>> Jonathan Grudin: Good morning. We're pleased to have,
pleased to introduce Rob Baker today. Rob Baker is director of
technology at Cincinnati Country Day. He's one of the leading
technology innovator, one of the early users of Microsoft
products in education. We're just sort of at the conclusion of a
couple days of meetings with people, the different groups around
Microsoft that have just been very well received and very good
meetings. And Rob will now give a presentation of what he's been
doing without too much support from Microsoft with our products
over the last ten years or longer. So thank you for being here,
Rob.
>> Rob Baker: Sure, thanks for the intro, Jonathan. All right.
So I am Rob Baker, director of technology at Cincinnati Country
Day School. So I am not a futurist. I want to make sure
everyone knows what they're about to see here. I am not going to
tell you really my vision for the future if only we could
implement. I'm going to let you know what's been going on at
Country Day for 18 years.
Cincinnati Country Day School is the first school in the nation
to go one to one in 1996. We've been doing this for 18 years.
1996, people thought we were crazy. It was heresy. Not so crazy
now. And as it turns out, lots of people come to see what we're
doing and we try to help. We are dedicated to try to help spread
the word about the best way to implement technology in an
educational environment. So I want to make sure you know that
this is a history lesson. I'm telling you what's happening. I'm
telling you the best way to do things, because I have a really
simple job description at Country Day. I am trying to create the
most powerful teaching and learning environment that exists on
the entire planet, and I know, I get it. That sounds vain,
right? Who the heck is this guy from Cincinnati, Ohio? But I
think we're doing it.
Two weaknesses to do, two reasons that it's hard to do what we do
at Country Day. One is a big one. It's obscurity. I'm sorry,
Microsoft, although you make the most amazing, unbelievable
products that we are crushing it pedagogueically with, not really
good at getting the message out. No one really knows what's
possible and we work really, really hard to get the message out.
Jonathan mentioned in the introduction, it's true. I can't put
too fine a point on it. We're doing some really cool stuff and
I've got to say that if anything, we've done it in spite of
Microsoft. But that being said, I want to make sure you see
what's going on, because here's the deal at Country Day. There
is no bureaucracy there. That's a huge advantage for me. I
answer to one man, my headmaster at Cincinnati Country Day
School. He in general thinks I know what I'm doing and as long
as I don't spend too much money, I get to be pretty fluid in what
I do. And I get to fail sometimes.
So schools right now are on the cusp of this, and they're making
the same mistakes we made. We just made them 18 years ago. It
is so much easier to emulate what we're doing now than it was to
start in 1996 and get to where we are right now. So that's why
job here. I've got about an hour. I want to show you what's
going on and why we are using the device and the Microsoft
products that we are using. And the reason we're using them is
because they're absolutely, unequivocally, hands down the best
way to do this. There is no comparison. There is no hardware.
There is no software. There is no networking that lets me do it
any better. And it's not even close. And if something came
along that was better, we would drop this stuff like a bad habit
and we would switch to that.
So I'm showing you what we're using when there is a small school
with hopefully just a couple of key people who are really smart
and know what they're doing. That we could really see what
happened. There are so few places in the entire planet that can
get to the point where we are at Cincinnati Country Day School.
And we really do consider ourselves a lab for the world.
I run three or four, departing on how much time I have, tablet
conferences every year at Country Day. We've had educators from
all over the world, every continent except for Antarctica
we're not too hopeful
and South America. We cannot get
anybody from South America. I don't know what's up with that.
But anyway, people travel quite a great distance and spend quite
a bit of money to come to these tablet conferences. They're
three days long. Can you imagine listening to me for three days?
I can't.
But at the end of it, they're better for it. And if we've done
our job, they have more questions when they leave than they had
when they came, because there's no way to really even think about
the kind of things that we do at Country Day, because no one has
this stuff in place. We really, really do feel like we're the
best kept secret on the planet. And we can only do so much. And
I've complained a little bit that Microsoft should allow me to
expand my message and, you know, here I am. Be careful what you
ask for, right? So now I'm standing here being recorded and
talking to all you guys.
So let's jump in. I want to show you this, what we're doing. So
first school in the nation to go one to one back in 1996.
Tablet. I mean laptops. Every fifth through twelfth grader got
a laptop computer. Now, some people are very young in this room
and hopefully are watching me. 1996, there wasn't a lot going
on. Internet barely exists. There isn't even a built in network
adapter on a laptop in 1996 yet. We had to use PCMCIA cards with
dongles that we had to get special permission to Super Glue
because our kids were breaking them to make it work.
You know, back in 1996, we said some stuff. You know, you see
somebody who thinks they're smart in technology, like me, and
they're always saying stuff like transformational and transparent
and blah, blah, blah. And I know we said that back then. But I
mean, it was kind of a lie back then. I mean, I want to paint a
picture. I have one, I don't.
In my classroom, when you walk in in 1996, there is a 20 port hub
in the middle of the classroom with the tables in a U shape and
everyone walks in and plugs that cable in to get access. Not
really transparent. And we made all kinds of mistakes. I want
to share some of those with you, and I want you to know where we
got to and why we're there and why absolutely this kind of device
happened.
So 1996, we're doing some interesting stuff. Lots of people want
to see what we're doing and all that stuff. We're pretty well
known. 2001, Toshiba
we were a Toshiba shop back then. We
aren't anymore. They brought, they sent some guy, had a
handmade, first tablet PC. The prototype, hand made. I mean, it
was NDA. We didn't even know it existed until that day and we
were like, you know, holy crap. I mean, the Toshiba guy didn't
get it. He's like, you know, you can imagine, I don't know,
inking on it or something. I mean, we knew six years in this was
going to be a huge deal. So we've been tablet PC, digital ink,
active digitizer stylus for 11 years. This is the 11th tablet PC
that we've deployed. We've been doing it for such a long time
and trying to share the message all that time.
You know what? I've gotten a lot of schools. We helped a lot of
schools transform and do this. But not enough. And again,
obscurity. I told you obscurity's a big one. So I like to start
with this slide because it's an archaeological slide. I believe
this is the first thing ever made on a tablet PC, because we had
the hand made one from Toshiba, and I can't understand why, but
they let a teacher take it to a class that day. That was stupid.
But we didn't break it. So the teacher clearly just gave it to a
student. It's a science class, a lower school. Anybody that's
been around for a while, you'll recall journal, which is still
available, but that's all we had back then. And they were
clearly talking about the layers of the earth. So I mean, not
extremely powerful, but kind of cool in that they kind of used
the thing that they didn't even know existed probably ten minutes
before that.
And we like to say a lot, you know, type this. So lots of
misconceptions at Country Day. Oh, my gosh, 1996, 18 years, you
must use the computers 98.7 percent, all day, every day. You
know what? We don't have any mandates and I can't tell you what
it is, but I can absolutely tell you that so much of the benefits
of this are preserving class time. We can outsource so much of
the rote learning and all that so that my teachers can do what
they want to do in the classroom and that's why this has taken
off so well at Country Day.
I try to make decisions from the point of view of a classroom
teacher. I think that's the only way anybody involved in
education should discuss stuff. And I think I'm
I think I'm
doing a job I was born to do. I'm a bit of a gear head. I'm a
network guy, kind of know all the hardware stuff. But I'm also a
classroom teacher. I think I'm a good one. So I have stood in
front of a group of individuals like you, but they were 14 and
they did not want to learn what it was I was about to teach them.
And I came out on the other end and they learned it. So I think
there's something to that. I think empathy is powerful and me,
the guy who's actually making the final decisions at Country Day,
I truly am looking at everything through the eyes of pedagogy,
through the values and the way you teach children. And when you
do that, some really cool stuff happens.
So this is a picture of the device I'm holding in my hand. I
don't know if you noticed this, but Miracast is a big deal.
We're using Miracast. At my school, at Cincinnati Country Day
school, I've had a wireless short pro projector in every
classroom for four years. My teachers love the fact that they
can walk around. The camera guy said don't walk around, but if I
were making my point, I could walk around the whole room and have
full, absolute access to the lesson that I'm doing.
Why do you want to walk around, Rob? Well, good question. Maybe
I want to walk over next to Johnny because I think maybe he's
checking his email and is not focused. I don't want to stop the
lesson. I'm going to keep going. I can keep doing my lesson.
But if I stand next to Johnny, he knows that I know that he was
not doing what he's supposed to do and I'm in good shape.
Maybe it's group work. Maybe I've just thrown something out
there and I want to wander around and see what the groups are
doing and then be really, really mad because no one listened to
the instruction and I can say whoa, stop. But I still have full
access. I can't tell you what a big deal this right here is.
Now, I had a little input into the design of this device. It's a
Fujitsu hybrid tablet PC. Now, Fujitsu are even worse marketers
than Microsoft so many of you are saying what? Fujitsu makes
computers? They actually had the very first hybrid tablet PC. I
had a little input into it. We were stuck with swivelling. We
were stuck with an all in one tablet PC until I got these. I
wanted to rip the screen off of my tablet for about five years
because I want everything. I'm greedy. It's the only way I can
describe it. I am absolutely focused on letting people, my
students and my teachers, do anything any want to do, but I want
it to be as easy as it is to hand out a piece of paper.
