Supporting Innovation Through Distance Supervision & Telepresence Experiences

PRESENTER

Mark Ellner

Dr. Mark Ellner is a Teaching Assistant Professor that serves as the Distance Supervision Technology Supervisor at Kansas State University’s College of Education. In this role, he supervises the use of GoReact in the college’s Masters of Arts of Teaching, methods courses, practicums, and student teaching. In addition to guiding the college’s use of technology, he also teaches courses in educational technology, coaching, and health and movement.

TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hurdley:

Introduce you to Mark Elner, who is an assistant professor at Kansas State University. Mark, I’ll turn the time over to you and I’ll hop back on for q and a.

Mark Ellner:

All right, well thanks for having me, Jessica and Karina and really appreciate it and all the work we’ve done with GoReact and thanks for anybody who’s on here. And so just wanted to share a little bit about myself before we get going here. I’m a teaching assistant professor at Kansas State University here in Manhattan, Kansas. We’ve been working with GoReact for a number of years, and I’m along with my many other positions in the College of Education. I’m also the supervisor or specialist for all distance supervision technology we use here at K State. So I’m going to go ahead and get my presentation going here. And it’s like it said earlier, if you have any questions, please love to hear from them.

So again, welcome from Kansas State University. We like to call ourselves Ed Katz and Power Educators powered by purpose. So kind of what I’m going to talk about today is a little bit introduction into our program and what we’re going to do and really focus on two distinct areas. The first is on how we have used a telepresence in using these. They’re called dual robots that are, well, I’ll show you a picture of ’em and how we’ve used them to do some global outreach, but also to expand our teaching opportunities and somehow how that came about. And the other is going to be how that case eight has really went from distance supervision being something at the beginning that we were hesitant to use and really not excited about, but it saw as more of an necessity than something that was really going to benefit us to where we are now and how it’s something that we really feel benefits us and then how we have used that to build our programs in addressing our enrollment needs.

And then looking, where do we go from here? So here at K State, our vision is preparing educators to be knowledgeable, ethical, caring decision makers for a diverse and changing world. I just like to show that picture. It kind of makes us look very pretty. This is our main building, probably one of the oldest buildings on campus. And so go ahead here. Sorry, go back. This all starts with kind of a story of how we got into our telepresence and so kind of during Covid and prior to Covid starting, which is actually ironic that we were getting into this prior to covid because it really did help us. We had a distance pre-service teacher that didn’t have a placement and they were in a different state and they were not allowing us to place a student there. And when they started looking at opportunities, one of the building principals had heard of this double robot.

And if you look on the screen here, this is the double robot, this is the class of students behind. But you see it’s basically a big iPod or iPad on just a telescope here that moves up and down and it can move around all over. And so the idea was that we could put these students, the student teacher using this robot into a classroom with the kind of physical presence that made it seem a little more real and gave that teacher some personal experience with students. And so the solution offered more of an interactive than just getting on Zoom. So we’ve all done that where we just get on Zoom and we join a class. And so we actually, this allows the teacher to move around the classroom and also to interact with individual students or small groups of students and give them actually a place to the students, a little bit of a personal relationship with that teacher even though they’re not in the classroom. In fact, I know for one of the classrooms that we’ve been in, they actually hung a little t-shirt and some pants to make it look like a real person.

So this is Dr. Eileen Wertzberger, she’s our head of field experience and she’s our main person who’s done a lot of research on this and she’s the one who started this program and just wanted to highlight her. And before I get into it a little more is they did a study when they did put this on here. And what they found was that when you use this implementation of this technology in effective co-teaching practices, that you actually gain meaningful field experiences in real time. And for us it was allowing us to put place bound pre-service teachers into local K 12 institutions and allow them to host some of their different field experiences. Now, one of the big things obviously is these are not cheap and each one of these robots costs roughly $4,000. And so we have what’s called a rural education center. Now I’m sure many of you in your state have a rural areas, but Kansas, our rural education areas really struggle to find teachers.

