Videography
In ?Filming Compassion? by Janet Bremer and Marilyn Clark, students create an advertisement for a nonprofit agency using the tools in their own classrooms. Students were assessed in various areas including teamwork, planning, introductions, video transitions and effectiveness. Videography and editing involves not only the recording of the video but also the creative process of planning the scenes ahead of time and editing them afterwards in order to most effectively communicate the message of the video. In order to facilitate that process and make the best use of the students? time, they were required to use a storyboard to plan prior to visiting their non-profit. This article touched on many of the ethical and technical issues that arise when students are using expensive equipment and dealing with community members.
Video production has always been a love of mine and one that I?ve wanted to feel comfortable enough to share with my students. This article was helpful because it reviewed what the teachers had to consider before beginning the assignment and what they had to do for the students to help them be successful. The rubric was informative as well because it allowed me to see the variety of skills that were covered by this project. Teaching students how to introduce a piece of writing is often challenging. Having them learn to introduce a video is not only reinforcing the skill of introducing but it is more exciting because it is tied to technology which many students find more motivating than a 5 paragraph essay.
If I were to use video production in my classroom, I would love for students to find an issue about which they are passionate and create some type of persuasive video. It could be an advertisement, public service announcement, or any other type of persuasive material. The goal would be for students to get practice manipulating environments and words to get their message across. Since video/TV is a genre with which most students are familiar, it would be great to use it as a way to introduce the techniques used in persuasion, including bias, propaganda and exaggeration.
I would also be excited to pair this experience with podcasting. The newest form of podcasting is vodcasting and it would be great for getting the kids involved in the activities at school. Students could vodcast episodic tours of parts of the building. Students could vodcast introductions of the staff or interviews of our leaders of the week. Using video brings otherwise dry activities to life.
Posted at 10:44PM Jun 20, 2006 by svfelder in General | Comments[1]
Tablet PCs
Tablet PCs are very similar to laptops. They are portable, have memory and can come with keyboards. What makes them unique is their ink-enabled applications. Students can write on the screen with a stylus and have that information stored in the tablet's memory.
Tablets can help students who still need the control of the stylus. Many students are not adept at computer composing. As wonderful as concept-mapping software is, sometimes a pen (stylus) and paper (tablet) are exactly what a writer needs. Aside from that, the ability to write on a "paper" produced on a tablet and electronically send that data to the student is remarkable. As a Language Arts teacher, one of the most frustrating experiences is when a student works long and hard on a paper, I make suggestions on the paper, they revise and edit and then when it's time for the final copy, their work is nowhere to be found. Writing on tablet PCs minimizes this risk because students can save their handwritten notes and my handwritten comments as a file.
I?ve heard of other teachers having students submit their files to a Blackboard drop box. The teachers would then use their tablets to make comments on the student?s file and send it back. This is convenient and eliminates a the common teacher problem of bringing the papers home or, in the case of students, bringing the papers to school. It saves paper and makes giving feedback to students one step easier.
In Godsall?s, ?Exploring Tablet PCs? there was a lot of information for school districts interesting in purchasing tablets. There are many things to consider. For example, tablets without keyboards are cheaper, but tablets with keyboards can be more flexible for classroom use. Battery power and the size of memory available are also important features. Cost and features must be examined to see which tablets will be the best fit for a school system. Many tablets have capabilities similar to laptops which can be a selling point due to the fact that tablets have the ink-enabled applications that laptops do not. Aside from hardware considerations, software must also be examined. Currently, software on tablets is limited. As tablets grow in popularity and become more common in classrooms, there will most likely be more of a variety in available software.
Posted at 12:48AM Jun 20, 2006 by svfelder in General | Comments[0]
Hypermedia
Hypermedia
Hypermedia refers to a way of storing information from different sources in one place. It is a way of incorporating the capabilities of various websites, files, and other resources into one powerful document. Many online encyclopedias have incorporated hypertext into their articles. Students can click on difficult words to find definitions or links to other articles. Many times, a sound bite will aid either in pronunciation or provide an auditory example.
Research shows that having students ?learn by doing? is good, but learning by making might be better for retention. Dale?s cone shows that when students create a presentation, they retain 90% of what they?ve done. In addition, creating a hypermedia document could incorporate many of the skills and concepts that are important for me to teach. Teaching students about ethical use of property and copyright laws seems so ?preachy? when it?s not attached to some authentic reason for the conversation. Yes, it often comes up when students discuss burning CDs, but I am not in their homes to reinforce the concept enough for them to absorb what I say. In the classroom, I will be there when they attempt to add images and sound to their projects. Better yet, I will be there to show them how to design their own sound effects or images. What better way to teach them that feeling of ownership that comes when something personal is shared with the public?
Creating hypermedia documents with my students would change my classroom. My students would become proficient with tools they will use on a regular basis, such as hyperlinks. Web pages, files and browsers, as well as learning about their proper and ethical use. I will be able to incorporate the other goals and objectives through an exciting, challenging and relevant medium and I will be modeling lifelong learning, as I will share with them the newness of this knowledge and the fact that it came out of graduate school and a desire to be better.