And when you can set up an environment where that's possible,
good classroom teachers do amazing things. So don't think that I
some magic pixie dust for you that if you just implement this,
all your bad teachers will suddenly be good teachers. They're
still going to be bad teachers. They're just going to have some
technology in their hands. But your good teachers and your great
teachers are going to do amazing things. They can amplify all
their lessons. They can reach those kids and really extend what
they're able to do and get every student a more personal
instruction thing. That's all the stuff that's happening.
Again, I'm not speculating. I'm not a visionary. I'm just
reporting back.
And sadly, not enough people know what's going on and what's
possible. So I wanted to rip this off just quickly on the
device. I'll talk more about it. The device is actually,
although I will say a million times it's not about the
technology, I mean, it's kind of about the technology. I want
all day battery. I got it. But the only way to get it was to
have an extra battery in the keyboard because I want an I 5
processor so I can run PhotoShop, my history curriculum in my
upper school, they run, they play Sieve and Rome Total War like
wow, I'd like to take that class. You know what? You would like
to take that class. Not because you just playing the games,
because the way we use those games is we compare the games to
primary sources and we challenge the kids to use primary sources
to say where the game developers dropped the ball.
Is building a city near water really is important as the game
says it is. Things like that. Really a compelling and
interesting way to study history and civilizations.
So a couple of other things. Picture of a stylus here. Now,
this is a finger on a stick. You can use a frozen sausage. I
remember that was the cool thing to do back in the day. You use
a sausage, right? You don't need a stylus. Just use a frozen
sausage. So many people, maybe there's someone in this group or
somebody watching me, they don't know that there's a difference.
Again, the whole obscurity. This is an active digitizer.
Digital ink is actually something that Microsoft designed and
developed and you can do amazing things with it. You've got fine
motor skills. It's like writing on paper.
If you want to be an artist, you are going to be a digital artist
and you're going to spend $5,000 on a big syntic. I don't care
if you're developing the villains for the next Xbox One smash
hit. I don't care if you're making the next great Pixar cartoon.
That is all done digitally with a Wacom active digitizer. Every
single one of my kids, starting in fifth grade, have that. So my
artists don't have to be starving artists. What would Picasso
use if he was alive today? Would he stick with oils? Or would
he be using an active digitizer?
So there's a huge difference between these two and nobody knows
it, and they should. And I tell them, but they don't know. Oh,
you know, I've got an iPad. I've got a stylus too, Rob. I'm
good, never mind. Literally, no comparison. So I'll keep going.
So I want to make a point. Again, I'm an environmentalist, not
because I save tree, but I save a lot of trees. We don't print
very much paper at Country Day. I'll get to that later. But I'm
environmentalist because I am trying to focus on this environment
so that my teachers and my students can do great things. But
even if I'm as smart as I think I am, and I can't possibly be
that smart, there's no way for me to know who wants to do what
and when they want to do it and even why they want to do it. I
mean, there's too many variables. Even a small school like me,
right. There's age level, there's teacher, there's class size,
there's how long does the class meet, there's subject. I mean,
who knows. So I err on the opposite side. Big, huge mistake in
education, one of the big ones when I consult and try to help
other schools, somebody who thinks they're smart like they
decides arbitrarily the 10 to 15 tools that are essential to
integrating technology into the curriculum, and then they train
them like heck on that stuff and then you're good to go. That's
not what we do.
I'm erring on the opposite side. I want them to do anything that
they want to do. That's why we have this device. So what do I
have? I've got everything. If you've ever seen an advertisement
for a tablet PC, and I bet you, you haven't. I've seen two in a
Sunday paper and it said the same thing both times. Written,
written. Converts handwriting to text. And that is not what a
tablet PC is. There is no one on the entire planet that uses a
tablet PC more than me. I'm sure there are some that use it as
much. No one uses it more than me and I have never, in my entire
life, converted one word of handwriting to text. You know why?
Because I can freakin' type really fast. And I got a keyboard.
So when I want to bang it out, I put it on the keyboard and I
type. I don't want constraints. Multi modalities is essential.
So much of education is wasted on square peg round hole stuff.
You try
teachers want to do something and they just can't do
it. And I got an example of that coming up.
Touch. Slate is important. I'm usually on my couch, I'll admit,
when I've got the slate, but I check my blogs. I check my
Twitter account. I do some tweeting. I'll check some websites.
I'll zoom in on a map. And then I'll go oh, my gosh, this guy's
killing me and I strap on the keyboard to bang out some emails
because I got to solve a problem and I'm not going to sit there,
it's too slow to do it with the on screen keyboard. I want to do
anything that I want to do, and I want my users to do that. And
because we're doing that, some amazing things are happening.
So this is a great microcosm. This is actually an algebra class,
middle school algebra class, and I was actually just checking on
a projector and I snapped this with my phone because it spoke to
me. I really thought it was an interesting picture to take. Who
are's why I think it's interesting. We don't buy new
I have
800 tablet PCs deployed. We don't buy 800 of them every year and
give them new ones. I have four different models at any given
time. I am very anti BYOD. Very anti BYOD, because I am telling
you, I am positive one of the main reasons we're doing such cool
stuff, think about the classroom teacher. My classroom teacher
knows that anything they can figure out and do, every single
student they see, any time, any day, can do the same thing. Now,
put that up against a BYOD rollout. Let's pretend that
everyone's machine is actually working, because you have no
support for it. What are they going to do? What's their lesson
going to look like? I can tell you what it looks like. Let's
see. Some tablets. There's an Apple, there's an iPad.
Smartphone, really, dude? Smartphone? What are you going to do
with that? You're always constrained to the least powerful
device. And it's not even by class. If I'm a teacher teaching
four sections of algebra, I am not going four different lessons.
If I'm actually going to step out and take a chance and see if
technology really can make a difference in my students' lives,
I'm going to do one good one and try to do it four times. So
I've got to think about the least
so you know what happens?
You're stuck with the web. The web's everything. One to one is
now a CMS. Having noodle set up is not a one to one program.
It's just not. And people think it is.
So back to my picture. I've got different modalities and I
really think it's cool, because the kids that have the new one,
the new cool one, because they're writing, they're inking, it's
algebra. They've decided to rip the screen off and set it down.
I have no idea why. No one told them to do that. I'm going to
guess it's because it's like paper, because that's what I do.
But they did it. But there are some people who have the older
machines. This girl does. I don't know if you can tell, but
I'll zoom in. She just has it rotated to get the keyboard out of
the way. Why is she doing that? I'm going to assume because her
handwriting's better or I don't know, but she's doing it.
Then when you pan over here to the gentleman in the corner,
they're still writing a ton there in the middle of a lesson using
ink, but they didn't swivel. And it's really a microcosm of what
I'm trying to set up at count day. You can't know who wants to
do stuff. You can't know who's going to figure out the next cool
thing. We have serious implementations based on the a little app
that some kid found in some class.
You never know where it's going to come from, and I got to make
sure I say this. I don't know if you see this kid right here,
looks like he's sleeping, you see him? He's not sleeping.
That's my son. Let me tell you what he's thinking. Jesus, dad,
you're killing me. Why are you taking a picture? Get out of
here! That's literally what he's doing. He saw me and he hid so
I just thought I'd point that out. It's kind of funny because he
said something to me later that day, like what are you doing,
dad? God!
>>:
Hey, Rob.
>> Rob Baker:
>>:
Yeah.
An observation, question.
>> Rob Baker:
They do.
I see they also have calculators.
>>:
I was just curious.
>> Rob Baker: So I'll speak to that. I don't think they do, but
we are kind of stuck with that because of standardized testing.
We can't use the tools we'd like to use. You only get to take a
calculator in, but I'll actually talk about that a little later.
Great observation. I can tell people aren't sleeping. That's
sweet.
>>: Rob, one other question.
hardware jealousy?
>> Rob Baker:
Do you deal with app jealousy or
What do you mean?
So
>> IPad comes out with XYZ apps for education.
about it, but they can't use it here.
Kids find out
>> Rob Baker: There is nothing
I'm ready to talk to anybody
with any device or any app store. There is nothing that anybody
can do that I can't do way better. Nothing. And my IT
Department loves it because it's a full operating system. I can
manage it, I can maintain it, I can use group policies. I can
use Active Directory to automate all kinds of things. I can
reimage it when the kids screw up. There's nothing, nothing,
nothing that I can't do better. I'm positive of that. That's
what I think.
Let's see here. So we are absolutely not jealous of iPads. We
actually had some iPad schools come to the tablet conferences and
I can let you know that they do not leave very happy because
there is no comparison. They're not even remotely related in
terms of when you can do with that kind of deployment compared to
what you can do with what we've got running, in my opinion.
All right. So let's keep going. Lots to share. So I got to
talk about OneNote a little bit. OneNote's a home run. Part of
the reason here today is because I got to meet with the OneNote
team and we are crushing it with OneNote. OneNote is amazing.
don't even consider it part of Office. I think it's its own
thing. It's a framework.