It’s a big problem. Basically anything west of Manhattan, Kansas, we’re kind of in the central part of Kansas, west of Manhattan, get into Salina area, you really start to get out into the very, very small schools and small areas and far away from everything else. A number of our students come from schools that have schools, eight to nine students in their entire graduating class. And those places are really struggling to get teachers into it. So through the grant we were awarded two grants, a distance learning and telemedicine grant and had funding from the Department of Education or for Department of Agriculture to purchase these. And the idea was we wanted to explore the potential of using telepresence and that application or hard to staff content areas like let’s talk about the rural areas. And so this was all focused on them at the beginning and we’re going to talk about this a little bit, but then also talk about how this came into another, into where we wanted to expand it a little bit.

So what we were doing was taking these robots, and again, here’s go back to so you can see this robot here, taking these robots and putting them into rural school districts and allowing our student teachers or pre-service teachers throughout their time in our program to go into those schools. It’s hard to get student teachers in those schools. It’s hard to get, A lot of them want us to come out there, they want us to be out there and be part of it, but the reality is some of those places are four or five, six hours away from us. So this was an opportunity to get them and let those rural districts have a little more maybe interaction with teachers and allow those students to have a little more interaction with other teachers to help them on things.

So through these robots, we’ve allowed ’em to do a lot of things. We are allowed them to have classroom observations so teachers can be on that robot. So basically with that robot, just kind of go back to this, sorry. While that robot is, what I would be doing is sitting at my computer and using the arrows on my computer and we’re going to see an example of it a little while. I’ll show you a video example of it, but I would be moving it around, my camera would show my face and I can just talk like I right there with people. Next was service learning opportunities. We tried to get our students as many opportunities to work with students in a classroom or in a gym setting or whatever setting it is in their educational subject, try to get them in as many different places as possible and those opportunities.

And this allowed us to increase that where instead of running or not having enough schools close by, we were able to put students in this situation. And finally is putting some of that extra instruction into rural, elementary and secondary classrooms. So as I said before, the study showed that if you couple this with the teaching practices that we teach within our program and then put that into a classroom with students that are in need of it, we came up with a lot of effective experiences for our students. So that was kind of how it all started up into it. And the reality is we’re always at Kansas State and I’m sure many universities that you’re with, we’re trying to look bigger. So we get with our research and then we want to go further and further. What can we do? So we were looking for some different answers to do something different and we came up with a international telepresence project.

So again, how can we use this technology rather than, okay, we understand we can use it somewhat Kansas, we can put people from other places within Kansas into schools and rural schools and hard to get to schools, but now what can we do more? So how can we actually use this to cultivate some critical reflection in the pre-service teachers and promote global perspectives? And we’re finding that global perspectives really enrich inform us looking at not just what we do in America but what is going on around the world. And so I happen to be part of this program, but we have a group of doctorates. They were doctorates students at Kansas State and now they’re professors at Kansas State that were also part, they came from a college called Uum, which is in Monte Ecuador. So that’s the, you see on the right. We partnered with that university to put in those robots into four schools within Monte Ecuador for our students to work with them.

And the professor, he’s a good friend of mine, Dr. Ed in Trigo who is a professor at Monte and now is a teaching assistant professor at Kansas State, wanted to look and see how we can use this to help our students one, get an experience and an international experience, a cultural experience being in different classrooms and then how to impact their classes where they’re trying to teach English and provide native language speakers into their class. Doctor Dr. Tiago, his focus is on linguistics and language and education and being an ELL teacher. And one thing that I didn’t even think about was if you think when you’re teaching different languages, you’re typically when he’s teaching English to Spanish speaking students, he is talking to them still in a Spanish dialect from Spanish first. So actually bringing our students in with a English first dialect native speakers really would be an impact.

And so we really went into the classrooms working on reading and everything. Now how did we pick all these kids and how did this all get started? And it kind of was just like out of a conversation of what can we do with these robots? And I happened to be in the meeting and I teach the honors educational technology class, and so we decided what a perfect group of students to do. We’re always looking for different projects. So we picked, if you see this picture, these are the students here that were in the honors class. We kind of volunteered them and offered them an opportunity to do this project with us and be part of our research. Also as we had to get with people down in Ecuador. And it was an interesting project down there. One is we had to get the robots down there to Ecuador, and two is we had to go into schools that had the ability to host the technology, the internet technology, the wifi, the ability to do this kind of a project.

