Screencasting - Taking Teaching on the Road

A new tool that I've been playing around with this week is screencasting. Although it's undoubtedly true that nothing can ever replace direct instruction, I certainly feel like we can make it more personalized (and portable!) with technology.

I found two excellent uses for screen casting this week that just tickled my students pink.

Tutorials and Lectures

Although I've used Educreations in the past to create tutorials "flipped-classroom"-style, I was always frustrated by the fact that it was limited to a white-board-like screen, a finger acting as a marker, and whatever images you took the time to drag into the frame. (And if you wanted text, such as a worksheet, you had to screenshot it or make it an image first. Ugh.)

An Educreations tutorial I made for poetry

Although I know teachers who use Educreations to thunderous applause from students (the social studies teacher next door to me last year was a HUGE hit when she put her lectures into this format), it is fairly tough to use with the English Language Arts classroom. I don't know about you-all, but I don't do a whole lot of lecturin'.

This week, I had to make a screencast for class, and it set off a little lightbulb in my head. Rather than showing students on the projector how to use a certain website, for example, and getting assaulted with questions later ("What did you say again?"), why not record the instructions and inject a little humor?

To introduce to them a new vocabulary site I wanted to use, I made a tutorial using QuickTime, which I then uploaded directly to Edmodo for them to access. Since you obviously can't access their Edmodo class, here's a condensed version of what I gave to students. (Please note and forgive my sarcasm-- I promise, the students are in no way emotionally scarred by my gentle verbal ribbing).

My students were cracking up as they watched this. One commented, "She talks to that just like she talks to us!" I can guarantee they were more engaged than they would have been if I had just pulled up the site on my laptop and projected it while I talked. The students got really into the new site I was modeling and wanted to log on right away to start using it for their vocabulary homework.

• Cool discovery, by the way-- I had so much trouble figuring out where to upload my enormous QuickTime file that I finally remembered about Screencast-O-Matic, an amazing site that lets you easily record and store screencasts for your students.

Conferences, Sans Me

The other cool way I got to use screencasting this week was by using it to record myself making comments and giving feedback on their PowerPoint projects. I went through the project slide by slide, made suggestions, and avoided telling them their grade-- purely comments and suggestions. Then, I emailed the link to students to watch outside of class. No homework requirement necessary-- once students saw that there was a personalized video waiting, they were more than excited to have our one-on-one conference (well, if you can still call it that when I'm not really there physically).

A screen shot of a video I used to give feedback on a project

I never would have had time to meet with each student in our very short classes, so this was a perfect solution, tailored to my schedule and my students'. (And it was just a little fun for both of us).

Best of all? I actually had students emailing me back, thanking me for my feedback. How great is that?

Digital Media Literacy and... Bath Salts?!

When I set out on this new media and literacies adventure, I have to admit that I had some misconceptions about exactly what it would mean. Like many teachers, I thought that using new media would mean simply incorporating technology into my classroom. How wrong I was!

I came to learn that new media and literacy was about finding authentic purposes for technology use in the classroom (which I've explored in my first posts), but more importantly, about teaching students the critical literacy skills they need to survive in a digital age. According to the NAMLE Core Principles of Media Literacy Education:

"Media Literacy Education requires active inquiry and critical thinking about the messages we receive and create... All media and message contain embedded values and points of view" and, if we are not careful, "media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process." 

Media literacy is clearly about more than simply switching out the chalk board for the Smart Board. In fact, we can teach students to critically read new media without ever touching a computer!

Bath Salts!

So, why bath salts, you ask? Well, I was polling a few students last week as they worked on a group project, asking them what news stories they were interested in reading in conjunction with our horror unit. A student reminded me about the incident in Miami last year when a man allegedly took bath salts and ate another man's face. I found this article from NPR and thought it would be an excellent one to use to examine the diction (word choice), details used, and the author's tone.

The author's word choices, such as that the victim was "homeless" and is "fighting for his life," paint a picture of a heartless attacker that are clearly heavily opinionated. Through his choice of what details to include (and leave out), the author attempts to influence the public's opinion of this man-- and of bath salts in general. In fact, after this incident, several key laws were passed relating to this "new" drug.

So, what's the problem? The man never took bath salts.

Take another look at the wording of the article-- it claims that there is "a theory emerging" that he was "high on 'bath salts'"-- hardly conclusive proof. And yet, we read it as fact.

In teaching students to critically read new media, I will have them read and analyze this article using critical questions such as what might be left out of this story, what details are used to portray the subject of the story, and how it could influence our opinion. See the worksheet here.

After they more closely read and analyze this article, I will have them read another perspective on the story-- actually, an analysis of another take on the story.

Though this version points out many holes in the original story, it is also highly biased and has some flaws in reasoning-- at one point, the author states,

If Aguilar said bath salts were the new form of LSD, Adams would concur that you "can call it the new LSD," even though he knows LSD and bath salts are completely different drugs....