I
But you know what? We kind of have to OneNote. Seven years ago,
when 2007 came out, we started playing around with it because it
didn't do exactly what we wanted it to do. We shared OneNote
notebooks. Maybe everyone knows what I'm talking about. And we
use a ton of them. But we wanted to use it in the classroom. So
we just started playing around with it and it kind of did what we
wanted it to do. And seven years later, I'm finally here,
everyone who comes to my conferences sees what we're doing, and
they want it. They're desperate to have it. And we say yeah,
sorry, there's all this PowerShell scripting and it's on our
server. Doesn't work. So the main reason I'm here is I think
we're going to standardize this. This is a huge framework deal,
and I think it's going to become part of Office 365. Very
excited. Cool that I'm part of it, but cooler that everyone's
going to have access to this, because when you see what's going
on, it's, I think, life changing.
So let me tell you what's going on with OneNote, just so you see.
Here's what we did. I assume no one knows what OneNote is from
my discussion. I'm sure that's not the case. But here's a
student notebook. A majority of my kids have no paper. We do
not use paper at all. Everyone has an OneNote notebook. I'll
show you a math as an example.
This is what a student's notebook looks like. Let's look at a
problem of the week for the kid. Let's go up here. Here's a
good one. So I hope you can see the benefit to digital ink. It
is such a huge mistake. Ink is not this little extra thing.
It's absolutely life changing. It's infinitely better than not
having it. There's no comparison. So much of educators
I
already said it, square peg, round hole. Writing, annotating,
sketching, drawing and highlighting is a huge part of the
teaching and learning process. And so many times, you just want
to do a little bit of that. And I can prove that people know
that. If anyone's ever gone to an educational conference like
ISTY, that's a big one, when you go down on the floor, almost
everything down there is a smart board or something like that.
They kind of get that I kind of like to write on that thing, but
that's not the way to do it. This is. This is absolutely a
freeing experience.
I think OneNote is probably the most powerful piece of software
ever developed, ever. Maybe Outlook and Exchange is a close
second. But that sounds like something, okay, let's say you
assume I'm right. That sounds like you got to set up a four week
seminar for all your faculty to learn this unbelievable tool.
The main reason it's powerful is because it's so easy. Because
if you want to write, you write. If you want to use image, use
it. You want to type, do that. You want to use touch? Awesome.
Pinch and zoom. You don't have to talk about palm rejection
because it's a real active digitizer. I can pinch and zoom. My
kids do the same thing. It absolutely transforms the way you can
interact with this. I do it all the time.
Think about a teacher doing this, but more importantly, think
about the student. So here it is. Let me put my teacher pants
on. Formative assessment is an essential part of the teaching
and learning process. For any non teachers in here, that means
that a teacher just needs to know who knows what and when they
know it.
So public school syndrome is have the kid read something,
multiple guess test. I don't have time to grade that stuff.
I've just got to make sure the kid has any idea what's going on.
What if all of this was as easy as doing that multiple guess
test? I'm a big believer in you get more of what you subsidize.
That's all I'm trying to do. I'm a work flow guy. I'm trying to
subsidize powerful feedback loop. That doesn't sound like
education. But when you do it, when you make stuff easier, more
people try it and the people that want to use it use it way more.
And that's all I'm doing. It is so freeing to just ink when you
want to ink.
And not finger on a stick ink. Actually real fine ink. I think
this makes a great example. Maybe some of you didn't know there
with as a difference between styli, and there is a huge
difference.
This teacher, interesting actually wants
these are problems of
the week. You remember those as a kid, right? Those are the big
hard ones you're supposed to figure out by yourself. This
teacher wants their students to describe the process. Great.
Well, we're in OneNote so here's what happens. The kid clicks
the button up high that says insert audio. Kid starts talking
and hits stop. And that's it. This little file shows up, and
because of the hack, that gets synced to the teacher
instantaneously. So here's the coolest part about this. The way
we're doing it, all of my teachers have near instantaneous
access, at home or at school, to every single thing every single
one of their students does at any time.
Wow. It's huge. And here's the example of that. Well, let me
show you more than notebook. This is a math notebook because,
again, there's no paper. There's no notebooks. Nobody hands
anything out. Nobody turns anything in. It's all here. So
preserving class time is such a huge thing. Because that's a
misconception. It's not about using the technology all the time.
I'm telling you, when you have the right environment with the
right kind of modalities and options, you can preserve class
time. I've never had a teacher complain that they saw their kids
too much. There's never enough time to cover what you want to
cover.
So just let me show you some
what do you want to look at,
class notes? How about homework. Here's what a homework folder
looks like. You can see down the right hand side all the pages,
all the assignments. And all the work that this child is showing
to do their math.
>>:
I have a question.
>> Rob Baker:
>>:
and
Yeah, go.
Do you guys do much sharing of this stuff during the class
>> Rob Baker: Funny you should ask. And another feature, I'm a
computer science math guy. I teach computer science. You know
what's important in computer science? Everything. I think
I
don't think we should be teaching geometry anymore. I think we
should have a required programming course in our schools, because
the only thing geometry is teaching is logic and problem solving.
I can do a way better job of that in some simple programming.
Its way better, I think.
But I'll push that aside. Let's go to
let's fast forward to
my computer science class doing stuff like this. Here's what I
want to do. I give my kids a problem let's write a four next
loop that goes from two to a hundred by evens. Well, before I
had stuff like this, I would maybe have one kid describe it or
maybe come up to the board or maybe I do it and I ask everyone,
does everyone agree with that? Yeah, we agree. Everyone
understand? Yeah, we understand. You know what? They're liars.
They're dirty, rotten liars. Some of them didn't get it. Some
of them did it differently.
So pretend you have what I have. So now they just did their
homework in OneNote. I, if I want to, I can go down through
every single kid's thing. They don't turn it in. They don't
submit it. They don't print it out and hand it to me. They
don't do anything. I have complete control. So here's where the
power comes. There is nothing that gives laser focus to a bunch
of high school students than the opportunity to point out
mistakes of their friends. Audience affects effort. I've used
that against them. They love it. Oh, right, what's everyone
think? I'm not very good at this coding stuff, guys. Is this
correct? No, no, it's a syntax. No, no, it's good.
So I get to do what I want to do, because I could stand up there
and I used to say this is a common mistake in looping structures
and they're like yeah, whatever. I mean, maybe your old students
were idiots, but I'm smart. I'm not going to make it. But what
if I can go through homework and show that four people made the
exact same mistake? Is that different than me saying this is a
common mistake? And I get exactly what I want. You know what I
want in computer science? I want everyone
I love computer
science because it's super math. I don't tell anybody how to do
anything. And I get to look at seven different examples of
solutions to exactly the same problem. And that gets me to the
money. Here's the money. Then we get to argue about which one
is better. Which one's more efficient? And there's no other way
to do that.
What am I going to do have them pass it forward, a copy machine
and opaque projector? You just don't even think about doing that
pedagogueically because it's a pain in the butt. But if it's
just there and I get to decide what to do, I get to focus. A
good teacher gets to focus on what they know is important. It's
a freaking home run. I can't tell you how awesome it is.
Because that's usually
I make them turn code in copying and
pasting it, right? They're using it
they're writing it in
there. I just copy and paste it to turn it in just to make it
easier for me to do what I want to do. It's compelling and
amazing and really lets good teachers get to what they want to
get to. Yeah?
>>: I want to say I really love all this. Both of my children
go to schools where it's all on the laptop all the time, same
thing, OneNote. They're handing in their homework. No paper.
The only glitch that we've had so far is that when he makes both
the reference
your reference material and your homework in the
same format for people who have a little bit harder time kind of
keeping two things in their mind at the same time, it's very hard
to flip back and forth between, you know, kind of the digital
version, say, the Spanish lesson and the homework that is to be
done. So there, we've actually found helpful to print out some
of the reference material so that that's available on
you have big screens. But the kids don't.
unless
>> Rob Baker: That's a great point. Let me stop you and point
out, I would never roll out a device
I said I would never roll
a device out smaller than 12 inches because my kids all day every
day split screen. How many of you have a big fat external
monitor that you extend to and get some work done? Yeah, there
we go. We're not handing those out. You can't hand out external
monitors for the kids to carry around. You got to have a screen
big enough. That's why split screening is huge. So I'll use her
example to show something that's essential that people don't
know. Digital doesn't just mean we're writing on a computer.
It's not just a digital version. Digital means it can be in more
than one place at one time. Here's a great example to speak to
her point.
I'm going to look at two different pages of my notes at the same
time. Do that with a five subject notebook. So let me go here.
Let me go to view window, new window. Let me drag. Oops, sorry.
Give me a second here. Or is that one? I'll just drag this one
over to the left. I'll full screen them to show off a little bit
and it's the same thing, but you can look at any two things you
want to. My kids do this all day, every day. Periodic table on
the left, taking notes on the right. Electronic textbook on the
left, doing their homework on the right. Video running, taking
notes on the video. You can literally do anything you want to do
and you can't do it on a device that you can't split screen on.