One thing we really start to realize is that is what things that we take for granted maybe here in America is not always other places. So we actually worked with four private schools. The public schools in Ecuador did not have the ability to do this. So kind of just a little bit of a history and how this all went was as you see right here, over here on the bottom left, this is actually, we believe this or not, is actually cheaper to fly four people down each carrying one of these robots in these big boxes as their baggage than it was to ship ’em down. If we shipped them down, they would also be stuck in customs for months and months and months. So literally the university flew four robots and four people down and put ’em in the school. Also gave them an opportunity to train them.

Now through this project, you can see right here, or I’m going to kind of forward in here, our students started working with other people or the teachers down there to create lessons and opportunities to just talk with the students. And what we really found was some of the best opportunities were when they just got to chat with them. We started off, they were reading books and doing different things to ’em and what they quickly found was they were reading books and the reality was that’s not our students would typically say, this is not how we would say it. So it became a lot of just conversations with the students about cultural stuff. They would ask us, our students, a lot of questions. Our students would talk to them about what they do a day in the life of a college student. But you can see opportunities now.

There’s an example. There’s an example. This is a moving through the room now these other pictures as you see up here, part of this project after we finished it, we actually, myself, Dr. Tiago right here, Mona making, she was our coordinator for all this, our global outreach coordinator. We took a group of students down to Ecuador to visit and visit schools. And so this is me back here traveling around there. This is actually my daughter here on the bottom. My daughter was born in Guatemala. And so able to take her down for a cultural, this is a professor, another professor at this is again Dr. Tiago, as you can kind see our students. This is the equator. So we are in keto Ecuador, which actually sits on the equator. So we could actually be in different hemispheres. I’m going to come back to this picture a little bit because I think it informs a little bit of what we found with this research. This right here, this is one of our, this teacher here, Isabella, she was our probably longest tenured person with our process. She did this project with us for a number of years, but you can see those are two of our students. Right? There we go. Now this is what it looked like within the classroom. So if you look here at the robot, that’s one of our students. I’m going to show this video to you

Speaker 3:

Mark. It’s Corina. I’m just making sure we shouldn’t be hearing any sound, right?

Mark Ellner:

I’m not going to have you watch the whole thing, but you can kind of see how that moved up through the classroom. And what they would do is go around to individual students and have that conversation. And so we did this for a year and I could go along. There’s a lot of things that we found that were difficult. We ran into lots of challenges with the technology obviously whether having strong wifi, different things. But what we really found a couple of interesting things was one was the different perspectives and the disorienting dilemmas. Things that the students were not, they did not understand until they had this experience with these students. They had these ideas of what they thought that education was in Ecuador and what they thought it was in other countries, especially developing countries and what it actually looked like. The next was questioning the educational space assumptions.

What does education look like? Does it always have to look the same? Are we able to push the boundaries and do something different? And then another one was examining the America centered values. When we developed teaching identities, our students found had this idea that we were thinking that we take for granted that or we think that everything we are doing is the only way to do things and especially they were talking about from their perspective, they really got to see what was happening in a classroom in another country and are there things within that teaching that are better than what we were doing within our own programs? And in one area that was really interesting I thought and that it brought up, it was kind of a surprise to us, but we wanted to highlight it was the idea that they’re bracing humility. They don’t know everything.

There was a lot of ego checking at the door trying to make sure that they were developing relationships with these students and it wasn’t always just about very one way, this is how it’s done and they were kind of humbled by the experience. Now the cool thing about this process is what I don’t have in here, but we always talk about with it through all the difficulties we had our first year with our technology and getting that we can show you some videos where it looked very organized. You’re not seeing all the emails from students and messages and text messages that they were struggling with the technology part of it, but was that relationships were built and it was pretty amazing how well these relationships were developed in short amount of times with the students, how quickly they attach. Just like when we send student teachers out into classrooms now, I think they’re always surprised about how quickly they match up for that, how those relationships develop. Now going back to that, I wanted to share this picture with you. This was a really interesting, this was actually a school on the Galapagos Islands and my daughter Macy is right here now. Obviously Macy is Hispanic in her ethnicity.

These students all saw Macy and we went out, we’d been done when they came over to us and they’re like, Hey, we want you to come back and take a picture. And I was like, oh sure, you can take a picture with me. And what they didn’t want was they didn’t want me to take a picture. They didn’t want a picture of me. They wanted a picture with my daughter because what they were seeing was somebody that looked like them, but in a very different situation. Macy was dressed up, she had makeup on, she had earrings, she had necklaces. And as you can see, these students were all dressed in uniforms. They kind of looked like Macy for that little time. There was a superstar. They wanted her number, they wanted her Instagram information and all that and they were very excited. So it was kind of a real interesting experience for my daughter, one being around a culture that for her, everybody looked like her because that’s not her normal day, but also is to see how they reacted to her as someone special.

