Hello, everyone. On behalf of ASCP and my fellow colleagues joining me here today I'd like to welcome you all to this very exciting webinar titled educating with impact practical tips for creating engaging presentations. I'd like to start the introductions today. My name is Teresa tell your cast alone. My current role is I am program director for two separate hospital based medical laboratory science programs here in the wonderful state of Rhode Island. Hi everyone, I'm Danielle Fortuna and I'm a pathologist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Hi everyone, Cameron Mirza I'm a hematologist at Loyola Medicine and associate professor of pathology and medical education, hempath fellowship director and the medical director for the MLS program here. Hi I'm Aaron Odegaard, I'm a lab quality coordinator with Baptist Health, and an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas, medical sciences, MLS program. So, just to kind of see where we're going. So basically Teresa is going to lead us on targeting outcomes so writing the best objectives that we're going to lead into Daniel kind of talking just a little bit about lecture building and building that big picture concepts with the objectives that you've learned to kind of build. And then Cameron will actually lead us through beyond words and kind of harnessing the power of visuals. And then I get to round us out, talking about assessment and seeing how we did and engaging your audience. Okay, so just some webinar reminders by participating in this recorded video conference you are agreeing that ACP may use the recording of your image or statement on the ACP website. Remember not to share any protect health information or personal identifiable information about patients. And then also this session. You can actually gain CME and CME credit is available for our event and instructions for claiming this credit will be shared at the end of the presentation, and will also be sent to the email address that you guys provided when you signed up. Okay, so now that we've introduced ourselves we would love to know who you are. So go ahead and put in the chat, who you are and where you're from, and tell us something about yourself. Put in the chat. All right, so we have program directors here. Well a lot, lot coming in here, Chicago, Georgia, Wisconsin. Welcome, welcome. So we can keep that flowing as we move into the next parts of our webinar but thank you so much for coming. This is so incredibly exciting to see names and, you know, no faces but names from around the world. That's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today. So as Teresa Daniel and Aaron have already set the stage today what we're doing is we're giving a real life example of how to make an engaging presentation, and the four of us in the ACP team we decided that what better way to do it, but then to show you a topic that we think would be interesting. I'm a heme path and the topic is on nematode so trust me it's not necessarily my wheelhouse, but we thought that we could show you from soup to not start to finish, how to make an engaging presentation and hopefully along the way give you some tips and tricks. So we are all here but what we ended up doing is we recorded the presentation, it is step by step on all four of all of our learning objectives and we look forward to engaging with you, please put the questions in the Q&A box and we look forward to a great discussion afterwards. Hello, today we are going to start off this webinar by talking about how we can write your best learning objectives. So we know as educators that we typically have learners have varying types of skills and abilities. So, we usually focus on the cognitive domain which is one of the three main domains of learning and ways to measure learning as a way for our learners to acquire retain and use the knowledge that we are teaching to them. One of the best ways for us to measure the knowledge that our learners are getting from us is by using Bloom's Taxonomy as our guide to help us write our objectives. So Bloom's Taxonomy, let's talk about that a little bit. It is six levels containing remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. And so within these levels, this creates a framework for instructors to use to create meaningful, helpful, and measurable objectives for their learners. Each level represents how cognitive learning can be achieved. So when building a lecture, writing objectives which address every level of Bloom's Taxonomy will be helpful in making sure that we have a well-rounded lecture. However, we will not reach every level of Bloom's Taxonomy, but as a guide, we want to move in order of our Bloom's Taxonomy to make sure that we are really expanding on the knowledge that our learners are getting from us. So let's talk about these levels one by one. First, we're going to talk about remember. And in this stage, there's not much understanding that occurs at this level. Basically, it's a lot of memorization. So as an example, I'm going to say, let's learn about eggs. So one of the first things we'll memorize about an egg is the name, the size, shape, color, and the fact that they are quite fragile. If we move on to the level of understand, it's at this point that our learners should be able to demonstrate understanding of facts and ideas by organizing, comparing, giving descriptions, and starting to really put together ideas. So if we build on our egg example, we can say that, well, now we know eggs come from chickens. We have learned that there is salmonella on the shells. And also, if we want to eat them, they are a good source of protein. However, they tend to have cholesterol in them. We move up to our next level of apply. This is where our learners are going to really start to use what they've learned in a very meaningful way. So let's apply what we learned about eggs. We know eggs may infect us with salmonella from the shells. Therefore, we should wash our hands well after handling them. If we want to cook them, we want to cook them thoroughly so as not to get sick. And we don't want to eat them raw like Rocky, again, to prevent us from getting ill. We also learned that while they're a good source of protein, they can provide a source of high cholesterol. And so we want to make sure that someone who eats them will not be someone who has high cholesterol. So we need to keep that in mind. Now we move on to analyze. So here is where our learners are going to start to draw connections to the new concepts that we've learned. And we really want to see them use their critical