This is essential.
And some popular devices aren't very good at split screening, and
that's why I think maybe a ten inch device is a little too small.
I got to be careful. I'm greedy. I think a ten inch device with
my stuff is 90 percent of what we got going on. But it's a great
point and I agree. And that's why we want to make sure.
I'm going to show my video. The kids always mention, when
Microsoft asks what they like, they're like they love the split
screen. All of them talk about it and how important it is.
great question. She's like a plant.
So
All right. So let's minimize that. Let me get back to full
screen here. Just looking at
so here's what it looks like
from a
so this is a class. This is a hack, the shared OneNote
notebook. I just want you to see what it looks like. This is
the teacher's notebook. The way we do it, every student is just
a section group. But the teacher can go down through and see
everything that every single student does. And when you can
write on it, it absolutely transforms what you can expect from
your kids. Here's a great example of a homework assignment where
ink makes some sense. And I think there's maybe even a better
example. What if you want to use
you start doing cool things
when you can do anything you want to.
If you don't know what the snipping tool is, you're missing it.
But images make a lot of sense. Our teachers snip so much stuff
and have kids write on top of it. And there's a really good
example in here somewhere. I'm not sure I can find it, but
someone found a picture of a battery and they had to write on
here it is. I think that's cool. Is that better than just a
regular sketch? And you know what? That's stupid, drop dead
simple because the snipping tool lets you grab what you see.
Great teachers and good teachers and smart kids figure out
amazing things to do. When it's completely free form, OneNote
has completely spoiled us as Country Day. I don't like being in
the other Office products. I don't use Word unless I have to.
Not because of I hate it. Because it's just too constraining,
right? Everyone in this room has had trouble getting Word
wraparound a picture to get to it happen. I can't even do that.
But once you have OneNote, you just put stuff where you want it
and add ink if you want to and type if you want to and ink on top
of it and move stuff and resize it, it's freeing. It lets you
focus on what's important. There is no other way that comes even
close to this. I just had a couple of great questions. What
about electronic portfolios, Rob? Great. If you're at a school,
you want electronic portfolios. You want to keep track of what
the kids are doing and figure out how to share it. Bam. Because
you can do anything. If you don't know, anything that you can
print from, you can print to OneNote. Because here's something I
get from teachers. OneNote's awesome. Oh, Rob, dude, this is
awesome, but I got to tell you, I just got my courses perfect,
and they're in PowerPoint. So sorry, dude, I'm not switching.
I'm not doing all that work again. I'm like oh, you're in luck.
Don't rep do it, just print it to OneNote. If you didn't notice,
and I didn't say it yet, I'm actually presenting in OneNote.
This presentation started out in PowerPoint, but it's too
constraining. I want to zoom around and zoom in when I want to
make a point. Its way better, in my opinion. Very, very
freeing.
All right. So let's move on. Lots to talk about and not much
time. Remember, I told the tablet conferences are three days
long. I mean, really, three days of me. Can you imagine? But
the hardest part about the tablet conferences I run what is we
have to cut. I have to tell people they can't present because I
throw it out there. All right, tablet conference is coming in
two weeks. Who's got something new and cool they want to share
with the
I always have to tell a couple people that, I can't
fit you in. Two other people already kind of talking about that.
I mean, what a great situation to be in.
And again, I'm not suggesting that I have some magic pixie dust.
I'm just saying that 18 years in, with the right people in the
right environment without any bureaucracy, that's why I think
we're a lab for the world because remember my stated mission
statement. Most powerful teaching and learning environment on
the planet. I know how vain that sounds because I say it a lot,
but I'm telling you, we're doing it. We're absolutely doing it.
But not enough people know about it so I'm here and this is being
recorded. I hope a billion people watch this thing, because if
I've put myself in Microsoft's shoes, Miami Dade
just won
Miami Dade. What, 150,000 one to one devices. Bam! But I don't
understand how you're losing anything. Because this compared to
everything else is way better. I mean, I want to be in a room
and talk to the other people who are presenting. I can't imagine
what's being said or shown that you're not winning everything.
And I'm not a Microsoft person who would make a billion dollars.
I'm an educator who has this secret that I just want everyone to
access. And that's why I'm here talking about it.
So that lead me brilliantly to my second
I said there were two
main problems with doing what I do at Country Day. First one,
obscurity. Microsoft really, really bad marketers. I mean, you
know, all I know, I get branding. You got to recognize. But I
think it was a billion dollar campaign and all I know about
Surface is that really good dancers like. And I literally don't
think I know anything else. I'm sorry, but I thunk I could have
spent that money and shown some other stuff and I just want
people to know about this. I mean, do people know that digital
ink is a thing and that OneNote exists and it's all this free
form stuff and it will be awesome? I literally just think that
nobody has any idea.
Second problem was price penalty. There's used to be a huge
price penalty to pay to have tablet PCs. We still have some high
end equipment because I'm trying to push the limits. I want to
make sure we can do anything we want to. But finally, it's come.
The brand new Adam, the new Adam processor is so good that I
can't believe Intel did not change the branding. I think that's
a huge mistake, because when I talk to people about the Adam,
they're like, Rob, are you sure? It's an Adam. So here's what I
think the home run device is. I think it's the Lenovo Tablet 3.
I have unofficial confirmation that they're actually going to
release it soon. The Lenovo Tablet 3 is a 10.1 inch device.
It's a Surface. Let me put it this way. The Lenovo Tablet 3 is
what I think the Surface, the cheaper Surface, the RT should be.
I think that's
because it's an inexpensive, Adam processor,
Wacom active digitizer, all day battery. Keyboard that connects.
And the Surface keyboard's cool. That's an absolute home run.
You know what? The numbers are going to work now. It's going to
be less than an iPad. Or the same amount. And it's full, all
out Windows 8.1 so you know what? If you actually looked at the
invite you got to come to this thing, I think the title is
something like, you really can have it all. And you can.
Because education and pedagogueically, all this stuff, there's no
better way to do it. There's no more freedom possibly available
and your IT people freakin' love you because it's an operating
system. And you can do whatever you want to. You can plug it
into all the infrastructure you already have. You can add it to
the domain. It's reimaging. All that stuff just works.
Everybody, it's a win win win. I literally don't understand what
benefits anyone else can say there is for notice other device or
implementation compared to this.
So as soon as someone makes that, and I'm pretty sure the Lenovo
is going to be released, you're great. So I want you to feel my
pain. I follow this stuff pretty closely. I bet you've heard of
some of the devices I'm going to mention. How about the Asus
transformer 100, the T 100. A little ten incher, hybrid like
mine. I'm like oh, yes, sweet. It's like $399. No pen. No
active digitizer. I can't use it.
They made an eight incher with a Wacom but didn't put it in the
ten incher. I mean, what's going on? I don't understand.
They're killing me.
What else is there? HP. You know, everyone's releasing stuff so
either it's too small or it doesn't have a keyboard. I'm telling
you, in education, I want my kids
the company line at Country
Day is you must use the provided bag so as to protect your tablet
from damage because it's an essential tool for teaching and
learning and you need it. Now, the end part's true. You don't
have your tablet working, you're screwed at my school. You'll
fail. Can't live without it.
But they still shove it wherever they want to. I mean, you can't
central plan that. So you got to have something in place. You
got to have
I even talked about fixing it. These things
break. I mean, you got to have a device that you can put a
warranty on it if you want to. Small shop like me, you warranty
it. Big Miami Dade, well, self warranty. They will not pay
money for insurance. They'll just pay, it will be cheaper. You
know, you run the numbers, all that good stuff.
But you've got to be able to fix them and we fix them all the
time. That's fine. That's just sort of nature of the beast, I
think.
All right, let's keep going.
here. What's up?
>>:
Are there many students at your school using screen readers?
>> Rob Baker:
>>:
Go ahead, while I find my place
You mean the reading something aloud to them?
Like narrator.
Are they using narrator?
>> Rob Baker: No, not many. We definitely have a few very high
performing kids who have a very specific and, you know,
aggressive problem that they are able to overcome with the
technology. So we use
talk to me offline if you want to, but
we definitely have some programs for a specific set of kids that
really lets them function at a high level. All of our research,
like Gale Learning, everything is readable, we really like to
talk about that so that those kids aren't at a disadvantage. So
there are lots of possible games for that.
>>:
So I'm just curious about how well it works with the inking.
>> Rob Baker: So you can read ink to yourself. The ink is a
thing. I would say we are not trying to read ink to ourselves,
though. Let's see. So let me get back to where I was here, and
let me continue on my tie raid. Ink everywhere is where I think
I am, right? All right. Let's see here. All right. So a lot
of stuff changes. See, I'm just not comfortable standing here.
Sorry. I like to move around. I wish I could move more. Am I
walking slow enough? The camera guy said not to walk too fast.
