Author Archives: David Truss

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned:

I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” 😉

I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool can’t you live without, that didn’t exist 5 years ago… and by the time people had discussed this with their neighbours and we started sharing as a group the power turned on… “POP” … that would be the sound of the ceiling mounted LCD light bulb burning out.

That’s when I asked a new question: “How many of you have had the experience before of having a lesson planning epiphany… suddenly you are up late at night planning… you head into the school before class starts in the morning and when you get to the photocopier… it’s BROKEN!“ ~Most teachers raised their hands.

“So, keep your hands up if you said something like, ‘That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again?’“ ~All hands went down.

Sometimes ‘technology’, be it a photocopier, a presentation, or even a pen doesn’t work.

Other times the technology is new, and different, and not intuitively transformative. That doesn’t mean the tool can’t be transformative, it just means it’s hard to see the benefit or the value.

This afternoon a good friend and educational leader, Dave Sands, and I will be presenting to principal and vice principal colleagues. We will be sharing the value we see in using Microsoft Teams with our staff in schools.

For some people this is just one more tool to add to the list of other things they need to look at in a day… it doesn’t add value, it adds work. However Dave and I see it differently. We see how this tool can change workflow in a positive way, making it an effective way to streamline communication with different teams of people that you work with. Here are a few key points about how a tool like Microsoft Teams can be transformative:

1. It can reduce and be more efficient than email.

Have you ever shared an email that requires a response from a group of people? Some ‘Reply All’, some don’t. And you’ve got to figure out what’s what, and collate the information while responses trickle in.

Have you ever shared information with a group and one-by-one people ask the same clarifying question that you end having to respond to individually?

Have you received an email from someone that you wish you looked at sooner than you did, but instead you were dealing with 30+ other emails that came in after that?

Using Teams contextualizes conversations. It allows you to keep responses public to the team, and to clarify responses in contained conversations rather than scattered throughout email. It also allows you to prioritize your teams over the most recent items in your email inbox.

2. Using Teams creates a shared learning space within your community.

Have you ever worked as a staff on professional development, sharing paper resources that never get looked at again? Then someone shares a great resource through email, but that resource stays in your email?

My staff has created channels within a Team to work on our professional development. We co-create the notes, share files, and publicly follow through with our plans. Afterwards if someone adds anything, everyone has that resource available within the context of the learning that happened, not lost in email.

3. You are working with a team of people in other buildings and you don’t see them often.

Email is brutal for this. Conversations get scattered, supporting each other is challenging, it doesn’t feel like you are a community. When you create a Team with this group, everything is shared in one public space. When a question is asked, the whole team is there to respond, and resource sharing is easy. It shifts the environment from a broken up group into a shared community.

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That’s three quick examples of how a tool like Teams can be more effective than other tools like email, but it requires shifting practice to be truly transformative. If you are communicating with your team or staff using both Teams and email, then you are being ineffective and adding more to your plate. But if you replace communicating through email with Teams, now you have a few key advantages you didn’t have before:

  • You can actually prioritize the people within your community that you want to give your attention to by going to teams first, before dealing with the most recent and often erroneous emails at the top of your inbox.
  • Communication on Teams is public to your team, and responses are easily clarified for everyone.
  • You can embed forms where everyone can see everyone else’s responses.
  • You can easily switch to the private chat function when information becomes relevant to just one or a few people.
  • You can use the @name function to specially address a person or a whole Team.
  • You can build a sense of community and support that email does not provide.
  • Conversations are contextual. I can prioritize what I look at first, at a glance, not just by the most recent items.
  • You can reduce the amount of email you get! My email has gone down by more than 1/3 since adopting Teams.

For me the ability to prioritize my teams in a space outside of email, and reducing the amount of emails I get, have been the greatest benefits to moving to Microsoft Teams.

Note: I share expectations and etiquette with my teams about how and where to communicate. It’s a good idea with any new tool to make the intentions and expectations about how to use the tool clear. Otherwise, the tool isn’t transformative, it’s just one more shiny new thing to check, without really seeing the value in using it.

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Related: Transformative or just flashy educational tools? (Written almost a decade ago.)

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Also shared on my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog

Notifications are interruptions

For the past few months I’ve been turning off most notifications on my phone. I tend to keep my phone on silent most of the time. I still get banner notifications for a few things, but most of my notifications only go to my Notifications Center, they don’t pop up and interrupt what I’m doing. What that results in is a phone filled with red notification dots, every time I look at it. I know this would drive some people crazy, but I don’t mind.

I use the dots to remind myself that I’m in control. I don’t need to see what’s on social media, it will still be there when I choose to look. I will see all my email, but I won’t let email determine my schedule. I won’t let email interrupt what I’m doing now. I let my staff know that I will frequently look at Microsoft Teams, and that this is a faster way to connect with me than email.

This shift to MS Teams allows me to prioritize my staff over the last 10 emails that came in after a staff member asked me something on email. It allows me to contextual the conversation rather than letting outsiders determine what distracts me, simply because they were the most recent item in my email inbox. This shift has reduced my total daily emails, and it has also reduced my time on email further because I’m not getting emails I wish I saw hours before from my staff, and my staff know what to, and not to, add to my email.

I’m the first to admit that I probably still spend too much time on my phone, especially at home. It’s where I read my news, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, consume social media, and even create these daily blog posts. But I also know that reducing notification interruptions has helped me stay more focussed on the tasks I’m trying to complete both at work and at home.

Sometimes features are actually bugs

I am not a fan of vertical (portrait) video. It’s not just an aesthetic, it’s wasted real estate. Seldom does more room above and below a subject being filmed give you as much information as more room to the left and to the right. That said, we will end up watching vertical videos that people choose to take. If you are one of these people taking vertical video, please do me a big favour: Do NOT use the Apple iMovie ‘feature’ that fills the black sidebars on a vertical video viewed horizontally with a magnified, blurry copy of the video.

This is a bug, not a feature. It actually takes away from the video. It’s a distraction. Worse yet, it creates a horizontal video with the side bars out of the vertical video so that even if you watch the video vertically, then the video is even smaller.

Here is a vertical music video:
Billie Eilish – bad guy (Vertical Video)

It was an intentional choice to film the video this way. Here is a horizontal screenshot of the video:

And since she left the video as vertical and didn’t fill the sides, or worse fill the sides with distractions, here is a screenshot of the video viewed vertically:

And here is the video vertically if she had forced the video to be horizontal after the fact:

I didn’t share any images with the sides blurred, but just know that this is even worse. Sometimes features that are added are actually bugs, they don’t make things any better no matter how they are used.

Here are some public service announcements regarding the tragedy and horror of using vertical videos! 😜

And one more short one, but the cover image has a swear word not seen in the video, so I’ll just link to it.

The Netflix Trap

Despite the fact that I grew up in the era of Seinfeld and Friends being sitcoms that were on the air, I haven’t seen all of the episodes. My daughters have seen every episode in order, and my youngest daughter is on her 3rd round of watching Friends through all 10 seasons, or 236 episodes, on Netflix.

When I watched these shows, they were on TV, with commercials, and we didn’t have a VCR set up if we missed the time slot. By the time the reruns were on, I was already not a fan of waiting through commercials to watch a show.

This weekend I got sucked into a drama on Netflix, and still nursing an injured knee, I found myself in front of the television for hours. I fell deep into the Netflix trap watching the next episode, after the next episode, after the next episode. ‘OK, just 1 more,’ I’d tell myself, then just one more after that…

I do this sometimes on longer breaks like summer and Christmas break but it’s very rare that I sink into a series like this on a regular weekend. The appeal is strong when there are no commercials and the opening/closing credits can easily be skipped. There is no waiting until next week’s time slot on TV, no waiting for commercials either. Just show after show, with each ending designed to hook you into the next one.

Watching television has changed significantly. I can see how easy it is to stay trapped in front of it now in a way that wasn’t possible when I was younger. YouTube and Facebook can be the same for some, with the next video automatically playing after the one you are watching is done. Blink and several hours have gone by.

I had a good dose of this on the weekend, and I’m done for now… At least until the March break. The series I was watching has one more season and I’ll probably watch most of it in a two to three day span. I force myself to wait for an extended break. But when I start, I don’t pretend that I’m not easily sucked into the trap of binge watching, like many others.

‪Incessant reminders are an annoyance, not a service.‬

I’m sure that I’m not the only Apple user fed up with the repeated ‘invitations’ to use iCloud for backup.

I know I’m not the only one that opens an app and gets the request to rate it, and the choices are to rate it or click ‘Not Now’ only to have to face this question again in the near future.

These ‘reminders’ and ‘invitations’ are annoying when they keep coming up. I understand an initial invitation for feedback. I’d be ok if I got another one 6 months later, after I’ve used the app for a while. But the window of time before the next time I’m asked is too short… Well here is a solution I just found after starting to write this little rant:

You can go into the iPhone settings under ‘iTunes and App Stores‘, scroll down and toggle the ‘In-App Rating and Reviews‘ radial button off.

This won’t stop the annoying iCloud reminders but it will go a long way in making my app user experience better!

If you are an app developer, or someone that is creating a service, remember that asking for feedback or selling a product are interruptions, so use these sparingly. Or, imbed these options in a way that isn’t a pop-up that forces a break in the flow of using the app. For example, 3 highlighted features/buttons to click to use features, and 2-3 more that are greyed out, but still work, taking you to a page to upgrade to use these features. (Take note Apple iCloud.)

Incessant reminders are an annoyance, not a service.‬

Adding a little extra

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a recipe where the amount of garlic ‘recommended’ wasn’t less than I wanted to (and probably did) put in. My whole family loves garlic and despite adding more garlic than suggested, in our house a meal has never been ruined by too much garlic. You can’t say the same for salt, or dill, or oregano.

Some things you can add a little extra, some things you can’t:

You can add some genuine compliments, be careful how much criticism you add.

You can add generosity generously, but just a pinch of selfishness.

You can add copious amounts of love, but only a sprinkling of animosity.

There isn’t any one recipe for living a good life, and so the ingredients we choose to put in can be played with… if we are thoughtful and liberally creative with the right ingredients, we can end up with delicious results!

Share your work in the open

I already shared this quote that helped me decide to blog daily:

“For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.“ ~Seth Godin

As a result of blogging daily, and having it also post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, I now transmit a lot of posts about my own work, and I’m sure that for some, that can feel like too much.

Last night I was chatting with Jonathan Sclater and, like me, he has some healthy living goals he is working on. One of the things he now does is share his morning runs on social media. Here is his Tweet from Monday,

My #health #oneword2020 keeps me moving forward. 5 hours of sleep last night, so I felt like sleeping in instead or saying “maybe tomorrow”. But I got up anyways and put in the work. Won’t stop pursuing my goals. Don’t let anything get in the way of yours today!

#runlap

#health

I love to see sharing like this. Jonathan questioned if some people thinks he is over-sharing regarding his runs, and I responded that I think it’s great! We don’t have to worry about that. If someone doesn’t like it, they are free to unfollow, but sharing your passion and commitment are inspiring.

Similarly, Kelly Christopherson has been sharing Exploring Personal/Professional Learning One Day At a Time. Here is an example from Twitter:

Every day is a new opportunity to try something new. Each one of us is capable of doing great things if we only give ourselves permission to try without limiting ourselves to what we know we can do. Every day is a PD day. #myPDtoday @DomenicScuglia @dteneycke1 @LoriMeyerMseJaw

Sometimes he tags me in the Tweet and I appreciate it, and actually asked for it. Kelly’s regular reflections on living a life of continual thinking and learning ‘out loud’ is inspiring.

