Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast season four episode three: Documents, Documents Documents!

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. So some fun stuff. First of all, you and I are both a year older since our last recording Oh, yeah. Happy to you, too. And we both have birthdays in August. So

Brent Warner
August. Yeah. The I don’t think many people would kind of walk around to calling us babies. But yeah,

Tim Van Norman
you know, only our parents. But yeah, so that we talked about last time, the training center, the new training center that we have here at IVC. And I’m starting to see a lot of use, it’s great. It’s cool

Brent Warner
to him, I’ve walked in on you a few times in there, I just kind of swing by and like just kind of either to chat or whatever it is. And like, last few times I’ve been in there, there’s like always someone in there talking to or waiting for you, or whatever it is. And so it’s awesome, because we’ve been talking about that for a long time. And we that was the last episode we got into it. But like, I’m really glad to see that people are just going like, Oh, I’m going to use this I’m going to show up and make it work. So having a physical place and being knowing that you can go in there and just start working. It matters.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So it’s, it’s been great seeing that in use and, and having faculty show up. And staff, in fact are showing up to, to, to just get help or, or to work, awesome record, whatever.

Brent Warner
And that’s a big one to like, let’s not let’s not skip that. Because, you know, I know that some of our staff members recently have like, learned about the show, and they’re like, Oh, we didn’t know the show was going on right? Desiree on campus as like, you know, like, super excited. So it does or if you’re listening hi Desiree! But, but it’s wonderful like to see that, you know, like it’s meant for everybody, right? It’s meant for anyone who needs a little help, who needs a little whatever. And so I like that, too.

Tim Van Norman
Yep, that’s been great. And then you know, we’re still we’re new into that the new Canvas instance, using the trust relationship with Canvas. And we’re gonna go into that in future episodes. But it’s interesting to go from one way of doing things. And now while it should be the same, it’s just a little different, or finding just some creative things going on with that.

Brent Warner
You’re not I think it’s like Tim, it’s kind of like when you look at your, your, like living room in the mirror. And you’re like, I know where everything is, it’s just a little like, it all makes sense. To me it all lines up. But it’s still not quite the same as it is when like when I know what I’m looking at, right? Is that kind of it’s like it’s the same, but it’s not the same. It’s not totally reversed. So I don’t really want to get into that the analogy too much. But it’s that feeling where you’re like, wait, okay, I kind of have to do a little half thinking to figure out where or how something else works in a slightly different way. So yeah, I think we should get into that a little more into the weeds later on. Once we have a few parts cleared up. Absolutely. All right. So we’re going to talk about documents today, we got just documents on the mind. So let’s jump over and and see what we have to say.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So we were talking about topics, and all of a sudden started talking about documents. And one of the things that I see all the time in classes is in Canvas shells in emails all over the place, is different document types that are in use. And so the first part here, we want to talk about is those different types. What are they? And what is what’s good use of them. And then on the second segment, we’re going to talk about how do you decide which document types to actually use, right? Because you shouldn’t just use one document type and your whole class necessarily.

Brent Warner
Oh, yeah, no, for sure. You need to think it through. So let’s start off with this first one first section here. So just these document types, Tim, I think, you know, like none of these will be surprised, like Moo I learned about a new document type today. Like that’s not what we’re really getting into. We just kind of want to understand maybe a little bit about what they’re for and what’s going on. I think what has happened for a lot of teachers is in the rush to get online in the last two years. It’s kind of turned into a scramble for a lot of people it’s like okay, I’ve got it just got to get away to get this digitized somehow right and I’m Maybe not careful thought went into some of the choices that we made. And, and now some of like me, I’m sometimes like regretting I’m like, oh, shoot, like, that was not the way to do that, and then I gotta fix it. And I know that’s gonna take me hours of figuring out a way to present it in a different format. So, so let’s just get started. We don’t totally have a perfect order here. But I think we’ll just start with PDFs.

Tim Van Norman
i Some days, I think that’s the teachers best friend and the students worst enemy. i We see PDFs everywhere. And every type of document gets turned into a PDF. And every type of presentation gets turned into a PDF and, and PDFs blow up like crazy on a lot of Canvas, Canvas shells, which can have good parts, but understand also that as you’re dealing with PDFs, now you do need to deal with accessibility, and other factors. So PDFs are really not editable by most students. Yeah,

Brent Warner
let’s hold on. Let’s let’s pause on this, Tim. Because if you were just to say to someone, like I understand the idea of a document, but what actually, like, a lot of people don’t even think about this, what actually is a PDF? Like, what is it supposed to do for people in your thinking? So if you’re just gonna say like, Hey, the purpose of a PDF is blank, what would you say?