All right. So the physicality sharing changes. Something
changes when you have a device. This is 11 years ago. But when
we got the tablets and you could swivel the screen and get it out
of the way, just really cool stuff started happening. Not ground
breaking stuff, but this is an experiment. Every school does
this experiment at some point. You give the kids a bag of
Skittles. They count the colors and then you bring in a pounder
bag of said Skittles and they have to hypothesize as to how many
colors are. And they get to eat all the candy and you're like
the best teacher on the planet. It's a great lesson.
When we did it with the tablets, it was interesting, because
we're always told don't touch the screen, stay away from the
screen, don't lift the screen, don't grab it by the screen and it
was the opposite. Because we slap rulers, we slap protractors.
These kids, some of them, they stack them up and drew a line
around it to do the graphing part of it. That was kind of
interesting. I don't know why they did that, but it absolutely
changes. If you go to a lower school, maybe some of you are
teachers or you have some lower school kids, I go down there all
the time. When I'm having a bad day, there's nothing better than
going to a lower school. It's so awesome.
But for whatever reason, and again there's no way I can know, a
huge amount of learning happens underneath tables and on bean
bags. I don't get that I don't know what the deal is. But those
of you who have little kids, you know exactly what I'm talking
about. I don't know what the heck's going on. But if the
technology can help whatever it is they're doing, I love that
they can sort of take the technology wherever they want to and
use the touch, because any do. I'll walk by, and there will be
three kids looking at it. I don't know what they're doing, but
they're under a table. Why the heck are they under a table? I
don't know.
So prototyping. I think I mentioned it once before, but
prototyping and the feedback loop are the two big things. I
think this applies to business. We are literally training the
future leaders of America at my school. We're a pretty high
performing school. I'm not going to lie. We're private. We get
to say no to people if we want to.
But we're not all gear heads. We're not all engineers. We're
not all coders. We're politicians. We're doctors. We're
lawyers. We are engineers. We are fashion designers. We are
producers on famous TV shows on Showtime. If you're going to be
a leader, technology's going to have some something to do with
that, and I would be foolish to think I know what that technology
is going to be. Computer literacy is not a 4,000 bulleted list
of things you have to know how to do. Computer literacy is being
comfortable with figuring out what works and what doesn't work.
How about deciding when to close your tablet and not use the
technology because it's distraction? Does anybody in here need
help with that? I think it's better to give the kids the
technology and help them through that and talk about it
pedagogueically. I think our kids have a huge advantage. Some
people think we have a huge disadvantage because they have such
access to the technology. And I think it's wrong. I think our
kids, when they go to college, have already gone through it.
They already know when to use a tool, when not to use a tool, how
to be efficient. I think a kid that goes to college and didn't
have a laptop and now he's got his new cool one, I think he would
be more likely to be distracted during class. That's what I
think.
All right. So some great pedagogical examples at Cincinnati
Country Day school. Spoiler alert. No spreadsheets. Now, I'm
not even going to talk about it, but remember I want you to be
able to anything you can possibly want to do. You're a science
teacher, you want to plug in two USB probes and do something,
great. I got a ton of USB ports. Knock yourself out.
You want to do spreadsheets? Great. We use a ton of
spreadsheets. We use everything. You're a Google docs fan, I
think Office 365 is better, but knock yourself out. You got full
access. Kill it. Any program, you like PhotoShop? You like
CS6? We can run all that. You want to use Rome Total War in
your curriculum? Good. Install it. But I'm focusing on ink,
because people, even if they get it, even if they're fans of a
stylus, they think it's just this little hokey thing and why
bother. And it is absolutely exponentially transformational.
So here are some great pedagogical examples I like to show. This
is a pretty cool one, because we have an astronomy club, and they
went outside to draw what they saw. So you get astronomy, right?
You got to go somewhere where it's dark and someone decided they
were going to try to draw on their tablets. Well, how's that
going to work? So they went out. The whole astronomy club is
out in the middle of nowhere. They pull it out, they bring up
I think they did this in journal, and they went like this and it
like, oh, I can't see the stars. It's too bright and some kid
said let's make the paper black and that's the only reason I'm
showing it. That's not even a big deal, but that's what digital
means. Anything can be anything you want it to be. There are
literally no constraints. That is my job description, to remove
constraints and people find amazing ways to do it.
Far right, I love this one. We do a lot of this. You do
timelines in education. And I hope someone's thinking, oh, well,
you know, this is pretty cool but that was a mistake. I mean I
can't even read what's written there. I mean, that's pretty
useless. Here's the beauty of it. It's a humanities teacher.
The goal of this lesson was to help kids alive at a reason why
there's so much strife in the Middle East. So here's what this
teacher did. Set up a timeline, told the kids to zoom way in and
write when and what happened in a different major religions. And
then zoom back out. Her whole pedagogical goal was for the kids
to see that there's a lot of stuff going on at the same time in
the same geographical region in a bunch of religions and maybe
that's why there's still a little bit of conflict.
But it's so cool that she decide that zooming in was useful to
her. I kind of think that's a neat one because you can't read it
unless you zoom in. Another thing, she actually messed up. I
bet you there's one person, I can usually get one other person to
admit that they have taped one piece of paper to another piece of
paper to save themselves from an oversight. I have done that.
We don't do that anymore. She actually needed more room.
Paper's digital. Just make it twice as long. Make it a freakin'
mile wide. It doesn't matter. It's digital. Do whatever you
can fit the tool to the task. If you don't have something like
this, everything's the other way around. And I've got hopefully
a good example here in a minute.
Okay. So obviously math is a big deal when you have a tablet. I
mean, I don't need to say much about that, though I've got some
other stuff I'll show you. This is a great example of just
sometimes you just want to write something down or circle
something. Great example. This is data from a bowling ball
being dropped from the third story of our upper school. So
that's pretty cool. That's a cool lesson, right? We've got the
sensors plugged in so we can do all that. Class ends, the kids
leave, and the teacher's like crap, he forgot that. I know you
know what it is. He forgot to tell them something important,
because if they did the lab or finished the homework, everyone
would have gotten it wrong.
What he did, it was still up on his computer, he just snipped it,
put a little bit of ink on it and emailed it to the class. He's
superman. He saved the day. I've done that before. And it's
just a simple, silly, stupid little example. But again, there
are so many times you just want to write something down.
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could.
So this is a plug. I actually made an app. Yay for me. It's in
the store pending approval. I mean, I'm at Microsoft, couldn't I
get it like pushed a little quicker or something? It's not
approved yet, but it's a microcosm of my school. I made it
because I want my kids, my students, my children
I have a
junior, freshman and seventh grade daughter
I want my kids to
have a flashcard app. Flashcards are table if they're already
made, I think.
If you look at the research, the research tells you that a lot of
the learning is in actually making the flashcards. There's a lot
of research about handwriting that I'm not going to share with
you, but if you looked into it, there are so many studies that
writing
little kids, when they learn to write if you don't
know, they write on sandpaper. They write in sand. They write
on rocks. There is something to that that is completely
different to be looking at the location of when you're doing
something as opposed to looking at a screen and typing. Not
going to bore you with all that research, but it's absolutely a
fact.
We don't want to get rid of handwriting. Handwriting shouldn't
and can't die. It's the way we're wired to learn in a lot of
cases. So I want ink on my flashcards. So I've got Ultimate Ink
Flashcards. I'm hoping that the word ultimate makes you want to
like what the heck's so ultimate about that? I better buy it. I
don't know if it will work, but this is really a microcosm.
So you can write on flashcards. You can put pictures and images
with the clipboard using this snipping tool if you'd like, and
you can put sound on the front and back of the cards. So you can
do
I don't know why it's important for front and back, but I'm
100 percent positive that a teacher or student is going to find a
really good case where they want sound on the back of the card.
I don't know, do they have a picture and they're supposed to say
it out loud in French and then you just flip the card and push
play? I don't know. But it's going to be cool. So it's
modalities. Modalities, modalities, modalities. I want
everything possible. This device makes that happen. And again,
I can't emphasize enough, classroom teachers and students do
crazy cool stuff when you get them in the right environment, when
it's easy.
So here we go. So the only people I hate more than Adobe
and
I hate Adobe
is anyone from Adobe like watching this? Where
is this going? Anyway, nobody needs a competitor more than
Adobe. But the only people I hate more than Adobe, every
publisher on the planet. Oh, my gosh. I mean, this has been
over a decade. We just want what we want in a reasonable format
and we want to pay them a reasonable amount of money.
All they'll talk about is DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM. Digital
rights management. Once in a while, though, we can get a smaller
publisher or a workbook, the perfect electronic textbook, ladies
and gentlemen, is a textbook we print to OneNote. OneNote is not
a program. It's a framework. There isn't any pedagogical goal
or business goal, in my opinion that you can't just knock out of
the park with OneNote.
Because you know what? Think about electronic textbook. I read
a lot in Nook. I actually have the Nook app on here so I don't
really carry a Nook around. But I don't know, does it work?
Does highlighting and typing a note and searching, I mean, it's
supposed to be better, right, because you can see all the notes.
But is it? I mean, kids want to write in the margins.
