BrainBlast 2008: Survey Results and Musings

Last month, in the first week of August, the Weber School District Technical Services Department hosted the second annual BrainBlast conference. BrainBlast is a time of year when we techs get to feel like rock stars, and the whole thing was a resounding success. The keynote speakers were excellent, the techs were responsive, Vinnie’s antics were hilarious, the vast majority of the teachers I spoke to felt they were learning a lot and that the conference was worthwhile, and we amazingly managed to pull off an impromptu musical presentation on the last day for the secondary teachers.
The feedback we received from the teachers we surveyed was generally quite positive. We asked everyone to answer some general questions about the conference, followed by some specific questions about each class. I’ve processed the results we received and came up with some average statistics. All the ratings below are on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest.
Conference Ratings

Just the fact that the average ranking for the conference overall, out of 222 survey-takers, was a high 4.76 is especially pleasing. We had some great keynote speakers: Kevin Eubank, Jim Vanides, and Ken Sardoni. In retrospect, we should have had each keynote speaker ranked separately in the survey, rather than all together. We’ll make sure we do that for next year. The food from Iron Gate Grill wasn’t bad, but nothing to write home about, so I basically agree with the rating there. And the Maintenance Department did a great job getting Weber High ready. Kudos to everyone who helped put everything together.
We offered 19 different classes in all. The following statistics show the most well-received classes:

It’s not surprising to see the class on WeberTube, our new media sharing site, at #1. Shawn Potokar debuted this excellent new system at BrainBlast, and it received a great response. This is what teachers have been waiting for. I’ve mentioned this before, but I believe that if we block something that’s useful for educational purposes, we’re obligated to provide an alternative. Due to inappropriate content we must block YouTube, but WeberTube is our answer to that. And in his session, Shawn even showed the attendees how to pull videos off YouTube at home and upload them to WeberTube (see this post by Justin McFarland for a summary of this method). I’ve enjoyed seeing the videos our teachers have uploaded so far this school year.
Shawn Potokar also taught the Video U class, the #4 rated class, and showed some basic tips with Windows Movie Maker. Honestly, I wasn’t all that familiar with Movie Maker, but now I regret it. Last July I was assigned the task of creating a 30-minute video compilation for my grandmother’s 90th birthday, and I wrestled with various tools, mostly Adobe Premiere, trying to slap a working product together. Movie Maker would have been so much easier, and I wish Shawn could have shown me the ease and benefits of this product sooner.
Jennifer Boyer-Thurgood presented the Document Cameras class, which came in as #2. She was also one of the key organizers of the conference, so if you thought BrainBlast was awesome, you can thank her for it. Document cameras are extremely cool and extremely useful, and it was great to see first-hand how a teacher might use them in the classroom setting. I wish they had them when I was in the public school system. I’m excited to see more and more teachers get them in our district, and hope that they can use them in creative ways.
Bryce Ballif’s clickers class came in #3. I wasn’t really too familiar with the clickers, and this is the best introduction to them I could have hoped for. What a great tool these are for classrooms! Instant responses, statistical feedback…I wish he had more time to go into advanced usages for them, or that more of the attendees could share how the clickers had impacted their teaching.
Moodle Problems
Ryan James introduced WSD Online, our own Moodle system. We launched this at BrainBlast along with WeberTube, but unfortunately it came in second to last. Some teachers commented to me that they were very impressed with WSD Online, and that there was a lot they still could learn there. This itself was the problem and the reason for the low ranking, since it implies how steep the learning curve for Moodle actually is. The steeper the learning curve, the less likely our teachers will use the product.
A few technical problems with our Moodle system reared their ugly heads during the conference, too. First of all, I didn’t anticipate administrators being in the class, though I should have seen it coming! All our Moodle class data is pulled from our AS400, and since only teachers have classes in the system, administrators were left with no classes to see and nothing to do. As a result, I ended up creating a BrainBlast sandbox after the first “Online Classes” session, so administrators could log in, and at least have a class to create content in.
I’m considering a solution for the administrators, possibly creating a one-click install where they can set up their own unique Moodle system, and do whatever they want with it. In effect, this would give administrators even more flexibility over their courses than teachers currently get, and they could create training courses with those both inside and outside the district, if necessary. (I’ll have to consult with upper management about this one, and hash out a few more ideas.) In the meantime, for those administrators looking for a way to implement online classes, you might want to check out WiZiQ or HotChalk.
Second of all, somehow Two Rivers High School didn’t get their classes added to WSD Online when I upgraded to version 1.9 several weeks ago — I had a few teachers track me down to voice their concerns about this. (My apologies to the Two Rivers teachers.)
Third of all, apparently Moodle spammed a bunch of teachers (sorry!). When we set up the BrainBlast 2008 forum in Moodle, we apparently didn’t turn off the “email every comment everyone posts to everyone who has touched Moodle at any point in time” setting. Why that’s turned on by default, I have no idea!
Live Streams
This is the first time we’ve streamed some of the BrainBlast sessions live over the Internet. We even set up a chat room that viewers could visit while the sessions were going on, and though we didn’t take the time to advertise this as well as we could have, since it was mostly experimental, I feel it was very useful. We had a few people come and go, and then some recurring visitors, namely Brent Ludlow from Hooper Elementary, and Mrs. Durff from my Twitter network. I was just streaming off my dinky little webcam, but maybe next year we can install ManyCam or something on the presenters’ desktops and stream better presentations that way. Equipping the presenters with a wireless mic may be a good investment, too.
Some of the sessions have been uploaded to the BrainBlast WeberTube group. I’ll finish uploading the rest I was able to record soon.
Where Can We Improve?
As mentioned earlier, Moodle’s learning curve is too steep for some. Perhaps we should consider having two Moodle classes for next year’s BrainBlast, to cover all possible topics. I personally think William Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques would be an excellent resource to pattern any further training we do for Moodle. Another possibility would be to explore a lighter, simpler solution for the teachers who don’t want the vast functionality Moodle offers. More on that in an upcoming post.
Nothing is necessarily set in stone, but the current plan for BrainBlast 2009 is to have only two days of training rather than four, and join together the elementary and secondary teachers. In turn, we will increase the number of courses we offer, and expand the usage of the facilities to accommodate all the attendees at once. Frankly, I’m glad that we’re planning on this (I don’t think I can come up with four days worth of jokes about Vinnie again).
It seems that we’ve kind of stuck ourselves into a trend of providing only introductory classes. After spending time in the classes, and following some conversations with our presenters, I realized that the workshop-style subject material didn’t suit all the attendees. Some in the classes were already fairly proficient in Office 2007, PowerPoint, blogging, clickers, and the other technologies we offer in the district, and had to wait for other less-skilled but still eager-to-learn attendees to “catch up.” There wasn’t much room for our presenters to venture into advanced discussions of their topics.
It’s great that we’re offering training to those with such a wide range of skill sets, but at the same time, we need to find a way to group our teachers together based on their skills in particular technologies. It hardly makes sense to teach seasoned bloggers how to set up a blog, use the Dashboard, and write a simple post, when we could be teaching them about great widgets they can use, how to use RSS feeds, the importance of using a plugin like Slimstat to track visitor statistics, and using the blog as a platform to engage the educational community by leaving comments, using pingbacks, trackbacks, and growing your personal learning network.
So I hope that we can do something different this year. In lieu of “elementary” and “secondary” tracks, we could have two different types of classes: “beginner” and “advanced.” I think this would be a good move, as the teachers who want to explore the tools in more depth could do so. This way, those who are already proficient document camera users, SMART Board users, bloggers, Moodlers, Powerpointers, and so on, could learn more advanced tricks without having to wait for their less-proficient (but still eager to learn!) classmates to catch up.
A couple issues come to mind about this approach, though:

1. How would we be able to estimate the number of classroom sizes? Could we guarantee full classrooms in all our advanced classes?
2. We’d have to very clearly distinguish what an “advanced user” is, so everyone would be on roughly the same page in the class. We don’t want someone who thinks they’re qualified to join the “Advanced Podcasting” class struggling with basic things like recording in Audacity and posting MP3s on their blog. All attendees should be able to jump right into advanced topics without waiting too long for others. Perhaps a simple survey could help registrants determine which track they belong in.

And finally, maybe it’s just just me, but it seems silly that we have teachers going to a technology conference, sitting in a computer lab, and learning about cool web sites, only to write down the web links on paper. Why are we not showing them how to use social bookmarking sites like Delicious or Diigo (especially with the new Diigo accounts for Educators that was just released)? These sites let you store all your bookmarks online, and share them with others in your learning network. They could simply pull up their bookmarks in any class they’re in. Diigo is especially awesome, because it lets you also highlight text on your bookmarked web sites, so you can share specific snippets of text, point to especially relevant passages in long web pages, or even annotate them with your own comments.
I’m already looking forward to BrainBlast 2009. If the trend continues, it will be even more exciting and better than this year’s conference.