This week we talk with Dr. Pablo Riboldi, Assistant Director of Instructional Design at Brigham Young University, about how and why technologies fail to get adopted. During our discussion we explore the four elements of diffusion in technology, the role that politics play in educational technology, and how social capital is just as important as technical skills with successful technology rollouts.
This week we talk with Dr. Pablo Riboldi, Assistant Director of Instructional Design at Brigham Young University, about how and why technologies fail to get adopted. During our discussion we explore the four elements of diffusion in technology, the role that politics play in educational technology, and how social capital is just as important as technical skills with successful technology rollouts.
All right, Jared, I just heard the bell.
Sounds like it's time for another episode of Homeroom.
Sure is. All right, here we go.
[THEME MUSIC]
Jared, today, in Homeroom, we are going to be talking about something near and dear to my heart-- innovation and the diffusion of innovation.
I do know that you like innovation, and you do like to diffuse.
[LAUGHING] Do I.
And I'm not just talking about essential oils diffusion.
No, that's-- no. But we are going to be talking about the diffusion of innovation and the bell curve when it comes to diffusion of innovation. So on one end are the innovators, then the early adopters, and then on the complete other end of the spectrum are the laggards. What are you?
What am I? That's interesting, because in my job, I would say, typically, I'm an innovator.
Sure.
But I probably fall more under an early adopter. I kind of like to let other people take all the target practice on them first before I let the-- before I try a new tool or something.
Sure, sure. I'd say that I'm an innovator. I like all the new things and stuff. I want to break it. I want to be the one to figure out the-- I guess it depends on what it is. But if we're talking tech tools, that's me.
Are you someone who, when a new iPhone comes out, you've got to have it?
Yes, and I feel like I should test iPhones, if that's a job. I am so hard on my iPhone. I have 37 programs running all at once. I think I'd be great at it.
I think you could take one for the team and be an iPhone tester. I agree, you would be very beneficial in that.
Apple, if you're listening, I would take that job.
Well, I'm still with my iPhone 6.
That's cute.
Yeah, it's cute.
I have an iPhone X. All right.
Well, Dani, you ready for another exciting podcast? How would you like to introduce our guest to us today?
I would love to. Today, we have Pablo Riboldi, and he has had some of the best elementary and high school education in Rosario, Argentina, where he attended Escuela Superior de Comercio. This was one of the best and most rigorous schools in the country, and then he had the opportunity of having some of the best college education at the Universidad de Belgrano and Brigham Young University, where he got a bachelor's degree in information management and a master's and doctoral degrees in instructional sciences. Pablo got into education running his own tutoring services, teaching college level math, accounting, economics, and statistics in two languages. I would just like to say, I hated statistics in one language.
That's right. That's enough.
Yes, it is. And he's worked as adjunct faculty for the education technology master's program at the University of Utah for three years. So we can give him a pass for being a Ute at one point.
He can officially park in any parking lot here on campus.
That's how it works. Right?
I don't know if he would agree with that right now.
He might get his ticket still. It's fine. He currently is the assistant director of instructional design at BYU in the Division of Continuing Education, supervising and creating a portfolio of 500-plus online, middle, high school, and university courses for BYU independent study. He is amazing. Welcome, Pablo.
Thank you very much for that introduction, and I have to say, I have actually more parking tickets at BYU than at the University of Utah.
That's impressive.
So those-- the two universities are equal parking tickets distributers.
They're both very willing to give you a ticket.
That's right, yes. So in that sense, I think that we can call it even.
I currently have an open one at SLCC, so I'm just hoping to just not go back there until I have a new car, maybe. I don't know. This is how I handle the situation, Pablo. It's fine.
Now, Pablo, I want you to know, Dani practiced your bio for a long time so that she could say all of those schools.
I tried really, really hard. How'd I do?
You did very, very well. Excellent, actually.
Thank you.
Very well.
Well, Pablo, as a guest on the podcast, we kind of mentioned this to you already, but one of the things we like to do is to get to know you a little bit better. We've got some actual questions from actual students across the state of Utah, so we're going to start off with our first question. Are you ready?
