Final Project Reflection

Being introduced to a new technology, namely Photo Story 3, I thought of retrying a project in EAP Math/Science (an ESL support class) that I had done last year using Movie Maker. The idea was to prepare students for a difficult text they would face in their mainstream Science class. They jigsawed the text by each making a digital story for a few sentences from the article and then watched the combined digital stories before embarking on a solo read. Using Movie Maker turned out to be overkill and more complicated than necessary. It was also too time-consuming to ask students to learn the technology and make a digital story for as much text as we gave them.

When introduced to Photo Story 3, I knew it was the simpler technology I was looking for. I also had the luxury of having more students this year and being able to divide the text into smaller segments. But I realized that the text was still too long, so I took it upon myself to make the example digital story from the first third of the article.



I also decided to try and apply my recent Zen-ization of Power Point slides to use as images in my digital story. This added an extra level of complexity, because instead of just importing images into Photo Story 3 and using the built-in text editor to add text, I made the Zen-ified slides and added text in Power Point, then exported each slide as an individual .jpeg image file. (Is there an easier way to do this?) Even though this was more complex, it meant I could design the slides to be more Zen than they might have been if I had designed them in Photo Story 3. I also used this opportunity to do two additional things. First, I was able to model giving credit to images from Flickr or anywhere else. And second, I made some screen casts to cover the various procedures involved in the technology. Here's one of those.



Making such a long digital story myself with carefully designed slides in Power Point and proper URL citations gave me a lot of perspective on what students would have to do. Over the course of two COETAIL class afternoon work sessions and one afternoon in a coffee shop, I think I logged about 6 hours of time making a nearly 4 minute digital story. The bulk of that time was actually spent making Power Point slides. Once I had the slides, importing them into Photo Story and recording my voice was a fairly quick. Photo Story was simple to figure out on my first time to use it. I ended up using almost 50 slides in the story, including some text-only slides. No kidding that making a presentation more Zen makes presenations longer. Unbelievable. But probably the most visually pleasing and helpful bunch of slides I've ever made. I'm not sure I would ever want to spend 6 hours again though. A shorter model would do the job just as well.

As for the students, the digital story making took 4 periods on average. Some students finished in 3, but others needed another period. Although the students needed one to two days to design their slides, I'd say the new-technology-learning-curve factor added an extra day or two as well. That included showing some students how to use Power Point and all students how to use Photo Story 3, and even some how to uplode their files to PantherNet, ISB's version of Moodle. Students learned or at least were exposed to a lot of technology. Most of them picked it up quickly. We had a major technology hurdle with the voice recordings and microphone settings. Even with some tech support, it was still a bit of a mystery as to when the voice would be recorded loud enough to be heard in the published digital story. About half the times it was and half the times it wasn't. Because we didn't have access to the same computers on different days, one day's settings would not carry over to the next.

When I saw the students' final stories, I was impressed by the students more Zen slides. Absent were the usual dull bullet lists of point after point after point. Images took the center stage. I was also impressed by some particularly creative students who drew their own digital images using some program like Paint to capture difficult concepts that they couldn't find photos or other images for. I'm not sure if I was blinded by the charming creativity of the young artists, but I'd be willing to bet that the students graphic interpretations of the concepts were better than using someone else's images. This is an interesting return to student art for concepts, but now in digital form. It hadn't even occurred to me that students could still make drawings on their computers.



Ultimately, using Photo Story 3 was better than Movie Maker. Much simpler. The ultimate product of the jigsaw activity could be compiled and viewed as a whole. A traditional jigsaw for the same length article would have been hard pressed to compile so many different parts for viewing in a whole. However, the technology element reduced the direct student interaction that characterizes traditional jigsaws. Students worked individually, although they could have worked in pairs. As a matter of fact, when a few students finished early, I put them in pairs to create a second digital story. In this case, the students interacted extensively. So the trade off doesn't necessarily justify replacing a traditional jigsaw with a digital one, but perhaps supplementing it. If students were "fluent" in the technology and didn't need to practice it independently, they could work in pairs and interact more in this manner. For the purposes of comparison, a traditional jigsaw would have taken about half the time, I'd estimate. Hopefully, the gap between the traditional and digital methods will decrease with time as the student become more and more proficient.

Screencasting in Education

Screencasts are a great substitute teacher for short tasks that can be explained in a couple of minutes. And not just for students, but for co-teachers as well.

In a class that Jono Steenwijk and I co-teach, we had divided up some tasks during co-planning that consisted of my preparing screencasts for the technology nuts-and-bolts of our project. We used SMART Recorder from the Notebook Software for SMART Board.