It is just really when we talked about the relationships and the different egocentrics of what our students thought compared to what it was. So just kind of going forward, we’ve continued on, we’ve done this multiple times now this is, we’re on our fourth year. We’re learning and gaining better. We’ve lost some teachers. We’ve gained some teachers. But again, you can see our things here. So now I’m going to switch topics a little bit. So that’s one way we really try to address technology. So let’s talk about distance supervision. So I came on board with this in about 2017, asked to be the specialist supervisor for distance supervision within our program. We were using a different platform at that time and at that time we knew there was a need, but this is a quote from Dr. Goodson. He is our assistant dean in our curriculum instruction chair.

He said when we started distance supervision, we had no doubt it was a poor substitute for in-person supervision, but we were willing to compromise in order to expand our programs. So everybody we’re trying to expand our programs. Enrollment’s always an issue. And so as we get ready to move on to this, I want to ask a question and put your answers in the chat is how many people on here are using distance supervision within your program? And then maybe along that line is are you using it for a majority or is this something that you just use intermittently when you have to or So for example, we’re going to kind of talk about a K state. We’ve went to this almost being one of our primary supervision methods.

So at the beginning it was like this isn’t going to work, but we have to get some opportunities for kids to do this. Obviously in Kansas we are very rural. So I have had student teachers in my own program four plus hours away. My first couple of years I was driving to ‘EM four hours to watch an hour long class and then head home. Here’s what we’re doing now. It has a tear down system, but if I look at GoReact with what we are right now, KA, we have over 80 faculty and supervisors using it. So our faculty is us that are the professors, the teachers of the class. Then we go into our university supervisors, we call these their grad tests. These are students that are graduate students that are working on doctorates master’s programs and these students serve as supervisors within our program, within practicum experiences, also student teaching experiences and we have over 900 accounts.

In fact, I think we might have upped ours to about a thousand accounts this year. That’s how many people we have using GoReact each year. So you can see it’s become went from somewhere. That is a small part to a big part. So when I took this on, to give you some context, our program had about 20 people using distance supervision for student teaching experiences. We now have over a hundred to 150 people just within our undergrad student teachers. But we’ve also moved it on to other places, not just undergraduate student teaching, but we use it within our masters of ours to teaching. This is a all a hundred percent online program that allows students who already have a teaching degree or already have a degree, a college degree, to come in a one year intensive study to get their teaching license. So the three main areas we use it is our student teaching, our masters of art, student teaching and all practicum experiences.

So that’s pretty much where we’re using it within the general outside of classroom. We use this even when we are able to visit our student teachers face-to-face if they’re in town or if they’re within an hour or two. We still use this distance supervision. So for example, my students, I actually am in charge of the PE and health program at our for K state. So my students have a dual placement. They do eight weeks elementary, eight weeks secondary. So what I do is if they’re local, I visit them once face to face and then the second time of that placement, they’re recorded so we could watch ’em. The masses of our teaching is all over and at last count we were in about 30 different states and probably 10 to 11 different countries. The farthest that I’ve heard that we were at was in Pakistan and in practicum experiences we use this almost exclusively in practicum experiences just for the number of students that we have.

We don’t have time to go reach all of them. Right now I have 18 students in practicum experiences and 11 students in student teaching. There wouldn’t be enough time in the day for me to go visit each one of them the number of times so they can do the video. In course we’ve tried to use GoReact. One of the things that when I talked about the question of where you use distance supervision, when we use GoReact, I always feel like we’re kind of like the idea of the brain where we use 10% of our brain. I feel like we’re doing that with GoReact and we’re always looking for different ways to use it to expand our worth of it and expand the use of it. GoReact has so many different uses within the classroom. So these are just a few things that we are currently doing.