Yep, ready or not--
These are hard hitting questions.
Hard hitting questions.
If you would be on every sports team, which one would it be?
In any sports team?
Any sports team, what sports team would you be on?
I would love to be in any of the teams in the Vendée Globe Sailing Race around the world.
Wow.
That'd be amazing.
I started doing sailing in Argentina when I was about 10 years old. I love to sail. I'm stuck here in the desert of Utah for the last 30 years.
Yeah, there's not a lot of sailing teams around here.
No, no, not too much, really. But I love it, and I've been following this amazing race, so several times, whenever they do it, and it's fun. It would be awesome to do something like that.
I would love it minus the seasickness.
That is part of the course.
I'm not good on a boat. You don't want me on your team.
[LAUGHING]
Well, that's a first for us, to have sailing as our sport of choice.
It's true. Smart one, though, because it incorporates travel.
Very much, yeah. You know where you're going with that one. Let's go to our second question.
What is your favorite way to eat pizza?
This is a very good question. There is a right way and a wrong way to eat pizza. The right way--
Throwing down.
I'm taking notes.
Throwing down.
It's really, you start from the crust.
OK.
Because it's not the best part.
[LAUGHING]
And then you, technically, eat around the slice until you leave the greasiest, most pepperoni-filled, cheesiest part for the last bite, and that's how you eat pizza.
Now, I like that. I always have a favorite bite that I'm eating around.
That's right.
But I always feel like my spouse, somehow, sneaks that last bite, and then that's just--
Well, I have an experience about that. Right after we were married, we were having dinner. My wife and I were having dinner, and she reached out into my plate and took my last bite of whatever was it that we were eating.
And so then you got divorced.
No, no, no, no, but I let her know that that was not OK.
Pablo, are you an only child, by any chance?
No, no, I'm not.
I always say, that's what I carry-- the weight I carry of being an only child, is I always get the last, of his as well, not just mine. I get-- whoever I'm meeting with, I get your last bite, too.
So we should not have dinner together, I guess.
No, I might get stabbed with a fork.
Yeah.
So now we know that if we're going to start our piece of pizza, it starts from the back and works our way in. Let's go to our third and final question.
What animal would you see first at zoo?
Which animal to see first? That is a tough one. I think that I like to start with the big one, so I go, really, for the African savanna, trying to see the elephants and the lions and the giraffes first.
Awesome.
Growing up in Argentina, in Rosario, we had a-- our zoo was very close by where we lived, in a very large park. The lions cage was close there to the entrance, so that was the one that we always saw first.
Yeah, so you always kick it off with a bang.
I kick it off with a bang, yeah. You have to stay at a healthy distance from the lions, because one time we were watching the lion, and the lion turned around, lifted its tail, and proceeded to spray really far to the audience.
And that's how you've never forgotten.
That's right.
You learned a lesson that day, Pablo.
It missed me, but it got some other people standing by. So just for the students that are watching the podcast.
So I have to tell you that I did not think that's where that story was going when you said, keep a healthy distance. I thought you were going to say that the lion thought you were a greasy piece of pepperoni, and that you were the last bite.
Yeah.
Either way, I want to keep my distance.
Yeah, keep your distance, especially if the lion turns around.
[LAUGHING]
I love it. What are we here talking about? I forgot. I was having a good time chatting.
So today-- we've had a lot of experiences with Dr. Riboldi over the years, and today, we're excited to talk about a philosophy that you shared with us at a meeting we were at recently, about the diffusion of innovation. And for some of our audience that may not know that, maybe you could start by just defining that term and telling us a little bit about what we're talking about today.
Yes, uh-huh. So this is actually an important subject that is usually not paid attention in the area of educational technology. Most of the times, you see that there are a lot of different educational technology products that are in a graveyard of misuse.
Right.
So they get developed, produced, tested, evaluated. The data is shown. The articles are publish and whatnot, and then no one uses them.