Well, look at this. This is actually a reading
the homework
is to read and take notes while you're reading. This is
these
are great notes. And remember, this is inside of their notebook
so my teachers can go in and see if they're reading and take
going notes and do stuff like, you know go to a different kid.
This will make sense to you. Some kids start out, they color
everything, right? That's not highlighting, that's coloring, you
know. You need for scale back. And that's pedagogueically
sound.
As a teacher, you used to do notebook checks. I mean, what a
freakin' bluff that was. I'd collect all the geometry notebooks,
like I'm really going to
what am I, going to read every
I'm
bluffing a little bit. I'm afraid that I'm going to lose it.
The kids don't have access to their notebooks because I just took
them. It's just built into the system now. You can just
and
teachers know who to check in on. You don't check in on
everybody. You check in on who you know you need to check in on.
It's awesome.
And it's just all freely available, again, without doing
anything. There's no file structure. There's no saving.
There's no versions. There's no putting underscore V2 at the end
of the file because it's a different version. Where the heck did
I put that? Which one's right? Look at the date? My dates will
let me know. And when you want to take notes in the margins, the
margins are now infinitely wide. As wide as you want them.
>>: Fair characterization to say you're essentially using
Windows as an OS and file system?
>> Rob Baker: Yeah, sure, I think that's fair. I think that's
fair. So here's my use case. I told you I was going to come
back to a use case. So I think we're doing some pretty cool
stuff at Country Day. 1996, let me give you, because this is
what schools are going through right now. Absolutely going
through fit they don't have the device that lets them ink, lets
them touch, lets them use apps or lets them use a desktop. If
they can't do anything they want to do, it's all square peg,
round hole.
Here's my sample. Go back to 1996. Nobody
this is unheralded
and these teachers and students all have laptops now. We better
freakin' do something with this, because the whole world is
watching, literally. We've got press and people wanting to come
all the time. That's why the tablet conferences exist. We get
so many requests for visits, we kind of had to run the school,
right? So that's why we do them, to try to give some access and
still be able to run the school.
But my history and my English teachers met, and they go you know
what? The feedback's all we care about. The feedback look.
Feedback, feedback. So here's what they did. They're like
here's what we'll do. We'll have them turn in their rough drafts
in Word, that's usually a computer. Wow, we're awesome, and
let's do the mouse over comment popup on errors. Man, that looks
cool but that kind of sucks. I know, let's move it over to the
right. We'll do the bubbles and we'll do that really cool line
that shows you
well, that still kind of sucks. I didn't like
that.
2002, we get tablet PCs. I mean, these people, they're literally
drooling. And it's an interesting use case, because we're one of
the few places in the planet, but we've seen the square peg.
We've been battling the limitations for six years. This was like
the dams opening up. I mean, it was such a freeing experience.
We got so much more buy in from the hesitant teachers when this
happened than we did in '96 with the technology.
It just lets teachers do what they want to do. You can remember
a lot of young people in here. This is feedback, you know.
Red's bad, green's good. But let's go back to 2002. I'm not
done with my example yet.
So now we've got tablet PCs. We are awesome. So imagine your
English or history teacher, everyone can think of one that was
like crazy or something, right, or eccentric. So imagine they
wanted to do this with tablet PCs. So now everyone email me your
rough draft in Word. Still pretty good. So I'm sitting at home,
I'm an English teacher. I'm like in my pajamas. I got a
Starbucks. I'm kicked back. Got my tablet and my stylus. Open
up the first email. Open up the Word document, do this. Oh, but
now I got to save it as a different file name, send an email back
and attach the new document to them. Well, that's kind of cool,
but I've got 60 kids in four sections or whatever. Man, that's
not as cool as I thought. Still cool, though, in context. No
one else has a tablet. We're still pretty awesome.
But how many teachers did that? It still wasn't perfect. Now
here's my best use case example. Now I've got OneNote shared
notebooks, because we played around and figured out this hack.
So here's what you do now. All right, everybody, please print
your rough draft to OneNote. Now I rip my screen off, I still
got the Starbucks. I'm on the same freakin' couch. I got my
stylus. And I literally click on a piece of paper, I do that,
and then I click on the next kid's, and I do that. And I click
on the next kid's, and I do that one. And that's it. Everything
syncs in almost instantaneous real time going to where you want
it to go and the teachers have, in general, no idea how or why
that works.
You get more of what you subsidize. All I'm doing is subsidizing
the stuff that I know is important pedagogueically, and I'm
positive that the amount that's happening is
has elevated
exponentially because it's so freakin' easy to do. And I'll even
say the hesitant faculty are more likely to try something that
works.
Remember, you don't need a four week seminar. The reason, one of
the big reasons this is powerful because you just get to do what
you want to do, right? There's some colors up top. Change the
color, write where you want to write and that's it. You don't
need file structure. You didn't need to know what a server is.
You don't need to know what's going on. You just need to know
the name of your kids and where to click, basically.
You can ink anywhere. Did you know you can ink in Outlook? It's
awesome. So ten years ago, 11 years ago, I did this once in a
while, and I had to stop doing it because everyone would not
return an email answering my question or commenting on it. They
would email like, dude, how the heck did you write on your email?
And I had to stop and say I got a tablet PC and yeah, it's active
digitizer and it's Outlook. So I literally stopped doing it
because it wasted too much of my time.
And I don't ink much in email, but I do. But what if you could
ink anywhere? What if you really could have it all. Some people
find really cool uses for it. Here's a great example. A kid
snipped a problem out of their electronic textbook and emailed
their teacher. I don't get this problem. How do you do it?
Teacher hits reply and that's what they replied. Type that. Is
it used all the time? Would we run all our courses in email?
Absolutely not. But what if it's available? Would people find
an interesting use for it? Is there any other way to simulate
that? There's not. I mean, why would you constrain when there's
literally no reason to? Again, I mean, people
so I'm here at
Microsoft. People, I wish we got the level of support from
Microsoft that schools think that we get because we're doing it
because it's the best. We are doing it without any help. And if
something better comes along, we will switch to that. I couldn't
care less who does what they do. I just want the literal best
stuff. And it's not even close. There is literally nothing that
compares to this. Absolutely not.
Okay. Some more pedagogical examples. Let me go back to the,
again, the best way for me to equate this is with the public
school syndrome. Lots of kids, I'm really busy. I need some
formative assessment. Again, taking the temperature. Are people
reading what I told them to read? Do they know what I need them
to know. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance in lot of
cases for a school and a teacher, multiple guess test. I'm going
do a multiple guess test. I'm going to have it auto corrected
and I'll know who knows what. It's a shame. But like I said,
again, think about it. What if everything, whether you're
drawing a picture or writing, what if that was as easy as a
multiple guess test?
Upper left hand corner, we are very focused on primary courses at
Country Day. So this is actually a pop quiz. I love this
example. They had to read three or four primary sources on Roman
soldiers. The pop quiz was, and they did it in OneNote so the
teacher could then
he just went through every drawing and
talked about it. Draw Roman soldiers based on the primary
sources you just read. That's a pretty cool alternative form of
assessment, I think.
Now, I picked one where the kid's a pretty good artist. I mean,
you get a lot of stick figure stuff too, right. I'm not
suggesting we're all artists. I couldn't draw this. But I'm
presenting so I wanted it to be a cool one. But what if that was
your alternative form of assessment? As it turns out, I know
you're dying to know, the kid didn't get a hundred. Two mistakes
in the picture. Does anybody know the mistakes? First mistake,
shape of the shield. They're round. I kind of knew that one.
The other one, I didn't know. Flutes back in the day went
straight down. And you know what? It talked about that in the
primary sources. He missed that.
But what a cool way
could you do this on paper? Yeah. But
what if you wanted to do it on paper and just quickly go through
everyone's solution and have a conversation that you know you
want to have or something. You can't do it. You wouldn't do it
because there's no easy way to do it. It's so hard for me to
describe this, I mean, it's a catch 22. No one knows what's
going on because there's so few places that are doing it like
this. But when you have this environment with this hardware, I
mean, the stuff is phenomenal.
All right. One of my favorite examples. Two point perspective.
I loved this project in middle school. I remember it. We did
it, we had the rulers. I just really dug it. I was a bit of a
geek. It was architecture. So we studied it. I was doing cool
stuff and it was time for the final project. The teacher hands
me the big fancy, you know, the expensive cardboard for the final
project, right? I'm very excited. First thing that teacher said
to the class was, don't forget, one point off for every eraser
mark. Oh, crap. I don't want a point off. I mean, how many
risks did I take on my final project? We can put a ruler down
and practice here. How many of you have recovered from a major
error boy hitting control Z or edit undo? How many of you have
deleted ten pages and you're like, oh, thank God! Well, what if
edit undo or control Z applied to literally anything you did.
Whether it was painting, drawing, making a project. What if you
could edit undo as many layers as you want to. Would you take
more risks? Is my student's final project better? Oh, Rob, we
lust the feeling of paper and canvas. So do we. But what if you
could practice a little bit before you did it? Is the final
project going to be better?