We use it a lot for introductions so students can just in a video within a Canvas class, we use a lot of video remote lesson presentations, micro teaches, so my students do micro teaches. We upload the videos to their GoReact and they can go in there and comment any kind of short video that they make. Maybe it’s a online video that they want to do some kind of review and also we use it for class discussions. So we’re not doing it in class. They actually do it on GoReact, which we can then watch later within our distance supervision. Really the meat of it is we’ve had to use this to build and improve our programs. Our students for student teaching can go anywhere they want in this country to student teach for the most part. So from Kansas, I’ve had student teachers in Chicago, I’ve had student teachers in Austin, Texas.

I’ve had student teachers in Colorado and student teachers in Nebraska to multiple out of state. What that does is it allows for us to recruit students with them knowing they can actually go back home. So when I did my student teaching a number of years ago, I was only allowed to 50 miles and up until probably 10 years ago that was still with us with K State is you could only go within 50 miles. Well now this allows us to put students closer to where they want to be, allow students to go home, saves money for them and it’s a real draw for our program. Then it also allows us to provide multiple supervisors for student feedback. We can get more people watching our students’ video and giving them feedback. It’s not always just me. So for me, for example in my program I have two GTAs. So I can have all myself and my two GTAs all watch one student’s video to give them feedback to provide better feedback. And finally, right below you see the Master’s of Arts of Teaching and also we have a elementary program, so bachelor’s of Science online and elementary teaching that is 100% online and they actually do a full year of student teaching in that program that is all distanced. So that is 100% using GoReact.

Now here’s how we came out the other side and I think this is really the story of distance supervision for us. This is again our department chair and assistant dean today. We have no doubt the quality of data and the depth of conversation about professional practice is far superior using distance technologies and supervision protocols. We have found that we have taken this what at one point we saw as a necessity but not ideal to something that has become a luxury and something that has become ideal. The ability, and again with the variety of opportunities that GoReact, the platform provides us in the ways that we’re able to use it and allows us to give our students way better feedback. So the ability for me to sit down with a student, make the comments, have them go back and react to the comments or they make the comments than I go in React or the best time is when the student and I can sit online on Zoom and we can actually watch the videos together and really dig into it and see what’s going on.

I think the idea that using any kind of video data very, as I tell my students, it’s sometimes difficult to watch. It’s sometimes not the most flattering thing, but I actually think it’s one of the most important things. We talk about it in the terms in physical education as think about any sport that is played. They use game film and a lot of our students are obviously going to be coaches and so we talk with them about that. If you’re playing, you’re going to watch game film, so why wouldn’t you do that for your performance as a teacher? And they’ve bought into that and again, it’s going to be very uncomfortable at first. So where are we going from here? I think the biggest thing is just trying to develop more incourse opportunities, things that we can do and provide training for our teachers obviously use videos to practice teacher evaluation, so having our students actually evaluate each other, our peer reviews, our self-evaluation within teaching and then students creating own experience to evaluate.

So one area that we’ve looked into is actually having students do mock interviews with parents or mock IEP meetings where they can actually see how they react and those kind of opportunities. Group discussions I said. So we started this trying to work on that one area where we did use it a little bit when we’re working on expanding it is case study responses. So actually using it to, and you see below that the research applications. We’ve used it for coding and data evaluation. We’re trying to get more into right now everybody’s just so overwhelmed. We’re just using it. We all know the basics of GoReact, we know how to put it into our canvas pages. We know how to have our students upload the videos, we know how to evaluate it, we know how to use our markers, but actually looking and really what does our faculty need from it.

And then obviously a big thing with GoReact is their AI opportunities. Just now kind of getting into that, I know there’s a lot of discussion about that and that being on the new offerings from GoReact. So seeing where we go with that and then in to additional training, I think we can get pretty stagnant and as an education with everything and everything in life, I feel like if you’re not gaining, you’re losing, right? So we need to continue to find ways and push our teachers, push our professors, push our students to use this kind of technology.

How do we use it better? How do we find more ways to use it effectively if we’re just sitting there always using it as it is, we we’re not going to grow. And it’s hard for teachers to sometimes watch their video, but I think once they start watching it, I know I’ve done this to myself when I first started with GoReact and started with the distance supervision, again, very uncomfortable. First of all. You’re like, I look like that. I didn’t even realize I looked like that now and I sound like that. So now I’m pretty used to it and it’s made a big impact on my teaching. So that was like a big run through with a lot of different things and I’d like to open this up for some questions. I kind of have my information there and so if people have questions, I would be happy to talk and I know if we want to jump back on here and have that kind of organized,

Jessica Hurdley:

We’ll jump into the q and a now, mark, for everybody that is here, if you do have a question, please feel free to put it in the chat or the q and a so we can ask those questions as well. There is one question that is, how many videos do you ask the student to provide during practicum or student teaching?