And everyone is scratching their heads thinking, why is it that people are not using this stuff? This is great. But actually, the whole science of how to promote and diffuse an innovation is a very, very important subject. And in the early '60s, Roger Everett-- sorry, Everett Rogers--
He's not listening, so we're OK.
That's right, no, he's not listening. Everett Rogers wrote the seminal work on this area, called "Diffusion of Innovations," and he basically laid out the theory of how, why, and what is the rate of adoption of new ideas and technologies. He did a lot of studies starting, actually-- his studies were in the agricultural area. He was studying the adoption of hybrid seeds by farmers, and pretty soon, he realized that the ideas of how innovations are diffused and adopted are the same across fields, really.
So whether it's education or agriculture, same principle--
Same principles. Same principles, and you can see the adoption of the functioning of these models, really, in almost any sort of innovation. And this is something, really, that most of the times, people are not aware of, and it's actually a very, very important thing because we spend a lot of effort in creating educational products and developing technology, but then we don't pay a whole lot of attention or planning on how are we actually going to get these into the hands of people and to secure a full adoption of the technology. So that is the crux of the problem.
And that's something that we see all the time, Dani, in schools.
Absolutely.
Where principals will get excited about a technology. They'll purchase, maybe, building sets of these things, and yet they don't know how, or they struggle with how to get the teachers to adopt the technology and use it.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and that is the biggest problem, really. We spend a lot of money in buying technologies, trying to promote them, and then discarding them for the next--
The next big thing.
The next big thing, yeah.
And maybe not getting the teachers the training that they need to actually use it, so it would be exciting, and something that they would want to implement in their classroom. So when we're looking at the diffusion of innovation, it's a bell curve.
Yeah.
So it goes from the innovators to the early adopters, kind of the rest of the field, and then the laggards who are going to wait to be really sure of whatever the thing or stuff is that they're doing, that it's going to work, and that they're going to adopt it. So with your work, how does that fit into what you're trying to do?
So the main issue really is how to help people being able to adopt these innovations. Particularly in our work now, between BYU independent study and UEN, we have basically given to UEN over 100 of our independent study courses for high school, and they are all the core courses in the school. And these courses are fully developed. They have all the content, assignments, assessments.
They are there, and UEN has them in the-- they are in structure domain. They are free for any Utah high school teacher to download them and copy them. So my main concern is, we want this to be successful, to actually be helpful for teachers.
It is really, really interesting because the issue is not the courses. The issue is not the teacher's unwillingness to receive help. But it is a concerted effort in order to actually help with the diffusion of this innovation, so that teachers are able to adopt it successfully. And so my goal in doing this, working with UEN in diffusing this innovation, is to help this be successful, so it is something that the teachers are able to use and benefit from.
Yeah, and I think this is often something that we see. For some of our listeners, this may be the first time that they're hearing that these courses are available, and that's sometimes some of the problem with diffusion of innovation, is the communication itself.
Yeah, so Everett Rogers describes four different elements that influence the adoption of any innovation. The first factor is the innovation itself, so there are several characteristics of an innovation that would make it more or less amenable to being adopted. The second factor is what you mentioned-- the communication channels. How is the information about the benefits, the cost of entry, the changes necessary, what is available, and so on-- how is that being communicated to the potential adopters of the innovation?
The third factor is time, so the diffusion of innovations is something that happens over time. Now, most of the times, we don't have enough patience to give innovations the appropriate time, or we failed to plan for the time.
I feel like, a lot of the time especially, as teachers, something's rolled out, and there's not enough time to adopt it before it's changed again. And so that may-- even if you have the best innovation, even if you are appropriately trained, the communication channels are there, if the third element-- if time isn't taken into account, it's not going to go well.
That is especially true for teachers, because teachers have seen, so many times, this new thing coming in, and then I know that, in a couple of years, is going to go away.
Yeah, if I can just wait it out, I won't have to learn that.
