Screencasting – information, differentiation, and feedback

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Screencasting is great way to deliver audio and visual information to your students. If you have been looking for a way to record your lessons, or you’d like to deliver some formative assessment of student work using your voice as well as your pen, check this post for information about Jing, Screenr, CamStudio and other tools that make this happen.

Making a “screencast” simply means that you are creating a video using your microphone and whatever is displaying on your computer screen. A program captures both the audio and video and then makes them into a seamless package you can upload to Moodle, e-mail to a student, or drop onto a flash drive.

Three popular tools that make this happen are Jing, Screenr, and CamStudio.

Jing

Jing is the most full-function tool of the three. Sporting both an image capture and annotation tool as well as a video recorder, Jing enables teachers to take screen shots with a keyboard shortcut as well as videos up to 5 minutes in length. Teachers I have known use Jing as a way to capture equations, record directions for playback from their websites, and, at least in one case, record a physics animation in order to use it on an online assessment. I recently came across a foreign language teacher who is using Jing to record her feedback on student papers.  She writes:

“As long as I have been grading papers, I have been talking to myself while I grade — a habit that drives everyone around me nuts, except for those of my colleagues who do the same. And truth be told, I’m really not talking to myself, I’m talking to the student whose paper I’m grading, except my words float uselessly unheard into the atmosphere, never to help develop anyone’s writing at all.”

For this teacher, the ability to capture her thoughts via video has been helpful for her own understanding of student progress as well as beneficial feedback for her kids. If you’d like more info, you can read her full blog post.

Jing’s drawbacks are that it is a program that must be installed, and there is a five-minute limit to screencasts you capture.

Screenr

Screenr is an entirely online tool – one that is as available to students as well as teachers – and it creates a nice collection of your videos once you’ve created them (an example of my ‘channel’). It still has the same 5 minute limit as Jing.

The potential for Screenr, especially at the secondary level, is that students can create these videos just as easily as their teachers. Students can create tutorial videos on the use of specific websites, short narrated presentations (conveniently limited to five minutes), or teach mini-lessons as part of an assignment.

CamStudio

CamStudio is another program that must be installed on your machine, but it allows you to record as long as you’d like. This allows teachers to record full lessons or lectures, if they have a specific need to do so. I prefer this tool to others, like the built-in screen recorder in Smart Notebook, because it won’t slow your computer too much and you have more options for saving different video file types.

 

Awesome Screenshot

If you’re only looking to capture and annotate web pages, I’ll throw one more tool in for good measure: the Awesome Screenshot tool, a great Chrome and Firefox extension from the social bookmarking service Diigo. If you ever wanted to capture a screenshot of an entire webpage, this is the tool that will help you do it.

 

For more information about screencasting, check out the latest “1 Tool at a Time” webinar or a curated assortment of videos and posts on the subject on this Scoopit! page.

Know of another great screencasting tool? Feel free to include it in the comments below!

Promoting Peer Assessment – Using Blogs in Comm Arts

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When Erica Rogers and Dan Barnes, communication arts teachers at Parkway West High, were redesigning a cumulative activity for their English III students, they were looking to create an activity where students would be writing and revising work throughout the year, culminating in a final portfolio of work.   Applying a simple, stable technology took this project to another level of engagement and effectiveness.

The goals of the redesign were 3-fold:

  • Show student progress over time
  • Archive the work so it could be displayed as a portfolio
  • Enable peer commenting for draft versions

The solution: a blog for each student.

Blogging is in no way a new technology.  It’s been around since at least 1995, one of the earliest and easiest ways to publish on the web.  The concept of blogging is simple – create a post and publish it for others to view and comment on.  Blog posts can be organized in a host of ways, making it easy to view an author’s growth over time, and blogging is a uniquely public act — every page is searchable and shareable.