My kids, I absolutely know, 100 percent, see it every day, are
risk takers. They're prototypers. Prototyping is not an
educational term, but that's what we're doing. They're
prototyping. Thee try something and see what happens. It's so
much easier to prototype in my environment. So really
interesting stuff happens. All right. So we paint something for
a play. Great notes. Here's what notes look like. Again, notes
are not the whole class typing everything I say in case I put it
on a test. I mean, type that.
Another great example of notes, here are some notes on a
what
a sea breeze is. That's cool notes. I mean, they could have
described it. You could look at it. But what if you sort of
made it on your own? Turns out they're pretty good notes on what
a sea breeze is. There's some writing, there some drawing, and
that's pretty neat, I think.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that an artist with an
active digitizer stylus can draw amazing things. I put art rage
on my image and you know what? Art rage is available for the
iPad too. It's a great comparison as to the limitations of a
stylus that is not active. This is just random drawings, 11
years old, from the first tablets. Story like this happen. I
got to tell this one. It's awesome. But there are so few places
where stuff like this can happen.
Senior. We have some senior electives last marking period. I'm
sure none of you sort of shut down early in your senior year of
high school. But I'm willing to suggest some of our seniors may
start to slack off a bit once they know they're in M.I.T.,
Harvard and Yale. So we've got some electives. Keep them
interested. It's pretty cool. One of these electives that year
was children's literature.
So the goal of said elective was to, you guessed it, write a
children's book. But you're just supposed to write the text.
Now, this kid
now, I don't think anybody here's a teacher.
But pretend you're this teacher. This kid, amazing artist,
everyone knows it, went up to the teacher after class and said,
you know, I like to draw. Would it be okay if I illustrated
mine? I mean, how outraged was that teacher especially when she
saw what he did. This thing got published. It's in our library.
He's not even an author. I mean, they sent it to a publisher and
they printed it. And it was just a throw away course that he
sort of did on his own.
Back in the day, we used to use PowerPoint. Above OneNote,
PowerPoint was a great way to ink. And I'm trying to show stuff
that's old. I don't even know if this is the teacher's ink or a
student's ink. But man, I bet you that was a great class that
day, when they dissected this art. Because again, don't pigeon
hole me. We are not all gear head geeks walking around learning
how to program and code. This supports everything. We are so
focused and invested in the fine arts at my school, and this
empowers and enables all that cool stuff.
I could use a laser pointer. I could draw boxes. There's no
other way to have a conversation and end up with what you want
without an active digitizer.
I like to show this. So again, some of you are thinking Rob's a
nerd. He teaches computer science and math. I teach sixth grade
art. What do you think about that? Yeah. I'm telling you what.
I don't think anybody's a teacher. Middle school is the front
lines of the educational system. Sixth graders are so squirrely.
Man, they're weasely. But I love teaching them.
The goal of my a little class here is to make
to trick sixth
graders into looking at art that there's no freakin' way they
would ever look at any other way. And to talk about body image
as it turns out. We show them how to use PhotoShop or something
like that. And I get to talk about bill boards and advertising.
I want my kids at Country Day to be smart, skeptical consumers of
content. I want them to know that the beautiful girl on the
billboard, they found the best looking girl they possibly could.
They spent three hours in makeup. They redid her hair. They
took an amazing picture with ridiculous art, with ridiculous
lighting, and then they PhotoShopped it. Every single image they
see in every single magazine and online that they see is
PhotoShopped. And I want them to know that. I want them to be
skeptical.
Part of the class, you get bonus points if you can find an
advertisement where you think it's PhotoShopped. It's a great
conversation and it's just a good opportunity.
So they do some really cool work. So here's what I do. I really
don't know a lot about art, but I say
this is the final
project. We do a bunch of projects. This is the final one.
It's based on pageants of the masters. Anybody ever heard of
that? You dress up people and you do a famous painting. You
stand there and people come up and applaud politely. So that's
what it's based on.
So I say
I give them all the stuff they have to look at in
museums and all that stuff. Find a picture that speaks to you.
Now, I don't even know what that means. It just sounds good.
They kind of always do it.
So they find one that looks like them or reminds them of
something or is doing something they love to do, ballerinas are
very popular to girls, stuff like that. The young men usually
pick someone on a horse or someone with facial hair. So I
captain tell you how many freakin' Napoleons I got to look at
during this elective.
But anyway, the fact that a sixth grader is doing the awesome
work, that's not even why I have this slide up, although that's
cool. The middle slide is why I have this up to show you. We
break sixth graders into little groups and they help each other
do this. You can see someone's in the background, someone's got
the camera, no, no, tilt your head up, tilt your head a little
bit more. Tilt your head a little bit more. And they have to
deal with stuff that you guys deal with every day. The know it
all in the group that won't shut up. If you just shut up, you
get so much more done. You got to work with sixth graders
because they just tell them that.
No, you can't really. You've got to be polite, but they're
working on collaboration isn't pairing up in class and checking
each other's homework. That's not collaboration. Put them in a
group and let them fight it out a little bit and help each other
out. Someone always rises to the top as the expert with the SD
cards for the camera. It's so awesome to watch at that age.
So Escher is my favorite artist so I make them look at a bunch of
Escher. And I always get someone to pick an Escher. I love this
one because this girl was almost in tears, did not want to turn
this one in, it was so bad. She was so disappointed. I am so
proud of the fact that someone things this is bad work. But she
wanted her hand. She wanted this to be her hand so badly. She
took pictures. She zoomed in. And we just ran out of time and
she couldn't get to it work and she was so upset. I mean, how
awesome is that? That's a win for me.
And I just had this one up here because this guy's got some
I
mean, he's high end cojones. I mean, I don't know if you can
tell. Remember, I said pick something that speaks to you, and he
made himself Jesus in the last supper. There he is. Would you
have done that? I wouldn't have done that, but you gotta respect
him, right? Got to give him his props. But again, look at the
middle picture. He's got a prop. People are talking. They're
telling him to look down. They take like ten pictures and they
put the SD card in the computer and they're deciding if it's good
enough. I mean, it's so empowering and awesome at such a young
age to really let them do that kind of stuff.
All right. So I always put this slide on because if you listen
to me talk, you might think I hate iPads, and I don't. I don't
have an iPad. I have some Android slates, you know, that I use a
little bit. I don't really need it much, because you have
actually got everything I want on one device. I do all kind of
stuff on that. And they're amazing. I mean, they're awesome,
but they're too constraining.
I can't emphasize enough what a huge mistake I think it is to use
that. You know, it's kind of cool if you can get all your
textbooks on an iPad and not carry the books around, but that's
not what we're doing at Country Day. There's no ink. IT hates
them because they can't maintain them and control them and lock
them down. If you've seen any of their press with L.A. Unified,
you have some concept of what I'm talking about.
I don't hate them. It's just
I mean, they're sexy and schools
can't help themselves. They're not cheaper either anymore. What
I'm showing you is possible with the same numbers. And its way
more scalable. I still get people who suggest, oh, well, your
thing would be really hard to implement and scale. I'm like what
are you
it's the opposite. Myself and my network of men, I
could walk down to Miami Dade if you gave me enough manpower, I
could duplicate on 100,000 devices what I've got going, no
problem. I just need manpower. Because it's done. I've got the
image. I've got the network infrastructure. I've got Active
Directory that I can add everybody to and apply group policies
and lockdown and decide what we're going to control and what
we're not going to control and that's it.
I mean, it is way more scalable. I can't believe people make the
argument that the other thing's easier. It's literally insane in
my opinion.
So here's the big problem. I follow this very closely, as you
can imagine, and I mentioned how frustrated I am because I don't
even know if the stylus exists. It's like I'm waiting to hear
and I see something new that's released and I'm trying to Google
it and I'm like please, tell me they put a stylus
stylus.
oh, no
The Dell Venue 8, too small. Says it has a stylus. Dell Venue
11 is kind of interesting. Oh, really? They went with
synaptics? Oh, useless. The ink's just no good. Why didn't
they just put a Wacom on there? It's probably a good one.
So I want to show you a couple other things. I have got a little
more time and if I haven't convinced you yet, maybe you're
already all on board. I mean, we are at Microsoft, right? But
pretending that you don't think this is a good I'd but you're
still not sure, I want to show you. I hope that my talk doesn't
sound educational, because I'm telling you, I present this and I
get all kinds of people that see this, and it speaks to what
they're doing in their jobs.
If you have
I'm telling you, ink is everywhere. I am so much
more productive. I love to mind map. But we don't need to buy
education, you buy a mind mapping program software to get the
shapes. I just draw circles and color it and resize it and move
it. I mean, I mind mapped this presentation so I knew what I
would cover. I've got it. I'm not going to show it to you
because it's really crazy messy. But there are so many times
where you just want to grab something, circle something and say
are you freaking kidding me? It's right here, dude, and send it
out. And everybody would use it.
But let me show you a couple of things, interesting educational
things, I think. I'll start with this one. So let me do a new
thing here. I mean, I hope you kind of get how awesome it is
that I can walk around. It's very, very cool. This is Miracast.