thinking skills. So again, continuing to build on our eggs, perhaps we at this point do a study on eggs. How much salmonella does the outside of an egg have? Do brown-shelled eggs have more salmonella than white-shelled eggs? We know and learned that we definitely cannot and should not eat the outside of the egg because of the salmonella and also just doesn't taste good. And because of the potential of the salmonella, we should always wash our hands after handling the egg, right? But we did also decide that it's okay to eat the inside of the egg once it's thoroughly cooked. And we talked about the cholesterol, but now we can say, okay, we know about the cholesterol, where's the cholesterol? It's in the yolk. Great, I can still eat the egg white, get that great source of protein. So we determined, well, eggs are still a good source of protein, but I just need to be sure which part of the egg am I eating? Let's move up to our next level of evaluate. Here, we really want our learners to develop a complex understanding. We're going to ask them to do several additional steps of like analyze, critique, potentially compare and contrast the data information that they've learned. If we go back to our eggs, like I said, we determined that eggs are definitely a good source of protein. But at this point, is it the best source that we could offer to somebody or other better sources, such as like a meat source or a plant source like tofu? Well, let's compare and look. We could look at the protein amounts in each one of those sources, the cost, the availability to purchasers. And at that point, look, compare, contrast, do eggs still come out on top? Is it something that we should suggest for people to consume as a good source of protein? And this now brings us to our final level of create. And it's at this point that a learner has really gone through every level of blooms, has the knowledge, concept, main ideas, built, built, built to the point where they should be able to create novel work. Take what they've learned, make something new. And so here at this point, we've learned a lot about eggs. We've determined it's definitely a good source of protein. So let's turn it into a snack and not even just have it be a snack that you can make at home, but even better, buy free made. And we're going to keep in mind those who might have high cholesterol, and we will create the new portable hard-boiled egg white snack. We've created a new product and used all of the information we learned about eggs. So taking all of Bloom's taxonomy and now applying this to objectives, we want to make sure that the objectives we write have a couple of main points. They need to have an intended outcome. They must be measurable for our learners and for ourselves as educators. And they should be able to answer this statement, the learner should be able to. So typically when you write an objective, you want to make sure that you are using an appropriate verb to make the objective measurable. So verbs such as understand, know, those are not appropriate. You're not able to, as an educator, to measure what someone understands or to measure what someone knows. However, if you ask a learner to compare or contrast the information you just gave them, you're able to evaluate if they've truly learned the knowledge that you've given to them. So we want to be able to make sure that we can measure what our learners are getting from the topic that they are being taught. So let's go back to our Bloom's taxonomy levels, our triangle here, and look at this as an example of actually written objectives. The objectives that are used in example happen to apply to nematodes. Remember, you can write these objectives applying to any topic that you may be teaching about, but just our topic of choice for this webinar happened to be nematodes. So on the remember level, remember, this is a lot of memorization, not understanding that's occurring at this level. So appropriate verbs are usually define, describe, identify, list. And some examples on how we could build objectives using these words are as follows. Direct versus indirect life cycles, define those. Describe distinguishing characteristics. Identify morphological characteristics. List clinically significant examples. Now that they have memorized some facts about nematodes or intestinal parasites, we can want them to build on that by moving up to understand. Here we could ask them to explain, differentiate, define, and each one of these will now allow them to build on what they've remembered and bring them to a level of understanding about our parasites. Apply, and this we could ask them to outline the life cycle of a intestinal parasite. This will help them to apply what they've learned about indirect versus direct life cycles. Characteristics, where do we find the parasite? So again, as you can see, we are building on our knowledge as we write our objectives, having our students walk through that building of knowledge as we build our objectives for our PowerPoint. Analyze is where I have kind of left off with my examples. This is, I've used this one before, compare and contrast morphological characteristics. Again, we're having them use those critical thinking skills, really think about what they've learned, and create a list that allows them to visualize and really kind of dive deeper into just a simple listing of characteristics, what makes one particular nematode stand out or differentiated from another one. Now, typically, when we are writing lectures, we don't always reach evaluate or create. That is typically for an advanced project. So when we are writing like a foundational lecture or an advanced topics lecture, we're usually going to reach certain levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Evaluate, create, those are much higher order levels of Bloom's taxonomy, and sometimes those are not used quite as frequently unless you're working with students or learners who are readily working on a project like a capstone project or a dissertation, something where they are creating and working through novel work. And so that brings us to our final slide. I wanted to show you here some actual hard concrete examples with some specific intestinal parasites listed here. And as you can see, I've listed the levels of Bloom's taxonomy that the student is expected to reach. Most of these are hanging out on the two main levels of Bloom's because it was or this would be considered an introductory lecture, but I do have them reach analyze at one point, one objective. And this is just a snapshot of actually the