Mark Ellner:

Excellent, good point. So during our practicum experiences, so our practicum experiences, our students will do in my world, they’ll do a two different 40 hour practicums. They’ll do an elementary, 40 hour practicum and a secondary, and then if they’re like an elementary teacher where they do everything, they would do an 80 hour practicum. So from my experience, our program, our students are required to do three videos during their time and what we try to do in timing with all their stuff, but we try to go back to back to back. So within three weeks they do three videos and they do three lessons they have to teach, which to them seems completely overwhelming. And then I say, okay, so then when you’re student teaching you’re going to do that every day, three lessons at three times. So that’s that during their student teaching, their experiences. For me, for example, I try to do a minimum of four observations. So if they’re in a distance, two hours plus away. So for me it’s basically Kansas City to Salina is about an hour to two hours either side east to west of me. I will go visit them, but anything further than that, they would have to do all videos. So four videos, two per placement. But if I can go and watch one live, then they would do one live one video and so they always submit a minimum, they’ll submit two videos.

Jessica Hurdley:

Perfect, perfect. Another question came in through the chat. How would you get started to set this up at a faculty of education where I’m guessing GoReact is not used yet? Any

Mark Ellner:

Tips? Yeah, so we were not originally with GoReact and once we started doing some explorations where we were, things weren’t great and we moved in GoReact and found one, it has to be the most user-friendly platform. It was by far the most user-friendly platform we could find. I think the big thing that is, I would, and I’m happy to do this honestly since I’ve done this with other universities that are thinking about it, is get people like myself who use it, who are kind of really into it and come talk to your faculty about the benefits of it, but also to show them the ease of it. I’ve created modules within our Canvas pages, so we’ve created modules, actually done a webinar on that a while back where modules of training you have to show ’em. You have to start off with baby steps of here’s your video, here’s how you make comments, and then after that it’s really just constant support.

I think that’s one of the best ways though, is we, and we’ve actually interested enough with in our university have had other colleges reach out to us and I’ve met with other colleges. So for example, our counseling program that are going to be counselors, they are just now jumping on board with us, jumping on board and asking about this kind of technology and the best way is I just met with them and talked to ’em. I think that’s one of the best ways to do it. And then using leaning on GoReact for the original training. I will say as we’ve gotten further along, we’ve kind of specialized the training specifically into what we need. And I’ve kind of taken it over and I think I can just follow up that bottom question also, what equipment do you use for filming? So this is one of the best things that we’ve done because the stuff we were using before actually required a certain tool that students had to buy.

It was very expensive and so that was a big prohibitor one. We were trying to buy it and one year we were spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on this. So our students actually have, again, this is stuff like I would be happy to provide anybody, we actually have a technology requirement. Our students can use any videoing device. They want that as long as they can get it onto a file and upload it. So our students use their phones, they use iPads, they use tablets, they can use their computer. So anything that you can film, you can use a digital camera as long as you can get that file to upload. That’s it. We do use microphones, we encourage them to use microphones. There is a certain microphone that I am not paid for, I should get paid for because I’m sure our university has made them a lot of money, but it’s microphone on Amazon. It’s just like any other microphone, something you can plug into your computer. There’s a million out there. But that’s the nice thing. If you have a, ideally we tell our students they need a tripod, an iPhone or an iPad or any kind of tablet or recording device. That’s all they need.

Jessica Hurdley:

And I know someone mentioned the swivel cameras are their favorites. Many school media centers have them as well. Another question came in through the q and a, can you describe the feedback markers your program use GoReact?

Mark Ellner:

Yeah, so our feedback markers, we use basically what we do for our portfolio. So our students all do a 11 entry portfolio for their student teaching and we actually use that within our practicum experience. Also things like learning environment, learning development, assessment, content knowledge, application of content. So what we have done is created a marker for each one of those entry or evaluation points that we have. So 11 markers. So that’s our baseline. Every person who does it within our practicum experience, they use that. But we also have allowed people, for me in a physical education setting, if I’m watching a gym, I’ve added some specialized things in there. I’m looking for cues that they’re making. I’m looking for activity fit time. So we’ve allowed people, we have the basic standard I put in is called our just basically called K state evaluation and that is our 11 entry targets. So that way our students, it helps them when they’re also creating their portfolios to see where we’re hitting on those specific points.