The Process

Erica and Dan chose to apply blogging to their project in order to capitalize on its archiving and publishing abilities.  Students …

  • were grouped together with peers from other classes, creating an authentic audience for their work.  Students were given due dates for posting their work as well as for adding their comments.
  • posted both a draft for comments and a final version for review.  This established a sense of growth that both the student as well as his peers could see.
  • were required to comment in specific ways that were designed to promote valuable feedback to their peers.  Comments were defined, focused, and assessed by the teachers.  You can check out Erica and Dan’s feedback forms here and here.

This, in addition to in-class peer edits as well as teacher-edits, constituted a third round of feedback for every draft.  But what Erica and Dan noticed was that it was the audience of “strangers” that seemed to make this feedback cycle something different than the others.

Feedback from Beyond

Creating for a public audience changed how many kids went about the drafting process.  Erica sums it up nicely,

“Why would you want to create something you weren’t proud of?”

Students were concerned how their work was going to be perceived by students outside the bounds of their classroom, and they created with this in mind.  Students cared about the feedback they were delivering to and receiving from others, even going so far as to greet their teacher at the door with “My partner hasn’t posted his paper yet!”  The public nature of the publishing process meant that failing a due date didn’t mean that a student was frustrating her teacher – it meant she was letting down her peer.

An Example and an Explanation

 

Check out the blog to the right for a sense of what students were working on.   I’ve linked Dan’s write-up of the experience, a paper he recently completed for graduate school where he describes the positive impact of this application of technology on his students’ achievement.

In all, this project stands as a nice reminder that powerful uses of technology don’ t have to be complicated uses of technology.

Simple tools applied to specific needs can increase student investment and motivation without overwhelming the teacher.

Reason and Audience: Scratch in Geometry Class

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scratch iconAt the beginning of last summer, Corrie Meyer, math teacher at West High, was looking for a way to engage her 9th grade immersion students.  She wanted something fun but practical – something that would keep kids’ interest but also build logical reasoning, a necessary skill in mathematical pursuits.

She decided to try out programming, using an application called Scratch.

Scratch is a project created by MIT to encourage upper elementary and middle school  students to pursue computer science, but has been adopted by teachers in a number of different curricular areas at high school and collegiate levels.  In i’s basic use, Scratch allows students to tell stories by animating characters through a programming language that looks like puzzle pieces.

scratch controls

Geometry and Programming

After a successful first run in the summer school program, Corrie introduced the software to Kristin Judd, a fellow geometry teacher, as a way to give the abstract concept of geometry proofs some applied context.  The two decided to use it as an introductory activity this year.  When asked about the relationship between programming and the geometry curriculum, Kristin observed,

“In the past, students really struggled with ‘if, then’ statements.  It was hard for students to grasp the implications behind each step of the proof.  With Scratch, they keep asking ‘What do I need to do to make it work?’  They learn that they have to use the language of the system to explain to the program what they want it to do.  It’s the same with proofs – students need to learn the language so that they can explain to others the steps necessary to solve the problem.”

Leveraging an Authentic Audience

In addition to designing the application itself, the staff at MIT have built a website to show off student projects, creating an authentic audience beyond the classroom.  It’s this aspect that has really impressed Corrie.

“One of my favorite things about Scratch is that I’m not the only audience for the kids.  Kristin and I had our students turn in their projects by posting them on the Scratch website.  Then anyone who visits the website can see the projects and comment on them.  Their projects are also then available to download, so anyone can take it and improve it.  So in theory, kids from different schools (even different countries, if you check!) could collaborate very easily.  Our students were so excited when someone commented on their work.  Its a very tangible, real-world contribution as opposed to just a homework assignment.”
For an example of student work, check out the project below or visit one of the recommended links underneath it!

Learn more about this project

More student projects to check out:

 

Research and Inspiration from One Year of @actfl #flteach

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One year ago I became a member of ACTFL and began receiving the Foreign Language Annals as part of my membership. I meet monthly with the coordinator of modern and classical languages and ESOL here, and we use a bit of that time to discuss research that might direct the ways teachers and students use technology in presenting and learning a second language. I use the FL Annals as a starting point for my part of that conversation, and I suppose the highest praise I could give here would be this: I can’t imagine canceling my membership.