Tim Van Norman
I use a PDF when I have a document, when I have a document that I don’t want anybody to edit. And yet they have, but I want to control how it prints. They have other capabilities. But it’s more along the lines of checkboxes or something short fill in the blank, maybe, but not edit, right? They’re not You’re not gonna go in and change the text. Now, can you do that you can if you have the right tools.

Brent Warner
And it’s not very flexible, right. So like you knew very inflexible, you have those tools, but even still, that’s kind of just like, painting over the top of it in certain ways, and not really, not really interacting with the document, right. And so, so I’m totally with you, like, I think one of the things we might think of as a good use document for a PDF would be like your syllabus, once it’s ready to go. Assuming you’re not doing like the liquid syllabus, hey, like we change things up or whatever. And that’s a whole different pedagogy conversation. But if you’re just like, hey, here’s the standard rules for the class, here’s the contact information, here’s the things none of that’s really going to change that much. PDF is a perfect example. Also, I see teachers doing like, Hey, we’ve got this story, you know, whatever. Hopefully, it’s public domain or accessible, right? But it’s, you know, Hey, there, here’s the story. This is a PDF, you don’t necessarily need to do anything with it except to read it. Right. Right. So So those would be the cases, I get a little anxious when I see teachers putting in like, Okay, I’m going to have my students start really interacting with this PDF, and like they’re going to, you know, they’re going to do this and this, and we’ll talk about use cases again, later on, but like, but I’m like, my first thought is always like, is, is PDF, really the choice that you want for some interactive work?

Tim Van Norman
Especially because PDF on many computers is read only? There’s not much they can do. They don’t have, they’re not spending the money to buy Adobe, right? So just be careful. Would you use PDF, because of that? And also, the tendency is to scan something in and put it to PDF? Because isn’t, then can’t be anybody read it? Not really, I don’t know how many times I’ve taken a PDF that looks really good. And I tried to select text out of it. And it’s not selectable, well, that probably also means that nobody has gone through and made it accessible so that somebody who can’t see it, can can have it read to them. Right. Right. And so PDF, you can make them accessible, but it takes a lot more work to do that.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and all all the Printers Scanners on campus have the button right? Oh, send email to me as a PDF, right. So I’ve got this document. Maybe so something I’ve been using this this paper for 15 years, I’ve been copying it over and over again. And now I want to turn it in, and you get that scratchy copy version and then you click on the the OCR button, which means optical character recognition, which is supposed to convert or recognize what the letters are saying, and then translate and then make it copyable. But as I think anyone listening has had the experience, it’s like All of the sudden the you know, the C’s are becoming O’s. And the lines are splitting in weird places and all those types of things. So, so yes, there are some places where you can definitely use PDFs in order, they can be useful. I really do caution people to be careful about like, copying from an old paper document and turning that and just trying to scan it and turn it into a PDF that can be problematic.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And in fact, what I find fascinating is when somebody will print something out of Word, and then make a copy of it on the copy machine are and scan that in, people do that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, so going to the next document type word. Okay, and by the way, word, and Google docs are kind of, we can put those lump those two together in this part of the conversation in the later part will separate them completely. But basically, if you have a document that can be edited, if you’ve got a worksheet, if you’ve got something that you want the students to interact with, word is a great place to put that, or Google Doc. All computers have at least a lite version of Word. Now, yeah, Google Docs can actually read Word files, Google as if they’ve got a Google account. That’ll work there, too. It’ll at least get them some, somewhere along the lines of being able to work with it without creating a lot of extra hassle for them.

