Category Archives: Technology

Digital Immigrant as 21st Century Classroom Teacher

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Dave Sanders, Director, Roadmap Innovation – Education & Healthcare @ Ergotron

 

Last month, I had the humbling experience of walking a mile in the shoes of today’s teacher…sort of (I’ll explain the qualifier in a bit).  You see, I was responsible for a session at our annual sales meeting during which I was to train the sales team on our product offering and message for K-12 and Higher Education customers. 

 

And with overzealous confidence, I declared to my peers, “If I’m going to train the team on how our products can serve as the platform for the 21st Century Classroom, I’m going to do it Smart Classroom style”.  Easy enough, I thought. 

 

Wrong!  I had forgotten that I am a Digital Immigrant.

 

I quickly came to appreciate how daunting it can be for a Digital Immigrant Educator to step out of the old school and into a 21st Century Classroom.  

 

Teaching in a Smart Classroom requires all of the usual preparatory effort – what content to be delivered, how to engage and motivate students, etc.  It also introduces a very time-consuming stressor:  how to put a bunch of new technology to productive use without losing the lesson in the process, or worse yet looking just plain foolish? 

 

After all, one of my daughters reminded me a couple of days ago how wide the tech-divide is between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives (Marc Prensky offers up more insight on this divide at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp).

 

I had just sent her a text message containing “u” for you and “fb” for Facebook.  I thought I was both digitally cool and efficient.  Wrong again!  She said, “Only parents shorten words like that.”  I guess kids don’t need to, given their native ability to rifle off one-handed text messages on a cell phone keypad while playing a video game with their free hand.

 

So back to my “class.” The 90-minute agenda included a PowerPoint-supported training presentation, a small group breakout segment to discuss homework enabled by Google documents, some Excel spreadsheet data review, a guest lecture by one of my colleagues on education technology, an awards session facilitated by a document camera (to display the various awards to the whole class), and some mp3 audio content thrown in for spice. 

 

This was all delivered 21st Century Classroom style to about 60 “students” using a convertible tablet pc and the document camera mounted on a powered mobile teaching platform, with wireless KVM technology to throw keyboard, video and mouse action to a projector and screen at the front of the room.  Content was also thrown to two large-format LCD displays on mobile carts at mid- and back-room to ensure view-ability and facilitate collaboration during the breakout segment.

 

Needless to say, I spent a great deal of time preparing for this session, as did an especially tech-savvy colleague who helped make all the technology components talk to each other.  This led me to think of the significant time and energy that teachers must invest in education technology training as they move into a Smart Classroom setting. 

 

In the end, our smart classroom efforts paid off.  Everything worked properly and the session was productive.  This brings me back to the qualifier I made at the top of this post.  I was “teaching” a group of sales professionals – a tough audience in its own right – but undoubtedly not as challenging as connecting with a room full of Digital Natives!

 

As I travel the US this year meeting with K-12 and Higher Education professionals, and our technology integration partners who serve them, you can bet that I will be drawing upon insights gained from this walk in a teacher’s world to help them navigate the technology jungle. 

 

If I don’t find you first, look me up!  

 

What’s the Higher Purpose?

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Suchi Sairam, Vice President, Roadmap Innovation @ Ergotron

 

So, the 2009 CES is now over.  We have all been inundated with the lights and sounds of Las Vegas.  We have all “ooooh”-ed and “ahhhhh”-ed at the new products and gadgets and technology advanced that companies are offering in 2009.  I come out of every CES with mixed feelings – fascinated by what the human mind is able to create with technology, but perplexed at times by why we do it.  Is there a higher purpose to all of this STUFF?

 

Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s President and CEO, offered the “CES Seven” as a part of his keynote address – in summary, they are key obligations for creating great user experience.  Paraphrasing (and hopeful that I have captured the essence of his points), they are 1.) embrace the fusion of industries so products work across them seamlessly, 2.) be multi-functional, 3.) be service-based, 4.) support open technologies/architecture to support customer choice, 5.) create “value chains”, 6.) advance the “shared experience” (e.g. social networking), and 7.) be GREEN.  Pretty straightforward, nothing revolutionary or innovative, so to speak… and yet, that speaks volumes too, that a large conglomerate like Sony has found a simple way to articulate their higher purpose in the overall scheme of doing business.

 

His address made me think about this in a personal context – how do I communicate my company’s higher purpose, helping the world around us experience wellness, productivity and efficiency in their computer and display use?  Did we bring that to CES with passion, and did the people we met with leave with a clear understanding of how it benefits them?

 

I’m able to boil my professional higher purpose down to this: Improving the WAY people work.  Improving the way people FEEL when they work.  Improving how people feel about their PLACE of work.  And continually making it more AFFORDABLE and with minimal environmental impact.  It’s personally inspiring and daunting at the same time, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.  How about you? What’s your company’s higher purpose in the grand scheme of things? Do you agree there is one and if yes, what’s yours?

Why Dell Continues to Use Social Media

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Jeremiah Owyang interviews Bob Pearson (Twitter at bobpdell) Vice President, Communities & Conversations at Dell. Isn’t it fascinating that Jeremiah solicited his questions for his interview from twitter followers.

A few major points from Bob Pearson:

  • Dell is increasing its social media efforts in 2009
  • These efforts are profitable and low cost
  • One effort resulted in over a million dollars in sales
  • But the main focus is to engage customers in conversation

Another thing I found interesting was Bob’s answer to the question, what is the URL to your homepage?

Go ahead and watch it for yourself. You can learn first hand from Dell how they’ve used these tools to increase revenues and reduce costs. Well worth the couple of minutes:

Why Dell Continues to Use Social Media

Steve Olson – Technical Manager, Ergotron, Inc. Blogging about Technology, Social Media, Lifestreaming, Productivity, Lifehacks and anything else that’s interesting.