Jono and I quickly discovered some benefits of screencasts.

1. Screencasts teach teachers too. A co-teacher can learn from the screencasts if he hasn't yet explored the technology.
2. Screencasts are transferable. A co-teacher can use another teacher's screencast.
3. Screencasts differentiate. Students can watch the screencast once or multiple times.
4. Screencasts free up teacher time. While students are (re-)watching screencasts, teachers can help students in other ways that aren't as "mundane" as click here, now click here, and finally click here.

A minor word of caution: It might take a couple of "drafts" to make a screencast, but that depends on how well you narrate and perform on the spot. The investment of time on the teacher's part would be made up for if students are using and learning from screencasts outside the classroom.

Here are the screencasts we used for some PowerPoint and Photo Story 3 tasks.

Video & Video Editing in Education

Even though YouTube has been around for about 5 years now (?), even just two to three years ago, I was still using VCR tapes in the classroom. Yes, it was easy and reasonable, but now that video has become web-based it's even easier to use than before.

1. Instead of going to the International School Bangkok library to look for video, I now just search on YouTube, and show them live in class. Just in case my connection isn't working in class, I can use Zamzar or the Download Helper Plug-in in the FireFox browser to download the file ahead of time.

Here's one I used in class on Rice Cultivation that I embedded in the WetPaint Wiki I was using for class. (I am uploading a screen capture since the Wiki is private.)




2. Instead of finding the videos myself, I can ask students to search for videos themselves. In a Science class I taught about 2 years ago when I was at Rose Marie Academy, during the last few days of school, students made a Wiki page using insect videos. They wrote questions for each other from the videos, so students had to watch each other's videos and answer their questions.

Here's a screen capture example.




3. Another usage of video I've experimented with has been with videos of the students themselves. In an EAP Math/Science class (English for Academic Purposes = ESL), students previewed formal lab reports they would be learning about in their main classes through video lab reports. I was able to post these videos in our Wetpaint Wiki for students to watch and evaluate.




Ultimately, web-based video is bringing or has the potential to bring video into the classroom more than before. It is definitely becoming much more accessible to make and view videos from anywhere.

Digital Stories

I made this digital story to show my students what a digital story was, because I wasn't sure they were familiar with the medium/technology. It is a simple digital story which consists of only two photos, some text and a few words. Because I was familiar with the technology I was using to make it (Windows Movie Maker) and because I had a complete vision of the "story," it took a matter of minutes to create. With that said, those short few minutes were possible because I had already spent a few hours previously using Movie Maker.

My hope was that my students could make a similar length movie about an academic subject, namely part of an article about cells. Despite the expectation that the students' movie last 20-30 seconds and include 2-3 images, I was unable to transfer my knowledge of Movie Maker to the students to save them the hours that I had needed to become proficient using it.

Nevertheless, a digital story provides another option for a project or for submitting work. It could fit into the classic list of differentiated products: essay, song, game, poster, PowerPoint presentation, etc. Add to that the digital story. I now know there are numerous other technologies for creating digital stories: Photo Story 3, Voicethread, or Vuvox to name just a few. (The former is a free download from Microsoft, whereas the latter two are web-based.) As students become exposed more and more to the digital story, the time required to use the technology should decrease. Ultimately, making a digital story could be as simple for a student as checking email.

Besides modeling the use of digital stories to my students, I could use them to deliver content. My final project for this class, about which I will blog later, is an attempt to scaffold difficult language for ESL students as well as model digital story technology.

Guilty of non-Zen

Shame, shame everybody knows my name. And everybody who saw the following presentation knows I took a 10 year backstep on the design.

Does this look like 1998? Mountain landscapes, silhouettes, wow. How many bullets is that? How many words? Don't bother counting, it's just a rhetorical question.

I normally don't present in this way if I can help it. So what happened? Uh. . .well. . .I got lazy? Is that a valid excuse for non-Zen presenting? Probably not. But non-Zen presentation making is a lot less time consuming than Zen presentation making.

With that said, I chose the above presentation, which I used on Open House for Parents because I know it is a presentation I will give many more times in my career.

Since this was my first slide, I thought that in a more Zen-like presenation, my personal history could fit in nicely with a map. How would this look instead?

Instead of reading bullet points, I could refer to particular stars on the map of the world and say whatever I need to say about it.

I first saw a slide such as this in a Zen-nified presentation for parents, but I couldn't resist the temptation to play with prezi.com to for my presentation.

Just now, I realized that this part of my presentation could just was well be done with Google Earth and be much more engaging than a two dimensional map.

Regardless of what form the final presentation takes and what technologies are involved, there's no doubt that any of the new approaches beats out the old one for my