Brent Warner
Yeah, so what I like to say is like, this is great for when you’re really doing interactive, right? Hey, that’s, you can have the directions on the document. And then you can put in a, you know, in a box, or just a line underneath the question, then the students can write as long as they want. And the next question number two will still be underneath that right and so with, with a PDF, like the students have to shrink the text and make it fit, all weird, and all those types of things. And if they have expansive ideas, they don’t have the room for it. Whereas with Word or with Google Docs, you just kind of keep talking, typing or writing your ideas in there. And you can kind of plug it in and make it work. Right. Absolutely. That’s really the nice thing. Although, you know, obviously, you know, everybody who listens to the show knows that I’m the Google person. And so so just to kind of point out part of the reason for that conversation. And I think this is still true, although word is felt a little bit better. But word has, essentially is bloatware right, which is like that, that means like, it’s been built on top of itself for so many years, right? That, like it’s got all these amazing functions that like 0.03% of the population really need and like, and so it’s like, so you get like loaded down with all of this extra stuff, right? And that’s where that’s where my is like, Hey, stay away from that, for me, Google Docs works, because it’s just like, hey, it’s light. It’s simple. For the vast majority of things, it’s going to cover all of your general needs, right? You don’t need to get too fancy with it, all of those types of things. And so there are some power word users who can do amazing things that Google Docs users cannot you do, right? And

Tim Van Norman
it will just cannot Google Docs doesn’t have some of those capabilities. But as you said, power user.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And so it’s like, you know, like, I’m a pretty techie guy. And like, I would, I would not use those things. Right? Like, it’s just like, Okay, it’s, it’s, that’s the thing. That’s interesting. But But yeah, for the vast majority, and so this is where I get concerned about these words, word thing, that concern but like, whatever. It’s just like, okay, really, like, we have to do all this stuff in word when it could be Google Docs. And so we’ll talk about this. This will this will also link into the second part of the conversation, but the, you know, what? Still, Tim, I’m just gonna say, when people send me Word documents and emails. To me, it’s like, are you living in the

Tim Van Norman
check your email I sent you today. I use word all the time. I prefer word when I’m working on something. I like Google Docs when I’m going to share it. But I do prefer working in Word Excel. I’m much more comfortable. And the majority of my docs are offline. Yeah. So so this demonstrates exactly why we work together on these things is because there are reasons for each so don’t don’t feel like oh, well, I need to get rid of word because Brent said so. Oh, yeah. And I mean, there’s reasons for as much as they do. Yeah, I’m not on that kid that camp. But I love Google doc Sue, so it’s not like, you know,

Brent Warner
it’s working together. Well, we joke about this type of stuff, like the contrast between our approaches to these types of things. But I think that does work because it gives people around a choice and say like, Well hold on a second, let me actually think about what I’m trying to do. And does that make sense for my workflow? And for my choices, right, which dot which, you know, which of these two choices is the better choice? Or if you’re like, you know, if you’re really crazy, you could go into, like, open office or something. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So there are options out there. But it’s really about being thoughtful and kind of thinking through, am I using these choices? Because it’s something that I’ve always used? And that makes sense, or is it something that I’ve always used, and therefore, like I and I just haven’t thought about it otherwise, right? Like, there’s different parts to all of those. And so again, I think we always just want to encourage people to think about their use case individually,

Tim Van Norman
always. And that leads us to the next to PowerPoint and Google Slides, same guy, same part of that conversation. But PowerPoint, if you’re doing it in a PowerPoint, there’s a couple and Google Slides has the same capability. You can export it to PDF, if you really need to, right. And sometimes, that’s actually a really good idea. So instead of giving them a PowerPoint, give your students a PDF, that’s page by page exactly what’s on your PowerPoint. The other thing that you can do, I don’t recommend it. But I’m letting you know you can, is in PowerPoint, for instance, you can record your voice, and it ties it to the slide. That’s really powerful. But it creates a really huge file. However, you can record your PowerPoints with the audio, and then export it to mp4 and make it as a which is a really nice thing to do. And here’s why. When you decide you need to edit a slide, you can delete one slide, you delete all of the audio with that slide at the same time. So you can just replace just that section that you want. If you do that in PowerPoint, not in the mp4, you have to re export it to mp4. But it can be really powerful tool, if you want to do it that