The FL Annals have inspired technology integration ideas, connected some dots in my understanding of second-language acquisition, and given me greater confidence that the work I do with teachers is helping students. Below is a summary of a few articles that have inspired me this year. Though there were many, I’ve selected only two per issue.

Authentic Tasks and Choosing NOT to Grade

In Horst and Pierce’s article, Foreign Languages and Sustainability 1, two things stuck out at me – the important role an authentic task plays in motivating language production and the conscious decision of the professors to AVOID correcting student errors in discussion board forums where students were communicating in an informal register, albeit still in the target language. When integrating technology , the principals of authentic task and a conscious approach to content created in the informal register are important aspects that I’ve seen work in the classroom. This article provides some support.

Building Better Self-Assessors

In Weyer’s article, Speaking Strategies 2 , I found a wonderful strategy to offer teachers who wish to help their students better self-assess: the process of transcription. Though Weyers focuses on how the intentional transcription process pushes higher education students into upper levels of proficiency, the approach can be tailored to secondary education students as well. I’m most excited to promote this technique using the Nanogong module we recently embedded in Moodle, a product that allows students to record their own voice easily and then transcribe the contents in the same web interface.

Attitude Matters

Though it may only have a tangential connection to the use of engaging activities with technology, Conchran, et al., contributed a thoughtful article 3 on what internal elements of our students contribute to their proficiency in a language – their attributions, attitudes, or aptitude? Their conclusion (from the abstract):

“The best predictive model was attitudes leading to aptitude leading to exam grades.” (566)

It seems to me that one reason to include some of the dynamic technology now at our disposal is that, when combined with meaningful, engaging tasks, it has the ability to influence the attitudes our students bring each day to class. While it’s at times easy to dismiss the idea of having “fun” in class, this article seems to support the idea that the relational environment we create in our classes has a great deal of impact on the production of language we see there.

Write More, Grade Less

In Armstrong’s article on graded and ungraded writing 4, she makes this summary statement:

“ Findings suggest that grades had little affect on student writing, and therefore more frequent and more varied ungraded writing assignments may be a productive pedagogical tool for improving the form and content of student writing” (690)

Earlier in the year I had been able to work with a teacher using TodaysMeet to do just that — provide students structured but ungraded opportunities to write about a topic that interested them. As more language teachers attempt the use of Moodle discussion boards, I’ll continue to promote this approach as one way to strengthen student writing.

Your Answer Doesn’t End the Conversation

In Miao and Heining-Boynton’s discussion of IRF and RTI 5, they include a nice table of response strategies teachers can use regardless of a student’s answers to an initial question, the goal being to mandate participation and promote engagement whether an answer is correct or incorrect. Whether used in face-to-face learning or online, awareness of these strategies can aide teachers as they create a culture of participation among their students.

With Assessment, Context Matters

The role of assessment – both for quantity of writing as well as quality – is investigated in an article by Brown, et al. 6 where the authors point out a tension in motivating students to take risks as well as strive for accuracy.

The findings of this article, paired with those of Armstrong above, seem to indicate that each student learning activity must be contextualized in order for students to succeed. If the goal of the activity is rapid, experimental construction of language, these activities are best ungraded. The results of the same activity, though, may be examined later as students find errors and attempt to fix them. Incorporating both tasks while learning language is an important step to ensuring that students attempt more complex language tasks as well as evaluate how effectively they have succeeded at the same.