He claims to know what the police officer who shot the attacker is thinking. Clearly, though there are two sides to every story, every side has its own agenda. Teaching students to examine the inherent biases in the news will help them to form more reasoned conclusions for themselves.

Digital Discussion - Harder Than it Sounds!

Last week, I tried my first digital discussion on Edmodo. I gave the students the task of exploring a website that would give them some information on the historical backdrop of the short story we were about to begin reading. They were to investigate the site, read the information, watch the movie clip, and then go wherever the site-- and their curiosity-- took them. Then, they were to post an insight on the Edmodo link.

I was excited by the possibilities presented by this online form of bringing up interesting points from the reading. The students, I thought, would be challenged by having to present something new to the conversation, rather than all of them repeating the same detail. In addition, I thought that the online format would encourage them to hold a discussion, since they all spend hours commenting on each other's posts on various forms of social media.

I quickly learned that there are a few drawbacks to using Edmodo for discussion.

Requiring a post doesn't automatically facilitate discussion. Some students simply wrote throw-away comments that didn't encourage any sort of response. On the other hand, a few students asked questions that I found insightful and thought-provoking, but no one answered. And why should they? This wasn't a requirement, and they only had one night to complete the assignment. One student in particular asked challenging questions about human nature that I'm fairly certain no one saw except me.

What a waste of valuable thinking! I wouldn't consider this assignment a complete failure, because some great ideas came out of it-- both from my students and from me (on my end, how to better hold a "discussion" in the future!).

This week, I'm going to try a different format. I searched the web for a discussion site that allows for students to post direct replies to each other's comments, but that is still private in order to protect my students. I found a site called Collaborize Classroom, which has a variety of discussion features, including the ability to attach a poll question (yes or no, multiple choice, even a voting option that allows students to suggest answers) to a discussion thread.

I'm going to make a few changes to the way I frame the discussion as well:

• Making the assignment a week-long project to give students time to think and make meaningful replies
• Requiring students to compose thoughtful replies to each other's posts
• Posting rules of online discussion etiquette to ensure that students treat this as an academic discussion, not an informal, social chat

Here's an example of one discussion prompt:

I'm hoping that this way of holding a digital discussion will more closely resemble the types of online conversations I'm used to participating in for graduate school, which is another plus-- if students do pursue higher education, they will be used to composing in this format.

Do you have any suggestions for how I will implement this discussion this week? Have you ever tried anything similar? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Digital Fail

After the first few readings we did for my new graduate class in Theory and Practice: Teaching New Media and Literacies, I was hit with a variety of emotions-- I felt empowered, curious, and maybe just a little overwhelmed. My students this year all have laptops -- was I wasting a valuable resource in lieu of the "old fashioned" methods of instruction? Was the growing disengagement in my classrooms the result of worse students, or archaic teaching practices? Faced with emotional overload, I took to Facebook and polled my friends and family. My question was as follows:

I wasn't prepared for the 32 comments that followed in the coming day. Overwhelmingly, my friends and family realized that the majority of the reading and writing they do in the working world is through digital means. They suggested that their teachers had not prepared them for this part of their careers, and that it would be interesting if teachers today could do just that. (A few of my older family friends also reprimanded me for not teaching grammar to the no-good, comma-misplacing hooligans of today, but that's another story).

Feeling like a media literacy pioneer, I set out to digitize my classroom. The next day, I required students to sign up for a Google account so that they could all access and collaborate on the same document on Google Drive. Some students signed up for an account in a minute, then found themselves completely unable to focus on the next task they were to work on as I spent the following 20 minutes trying to help out the students who had been locked, out asked for a verification phone number, or just generally unable to work the internet intuitively. Finally, though, we were all signed up (well, mostly).

That night, I got an impassioned email from a houseparent (I teach at a residential school) suggesting that I had wandered into dangerous territory that might conflict with one of the school's policies by having students make email accounts. However, they wanted to help me legitimize my new project and get it approved by all the right channels.

I decided to deliver a very impassioned reply myself and espoused the many ideals of digital media literacy we have been reading about in the past week. The houseparent jumped on board and thanked me for my dedication to students. Win!

The next day, my optimistic bubble had been refilled, and I set about having students collaborate on the document. It was slow going, the students' excitement quickly turned into disruption, and we barely got anything accomplished. I felt like giving up on the whole enterprise. Then, slowly but surely, I started to pick up the reins and figure out how I needed to scaffold (and constrain) this collaborative mini-project. One the students knew what I expected, and I had modeled it fully and effectively, the students were hooked. I even had a student log online over the weekend and start filling in a document we were going to use in class the next day! Can you imagine?

A collaborative brainstorming document edited by my Honors English class

In The Socially Networked Classroom, Kist describes the "sometimes messy first steps of educators who are attempting to include social networking inside real schools and who are grappling with all the challenges that come along with this new kind of teaching" (7). It's important to remember, I suppose, that Rome wasn't built in a day, and that I won't become a digital literacy whiz overnight. The payoff will be worth all the struggle-- at least, that's what I keep telling myself!