Brent Warner
way. Yeah, yeah. And so again, I’m just gonna point out that’s kind of like power user stuff, right. And so, so there are some teachers who are doing like, hey, like, I’m gonna have my flipped classes like this is I’m gonna set it up, and then it’s gonna be ready to go. And then I’ll export it to mp4, upload it, and then that’ll be what my students are gonna see. And it’s like, okay, that’s gonna be a pretty cool and powerful setup there. But it’s total power user stuff, right? Like, it’s like, Hey, you gotta get yourself set up, it takes a lot of time to prepare for, you’re gonna kind of, you know, script out all of these things, whatever it is, right? So that’s cool. For sure. And if you’re, if you’re wanting to get into it, like that is a PowerPoint thing, right? With slides, like it’s little lighter, same, same conversation is with Docs, but like, my god, how easy it is to share slides. Right? Right. And so like, as soon as I’m doing slides, it’s like, hey, click, it’s available, it’s visible for everybody. thing I love about and you could do this with Office 365 on or online or whatever, whichever version is called. But like with slides, so I can embed a slides into my canvas, for example. And then I can don’t have to go back into Canvas, I can just go update the slides, right. And the students will see that updated version. It’s super simple, super quick, easy to access. And so, again, same type of deal. Are you trying to make some sort of robust thing? That’s part of the bigger plan? Are you doing things on the fly? I would suggest if you really well planned out, maybe stick with PowerPoint. And if you’ve got some real powerful and cool things that you’re trying to do, you know, Google Slides still does not do Tim is that track animation path, which I love in PowerPoint, like you can do that little, like make the little thing follow a loop or whatever it is, which, which could, you know, attract attention in certain ways. Slides does have its own types of animations, but I don’t think it still has that one. So anyway, it’s again, different different use cases slightly. For me, always, it’s going to be Google Slides. Because it’s light, it’s, I can use it on the fly, I can make quick changes to it. I don’t have to go and download any program for it. And I’m never really worried about it. And I always have access wherever I want to go. All of those things make it a strong, strong choice for me.

Tim Van Norman
Makes sense. Alright, so the next one. Hold on second. I added one in here. Oh, you did Canvas page. Ah, okay. Okay. So there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of reasons for this that are suggesting instead of using a PDF, if you’re just going to give content to students do Canvas pages instead. When it comes to accessibility Canvas pages are it’s a lot easier to make accessible when it comes to a lot of different things. Um, Canvas pages works very well for that. So do think about that as an option. Just like I said, I threw this in real quick in our notes. But definitely, it can be a really good option for you, if you’re using Canvas, all the rest of the stuff. We’re not talking about tied to Canvas. But in this case, I wanted to add that one. And

Brent Warner
so I have a question for you, Tim, I just want to throw this out. Because I think this comes up every once in a while is like, here’s the reality. Okay, Canvas is our platform right now. But in 10 years, that might not be right, right. So if I spend all this time building in Canvas, and then I’m going to lose that in 10 years, and again, I know that kind of the time, you can make arguments like it’s 10 years from now, you should be doing different stuff anyways, but but let’s just let’s just kind of imagine, oh, shoot next year, we’re changing again, right? And I have all this stuff that I still use, what’s your, what’s your thought on that just because like, I kind of have different feelings about it. I’m just interested what you think about it.

Tim Van Norman
So one of the really cool things is that all modern learning management systems can basically pull from all modern learning management systems. So like when we moved from Blackboard to Canvas, you could export your Blackboard course, and import it into Canvas. And it pulled all the slides all of the documents all of the and tried to pull all the links and everything else. Now, you still had to run through it and make sure it was all there. But you have to do that even if you’re copying semester, this semester in Canvas.

Brent Warner
So you so ultimately, it’s not a very realistic concern or fear for people.

Tim Van Norman
There’s always something that doesn’t go through properly. Their goal is to make that as zero as you know, as little zero issues as possible. Because they, whoever it is that you’re going to wants you to move over. So they’re going to make it really easy. So if you go for instance, into Canvas, and you do an import, and you look at the different options, you’ve got quiz types, you’ve got Blackboard, you’ve got a whole lot of different options already built in. So I don’t think that’s going to be a big problem. Okay, but I think I’m glad you asked the question, because I think a lot of people ask that question. Yeah, for sure. And whether they physically do or not, yes.

Brent Warner
Okay, so I don’t have my drumroll sound effects ready, but I’m just gonna tap on the microphone for this last document type, which is so ridiculous. Alright, what is it?

Tim Van Norman
jpg? Oh, my God, JPEG, PNG, Tiff. You name it. The reason we added this in as a document type, I actually requested it you didn’t you question whether I should or not, but ultimately agreed. We do see this happen a lot. And by the way, this could be students, this can be faculty, this can be all kinds of things. How many times have you seen somebody take a picture with their cell phone and upload it and that’s their document for whatever. And by the way, that is a very useful thing. If you do online tests that you want them to write, they can then take a picture of that with their cell phone and upload it. So it can be useful. Yeah. I understand. We talked about accessibility, we talked about copying text we talked about you name it in a there.