objectives that I would use, and some of them would probably reach us out to apply. And like I said, this was really a foundational lecture. And so it's, you know, the reason that you would see a lot of remember and understand, because it's important at this point for the learners to really start to build their foundational concepts. But Bloom's taxonomy really provides us as educators with a strong framework on how to write objectives. And now that we've walked through that, let's see how my colleague, Dr. Danielle Fortuna, uses these learning objectives to build a lecture. There's a lot that goes into lecture building. So what we're going to do in this segment is we are going to build from Teresa's materials and we are focusing on turning our big picture concepts and objectives into content. But before we start, we're going to start by highlighting what I consider to be the tenets of creating educational experiences. Engagement. This is building the educational experience together. Accessibility. This lies in the adaptability of our content and making our teaching material far reaching and available for all learners. And we will talk about zooming out a little bit later. And lastly, empowerment. When a learner walks away with a sense of understanding, it's truly priceless. And we'll revisit these tenets throughout our content building. As we've reviewed before, if objectives are specific and measurable aims, then our concepts are goals in the form of I would like the learner to know and understand. And then our objectives help us to achieve these goals. So where do we even start? Do we start with objectives or do we start with concepts? You can start with either. Sometimes you have big goals and concepts in mind that you know you want to present and teach, but other times you're starting with a list of objectives. For instance, if you're inheriting a syllabus or a crafted list of objectives like we have here. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to start with a list of objectives and extract some of our content. So here's the list of objectives that Teresa created for us. And what we're going to do is we're going to go through these objectives and extract out the really important highlights of this educational experience. What do we want the learner to know and understand? And what we see coming out right away is morphology, morphologic characteristics, also written in terms of structures and worms. So we know that morphology is important to know and understand. Then we continue to move through these objectives and we see that life cycle is an important part of this educational experience. And then we keep moving through and we identify that a major part of this is also detailing the clinical correlates, talking about the infection, the transmission of the infection, and how we diagnose it and what happens to the patient. As we go through our objectives, we also notice that this educational experience really focuses on specific organisms. So as we see here, I pulled out Ascaris longicoides, which is a big player in this educational experience. So as we put everything together, one of our big concepts that emerges is to know and understand the morphology, life cycle, and clinical correlates of Ascaris longicoides. When we start building our content, we can use this diagram to help us visualize everything. We're starting with Ascaris as an example here. And what we're going to do is build this concept with the supporting content of knowing and understanding morphology, life cycle, and clinical correlates. Here we're brought back to the tenets that we talked about before, building with engagement. And where this comes in is thinking about the flow of our content. How will we talked about before, building with engagement. And where this comes in is thinking about the flow of our content. How will we move through all of this supporting material in a way that facilitates those connections and the understanding? And once we do that, that's when we create empowerment. So let's get started. Maybe you decide that the way that you want to structure your content is more of this structure here, where you're moving from morphology to lifecycle to clinical correlates, discussing the eggs and the adult worm, then moving into the geographic distribution, talking about the development of the organism, its larval stage, its migration, and its host, and then detailing the clinical correlates, such as the details of the transmission. What does the infection look like, and how do we diagnose it? But maybe you decide to tell the story of Ascaris lumbricoides as a journey through its lifecycle, starting with the distribution, and then moving through the morphology and the clinical correlates and phases. So moving into the morphology of the eggs and how the infection is transmitted, and then detailing its growth and development in the human, talking about how it grows up from the larval stage into the adult worm, and then detailing what this means in terms of the patient. What does the infection look like, and how do we diagnose it? And then if we go back to our objectives, and this is a pared-down list of our objectives as they apply to this organism, we can go through our objectives easily and note that we accomplished all of our objectives in our content. But one of the other important things to keep in mind is setting the stage for our material. We know what our content will look like, but then we have the pre-concept content to think about. And what this does is it sets the stage before we dive into our concepts. And how do we do this? Well, the first thing we can do is we can think about, is there anything that the learner needs to know in order to set the stage and move forward? This is where we get to zoom out. We get to take a step back and really look at all of our content and think about where we need to begin. First, we can ask ourselves, what is the scope of the talk? We know from our objectives that this educational experience is a broad coverage of GI worms. But perhaps this is just a talk on this particular organism. So that's important. That helps us. Also thinking about the learners and the learner group, where are they in their educational journey and experiences? And what do they need to know? The beauty of the pre-concept content is that it allows us to adapt to various learners and allows us to remain flexible. And it's how we make sure that we're all on the same page moving forward to establish that baseline of the topic before diving into the details. And this brings us back to our tenet