Posted at 12:35AM Jun 20, 2006 by svfelder in General | Comments[0]
Podcasting
Podcasts
Podcasts are similar to radio broadcasts except they are on the Internet and are received via subscription. When a new podcast is created it is automatically sent to the subscribers for downloading. When they log onto the Internet, the new podcasts are downloaded to their computers. The benefit to podcasts over video clips on websites is that the content is delivered directly to the users computer or iPod and the user can listen to the audio files on his/her own schedule. If he/she is using an iPod, the subscriber can listen to the podcasts while "on the go."
In both Eash's "Podcasting 101 for K-12 librarians" (2006) and Flanagan and Calandra's "Podcasting in the classroom" (2005), there is discussion of the steps that teachers/librarians should take in order to make the podcast experience efficient and productive. The steps are simple enough for a group of students to understand, but the article informs the reason behind podcasting for teachers as well. It addresses the needs of auditory learners and special needs students and also serves as a motivational tool for students who enjoy expressing their knowledge in unique ways. Along with the excitement of a new technology, podcasting teaches students about ethical use of files as well as sound editing and basic computer navigation.
The use of podcasts in my school would be a wonderful asset to our school's new adoption, Positive Behavior Support. The idea behind this program is that students are taught expectations and have opportunities to practice expectations in order to prevent many of the misunderstandings that cause "bad behavior." Many times students are unaware of the procedures that they are expected to follow. Weekly or daily podcasts with students explaining the appropriate behavior would be more interesting and probably more effective that the traditional teacher talk. Featuring students who often choose to do the wrong thing might actually add to the programs popularity and to their own behavior training.
I?d love to get some of my ex-sixth graders, current 7th graders, together to do a few podcasts on the beginning of school (cafeteria procedures, locker techniques, moving around the school, etc) and the idea of "vodcasting" is even more exciting, as students would actually be able to see the proper actions. Flanagan and Calandra?s article introduced the idea of vodcasting but also discussed the benefits and restrainers of that fairly new technology. Vodcasting opens the door to exciting teacher presentations as well as student designed programs. Vodcasting does require stronger computers and video editing software, so it's use in the classroom might be limited until it grows in popularity and computers are updated to handle the large files sizes associated with this tool.
Posted at 12:34AM Jun 20, 2006 by svfelder in General | Comments[0]
Concept Mapping Software
Concept mapping software allows users to create a visual representation of the relatedness of ideas or topics. Some, such as Inspiration and Kidspiration, are relatively simple in that they allow students to create links to ideas as well as customize the shape and color of the actual "bubbles" in which the topics are placed. Others are more complex, allowing the author to not only "link" the topics, but add a relationship statement, called a proposition, to the linking arrow itself.
Although reading Regina and Jeff Royer's article , "What a Concept: Using Concept Mapping on Handheld Computers" gave me ideas about how to use handhelds with concept mapping, my own use of concept mapping for my Technology Integration class has proven to be far more informative. By experiencing this technology on my own, I was able to see what skills the learner must use to effectively communicate the relationships between ideas. First, the learner actually has to have learned (or read) about all of the topics. In addition, the learner must be able to find a relationship between the topics. Finally, the learner might have to categorize or organize subtopics hierarchically in order to most clearly communicate their relationships. That is a lot of analysis! Even after all that, students can still learn from each other's maps.
I can already see how concept mapping software can change my classroom.
Special Education Modifications
I have often been confused by the modification for graphic organizers that is included in many of my students' Individual Education Plans. This is compounded by the many special education teachers' different perceptions of that modification. I've always viewed it as providing graphic organizers so that students could see the interrelationship of ideas in a content area. In that case, I see concept mapping software as extremely valuable.
I am not saying that all students can do this, but many of these students who have passed through my classroom, would have been perfectly able to construct their own graphic organizers and that would have been much more valuable to them than the one I handed out and often found lying in the floor at the end of the day. The actual creation of the map requires the metacognitive strategies that students sometimes lack. There is a self- questioning that goes on during the creation of the map that makes it clear what a student understands and does not understand. Often, I ask a student what they don't understand and they don't know. This is a very concrete way of seeing what relationships or connections a student has not made- a very clear way of seeing what they do not yet understand. Special education students, in particular, need to develop an awareness of their own comprehension and I believe that concept mapping provides one way of helping them.
Prewriting
It is amazing how ineffective webs and maps can be when a child is planning a writing assignment. There are the children that write three bubbles and a single word in each and there are children who will write their whole paper inside a single bubble or two.
Concept mapping software (with the ability to create relationships) would not solve those problems. What it would do, though, is provide a place for everything. For example, in Inspiration, there is no place for proposition statements, therefore it seems very natural to write everything inside one bubble.
Using a different kind of software to create the relationships would allow me to have the students use the bubbles for keywords and use the proposition statements to link the keywords. Features like "knowledge soup," where students propositions and topics are combined into a statement, would be great because then, I could work on the use of simple transition statements to link the propositions together. This would help me to teach students how to organize their ideas effectively before writing and models to them how these relationships form their supporting details.
Posted at 10:24PM Jun 07, 2006 by svfelder in General | Comments[0]