Brent Warner
Yeah, do not consider image file type. So jpg, png, Tiff, Tiff, GIF, whatever. And now all the new ones web P. And he he I see. I’m with you there. Those are awful. But But anyways, these image files like please, you know, if you’re, if it’s a photograph, and you’re uploading a photograph for a reason on your site, wonderful, but please don’t use these as like document types. They are not designed for that. And so please think that through even if I’d rather have an ugly PDF than a JPEG sent to me as an image so, so yeah, I’m 100% there with you. You know, please be careful if you’re, you know, students for sure. And actually in Canvas, there is an option like upload a JPG, right? And so I’ve used that in the past where it’s like, I’m not really going to be like getting on to that document. I just want to see that you did the work. So take a picture, upload it, that’s totally fine. Right. But, you know, I would very strongly recommend against using JPEGs as any other like, actual document for your for your coursework, so just absolutely love. So those are the types we’ll jump over to the Zippy dip. Alright, Tim, so I have a kind of related Zippy tip it is PDF candy.com I actually, I wrote an article recently for T solar a blog for Teasle called Three better ways to work with PDFs and PDF candy.com bomb is just a kind of a cool way to interact and convert and organize PDFs quickly. So if you’re going back to that PDF conversation like we were having before, hey, I need to compress this or I need to convert it to Word or I need to convert, convert this Excel to PDF or, or, Hey, I’ve got a JPEG, but I guess I now I should turn it into a PDF. So you can do all these things, you can rearrange pages, all of this is free, if you’re using it, you know, kind of sparingly once a day, or you know, like, you’re just kind of trying to do a one off thing, it’s really great. If you’re gonna use it heavily, they do have a use thing, but I think it’s like you can use it once or twice free per hour. So I’ve never paid for it. PDF candy.com For all your PDF needs.

Tim Van Norman
So now let’s talk about let’s go to that second part of the conversation that we were talking about. How do you decide on which document type to use? In which case, as I mentioned before, I don’t think you should only use one type of document in your course? Absolutely not. There’s a lot of different reasons. And you know, there’s that old saying to, to a man with a hammer, everything’s a nail. So, sometimes you need a screwdriver, sometimes you need a wrench, and sometimes you need a hammer. So think about that, as you’re looking at it. And part of it for me is what are your expectations of your students? What do you want them to do with this document? Because presumably, there’s a reason you’re giving them the document. So thinking about that can actually help you choose which type of document to use.

Brent Warner
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So what are these types of expectations? Let’s it let’s just work through a couple of them.

Tim Van Norman
So do you want them just to print it or just to read it? That’s it. Not filling out anything, all it is is just them consuming it? And that’s it. PDF works great for that? Sure. Maybe even a PowerPoint or something like that, that works really well. Now, you can also do print it out and write on it. And then they’re going to save it, they’re going to upload it someplace something take a picture of it physically handwriting, how often do you actually want your students to handwrite? Probably not very often, not in today’s world. And so thinking about that, that may limit your ability to do PDFs,

Brent Warner
although it will say like, Okay, so let’s kind of think this through, right, because before I said, like that little complaint about like on a PDF, you can’t really expand the size of the writing or whatever else it is. But it also might be the case that you want to have a limited size box that students are going to be writing in, because you’re like, hey, I don’t want you to go crazy. Or I want you to to figure out how to present your idea succinctly. Right. And so in that case, you might even say like, I want that actually, as a PDF, I want it printed, I want you to write on it directly. Or I even want you to do like the the textbox in the PDF thing. But I want it to be this size. And I don’t want you know, I can’t read 50 students, five paragraphs, I can read 50 students two sentences, right. And so like my time for grading this right now, or whatever it is so. So those are certainly things to think through and try to figure out this.

Tim Van Norman
And also consider what if you need it portable. So I will print things off, if I need to take it someplace, and I’ve got a clipboard or, or something and I just need to write on it really quick. That’s perfect. PDF is great for that. And by the way, part of why I like PDF is because it’s formatted. It’s not just the string of of text or anything, you put it the way you want it, you put the image where you want it and it stays there, versus some of these others if you if the student does something changes, a font does anything to it, which they can do that will change the look and the feel. So PDF gives you control.

