Accentuate the Positive

How to be the MacGyver of Instructional Technology

You have a mission.  You need to make your courses more innovative and interactive to engage your students and improve their learning outcomes.  You know that students react well to media that engages them and do not like to download large Powerpoint files.  Further, large blocks of text do not work well online or when presented in the classroom.

Problems you face include your department have no money in the budget to afford new software and currently you only have access to Office 365.  Of course, the large number of students to mentor and other responsibilities also impede your effort.

When presented with a seemingly impossible task, we should remember to humbly think, “What would MacGyver do?”  Specifically, remember that:

                                 What you have may be all that you need.

If you are willing to explore the web with your browser (and possibly a paperclip), you may discover that the tools you already have access may be all you need to infuse your course with innovative presentations and technology that with inspire your students.  Naturally, a sense of humor may help as well.

How to Manage This Task

We need to keep calm, open to new and creative ideas, and follow these steps:

1. Determine what is your goal (what type of instructional task do you want)
2. Are there ways the tools you already have can do this?
3. Can you acquire free tools (such as an educational account at Prezi.com)

 Once you determined what your goal is when creating a learning object, you can then break down what you need to do into smaller tasks.  In fact, you may even be able to combine the products of tools, such as images from LunaPic (a Photoshop alternative that is free) and Google Slides.  For a detailed list of various online tools see: https://elearningindustry.com/321-free-tools-for-teachers-free-educational-technology.

Once you have selected the tool, remember to:

• Break down the task into smaller manageable tasks
• Create a separate computer folder of all the assets so that in case something goes wrong, you do not lose your content.

After you create your new exciting tool, you should consider embedding it into a page in your course.  When embedded within a webpage, the experience is smoother and the student will keep his or her focus better because they have not been brought outside of the Learning Management System.

Feel free to download the following files in the above presentation to help you and remember, you should keep in touch with your school's teaching and learning specialists.