of accessibility. OK, so what does pre-concept content look like in terms of our concept here? We can ask ourselves, what is new knowledge and what is a refresher? And since we're talking about Ascaris lumbricoides, which is a nematode, something that may come up is, what is a nematode? And given that this is a very specific type of organism, it implies that there's other types of worms that we have to think about. So how does this nematode fit into the grand scheme of worms? And we can dive into the different types, nematodes and flatworms. But then this also brings us back to what we're focusing on, such as our morphology. What does a nematode look like? What are the general characteristics? And what we see happening here is that our pre-concept content allows us to define and organize and classify our material so that we can all move forward on the same page together. Now that we've mapped out our content and we can take a look at everything in its entirety, this gives us the beautiful opportunity to think about how we are going to engage the group in different ways and plan where we're going to ask questions. But also, as we go through our content, we can think about where do we anticipate questions that we will be answering. And as you see, all of our content will require highly effective visuals. So now I will pass things on to my colleague, Kamran. Everyone, this is going to be beyond words, harnessing the power of visuals. So you already now have learned from my amazing colleagues how to come up with a plan of what you want to teach, create objectives for what you want to teach, and then how to convert those objectives into content. And now you're at the stage where you have the content, you have the objectives, and now you're thinking about putting together what you want the world to see. And that's where we are going to try and harness the power of visuals. So in visuals, I guess what I want you to learn or think about is that think of a screenplay. Think of your favorite movie, the favorite scene in a movie. Now, there is a mechanism in which the director or whoever it was behind the scenes took the screenplay, like this random screenplay I'm showing you, and converted it into the beautiful visual that is in the cinema in front of you. And so we're going to try and use some of the techniques and hopefully take you through step by step what effective visuals can be and how you can use it to really back a punch in the message that you're giving. And so hopefully, I'm going to give you a little bit of a headache for this and then hopefully going to fix it by showing you a slide like this. You know, if I could see a show of hands really, like if we were live, I would love to see a show of hands of how many people really have seen slides like these. And the answer, I would say, is a lot. Like, many of us have seen slides like these. So let's say we're talking about a scary slumber party, as you know, right? We want to now talk about the life cycle. And this is the slide that is in front of you. There are many, many things that we can do to make this a more effective slide for education, right? And so that's where I think the visuals really come in. So let's think about, break this down, right? So let's look at the text color. It used to be that everybody loved this dark blue background with the yellow font, right? This may have been really good in the time when we were using transparencies and different types of projectors. But in this day and age, you may not need this. And in fact, if you're on Zoom and presenting, you may not need it at all. The text font here, I'm using Comic Sans. This might be a personal view of mine. But Comic Sans doesn't necessarily give you that branding of being very professional. It's kind of a cutesy font. And it's really, I think it would be really great for children, for example. The text spacing and the capitalization, it's really cramped. There's too much text on this, right? And there are too many lines. And nobody can really follow along, even if I was reading. And as you can see, there are points of information, right? There's one through six or seven. And they're all written in like a paragraph form. There's also things that are happening in the description that infective eggs are being swallowed, right? As part of this process. And could that be that we can put a video or an infographic that might be more effective in teaching that story? And of course, we've mentioned the background color, right? And are there ways that we can animate this? And so I'm gonna try. There's a lot of pressure on me, right? Because I need to use good visuals to teach you how to use effective visuals. So I'm gonna try and take this slide and work with you to convert it in a way where I think that the visuals are more effective. And hopefully during this journey, we'll be able to learn together how to use effective visuals. So visuals are important, right? They're important in medical laboratory science and pathology all the time, really. But if you think about it, when the message is abstract or complex, you have to really break it down. And that's where I think visuals can have the greatest impact. If the key message is visual, that really helps, right? We think of social media all the time and everything is visual there, right? And so those visuals that are on the screen are really, really important. I think visuals can also be really helpful to emphasize key points, right? And so they can be used to particularly highlight or emphasize certain areas of a slide, for example. If a presentation has a how-to session, like how to do a particular thing, or for example, if there's a timeline, like a life cycle, I think visuals can be really helpful there. And then, of course, if it includes numbers or calculations, I think it's very important to be able to break it up a little bit. So some tips to start off with, I mean, use it if you can, but really don't force it. There's no reason to force multiple visuals. For example, in these slides, I'm animating the text because I want you to focus on one line at a time. But, I mean, I could be putting in different types of infographics or clip art, and I really don't need that. What I need you to focus on is kind of the few things that I want to say. Don't make the slide too busy, right? Simply put, I'm trying to keep it five lines, you know, five to 10 words a line. You know, you're not trying to read off the slide. You're trying to just give the viewer a visual of what you're trying to impart. So we talked about the five lines per page. We