Brent Warner
There was a GIF recently or like some sort of meme online. It’s like anytime, every time I move in an image in my Word document and it was a one of those Rube Goldberg devices with like all the all the dominoes and like millions of everything’s just moving all over the place as soon as you move it like a quarter of an inch to the left. So yeah, so that doesn’t happen on PDFs. It does happen on Word documents. Exactly. All right, what else we got? What are some other things.

Tim Van Norman
So let’s think about if you want them to fill out a worksheet. So this could be a Word document works well for it. But also a Google doc will will will work very well for it. Especially if you happen to make a mistake. You can correct it on the Google Doc, as you mentioned before, really easy, but if they’re filling out something it gives you what you were talking about before where that you can create extra space for them to work. And maybe you want them to add a picture or something like that this is perfect for that filling out a worksheet type of concept. Word, or, or Google doc really does a great job.

Brent Warner
also point out that like, one little trick that I’ve learned over time is, when you’re making, for example, a Google Doc, and you’re sharing that with your students, when you have when you put into it as you’re creating it a certain amount of space, like after a question, the students kind of get a feeling that that is how much I should be responding at the same time, right? And so that’s a kind of a cool thing to be able to do, because you can kind of shrink it down to like one line. And they’re like, Okay, I’m just gonna give you a short answer. Or you can expand it out to like, you know, half a page, and they’re like, Okay, I’m gonna give you a longer answer here. And you don’t necessarily have to clarify it, but even just kind of subconsciously, like, they recognize that oh, okay, hold on, I this is a more thoughtful thing, I need to fill it out more, this is less, I can do a kind of a short, you know, a knowledge dump on this quick thing. And, and so your ability to be flexible with that gives you a lot of options for how you’re designing the of the work for your students to do as well. And Tim, that leads nicely into annotations. So annotations are, you know, obviously, we do all sorts of different things for annotations, I actually tend to use them for in Google Docs. So I’ll have students clicking on the plus button on the side, right. So highlight something, click on the plus button, leave a comment, right. But also, you can also use a suggesting mode for annotations. If you’re using something like Google Docs or Word, you can kind of put those inside of there. Or you can leave notes over on the side. But I want to kind of add in my kind of, you know, where I really think there’s a great use that I kind of miss in it is with back going back to PDFs for annotating. I do not love. I do not by any means love Acrobat, or the Adobe options for for annotating. But there is a cool tool out there called Kami, K M, I should be pronounced kami. But they pronounce it kami. And what that does is it gives you a really it’s a web based on so when you upload a PDF to it, it gives you a really easy way to interact with documents, and you can kind of scribble all over them. So I like the idea like you can kind of link ideas together with lines and drawing easily that you can’t do on Word, you can’t do that on Google Docs. But you could just draw a line to connect different ideas, or choose kind of the matching colors inside of there. Or if you’re like a, you know, if you’re a biology teacher and say, Hey, draw cell, you know, like, what is what is the what is the cell actually look like? And then, and then the student can actually go in there and draw some pretty nice drawings in there with with a tool like Comey. And so those are some real options for annotations. There’s actually we’ve talked a bit about annotating in the past but but those those are some of the things that you might want to think about is like, what are the goals of the annotations? Is it leaving notes on the side? Is it to really interact on top of this document and work with it? Or is it like, add little bits inside and so so there might be who uses for one versus the other. And my classes are very text heavy and writing heavy. And so it’s great for them just to go leave comments on the side and kind of link back those ideas together. But again, what do you want your students to do? What are you trying to do with this document? That’s the part to think about?

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. And as we continue with that, let’s take a look at multimedia. Now you can add multimedia to a Word document. You can add multimedia to a Google Doc, I don’t suggest it but you can. Where that fits in a lot better, I think is PowerPoint and Google Slides. They’re much more designed for handling that. And and they do a really nice job of putting it in context and outlining it and setting things up so that it works together well. And more of a presentation type of system, which realistically, that’s normal. If you’re going to be doing multimedia, you’re often going to be doing it as a present presentation or that they’re going to be moving through. And so us setting it up giving your students or asking your students for a PowerPoint or a Google slide often is a better way of presenting that multimedia. Yeah,