And, a selection of quotes I found valuable:

“Current psycholinguistic research suggests that, as students begin to use more complex syntactic forms, their accuracy decreases until they have fully acquired the new forms” Horst and Pierce (Fall 2010, 373)

“Seeking broader and more diverse paths to mastery of a foreign language, students find the current two-tiered configuration [“language instruction” in early levels and “literature instruction in advanced courses] to be both stifling and largely irrelevant to major tracks emphasizing the sciences and business” Neville (Winter 2010, 446)
“Teaching is a matter of providing the learner with the right data at the right time and teaching him how to learn, that is, developing in him appropriate learning strategies and means of testing his hypotheses” Corder, 1988, cited by Mojica-Diaz and Sanchez-Lopez (Winter 2010, 473)

“Clearly, a need for striking a pedagogical balance between activizing new content and focusing on accuracy exists and, perhaps, has an analogy in the anecdotal two steps forward, one step back.” Brown, et al. (Spring 2011, 116)

  1. Foreign Languages and Sustainability: Addressing the Connections, Communities, and Comparisons Standards in Higher Education (pages 365-383) Eleanor E. ter Horst and Joshua M. Pearce ↩
  2. Speaking Strategies: Meeting NCATE Oral Proficiency Standards (pages 384–394) Joseph R. Weyers ↩
  3. Three A’s: How Do Attributions, Attitudes, and Aptitude Contribute to Foreign Language Learning? (pages 566–582) Jeff L. Cochran, R. Steve McCallum and Sherry Mee Bell ↩
  4. Fluency, Accuracy, and Complexity in Graded and Ungraded Writing (pages 690–702) Kimberly M. Armstrong ↩
  5.  Initiation/Response/Follow-Up, and Response to Intervention: Combining Two Models to Improve Teacher and Student Performance (pages 65–79) Pei Miao and Audrey L. Heining-Boynton ↩
  6. Qualitative and Quantitative Measures of Second Language Writing: Potential Outcomes of Informal Target Language Learning Abroad (pages 105–121) N. Anthony Brown, Raissa V. Solovieva and Dennis L. Eggett ↩

Priorities

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When I began learning about tech integration, I found Christian Long’s think:lab blog.  And not too long after I began reading, he stopped posting.  I’ve often thought about his last post, where he talked about reorganizing priorities and keeping true to them, as I continually strive to balance the employment that I enjoy and the family I love.  Each has been a blessing, one for now and one for eternity.

So, today I thought about it again, and looked Christian up.  Seems that he’s doing quite well and contributing to the network again.  I hope he’s found the balance he was looking for.  Time to add another feed to my reader.

When my first child was born, my father-in-law presented me with a bookmark that included every word to the song “Cat’s in the Cradle”.  If you’ve never heard it, it’s worth a listen.

 

 

Online Concept Maps – Two More Options

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Just before summer began, I came across a couple interesting concept mapping tools for teachers to take the place of Webspiration, which transitioned out of their free beta program this past spring.  While Webspiration is a great tool for both brainstorming and analysis, it also comes at some expense for teachers and districts.  The benefits – lots of impressive templates, an intuitive user interface, and consistent software support – are what make Webspiration (and its locally-installed counterpart, Inspiration) viable for-profit products.

But there are instances where funds just aren’t available.   In those situations, I’d highly recommend Diagram.ly and Lucidchart.com While there are other mind-mapping products out there (notable ones include MindMeister, Bubbl.us, and Mind42), the two products I’m focusing on have one feature that, in my opinion, makes for more flexible and meaningful mind-mapping activities:  descriptive connectors.   In brief, if you want to take your concept-map from a brainstorm to an analytical exercise where students must show their thinking, ask them to label all the connections they draw between nodes.  In doing so, students will be building knowledge and not just depositing it.  Though there are other products, this one critical feature has moved me to recommend the two products below.

 

 

Of the online options out there, I’ve begun to prefer www.diagram.ly for situations in which students don’t need to collaborate.  It breaks the mold of many online tools because …

  • no logins are needed (the app loads as soon as you visit the site)
  • there are lots of pictures to choose from in the toolbar
  • it allows you to “save” your progress locally on the the computer or on a flash drive in XML format and edit it again later, just as if the software was installed on your computer.
  • it allows descriptive connectors, something that’s important to great mapping activities but not supported in many online concept-mapping tools

Limitations:

  • It’s not collaborative.  There’s no way to share content unless you hand the file over to your partner
  • There’s no way to embed the result (since the content isn’t hosted online).  If you want to display your work, you have to save as a picture file (.png or .jpg) and publish the image elsewhere.
  • There’s no way to incorporate custom images.
  • There are no templates.