choose the background carefully, and I'll talk a little bit about branding of the image. And I've chosen the fonts with intentionality. You know, I think that they're a professional-looking font. They come across really nicely on screen, and I think that's something that should be importantly considered. Definitely do make the font large enough, right? This particular font that I'm using in PowerPoint is 28, and, you know, I think that this is a reasonable size. Not too many colors or change colors. Like, you don't want it to be too busy. You don't want it to be distracting. And be careful, right? We have to consider inclusivity of individuals who may not have the same color perception as you. And so be careful about using red and green together or other color combinations that can, you know, perhaps give people headaches or, you know, not even be able to differentiate. And, you know, some people love to put sound or a lot of animation. I have animated these slides. I'm a big fan of animations, but be careful. I think there's a fine line, and that fine line between having too many and too little needs to be kind of warped on carefully, right? So using these tips and tricks, let's think of this slide again, and I'll tell you that, you know, as part of the ASCP's webinar, I received a template. So, you know, if I was to, you know, perhaps show you the life cycle, here's the template that was given to me by ASCP, right? And so let's look at it. It has its incredible logo over here. We have a background that is white with a blue strip, right? The font is kind of a dark color on a white background. And you can see that they've given me already like a color scheme, right? There's this blue color and kind of an aquamarine color. And so what I can do is think of that aquamarine color. And really, if I start using the same colors, like I just changed the color here, you will be able to see that it's more in line with the brand. So it's important to consider brand guidelines, logos of institutions, logos of the company that you might be presenting for, et cetera, as part of what you're presenting. So with that in mind, let's take this and convert it to the template that was given to me. So I converted the background, you know, now obviously we have a completely different problem in which the text is absolutely the wrong color for the background. And so you convert that, and now we're using the text template and the color template. Already to me, this starts looking much better, but we know this is way, way too much information. So we look at the information and we see how can we convey it more effectively. And one way to do it is to, you know, bullet it, right? So now I've bulleted it. I'm talking about adult worms, how they live in the lumen, how the unfertilized eggs may be ingested, but are not infective. And now it seems that, okay, this is more ballotable. But what if we animate this? What if I'm to present this to you and say, adult worms, and these are the sizes, and then one by one, they live here. This is what happens when they're ingested. This is what happens when they hatch. This is what happens when they invade the mucosa. And then all of a sudden, what we've reached is me holding the viewer's hand and taking them one step at a time with effective visuals. But then I Google something and find that the CDC has this incredible image of the life cycle of Ascaris nebrocoides. And so now I want to show the visual as well. So one way I can do this is to put the visual right next to the text. But now using the same formula that I've already taught you, we have too many words and this is too distracting. So perhaps we can put all of that together and animate it. Animate it so that every step in this journey can be animated in the PowerPoint in such a way that if I was to explain this to you, all seven steps would be one at a time. I would draw your attention to that one step and then move forward. And then at the end, hopefully I would have been able to effectively use visuals to teach you the life cycle of Ascaris. Similarly, for example, if I was to show you data here, this is gangrene that's caused by Ascaris. It's very small. You can't see it. You have to be really careful, but I'm really not showing this to you to show you the size of the image, but it's showing you this, that there are ways that you can emphasize, right? So putting a box around that first case here makes everyone focus on the fact that, okay, perhaps Dr. Mirza is gonna talk about the first case, right? So this can also be an effective visual. So I would say create a clear structure, consider the ideal length of your presentation, because, for example, if I had 10, 15 minutes, I can make things much faster by using effective visuals rather than putting text out. I would say adding layers of interest is really important because it helps you from being bland, the presentation. Like I've mentioned, be careful about using brand colors, fonts, logos, and be very intentional with this. All the fonts should be aligned. They should be the same size. They shouldn't, you know, the boxes shouldn't move too much from side to side. And actually, if you want to combine images and graphics, you could actually consider making an infographic or using a QR code, right? So this QR code takes you to the Ascaris Lombrigoides CDC website. And so that way you can also interact with your viewers. Comparison infographics is one type of infographic here. I'm just showing you a marketing infographic where they're showing you three options. You can also create infographics which are very visual, like they, you know, you can put stars on something or timeline on something, for example, the cost of something. Similarly, process infographics can be really helpful where you define one, two, three, four, and, you know, there are many different types of infographics that are out there. For us, especially in medical laboratory science, or if you're talking about a case, a report, and then the timeline infographic could be really, really helpful where we can really chart out what happened to the case or the person or the disease over a period of time. And these can be really helpful visuals as well. Many people ask me which platform to use. And of course we have no commercial bias. You can use whichever platform you want. You know, many teachers use Google Slides. This particular presentation is in PowerPoint. I do have a Canva account. I use Canva a lot to make PowerPoints and Prezi, et cetera. So, you know, please do look around and see which platform gives you the best types of visuals to use. One thing I will tell you is that PowerPoint has an inbuilt design ideas where I'm showing you with this clicker. And so that can take your slide and give you different design options. And sometimes it can really help you put icons to things and, you know, fix the text a little bit and automatically the slides start looking better. There are many different ways that you can also address, you know, looking at a particular entity. You can put videos in it. So for example, in this particular case, in this image, you have a YouTube video, which I'll start really quickly, but I'll stop it. You can embed the YouTube videos. And here, for example, in this YouTube video, it's a life cycle of ascaris. And I think that that can also be a different type of media that you use in your presentations. All right, so to recap, what are we going to do to use effective visuals? Minimize the text, super important. Maximize your visuals, but do it appropriately. Use appropriate mix of media. Make sure that the branding of your presentation is in line with what your organization wants. Make sure you understand the background of the audience so that you can really use the visuals accordingly. Make sure the timing of the presentation is helped by those effective visuals. And really when there's a complexity in the message, the visuals can help break it down for individuals. Make sure that it is highlighting what you want to convey. And remember, do not overdo it. Too many sounds, too many animations, too many videos can be very distracting and can take away what you're actually trying to achieve. All right, so I hope that that was very helpful. And now you have to figure out how to assess if you've been successful and how to engage the audience. And for that, I give it over to my colleague, Aaron. Thank you. Thank you, Cameron. So now we've gotten to the part of the presentation. We're going to start talking about assessment. how do we do? We're going to measure successes, we're going to actually try to engage other learners and go a little beyond. So just like any trip and any journey that we go on, we want to actually have a good roadmap to kind of assess where we are and see what we're doing. So our big objective here is to actually identify some assessment tools to kind of help you measure the specific learning objectives and then also be a little more interactive with our learners. So like with any map, you kind of see how there's stops along the way. So some points of assessment that we're going to really touch on are going to be dealing with the pre-assessment, so even before the learners get in the room, starting point, midpoint, towards the end of the presentation, we're going to be doing some applications work, seeing how they can apply what they've learned, and then even go beyond with some post-assessment. So with pre-assessment, is there anything that we need our learners to know to set the stage for this concept that we're going to be covering? Do we need to refresh on anything? So pre-assessment allows us to make sure everyone's kind of, we've established that baseline, they're all going to be starting together with our learners. We want to make sure that we're engaging and connecting with them, and if everyone's not starting on the same page, you can't really connect. So we want to get them learning right away. Okay, so let's make sure we're starting together. Just like the runners here, you're always going to have the one student, the A student up at the front, who's going to have read 20 papers on it and be familiar with everything, and the rest of us who maybe reviewed a little bit of the topics, but we want to make sure that we have everyone starting at the same time. So some great interactive strategies that you can use involve using things like polls, flashcards, social media is a great way to engage users and learners and quizzes and also gamification. So the key here is to do short, concise, and engaging learning. You want to make it not too long, it's not a 200-page paper. You want to reach them and do that micro-learning. So some of the tools that you have at your disposal are going to be things like Padlet, Quizlet, Seven Taps, polls, social media, and then even just a basic case study. So just something that's going to make them recall factual information. So the key thing here is to do some micro-learning, but also assess using a very concise, simple approach. Okay, so here is a great tool, Seven Taps. It's great for micro-learning and assessing. So touching on a little bit of what Danielle was talking about, that getting those pre-concepts down. This is a great tool to actually make sure, do our users know what a nematode is? Do they, are they familiar with the structure? We're introducing one of our nematodes, and then actually you can collect some metrics as well and conduct polls with this. But the great thing about this tool is it's in the name Seven Taps. So you have seven opportunities to kind of provide some education. So another pre-assessment tool, which has been great, which is very good with engaging with users, is actually doing poll questions. So in this particular example, I'm using poll questions, social media, which were all on our phones, and then actually using a case study. So the big thing here is you don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are amazing subject matter experts like Dr. Bobbi Pritt, who does an amazing pair of Ziplocs. So on Twitter, I was able to take her case and actually give it to our learners and say, you know, as a pre-assessment, identify this worm, and then answer some poll questions below. And you can see the hashtags there are going to also provide us some metrics to see how our users are sharing and engaging with this one. So the first question dives into, are they familiar with the worm that's above, that they know it's a nematode? So we're getting to poll them. With the polls, you can leave them open for about seven days, and you're testing your learners to kind of see where they are on the spectrum. And then even going a little further, looking at the features that Danielle mentions with the cynical body with no hooks, you can kind of see we have a couple of learners that most of the learners are right there with what a nematode is, with the structures and everything, but we've got a couple that might need a little help. And the great thing with social media too is that like Dr. Pritt, she'll actually engage with your learner and different users will too, so it gives an opportunity to learn even further and about parasitology. Okay, so another great pre-assessment tool and a tool you can use throughout is a Quizlet. I did not have to do much for this. The great thing is you can go into Google and things are already there. So I found this great nematode Quizlet, and they cover flashcards, which the example I have to the right is of an example flashcard of one of our nematodes, one of the ascaris, which we're going to be looking at, but it gives you other platforms. You have tests, matching, so there's all these modalities that they can actually use. And then the great thing too is you're getting this data to kind of see where your learners are, and then right off the bat when you start your assessment and your lecture, they have a live checkpoint game that you can do that will take definitions that you've already done and turn them into a game, so that way we know we're starting out together. Okay, so one of the other stops in our learning assessment journey is going to be the midpoint assessment. So the big thing here is these are your wonderful learners, and at the midpoint, this is kind of what we're thinking. We're like, hmm, I need some milk. Does my sister-in-law like me? What's that recipe for that spaghetti sauce? So you're having to work through all these extra bubbles and extra thoughts to grab our learners back. So read the room. This is your chance to ask any questions and actually build on even further some of those more dynamic learning objectives that start to analyze and compare and contrast. It gives you that chance to not only answer questions that your users have, your learners have, but also build on the content and actually prepare them to do the analytical thinking, that comparing, that contrasting, and you're able to assess and reinforce some key concepts at the same time. So if they're not quite there, be ready to adapt. This is your chance to keep everyone on that learning journey. Okay, just like controls, no learners left behind. This has already been mentioned, but it's worth mentioning again to emphasize kind of the point that you do have these interactive and engaging strategies at your disposal. Do not leave people behind at the midpoint. You can do a poll, you can do some of the flash cards that I showed you, gamification, which we're going to dive into in a second, and you can even do some questions, but keep it short and concise. Don't lose people. Okay, so here's a great example of a cahoots that you could have at your midpoint where our parasitologist Dr. Bobby Pritt has identified an adult nematode, a female one, and then what are the eggs below. So with this, you're touching on so many different learning objectives. You're distinguishing between the male and the female nematode. You're seeing if they actually remember what a nematode is, a roundworm, and you actually give them that in the question. And then all of these different eggs are actually examples of some of the different eggs you're trying to compare and contrast in Teresa's amazing learning objectives. And one of these is actually not a nematode egg. There's a tenia at the bottom, so that touches on a flatworm, so you're testing them on that as well. Okay, so end of presentation, just like my favorite puppy says, how'd we do? So this is your chance to actually kind of apply everything, pull all those learning objectives together, and like Daniel was saying, you need to empower and engage with learners. So we're telling them this is our chance to say, okay, this is what you've learned, so wow, look at all the amazing knowledge you have. And then some of the interactive strategies and engagement strategies that I'd recommend using are what I call an unfolding case study, poll questions, and you can do even quizzes as well. But the key thing here is make sure you're not introducing new assessment tools at this point. It's the end of the lecture, you have very little time, and they're already familiar with certain assessment tools. So if you go with Quizlet, go with Quizlet. If you do Kahoots, go with Kahoots or polls. Okay, so here's a great example using Danielle's graphic from earlier and how she ties the learning to the objectives itself. So we could potentially, with the unfolding case study, along the journey, you're going to be assessing with the tools we've learned about. So with the Kahoots, with the polls, with those things, you're going to want to stop at different points. So you can do the traditional case study and unfold it that way, where you start with the clinical presentation, ask questions about that, go into the identification and the treatment, but make sure you're stopping along the way to cover our objectives that Teresa has designed. Or something that I love that Danielle mentioned is you could actually do what I'm calling the journey of Ascaris. You can do it from the perspective of the pathogen working its way through the host. So with Cameron, we went through this amazing life cycle chart where he actually, with the graphic, were able to walk them through each step. So with this, you could actually start with the host, talk about them a little bit, but then go to the parasite and go through their journey at each step and then assess whether they're able to compare and contrast eggs, if they can identify the worm, what are the clinical symptoms, at what point do they migrate here and there. You've got these amazing graphics to do that with. So post-assessment, it's important to remember that learning is not a one-and-done. Assessment is not a one-and-done. It's not a, the lecture's over. So you have the opportunity to actually do assess the long-term achievement. Did we achieve our goals? Do they remember them? We're also able to leverage and assess some data as well by looking to see where the gaps are. What can we improve on next time? And then here's some interactive and engaging strategies. So you can do emails, follow-up polls, follow-up case studies to see if our learning objectives were achieved, or we can even go a little further, like Teresa was talking about, and seeing if we can get them to analyze and create using things like a Padlet or A7 Taps, taking that knowledge and having them create something new that could even be integrated into our future talk to teach future students. So here's an amazing example of a post-assessment. You're continuing assessing, you're educating, and you're engaging. So Dr. Pritt puts out a great identification at the end of what the case of the day is. So I went ahead and took that great concept and made it into our post-assessment. I give