Brent Warner
yeah. I think there’s a lot of choices there. For people who are paying attention. I mean, I think with people who are doing multimedia stuff, hopefully they’re kind of already leaning towards those choices. But again, you know, I think there’s a lot of teachers that are like haven’t thought about like, oh, maybe I can have multimedia assignments, right? And then it’s like okay, well Let’s look at let’s look at PowerPoint, let’s look at slides as options here to make those work well. So something I would definitely encourage a little exploration on.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And along those lines, I love the concept. And you shown me how this works as well. And that is give a slide a set of slides, and everybody works on their own slide. And Google Slides, for instance, this leads us into the next one. So I’m going to tie the two together, when they create a slide, they can put multimedia on it really easily. And the beautiful part is with Google Slides, for instance, you can share one document with the whole class, everybody creates their own slides on that document. And now you have one learn presentation or one long series of images, whatever it is that you’re working on. And it’s shared, everybody’s working on the same thing. And so that leads to the next part, and that is, when you’re sharing with other students, or students or students sharing you sharing with the students, however that goes, unless you’re using OneDrive, you’re probably going to want to be in a Google environment. Yeah, yeah, big time. And if you’re using OneDrive, you’re probably going to want to be in a Google environment.

Brent Warner
But thank you, Tim, I appreciate you sharing. I you

Tim Van Norman
know, that said, OneDrive has gotten a lot better, especially with Office 365, it does a really nice job of sharing documents. If everybody is on the same system, it’s when they’re not that it sometimes gets a little bit goofy. But I’ve never argued OneDrive was a better product than the Google stuff. So

Brent Warner
especially goes back, like big time. And again, kind of talking getting to this idea of you’re sharing that thing out. So this kind of goes to my kind of joke and complaint before is like, you don’t want to send a like, you don’t want to send a PowerPoint to your students by email, and then have them do something and then send it back to you. And then you have to collect from 30 Different students at like 30, different PowerPoints, and then pull them all together into an individual one that you can then bring into, it’s like, Oh, my God, that is, it wouldn’t even be worth doing really like it’d be just like, skip that entire thing. But with Google with Google Slides, you can just click on the button, say, okay, everybody’s gonna jump in here. Everybody’s gonna do their part. And then instantly, when any when the last student is done, the whole thing is done. Right. And so that option for the online collaborative work is it’s still under utilized, I think, Oh, yeah. And not really recognized as much as it should be. You know, heavy power power. Google users are do that all the time. But I see a lot of teachers that are like, How can I collect all these different works all together into one thing? It’s like, here’s the answer. Do it. Do it in the Google Slides. It’s outstanding. Yeah. Absolutely. And then any anything else to think about? For those as we’re choosing our document types?

Tim Van Norman
Yes. Do you want the student to hand something in multiple times? So what am I talking about? So they do a Word document, they hand it in? And now you want them to have for an essay, for instance. So they hand in a rough draft. Now they hand in a second rough draft. And now a final copy. Pay attention to that? Would it be better to do it as a Google Doc or a Word document, you sure don’t want to do it as PDF. Because any document anything you put on there any comments you put on there, or any comments, any changes they make, they have to redo everything. So having them handed in as a Google document or handed in as a Word document, you giving them the word document or Google document to work on those types of things just in all of this. What are you trying to accomplish? And what are you trying to teach your students and then pick the tool that’s going to work right for that,

Brent Warner
right. All right. So I’ll point out just again, because I use Google Docs so much, they have a version history option. So you can just click on a button and you can see all the version histories. And then you can have students actually name the version histories individually. So they can say, hey, this is the one that I submitted on, you know, September 1, right? And so, and then that, and then I can just go in and click on that. And I can compare it to the updated version of the same document. So I don’t ever deal with versions. It’s all one document. And then I can just go back in and look at the previous, the previous work that they had done, and that that just is a lifesaver. It’s changed. I mean, I’ve been doing this for years now, but it’s changed the way that I interact with and have to think about and maintaining documents and all of those things. Have something so, so big time worth thinking about and worth playing around with.

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

Brent Warner
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, there is a link on that page where you can give us your topic ideas

Tim Van Norman
for everyone at IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. Also, if you teach at IVC we’re offering a 10 week online teaching certificate that’s aligned with the OSI rubric starts on September 9. And the first session will be Fridays, September 16 at noon, and it is both in person and online and going for 10 weeks, so be done before Thanksgiving. So we’re looking forward to having people there. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by the new IVC Training Center in a 322 and our contact me Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you’d like to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody