a moment to get this going. And we will have Nick back. I think, you know, that was also kind of one of the things we talked about was just like once a year, at least maybe even twice a year, sometimes having him back on to just kind of talk us through because sometimes there’s this major, major tech updates going on. So

Tim Van Norman
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And then I believe it was in November, we talked to Ruben Guzman, and that one, I talked to a lot of people afterwards, they were like, that was a really good episode. But I didn’t think you’d cover that because we covered FERPA. Yeah. And you wouldn’t typically go Oh, technology and FERPA. But it really opened my eyes. Yeah. You know, I thought I understood a lot more than I did.

Brent Warner
Yeah, it worked really well. And again, like, it’s one of those things where you’re like, I felt like before going in and like for every time it’s just kind of a pain. But he made it really interesting. And he made it like connect with with a lot of purpose. So yeah. Ruben Guzman was great.

Tim Van Norman
Yep. And then the last one we did just to start off this year. First episode in January, was Dr. McDonald, our Vice President of Instruction at the time (laughter). And he talked about decision making and how he was looking at what return to school would look like, and stuff like that. And, again, that was a really informative episode. We I think we did some really good interviews this year.

Brent Warner
I think so too. Yeah. And we laugh. For those who are not in the school or in the district, Dr. McDonald, just he got a promotion. So it’s not, you know, nothing got happened. And he didn’t disappear. He’s, he’s now at the district level. And so it’s great for him so and good for all of us too, ultimately it’s

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I do agree, though. There were a lot of great interviews. And I think we’ll, you know, our goal next year is to try and get some more like some semi semi regular, a little bit more on interviews over the course of the year.

Tim Van Norman
Yep. Absolutely. Then, of course, we talked about tools. We always try to but I was surprised at how few tools we actually came up with by name, like we talked about, specifically, yes, we we talked about topics, right. And we’ll get into that in a little bit. But we talked about OneNote. And teams Padlet, specifically, and of course, zoom and Canvas. We talked about some of those very specifically. But zoom, for instance, came out with whiteboard with several different things. Yes, they’ve had whiteboard, but some enhancements that just were amazing. And stuff like that happened this year, Zoom apps came out this year, there’s just a lot of different things that were associated with that. So it was not as many tools as we’ve had in the past.

Brent Warner
Yeah, but you have it on the list. I’m like, Oh, really, that’s all we like, as a single singular focus, we didn’t really do that much. Definitely, we talked about lots of tools in support of bigger conversations. Right. But But yeah, that’s interesting. So one note and teams. And then I’m going to add that one that I want to add early on in next semester is Microsoft has this one now called speaking coach or something like that. Have you seen that? Tim, it’s like, you work it together with PowerPoint. And then what it does is it actually uses AI stuff to kind of give you hints on the quality of your presentation skills. Interesting. So we’ll we’ll have to dig into it over the summer, and then kind of talk about it more, but there I can’t remember if what it’s exactly called, but there’s something going on with Microsoft. So worth looking into anyways.

Tim Van Norman
I haven’t heard about that in stages. So the next next part was topics. And there we covered a lot more topics and stuff like that, which that’s actually kind of what we tried to do a lot is is the topical things. So changes in specific tools, specifically canvas and zoom. But there were some other things that we did as well, just things that got updated this year. And that will always be part of what we do is talk about upgrades and changes that way. Another thing we talked about was recording tutorials. And it’s where we’re recording steps, things trying to make things quick for our students so that they can see how to do things quickly and efficiently. You know, like 30 seconds, not having to spend a whole five In a video learning how to do something, especially if it’s, oh, here’s how you log into Canvas, right? You know, can you do it really fast and get that to the students and different tools that can do that. So I thought that was a good topic as well, to keep us keeping it short and simple, because I think we a lot of times lose students by making it long.

Brent Warner
And I think we’ve got a lot more to kind of learn as teachers. And I think there’s a lot more tools like this coming out as well. We’ll see moving forward too. So. Yeah, great. Okay. We also talked about teaching options. So some of the things there. We talked about being synchronous. We talked about being asynchronous, we talked about in person lecture capture, right? The two, we talked about the HyFlex model, Tim? I can’t even remember I always block it out of my head (laughter).

Tim Van Norman
Shortly, as part of those conversations, yes, but not as, yes. As part of the conversation.

Brent Warner
Just briefly. Like, as you know, I am not a fan of that as a as a teaching tool. I like it for other purposes. But But yeah, okay, so that’s great. We also talked, I think, we talked about this every time setting up courses, new semesters, closing down the old semesters. You know, I think that one’s important that we come back to it, because it’s like you forget, right? It’s like, oh, I only do this twice a year. Right? Exactly. I only do it for that like 30 minutes to an hour, once in the once in the you know, late winter and once in the early summer, and then that’s an or mid summer, and then you’re kind of off to go right. So. So I do think that’s a valuable one. But if you’re, if you’re still running behind that, as you’re listening to this, you can go back and check those ones out as well.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And we talked about cleaning up clutter, from our desktop, email, Canvas, what to clean what not to clean, what doesn’t matter. I think many of us, I’m including myself in the US, I would almost say all but I’ve come across one or two people that don’t are hoarders of digital stuff.

Brent Warner
Digital hoarders. Yeah. I’m staring at my desktop right now just covered with icons (laughter).

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, exactly. As I look at my laptop, and I’m done, I need a new laptop. But do I dare? How much of this do I need? And all that? Exactly? Yeah. So an email, you know, how many people have 10,000 emails in their inbox?

Brent Warner
Well, that’s, that’s just today from from IVC. So we talked about some technology trends, you know, obviously, like that’s part, you know, key for the show, we just want to see like, what’s going on? What are people doing? What are people trying out those as part of the conversations, but then we flipped it right around and talked about whiteboards, and lots lots of different options with whiteboards. And I’m really like, as you know, Tim, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing is just like very, let’s get these whiteboards everywhere. And so we talked a lot about we talked about the 360, whiteboard rooms, all of those types of things as well.

Tim Van Norman
II glass and stuff like that all of those types of Yep. And then, just in our last episode, we talked about options to different types of exams. Rather than rather than having proctored exams online, what other things could you do? We’re not negating proctored exams, but trying to broaden horizons and think about other opportunities and other possibilities. Can you do it in another way? option? So you’re out there? Right. And as always, we talked about classroom tech, since that’s what the show is about. We I was surprised at how often we talked about other things that wouldn’t necessarily be considered tech. But we we spent a lot of time as we should on technology. Yeah.

Brent Warner
And we also did a good good one the on like physical hardware tech, which I think we should probably bring up a little bit more often too. So. Yeah, so that’s just an overview if any of those stood out to you, if you have favorite episodes that you’d like to share with back with us, let us know because we’re always looking for you know, just feedback on what’s working for you what’s valuable for everybody. And, you know, we’ll we’ll see what can guide us with our choices as we as we talk in in the next school year as well. Okay, Tim, so I have a very quick Zippy tip it’s tango, and it’s at Tango dot U S. We talked about the recording to to your tutorials earlier and we talked about IO rad this is kind of like a competitor for that. So if you want something that you can just quickly click and you know, show somebody the steps for some thing, and you click, click, click whatever you’re supposed to do. And then you just, it records it for you. And it turns it into basically a PDF. And it says, hey, here are the steps that you need to do in order to complete this thing, right? And so it automates all of that. I Arad kind of does that too. But I read a little bit more in depth, because you can actually physically follow the clicks through and type things in as you’re doing it. Whereas Tango is a little bit more simple. And I think Tango is gonna keep on building, it’s got a little bit of a wave going behind it right now. But basically, if you’re looking for a quick and simple way to make, just click through documents, click through you just do it, and then it turns it into a tutorial on a PDF for you tango.us might be an option for you.

Tim Van Norman
So oh,

Brent Warner
well, Tim, I’m gonna go first, I’m going to ask you! Instead of you talking about yourself, I’ll ask you. So we’re just briefly as we’re wrapping up summer plans, we’ll keep this short. But you know, since we’re not going to be here, and you know, this is the last time we’ll hear each other’s voices for a while. What are you going to be up to for summer?

Tim Van Norman
Well, the first one, not surprisingly, as I am working all summer, we have some big updates coming into Canvas at the end of this month. For us, this isn’t Canvas updates, this is IVC is making some changes. And I’ll be installing and working with some brand new LTIs: Circle in, Pear Deck. Other tools as well that are coming in, and that’s that alone would take care of my summer, but then I’m preparing for flex week. So Professional Development Week. During flex, I cut it down. Hopefully it’s only about four. Okay? Plus all the ones that I’m help being with somebody else. So I don’t know for sure I refuse to count.

Brent Warner
But the week before that’ll be fine.

Tim Van Norman
Well, once I start putting them on my calendar as the exact dates, that’s when I’ll dates and times. That’s what I’ll know. But then I’m also this summer, the online teaching conference is in person, June 28 29. And July 1, or 29th 30th 29th 30th. And July 1, that’s what it is. And it’s in Long Beach. So looking forward to that. Instructure Con is online. For North America. It is on July 14. So I signed up for that this week. And I’m really hoping to get a week’s vacation. But I’m not planning on it yet. Yeah. So.

Brent Warner
So we keep up for you. Well, just we got the online teaching conference in person and instructor Khan is online. Right? So yes, go figure. A couple things. So for me, for for school related things kind of school related things I am doing I’m not teaching this is my first semester I’m not teaching or my first summer that I’m not teaching since I’ve been working here, which is you know, I need it. I mean, I am you know, I’ve been just tired and so so I’m I am doing some my chair duties department chair. So I’ll be keeping up some of that and kind of, you know, keeping on top of things, so that’ll be fine. And then I’m also presenting at ISTE. So that’s the big ed tech conference that is in New Orleans this summer. So that should be kind of fun to go out to New Orleans and kind of do that whole thing. So I’ll be doing that. But the big thing that I think I’m doing and I’ve been talking about this with a bunch of people, but I’m not totally not 100% Locked in but I’m probably going to be doing this which is I am going to be working as a pool boy this. Oh, nice. Yeah. I just wanted like, I’ve had this kind of dream in my head, like to kind of get out of the academic bubble and just do good old fashion labor. And my friend has a pool cleaning business and I’m like, Hey, can I come clean pools with the summer and he’s like, yeah, come on this like, jump on in and, you know, let’s let’s do it. And so, so I’m thinking, I’m trying to see if this is going to work out a little there’s a few logistical issues but you know, I might just be standing around pools pushing the broom and mixing chemicals and those types of things and standing out in the sun all summer. So that will be a very different thing than teaching classes and I’ve been teaching every semester I’ve been teaching these 10 unit summer school courses, which are pretty intense and so I I am looking forward to you know, I’m, I want to be careful in how I say this. I’m like, I’m looking forward to the meditative process, I guess, of cleaning the pools and just kind of getting Zen with like, some slow physical work. And my friend has warned me that it’s not all fun. And I’ll be careful with that, but, but I am looking forward to just just doing something totally different. So that’s, that’s me.

Tim Van Norman
Excellent. And it is good to get away from what you do all the time and try to do something different. Just watch the sunblock. You’re gonna you’re gonna need it, at least at first

Brent Warner
sunblock. And I’ll have the I got my wide brimmed hat and all of the things I need for keeping myself safer. So yeah. All right. So that’ll be the summer.

Tim Van Norman
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about wrapping up the season. For more information about the show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you’ll find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
And as always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. Or if you have kind of topics or themes that you’ve liked that we’ve covered, let us know there. There’s a link over there where you can shout us out.

Tim Van Norman
For everyone and IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC Technical Support at extension 5696 or by emailing IVC tech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman AT tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Have a good one. Everybody. Have a good summer – a rockin summer! Smell you later!!