For details about diagram.ly, the co-founder of JGraph, its sponsoring company, was interviewed a few months ago by tech news site DoesWhat.com .

 

 

In an interesting example of how brands use Twitter, as soon as I sent out a tweet about Diagram.ly I got a new follower, Lucid Chart.  This company was mentioned by diagram.ly as a competitor and I can see why — it has most of the the functions of Diagram.ly (with the exception of downloading content) plus synchronous collaborative sharing, custom image uploads, linking to other websites, and template creation.

Even better — it’s offering the product FREE to K12 teachers and students.

Limitations:

  • It’s still a for-profit product (unlike diagram.ly, which is a “pro bono” service created by a company that sells diagram software), so the cost factor is in play even though they offer it free to educators at the moment.
  • Not many icon choices. Update: Lucidchart has committed to offering this service to educators free of charge and I didn’t originally find the WEALTH of images and icons included in the Library section.  Check out Dave’s comment below.
  • Students need a log-in.

If you need to describe connectors between objects, and still want collaboration, www.lucidchart.com might be worth a visit.

 

Building Community in the Language Classroom

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I was privileged to present with Eileen Kiser, Spanish teacher at Parkway West High School, at the Missouri Modern Languages & Modern Technologies Conference (MO3), hosted by the University of Missouri – St. Louis.  At the end of our presentation, we were joined by Ramiro Luna, English teacher from Prepa Tec Garza Sada, Monterrey, Mexico via Skype to describe how he and Eileen have taken community building beyond the walls of their classrooms.

Our slidedeck was accomplished through Google Earth. The KMZ file is available here.

Below is a playlist of the first half of our presentation, covering ways Eileen has used TodaysMeet, Edmodo, and VoiceThread to build a sense of community within her classroom and across her campus.

Why use technology? Because it’s part of life.

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I recently listened to a fascinating talk by Nick Perkins, entitled “ ;-) , LOL, [_]>, :P and 1337: New literacies and bilingualism“.  I’m currently thinking through a presentation I’ve been invited to help with for a local university conference and Nick’s presentation helped a couple bits to “click” together in my mind.  I’ll embed the video from iatefl below (which is worth a watch, or a listen, in its entirety).

A few highlights for me:

  • Languages are best internalized when the learner is constantly answering the question, ”How can I learn to be myself in another language?”  This is a deep reason to communicate – the idea that language is vital to helping others understand you – not just to understand someone else.
  • Informal communication often isn’t grammatically correct, but it’s the register we use most when communicating “the real me” to other people.  When opening up opportunities for our students’ self-expression, maybe grammar shouldn’t be the first thing we examine.
  • Why use technology?  Perkins doesn’t spend much time in well-worn paths here.  He makes a simple point that I appreciate – we use technology because they use technology.  If students are using technology as they do the work of self-discovery, shouldn’t that be something we use as well?

Thanks for the great talk, Nick.

 

Bringing Your Content Context … with Skype

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Just a few weeks ago, congress came to 8th grade.   Pat Williams, reading teacher at West Middle, reached out to a relative, Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver, and asked him if he would be willing to talk about his present experiences as a member of congress as well as his past as a young man actively involved in the Civil Rights movement. The congressman not only agreed, but invited his colleague, Congressman Bobby Rush, along for the conversation. The result? An interactive lesson in history, leadership, and personal responsibility — all through Skype.

Skype is a well-known, quick and easy way to invite others to chat, whether by text, audio, or video. Using only a computer, webcam, and internet connection, individuals and groups can contact one another from across the building or across the world. Increasingly, a good deal of collaborative work is done over some form of video-conferencing, and using Skype is bringing those types of opportunities into our classrooms.

What types of activities can be accomplished through Skype?