Exactly, and so they are always having to gauge, from what they know and everything available, all the information available to them, is this innovation something that is going to stick, or is it one of these that is going to go away? And frankly, many teachers just choose to wait things out. And so I remember one time, when I was at BYU doing my doctorate in a seminar, one of the professors that was-- it was a couple of professors, [INAUDIBLE] Richard Sudweeks.
They were talking about the curricular evaluations that they have done for the state of Utah over a period of 20 years, and they mention all the different things that were mandated by the legislature. Part of the implementation plan is to do an evaluation. Most of those things went away in the next election cycle. So it was really, really interesting that, because of the political situation, innovations would tend not to last more than four years.
Yeah.
And so a lot of these evaluations were just cut short, not giving enough time in order to prove anything, and they were failing because they were not being actually implemented.
Well, I was just thinking, as you mentioned the legislature, education is one of those kind of hybrid entities, where it's not just educators making the decisions. But there's this whole other group of people that feel like they know what people-- students need, and they make the decisions for education. And sometimes, they're the ones that aren't willing to be patient and wait for the innovations to have a chance to actually be successful.
Yes.
And going along with that, too, we all know in Utah, our legislative session happens in end of January, February. Then things start up school, goes on summer break, teachers implement whatever in August, and then January, February come around again, and--
Changes.
Everything changes. So I think that's something that we really need to be cognizant about, is if we are going to have these big disruptions in education, that we want to change everything, that should make everything great and better, it's going to take time. It's not just one election cycle or one year.
Not one calendar year, you're right.
Yeah, yeah, it is really several years, and we have to have the patience and the foresight to plan for the innovation. The fourth element, really, of the adoption of innovations is what is called the social system. The social system is meant by identifying who are the people that are in your adoption pool.
So you mentioned the differing categories-- you have the innovators, the early adopters, early majority, late majority, and then the laggards. That is basically the description of an adoption population. One of the problems that we have is that, most of the times, we give training or try to implement to everyone. We use kind of a shotgun approach, trying to--
Across the board. Everybody gets it.
Everybody gets it. It's out there for everyone, and instead, what the research shows is that we should, as implementers, try to analyze our audience and actually find who are the innovators. Map the social system of your population, and instead of spending your efforts across the board, you focus on just looking-- identifying who are the innovators, then who are going to be my early adopters, and then you work that way with those groups because those are going to be the ones that are going to be most likely ready to try the innovation. And then they have the social network to diffuse the innovation into the early majority and the late majority and so on.
Well, then, there isn't that pressure, too, that if it's across the board, everyone has to do it. It's just like having a toddler at home. No, if I have to do it, I don't want to do it.
One of the strategies, when I was a school technology specialist, they wanted us coaching in classrooms and working side by side with teachers. And there were a lot of teachers that were hesitant to do that, so I would find the innovators, the early adopters, and see if I could do fun activities in their class. And then the next thing I know, other educators are kind of peeking in, and they want to know. They want to be a part of it, too, and so instead of forcing my way into classrooms, I had people coming to me, to want to come in and do those kind of fun activities with their class. So kind of a similar approach-- find some people who are willing to try, maybe most likely to be successful, and then they have the social connections to pass it on throughout the rest of the faculty.
Yeah, that's the thing that I think was really important about your fourth point, Pablo, is that there's a lot of people who may have the technical skills to adopt the technology, but it's just as important that they have the social interactions. Because if you're just the super smart guy that does everything by yourself, you're not an influencer.
Yeah, it's not going to help.
Everyone looks at you as the person that-- oh, well, nobody else can do it like him because he's the guy that is off in his room doing it by himself all the time.
Yeah, he's so techie, or he's so this, so that.
Then when you have a group of innovators that also have that social network, people want to be with them. They want to be part of what's going on, like you described in your example, Dani.
Yeah, and that is a very important point to understand. Again, the research shows that the innovators are about 3% of your population. Those are the techie ones that are very willing to try new things, and are willing to spend the time and so on. Usually, those do not have the social capital to help the innovation, though. But you have to start with them.