I have it at my school. I'm going to retrofit everything with
this. It's awesome. This is a way better way to do it than I'm
doing it. We've been wireless for four years, but my wireless is
not as good as the WiDi here. I actually travel with my own, but
I'm using Microsofts. It's working as well as mine, I'm happy to
say.
Okay. I'm not going to save this. So this is actually the thing
I was talking about. So how many sizes of brushes do you have,
Rob? I've got an infinite number of brushes. Let me get a
brush. So I'm going to lay some paint down. You can push hard
and soft. How many colors do you have, Rob? Infinite number of
colors. And since it's paint, if you mix red with blue, it had
better turn into purple. It's kind of hard to see, it's washed
out, but it does.
Well, if you want to mix pencil in with that, go ahead. If you
want a palette knife, Bob, what's the guy's name? Ross, Bob
Ross, you know, the tree dude. He just uses a palette knife and
he draws trees. But if you're an artist, you use a palette knife
a lot. This is how you come up with that perfect color for
whatever you're doing. You mix colors together, you do the
palette knife and then you just have a little tool and you grab
that color and you start painting with it.
Now, again, I hope you're saying Rob, that's great, but we love
the feel of the canvas. Like I said, so do we. And what if
every kid at your school had full access to this all the time and
could practice a little bit and what if they could erase the
paint? Because you can't do that in a canvas, I'm pretty sure.
Oh, I didn't mean to erase it. What if you had
what if edit
undo applied to everything you did, whether it was a math
problem, whether you're writing on a map, when you're drawing the
next great painting. What if you had full access to the undo
features functionality. Would you take more risks? Would you
just lay that point down to see what happens and recover from the
mistake? I think you would.
So if I have not made my case, this is my big one because I'm a
math guy. Ink is a big deal because it's so important to
everybody. All of us have little side notes. I bet most of you
have a little thing that you take your notes in in your meetings
next to your computer. I just do it on my computer and then I've
got it and I can search it and all that good stuff. But this
transforms the way you can learn and teach. So graphing
calculators. We still have to use them because that's all you
can use is standardized tests. Graphing calculators are supposed
to be awesome because it lets you change the variables and see
how that affects the graph. You know what? It sucks changing
the equation in a graphing calculator. I don't know how long
it's been since you've used a graphing calculator, but it sucks.
So we got some really cool
there's apps and all kinds of
stuff, and there's Microsoft equation editor and all kinds of
really cool stuff that it does much better which we use. But at
the end of the day, a mathematician just wants to write some
stuff down and see what happens. I want my kids to discover
knowledge, not have me tell them, because they don't remember it
when I tell them. So this tool was amazing.
Let me write a little neater here, please. Whoa. Come on, make
me look bad. Do I have a dot in there? I think that will work.
Didn't work. Let me erase this. Give me another chance. I'm
standing up here. All right. So I think I got it this time. So
I just wrote an equation. What if you could just draw a line in
a draft, whatever you drew. Oh, that's a parabola. But the cool
part in education is letting kids do the what if. Let them
figure it out. What if I make that a 13? Did you see what
happened? It got skinny. Let me get rid of that. Ooh, three
makes it wider. What if I make it negative? Oh, did you see
that? The direction changes. That's
why is that happening?
What if I change this number? Two. Did it move? It moved,
right? What if I make it negative two? Oh, I know what that's
doing. What if you could give a class an equation, not tell them
what's going on, give them five minutes to change everything they
can change and then stop and have a conversation and agree on
what's happening? Is that better than me saying this is the
equation of a parabola. The sign of this changes the direction.
The bigger the number, the skinnier it is. I mean that's great
but I don't want to tell them. I want them to figure it out.
I'm not done. You might be thinking wow, this is awesome for a
teacher, but it's even cooler when it's in the student's hands.
But it's pretty cool for a teacher. If you're a teacher, you're
always looking for awesome manipulatives or apps because you want
to have a slider where it changes the variable and you see what
it does. That's important pedagogueically, that's what I was
kind of doing there, right, but just with ink. But I can make
anything like that on the fly just by writing and it's
transformational. It's completely changed what we're able to do.
Let me show you what I mean.
So let's do a circle, X squared plus Y square equals 16. Didn't
get my two. Give me a second there. When I graph it, oh, it's a
circle. It worked. I remember my circle formula. What if I
make this a four? Circle that smaller. What's up with that?
What if I make it a variable. An A. What if I write A equals 16
right here? Ooh, it's tied together automatically so now if I
change it down here it changes it up there. That's kind of cool.
But I'm not done. Here's the money shot. What if I wanted to
make it easy to manipulate that variable or any variable? I
happen to know if I draw a line to the equal sign, it makes a
slider on the fly for me. And I can just change it and see what
happens. Live and in real time when you're writing.
And this is just the tip of the ice berg. So much more of this
stuff would happen if more people knew that this technology
existed and recognized that if you get it in the right hands and
the right kind of environment, amazing stuff's going to happen.
There's all kinds of things going on. Think about circuits.
Think about drawing a circuit, being able to check and see if you
got it right just by looking at the ink. Absolutely
transformational.
Now, this is so hard for me. I'm running out of time. Remember,
my tablet conferences are three days long. It's hard for me to
fit that into an hour and 20 minutes. But I hope, remember, what
I wanted to do. This is a history lesson. I wanted to make sure
you knew what was possible. I wanted you to know what's going on
at my school, and I wanted you to know why we made the decisions
that we made. And we are all in on Microsoft. And it's
absolutely transformationally awesome. And there is not one flaw
or weakness to this, because there used to be two. Nobody knows
about it and I'm kind of here being recorded so hopefully that
will help a little bit. I'm doing my part. I'm doing tablet
conferences as much as I can, traveling all over the world,
meeting with schools.
But we need to amplify the message. If we can do that, more
people will know about it. And the second big one was money. It
used to cost a lot of money to do this. I'm telling you no one's
done it yet, but as soon as someone comes out with that 10.1 inch
hybrid that has a clickable keyboard with a Wacom active
digitizer running full Windows 8.1 for about five, six hundred
dollars, they should sell a billion of those things. And I've
done this. I'm not sure I said this so if I'm repeating myself,
I'm sorry, but that's what Microsoft Surface RT, your lower
surface, should be. It should be that. I like the Surface Pro.
I like the Surface Pro 2 a lot more because of good all day
battery. Need to have a garage for the stylus. That's a bit of
a fail. You need to be able to tether the stylus. 10.1 is a
little small for me, but it's a home run. 900 without the
keyboard, a little pricey. The cheaper Surface, the thing that
Microsoft is trying to get out to the masses, should be the thing
I'm describing. It's should be running the Adam processor. It
should be a full operating system. Why would you constrain your
people by not running all the apps that they love and want to
install? Just make it cheaper, have an active digitizer, have a
little Wacom thing with a garage, make the number right. You've
got the awesome
I love the keyboard. You can get the cheaper
one or the better one. It connects. You have to have it
connect. It has to happen in education. And that would be the
money. That would be the home run. Absolute, hands down, best
device in the world. I want a little bit bigger screen, but I
think that that's the thing for the masses. So got a couple
minutes if anyone wanted to ask me something or you just want to
stand up and leave because you've got other stuff to do, that's
great. But I wanted to have at least a couple minutes in case
there's some pending or question that you really were hoping I
was going to say and I didn't. So what have you got for me?
>>: Do you have a situation in the classroom where you need to
totally lock the PC down so the kids can do an exam without
>> Rob Baker: Great question. So there's a lot of options
there. We actually use Dyno. Dyno has two parts. There's an
interactive part called Vision, which is really cool and I don't
have time to show you, but it's phenomenal. The only thing even
close to OneNote that I would mention in the same breath as
OneNote, and it has a monitor part. So you can lock the
you
can say allow only this
allow only art rage so the only thing
they can do. Don't allow the internet. You can look at all the
screens. We have that functionality if you want to do that.
We do not do a lot of online testing. I would say 80 or 90
percent of the testing we do is on paper to make sure that we get
good results, because we are set up to easily share and
collaborate and we think that's a good thing. And we want to
help our kids make good decisions because some of these things
are pretty high stakes in terms of the colleges they're trying to
get into and the competition between their peers. So we test a
lot on paper to make sure we're getting accurate results.
There's all kind
so I don't know what your question is
specifically, like common core needs to be
so you can do all
the locking down and all the control way better on full operating
systems with a network than you can with any other device. And
there's all kinds of third party people who have a browser. The
coolest stuff is probably with the blended learning at the
college level. You can lock
you can get it so you're locked
done and they can see you. Some of them make so it that you have
to take the test and they can see you on the web cam so there's,
again, it's a
you just do it. You don't have to, like, figure
it out. So there would be all kinds of options.
>> Jonathan Grudin: If you have a couple more questions, after
we adjourn, you can come up and ask Rob. I'd like to thank Rob
for this inspiring presentation. I'd also like to mention that
the next tablet conference is six weeks from now, and not too
late to sign up for it.
>> Rob Baker:
Got a couple spots left.
>> Jonathan Grudin:
>> Rob Baker:
Let's thank Rob.
Thanks for coming.