  • Guest teachers – Bring the expertise of your colleagues into your classroom, from across the district or across the state
  • Outside experts- Whether it be with an author, congressman, or practicing professional, guest speakers who relate to your content can bring additional validation to the work of your classroom.
  • Partner classroom – The most meaningful conferences are connected to long-term relationships. Establishing partnerships with schools across the states (or the world) give students a sense of connection to people they may never meet face-to-face.

What steps should I move through if I want to make this happen?

1. Find someone.

Who do you know? Who do your friends know? Who uses your subject outside of an “educational” context? Answering these questions can connect you with any number of individuals. Ask your colleagues. Ask your professors. Ask everyone on Facebook. The worst that can happen is nothing. The best (and more likely result) would be that someone knows someone who’d be happy to chat with your students. If you’d like to try other avenues, check out listings of teachers interested in connecting. Skype in Schools, Skype in the Classroom (sponsored by Skype), the EduSkyper’s Phonebook,  and ePals are all websites where teachers look for partner classrooms.   Skype-an-Author connects authors to classrooms.   HEC-TV and Cooperating School Districts have active networks as well.

2. Find a time.

This is especially important for any conference outside your time zone. There a number of online resources to help with this. Keep in mind that international times may mean that your conference occurs before or after school.

3. Prep for the day

Meaningful interactions generally involve some prep work – whether it be a Skype conversation or a typical classroom discussion. You might co-create questions with students or ask them to do some background research on the person or issue.

4. Double-check your connection

Be sure to do a practice run using the same computers you’ll use the day of the conference. Check to see that your computer is connected to your data port (and not operating Skype over the wireless connection). Take the time to make sure everyone is on the same page (and has the same version of Skype).

5. Enjoy the interview

Pleasant introductory and concluding remarks make the conference feel more like an event.

6. Debrief with students and send a thank-you

Chatting with students about the experience gives you a valuable chance to hear their perspective on the conversation. Sending a thank-you, especially a tangible one, is a nice way to send your appreciation to your “virtual” guest.

The biggest barrier to coordinating a Skype conference isn’t the technology. It’s asking someone to participate in the pattern of your classroom and, to a degree, adapting that pattern to make this a worthy use of your students’ time and effort.   But making that happen can give your content an even larger context and connect the work of your students to the world outside your classroom.

Skype icon courtesy of YellowIcon

This is cross-posted over at Tech4Practice.

Quick Classroom Tools – Timer and Maps

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This week’s tip focuses on a couple quick tools for your practice, for those impromptu moments that you just need a resource that works. Today I’ll highlight an ad-free online timer that’s ultra-quick to use and an interactive map that creates blank maps quickly, with the added ability to scribble directly on top of them and save your notes.

E.ggtimer.com

E.ggtimer is a quick online app built for one purpose — to give a countdown from a specific time. What makes this any different from other timers? Two specific reasons:

  • Its ad-free, simplistic display (check out the screen shot below)
  • The ease of starting the timer. To start the countdown, you can visit the front page of the website (e.ggtimer.com) or simply type your starting time directly into the URL. For a two-minute timer, type e.ggtimer.com/twominutes. For one minute and thirty seconds, type e.ggtimer.com/oneminutethirtyseconds.

Simple. Easy.

 

 

ScribbleMaps.com

ScribbleMaps is a relatively new site that has collected multiple mapping programs (Google Maps, OpenMaps, etc.) and added a layer of impressive functionality on top.

For quick use (our theme for today), at the bottom of ScribbleMaps is a menu of the variety of maps available. The default is Google, but selecting “CloudMade Plus” and then “Fresh” from the color offerings gives a simple, blank world map that can be annotated with ease.

For those using Smart Notebook, this can be a quick an easy way to collect blank maps of areas around the world. Just click the “Smart Capture Toolbar” icon and take some snapshots. 

For those with experience with Google Maps and Google Earth, you’ll appreciate the number of options available in ScribbleMaps Pro (currently free while ScribbleMaps is in beta). For detailed information, check out an impromptu manual put together by bloggers over at the Crossing Boundaries project.

Have another quick tool you couldn’t live without?  Drop it in the comments.

(Cross-posted at Tech4Practice)