It’s not for everyone watching and reading, and that’s ok. It doesn’t have to be daily, but share your work. Share the things you value, or simply share your love for writing, or taking photos. Have fun, enjoy the process, and know that others can be inspired by what you share.

Slowly by slowly

In an email correspondence, my cousin, Lee, reminded me of a post I wrote in China, Slowly by Slowly. In the post, I quoted Rob Giebitz who “first heard this phrase from our Chinese production manager“. Rob went on to say:

“Those odd sounding phrases that often amuse the native English speaker, those Chinglish phrases, may offer a key to understanding our host culture. “Slowly by slowly” may carry some meaning absent from the more familiar “little by little” or “step by step” that a native English speaker would use. “Little” indicates size or quantity, “step” implies distance; “slowly” brings our attention to the element of time.”

As I mentioned Tuesday, I broke my patella. I got in to see an orthopaedic surgeon and he gave me good news. Luckily, the break was the ‘right way’ (vertically on the bone) and I can start putting weight on my leg right away. It’s still very swollen, sore, and stiff, but it could have been a lot worse.

So now comes a 4-6 week recovery. It will go slowly by slowly. This will be tough. I’ve been doing 5 or more cardio workouts a week since the start of the year, but now I can’t run or ride for a while. I’m also still doing Physio exercises to strengthen an injured shoulder that’s recovering well. So, I have to be careful with upper body workouts too.

What will my fitness regimen look like? I’m not sure? I was too achy this morning and still want to get into work today, so icing and elevating is my workout after an unsettled sleep. But I’ll be up early tomorrow, I’ll hobble down the stairs and figure it out. Sometimes we have to accept that slowly by slowly is the best approach, and save the sprints for another time.

Fear can paralyze

Imagine being legally blind, able only to see shadows in your peripheral vision. Now imagine needing to endure 10 rounds of fighting a new fresh black belt fighter, for consecutive 3 minutes rounds, to earn your black belt… Richard Turner did this. However I didn’t learn about Richard through his martial arts skills, but rather from his skills as a card mechanic… a close up card magician.

Here is where I first saw him, on Penn & Teller’s show ‘Fool Us’, where top notch magicians try to earn a performance spot in Penn & Teller’s live Vegas show. How do they earn this spot? They must do a trick that confounds Penn & Teller, and they are hard to fool!

Richard fooled them faster than anyone, and Teller was motioning to give him the trophy before he finished his trick.

I recently listened to Richard Turner — The Magical Phenom Who Will Blow Your Mind (#411) on the Tim Ferriss Podcast

Here is what Richard said at about the 1hr, 13min mark of the podcast (including opening commercials). I’m not adding anything beyond this quote, it’s brilliant and stands on its own!

“Fear can paralyze. We can be so worried about doing the wrong thing, that we do nothing.
There’s actually an English proverb that says, ‘A man who is afraid to make a mistake is unlikely to make anything… Fear of failure, when left unchecked, can actually lead to the failure we fear.” ~ Richard Turner

I didn’t ‘kneed’ this!

I wasn’t paying attention. I was at a friend’s house and took a shortcut off the front door path and across the driveway to my car, which was eye-level, 30 feet away from me. But it was dark and my friend’s driveway leads to a basement garage. What I thought was a 6 inch step to the driveway was actually a 4 foot drop. I don’t know if my right foot or my left knee hit the driveway first, but the pain was instant. I broke my patella (my left kneecap).

Careless? Yes. Unlucky? That depends, because it could have been my face. I literally took a step onto nothing and dropped 4 feet onto an asphalt driveway.

It’s almost 1am as I write this, in the emergency room, awaiting a tetanus shot. Tylenol 3’s tonight, and probably back to work on Wednesday… on crutches. I didn’t need this, but I’ll just thank my lucky stars it’s not worse.