The social connection of the innovators is with the early adopters. The early adopters are about 10% to 12% of the population. They have more social capital and influence with the early majority, and so-- and you really have to work them in order. The innovators are going to take all the lumps, work out all the bugs in the system, all the technical issues, and so on. They bear the front of--
They're the ones going into the message boards to talk about features that don't work and to try and get the product to go a little bit beyond where it's currently at.
Exactly, yes. The early adopters are waiting until those things are worked out. Then they are going to be willing to try the innovation, but because they are aware that they have social capital, they are only going to give their stamp of approval if the innovation is working for them. Because they don't want to lose that position of influence with the other--
They don't want to lose their street cred.
Yeah.
That's right.
I never really thought of it that way.
So you have to-- this is the problem. If you have an early adopter trying the innovation before you work out all the bugs with the innovators, the early adopters are going to say, it doesn't work, and then you lose.
OK, yeah.
Does that make sense?
It does.
So you have to really be careful and plan this precisely in this order. So the jump from the early adopters to the early majority is the critical point of adoption, and that is when the early adopters are actually being able to say, yep, this is working for me. And then they are going to use their social capital and their communication network, their social communication network, to influence the early majority of adopters. If you don't cross that chasm, they--
You're not going to make it.
You're not going to make it.
You know what's interesting, is we kind of listen to this, because I can look directly at the last, probably, five years of canvas adoption across the state of Utah. Dr. Riboldi, you mentioned a minute ago that one of the projects you're involved with is online materials that can be put into Canvas, and so if we tried to put those out there five years ago, it wouldn't have worked. It would've been too early for us to try and bring in these curriculum resources, because people just weren't ready for it yet. The early adopters and the innovators were testing Canvas to see whether or not it would work, and now, we've crossed that threshold. We're now in that-- probably more in the late adopters, actually, phase right now.
I would agree.
And so now, there's this huge pool of people that are looking for content, and that's where your program's going to come in and be way more successful than it ever could have been in the past.
Yes, yes, in that sense, that is correct. However, the problem is that these courses are fully developed.
I see.
And so even though that is a great blessing, and it's that great advantage, because hey, you could say, I have a course fully developed. Well, the trick is that teachers are teachers because they love to create and to teach. And so if you give a teacher something that is completely fully cooked, they start thinking, so what is my role here? Where is my--
Do I just push the start button?
That's right. So is that all that I'm doing here? And so a lot of innovations, especially when we are talking about teacher mediated instructional systems, fail to take into account what is going to be the role of the teacher when using and adopting this innovation. And so when I presented in conferences about these courses and everything, I tell the teachers, here you have the courses, but feel free to change them. You have full edit rights. Make sure that you look at the courses, and you decide what parts of the courses are you going to use. How are you going to balance your role with whatever is that the course is bringing to you? Because if I were to tell, or anyone were to tell the teacher, hey, this course is all done and everything, you just plug it in and let the students go. It works for independent studies, so it's all done. It really-- very, very soon, people are going to stop using it.
Yeah, they don't like that because--
They don't like that.
Teachers are artists very much. They want to-- their teaching is their art, and so when you give them that freedom to take something that's already been developed and tweak it and make it better and make it fit their exact classroom, that's where the magic happens.
That's right.
And so that's what I do like about those online courses, is that teachers can take this, and they don't feel like they're starting with a blank "canvas." See what I did there? And then they can kind of edit it and make it work exactly for their classroom's specific needs.
Yeah, I always tell the teachers, the way to look at this course is one or two ways-- or in two different ways. You can look at the course as if you were, say, this is my new textbook. No teacher, whenever they are using a textbook, is going to use all the features of the textbook.
Or even in order.
Or even in order, or complete the whole thing. So that is the same thing of how you can see and view these courses. Which parts am I going to use, and which parts I'm not going to use?
The second view of the courses could be as thinking the course and the be assignments, the content, what is there in the course, is as if I have now a team teacher. So I'm going to decide what things am I going to delegate to my team teacher, and what things am I going to retain for myself? So if there are projects or lessons or content that you love to teach, by all means, put those into the course.