them some basic information about Ascaris. It's a roundworm, some of the things, and then I attach some polls as well. So we're looking to see, okay, let's go beyond just the basic knowledge and see, okay, what can this worm be confused with? So three options, you can kind of see where your learners are, and then even giving them bonus questions, people love bonus questions, to see, to bring home that a patient's being impacted as well. So we look at this and we go, okay, our learners aren't really holding on to this concept. The great thing is that our case study that's provided by our subject matter expert actually allows them to go a little further, learn a little more, and then even with social media, some of the experts in the field will start to engage with our learners as well, so the learning doesn't stop. With that, I will answer questions. Thank you. All right, so share your comments and questions, put them in the Q&A. So surprise, there's going to be a 500-question test on Ascaris lumbricoides for all of our viewers, which is going to happen right now. Hopefully, you guys are paying attention. I think that I'm, at least we're all, on behalf of all of us, I think, I'm hoping that this was a very useful kind of way of taking everything from objectives. I know that I always have trouble writing appropriate objectives and kind of making an adequate, excellent pedagogical kind of tool that can help engage your learners. And so there are some questions already in the Q&A. I know we'll only have like five minutes, but we'll tackle some of them. A lot of them are about engaging students that are coming up right now. Erin, I'm going to ask you the first one. So a couple of people are asking about Quizlet, whether you use the free version or whether you purchased it and if you have found it to be accurate. I've used the free version. Before I actually, if I'm using someone else's content from a Quizlet that's already built, I do go back through it and double-check that the content that's actually there is actually relevant and up-to-date. I don't want the learner putting the wrong thing on the test and being like, oh, well, it was in the Quizlet that you sent out. So I am doing some kind of quality assurance. So I do use the free version. Wonderful. I'll piggyback off of your answer. And I know somebody in the chat had asked about how to create QR codes. So there are numerous free QR code creator websites. You can just Google free QR code. You don't have to sign up for anything, but if you wanted to pay for a subscription to do it too, you can do it through bit.ly, B-I-T-L-Y as well. There are many ways that I would recommend just Googling it. So Teresa, I'm going to take, I'll ask you a question and that is about, I guess people are wondering about whether most classes are in person, online or hybrid. I guess all of us can answer. In your program, what's going on? Like what's the breakup now? So now my students are all back in person. But when COVID first happened, we did pop to having to be virtual. So I think, you know, there is definitely a difference between engaging students online versus in person. And, you know, I think that takes a little trial and error to find out how you're best going to best engage your certain audience. And I find face to face personally to be much easier to engage. And I really struggle with engagement online. I do a lot of hand gesturing and pausing for questions. And you kind of have to like make up your own excitement because you're not reading a room. So I know that engaging online definitely takes a lot more energy from me. Whereas when I'm face to face, I can really usually drive my own energy from the energy in the room. And also just, I feel like it's easier for me to check in with my students at that point in time. So it definitely takes some trial and error as you start to present. I hope that helped. Thank you. So Danielle, I'm going to give the next question to you. I'm not sure if there's like a right answer for this, but your opinion on someone's asking if putting an icebreaker at the middle of the presentation can recapture back the attention of students. Do you think that that's an effective strategy? I welcome everyone's thoughts on it, but Danielle, I wanted to start off with you. I think you're muted, Danielle. There we go. So I personally have not put an icebreaker in the middle of one of my talks, but I think Aaron brought up a good point about the mid-talk check-in. And I think that that could be a good way to get that engagement if you just put a pole right in the middle of the material. So I thought that was a really good suggestion. That's wonderful. Anyone else about any middle of the line activities? Aaron, any more thoughts that you have? One thing I'll do is, even if it's the first time I've given a talk, I'll stop at the midpoint and be like, usually when I give this talk, people tend to have questions. And then I'll start to, we're going to play just a quick kahoots or something just to kind of see where you guys are. But usually I'll even admit, I'm like, at this point, most learners have questions. So if you have questions, don't be afraid to ask, even if it's like the first time I'm giving it. So that way they're kind of reassured that it's okay to ask questions at this point. Yeah, I'm always reminded of like the visual feedback that many of us are talking about. Even if, for example, the chat has been going on, that to me was really helpful in the middle, that it felt that people were engaged. The Q&A, that's another way to kind of assess whether individuals are engaged or not. And so I find that very helpful. So we have two minutes left. There are a couple of incredible questions already coming in the Q&A. And I think that, you know, on behalf of ASCP, I'm pretty certain we will be able to try and answer them for everyone even later. But in the last two minutes, I'll turn it over to Teresa to lead us out. So we would just like to say thank you for attending. If you could please stay on to complete the 30-second survey that will appear as the webinar ends. Your input will be very important to us as it will help to inform any of our future educational initiatives. And we just really want to thank you for joining us today. It has meant so much to us for you to be here with us. So thank you again for joining us. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Thank you.

ASCP webinar

medical laboratory science

educators

Bloom's Taxonomy

learning objectives

engaging presentations

visuals

assessment techniques

learning outcomes