Jessica Hurdley:

That’s a great idea and a great option. The last question we have would love to hear more about the tutorial modules you use in Canvas and how you created those. What is the most valuable learning objective out of those tutorial modules?

Mark Ellner:

Yeah, so we saw early on, just like any technology, 99% of the people are going to say, I have no idea what I’m doing to you. Just tell me. So we had to, after 8 million calls, I’m like, I have to make this so simple that everybody has this. So I created a module and again, these are things that I’m happy to share and my information’s available with you. One is we have an overall training module or training video. This is how you do it. It used to be we for a long time we had the recording that GoReact did with us at the beginning, but then I try to make a very easy one basically based off the questions we would get and everything. And this is the basics. The next thing, I think this is the most important thing you have to do if you were say, my one main objective is GoReact is filled with resources to the point where you couldn’t look at all of them.

So what I did was pick the most important ones and I have links directly to them. And so basically I have a link to the help desk. I have a link to uploading the number one problem is people have trouble uploading. Well most of the time they call and they say, well, GoReacts down, it doesn’t work. Well, no, how’s your internet? Well, I don’t have very good internet. So we have a directly to their uploading troubleshooting page. We have a video that we did that we brought GoReact in and did a video just on troubleshooting. So that’s the first one, the troubleshooting. And then the final one is GoReact as a you type in and you talk to them, oh, I don’t even know a chat. Basically where you type in, you say, this is what I’m at this school, this is the class I’m working on.

And then they get right back to you. And we’ve had amazing success with that I will say is I’ve put stuff in on a Saturday night and got responses. So those are the main three. Then finally, as we have two other things that are really important in there. One is we have their technology requirements. So yes, you have to have good internet, you have to have a good camera, you have to have a microphone. And then the next one is we have our policies. This did not come around easy. When we made the switch to GoReact, we had to go, I mean the amount of lawyers and contracts that were involved in this, I got a whole education. They said, mark, we want you to do the contract on this. And I didn’t realize there’s so many acronyms and forms that we have to fill out. Gil React was amazing. They always had the answers for ’em, but so we have a lot of policies. We own the video, don’t use the video. So those are the main areas and like I said, I’m happy to share this and I know we’ve, in the past, there’s been some webinars that I’ve done with GoReact on that.

Jessica Hurdley:

I did see in the chat someone said one of our biggest questions pertains to uploading students who use an iPhone or iPad need to send it to their email first and then upload it to a computer. After that they can upload it to GoReact and Canvas. I did see that come through on our support, our help desk. There is some guides there in helping those students that use iPhones and iPads. Apple made an update where it does compress the video first before uploading it anywhere, which is what is going on and likely why it’s taking so long. There’s a guide on our help desk. We also have recently put in product notifications on there in there and ways to help the students along that process as well for the iPhones and iPads. So just so you know that it is filled into the system, students will get more additional notifications, but it is due to an update that Apple had released. One other question, how do cooperating teachers participate and use the system?

Mark Ellner:

So this is a great question. This is the little thing that GoReact put in about a year or two ago because it used to be like, well, can the cooperating teacher watch this video? And we’re like, well, are we going to make them a GoReact account? No. And we’re certainly not going to give them a Canvas account. A case states the university’s not going to. So GoReact actually has a button you click and it allows you to share your video through a link with the cooperating teacher so they can just see that video. It doesn’t give them access into the whole GoReact platform that our university uses, but that’s been one of the best things that we’ve been able to add into it. So yes, so they can watch it, they can make comments on that, but they have to have that specific link and you can allow that or disallow that throughout your platform. Am I correct on that, Jessica? I believe so, correct.

Jessica Hurdley:

Mark. You can actually allow it or disallow it on the assignment level too. So some you can allow for that. Other assignments or activities, you can prevent that as well. Thank you so much, mark, for sharing all your details of your innovation and meaningful distance supervision experiences at your school, helping to guide others to embrace distance supervision and to assist with increasing enrollments in their programs in unique and innovative ways.