Modify the course as necessary in order to insert yourself as a teacher into the course, so it is your course. And then you decide what parts of the course you want to delegate to your team teacher, to say the students are going to do this assignment, because I'm OK with that, or they are going to do these quizzes, or this part of the content is fine, and so on. So it has to be that type of dialogue and negotiation between the course and your own style of teaching.
Which I love. I think-- I mean, when I first heard about the courses, I thought, so if someone gave me one of these courses, and I looking to teach it in, say, an English sophomore class or something like that, the first thing I'd want to do is compare what I'm currently doing to what's in the course, to see, oh, this is an area where I struggle, maybe, of how I teach this concept. I want to see how it's covered in the course. And then you're right-- that negotiation between what things you're doing that work really well, and also the areas that maybe you do need some supplemental material or a different way to teach or a different assignment or something. You can have that negotiation.
Yeah, I like that because we all know that everyone learns a little differently, so if I teach something one way, my students aren't getting it, or maybe they're gone for a week, or whatever that looks like, we can use the independent study courses to back that up as a reteaching or as a first time teaching for, maybe, someone who's missed it. So I just really see them as a complete jumping off point.
Well, and one thing that I was just thinking, too, Pablo, is so many of the teachers-- they're just transitioning into using online teaching as a model in their classrooms, and so seeing this, maybe they've never taught a module where they put that content online before. And so they've got some great activities, but they really don't translate into the online world as well. This gives them a chance to see that, maybe for the first time, how would someone teach this online or use this as a, like you had mentioned, maybe something to reteach or to validate what you did in class.
Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I think these courses provide great value, is all the courses already have, loaded in them, the learning outcomes following the Utah Core.
That's lovely.
So yeah, if anybody out there has tried to set up a new Canvas course and start getting on learning outcomes and rubrics and linking quizzes and this and that, it's--
It's a lot.
It's a lot of clicking. It's a lot of work. And so just if you were to use the BYU course through UEN, just to get that already loaded--
Yeah, saves a ton of time.
Saves a ton of time, and then you can then consider, like you were saying, what parts am I going to keep. These courses also have questions, quizzes already organized and linked to the learning outcomes. Creating quizzes in Canvas is certainly feasible and doable, but it is a lot of work also. And so these courses are really a great starting point for teachers to be able to have something that is already loaded. Very, very valuable in that sense.
Yeah, we're excited as far as-- our training staff is really pushing these resources out to teachers right now, because we know the one thing that teachers always want more of is time. And this is one of those ways-- like you just said, even if it's just to use some of the quizzes so you don't have to spend 30 minutes building your own quiz. If it covers the same material that you normally teach, use the quiz that's already been created. If it's covering the same material, what does it matter? And it saved you half an hour.
Right, and it's easy to edit.
Easy to edit.
You can take away questions. You can add your own questions to the quiz. But say the quiz is 15 questions long, that just saved you, like you said, 30 minutes. Maybe more.
15 question quiz? Yeah, easy an hour.
So I know we're just about out of time. One of the questions that I have for you, Pablo-- so our podcast is now in its first year. Where would you say we fall on the scale of the diffusions of innovations with this?
Are we still just reaching out to the innovators? Are we starting to move into the early adopters? Where are we going to fall before we maximize our podcast audience here?
That is a great question.
Because now that you've been on, we know we're going to get a lot of listeners down in Provo.
Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. I wouldn't bet on that one.
But we're willing to be patient-- right, Dani? And take some time.
One thing we do have is time on our side.
So keep at it. All these things take time, and the-- Greg, amazing thing that the internet has done is really to help basically almost anyone be able to produce and share with the world. And so it is really a very, very exciting time to be able to innovate and produce these type of things. What I think is that we need to be more cognizant in planning how are we going to actually implement these innovations so they are successful.
All right, we better take notes on that so we know what our business plan is.
Got it. I'm all over it.
Although I will say one last thing about that, just as you're mentioning that, Pablo, I'm just thinking we taught a podcasting class 10 years ago at UEN. And it lasted for about two or three years, and then podcasts fell by the wayside a little bit for about five years. And now in just the last, what, three or four years, podcasts have had a resurgence, so maybe there was just the missing time element. We just needed more time before the late adopters and the early adopters would find them and see their use and pick them up. So it's something maybe we're starting to see with podcasts as a learning tool.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that is a great example of these innovations and how they happen, and you really have to think how grateful we are to all the podcasters that kept going.
Stuck it out.
Stuck it out. So many people would have said, hey, I'm not reaching anyone, and then those who stuck with it and continue develop better styles, develop the audience. They started getting word of mouth, and now, they are doing very, very well really.
There's a chance for us still, then.
Pablo, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
Thank you very much. It has been a pleasure for me.
Thanks.
[MUSIC STING]
So, Dani, do you want to give our audience a tech tip today?
I mean, do we have to?
Well, I mean, this is a podcast about technology.
I'm tired. Do you have a tech tip for today?
I mean, I guess if I have to, I can come up with it.
I mean--
So, Dani, for our lazy teacher tech tip, today, I've got something that might just change the way you put content online.
Ooh, I'm interested. Is it a new social media tool?
It has nothing to do with social media.
Well, then, I'm out.
Other than you could tweet about it or post it to your Facebook account, if you so desire.
I'm listening.
So one of the things that a lot of teachers like is they like to have content online that can be shared, but they want it to be a little bit more dynamic instead of just a static web page that looks kind of boring and very traditional. One of the tools that we've spent a lot of our time teaching on recently is Adobe Spark.
Ooh.
I know you love you some Adobe Spark.
I do love Adobe Spark.
So one of the tools that I've been using a lot lately is Adobe Spark Page. So in this, you can build a template where you can drag in pictures or text, different colors and different content, and you can make it a very dynamic web page, where it looks like you're scrolling down from top to bottom, almost like a newsletter that's very interactive.
Yeah, so I haven't-- I love Adobe Spark, but I haven't spent a lot of time in Pages. But just as you're describing, they are really easy to make them look really, really beautiful. I've seen some student examples in Pages, and it looks like a professional has made these pages. But really, it's a fourth grader doing their animal report.
That's right, and they're just literally dragging and dropping in images, text, audio files. Whatever the content is that they want on the page, they can just pull it in and rearrange how it loads.
That's fabulous. I think this is not just a lazy teacher tech tip. This is a lazy student tech tip as well.
And one thing that-- if your school actually has an Adobe account, so maybe you're partnered with Adobe, and you're using them district wide or school-wide, one of the new things that you can do in Adobe Spark is you can actually create your own templates with branding on it. So when the page loads at first, you can include your own logo or some of your own branding options that you want for your page, which is a really neat thing just to keep all the ones in the school kind of looking at least with the same entry point look and feel.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah, so that's a really easy thing for you to do. If you haven't played with it yet, you just need to have an Adobe account. It's completely free, adobe.com, and you can go and try to create your own dynamic web page using Adobe Spark Page.
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So, Dani, that just blew my mind, as we talked about all of the different ways that we can integrate technology effectively, using not only people who have skills, but also social network skills.
I know. It's amazing. I think we-- so much planning goes into technology implementation, but I don't know that I've ever seen or thought of it in this way, that you stagger how you're doing your implementation based on who the members of your faculty, or who the members of your district are for it to be really, really successful.
Yeah, most of the time, we're so focused on getting the devices or rolling out the program, that we forget about the human component of it, that they're the ones that will make it successful based upon their experiences.
Right. Pablo is awesome.
Yeah, great conversation, and I love the idea that every one of us can make these implementations successful based upon how we share and learn about these different tools.
Yeah, I love it. I think it was great, and it was a new way of thinking, which I'm always board for.
Yeah, you're very innovative in that respect.
Thank you, Jared. That's what I was fishing for.
I'm diffusing you. Instead of being diffusive, I'm being effusive with my comments.
Well, thank you. Hey, there's the bell.
All right, we're out of here. Thanks, everybody.
Good-bye.
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