The digital tool that I chose to evaluate was the app called Educreations. I have been using this app for a couple of years now on and off and my students really some to enjoy using it. Basically I think the website wants you to use their app like a whiteboard with sound and record a lesson. It has an arrow feature at the bottom of the page so that you can get a new “white board” when you have run out of space. You can record your voice while you are writing/drawing on the app, and then at the end you can save your video as a draft or a finished video. In my experience it is better just to save it as a finished video and then you see a screen with all of your previous ‘saved lessons’. I have never actually used this app to record a lesson of my own. What I like to do is pair students up and get them to use the app themselves. They have been using the IPAD to do this. For example, in French 1, each student prepares a basic description of their pet, giving information that their partner could represent in a drawing. When they have finished preparing, they take it in turns using the app. Student 1 draws and records what student 2 is saying and then vice versa. They then can upload the link to Schoology so that I can watch it later. Once they have finished recording each other, I then get students to look at the pictures that they drew and they then have to describe their partner’s animal in the third person so that they get practice talking about someone else. As a teacher you should create an account for yourself, and I also get students to make themselves an account too. Here is what my page looks like. To make a new lesson, just select the plus button on the top left of the screen. Once you have selected the plus button, you then get to the screen below. You then use the red record button in the top left to record, and can color and draw using the pen and color selection at the top. The colors look quite limited, but if you select a color you can change them. Having chosen a pen color you can then record and draw and press the stop button (the play button becomes the stop button while recording) when you are finished. You can also hit the pause button part of the way through if you need to stop for a bit. Once complete, you should save the finished video using the button at the very top left of the page by giving your lesson a title and description. When your students have saved their finished video, they then have to upload the video (button on the top right) so that you can see it. One disadvantage is that you cannot open the app directly into another program unless you buy the Pro version, but you can copy the lesson link, or email the link to your teacher. My students copy the lesson link and then post that to the assignment in Schoology which I can then open. This is really a great app for students to use for recording themselves or others and drawing, and it’s really simple to use. It didn’t take me long at all to learn how to use it and my students also have had very few issues with it - I just had to tell them about copying the lesson link and to not directly upload to Schoology/google classroom. Once their account is set up (I didn’t use a classroom code as I think that comes with the Pro version) they can just add lessons. I haven’t really used it to make a lesson myself, but if I did I would just copy and post the lesson link so that students could watch it later.
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According to Common Sense Media “Digital Media is part of Media Literacy”. Both of them together are included in the idea of Information literacy which is “the ability to effectively find, identify, evaluate, and use information from the internet, smartphones, video games and other non-traditional sources.” This website also gives us good pointers as to what our students need when using digital resources such as the ability to search effectively, to protect their and others’ private information, to credit others’ work, understand what a digital footprint is and respect others’ thoughts and opinions.
This is a huge range of topics to teach our students, but it is most important that they are aware of these things when using the internet. Our school has an advisory program, and in August as the Freshman enter the school one of the first topics they cover is digital citizenship, the honor code and plagiarism. This is a great introduction, but the time allocated is quite small, say only 20-30 minutes for each session, which still leaves a lot to be taught be individual teachers. Where I teach we use Schoology as our platform, but teachers are at various stages of using technology – some use it sparingly, whilst others use it every day. I personally do use technology every day with my students, as I find it really enhances our lessons and gives us the ability to really do something different. However, having read through the information that we really do need to impart to students, it is somewhat daunting! I would normally approach digital literacy on a need-to know basis – ie depending on the assignment in questions and I hope that students have acquired the basics from their advisory sessions and experiences at middle and elementary schools. In French 1 we do very basic presentations, for example students talk and give basic facts about their pets or they choose a city in France and present information about it to the class. All presentations have clear rubrics that students have to follow and adhere to if they want to get the maximum points for the assignments. When students presented about their pets, they needed very minimum information from the internet, since most of the photos had been taken by them. However, some students did need images, so we reviewed why it is necessary to give credit to sources and how we should go about citing them. I have a presentation of my own and show them how the copyright should be given on the images themselves and then in the bibliography at the end of the presentation. Students discuss the MLA format and how to implement it. Students are also made aware of the website Easybib, which they can use to help them cite their sources, and are shown how to look for information and to not give away personal information to websites. In Spanish 4 my students tend to do cultural presentations on topics such as Hispanic Music, poetry or different Spanish-speaking countries of their choice. Again I give them an outline for the project with a rubric to follow. These students are mainly Juniors and Seniors so they do have a lot more experience with the internet as opposed to the Freshman. I tend to review how to cite sources using the MLA format, even though I know they do this in other classes, and sometimes I give them links to websites where I know they will get accurate information. I know that I probably need to do more, since the use of technology is growing more and more in our everyday classrooms, but it is a question of balancing the time we devote to that compared to our own subject matter. It’s a tough call! According to the Oxford English dictionary sense-making is “the action or process of making sense of or giving meaning to something, especially new developments and experiences.” The Dervin article that we were assigned to read was complex with a lot of unfamiliar technical language and references which made it very difficult for me personally to understand. When I first started to read the article I really struggled to work out what it was talking about, so after reading the first few pages, I then googled the word sense-making and took a look at diagrams explaining it, dictionary definitions and I also watched a couple of short YouTube videos. Having done that I returned to the article which I continued to read, systematically trying to underline and highlight some key concepts and then made summaries of those points at the side of the document. For me the important thing was to try and break it down into basic concepts in an effort to understand what was being discussed. Here are some images that I found helpful when initially looking for insight into what sense-making was: I continued to read and these visuals did help me somewhat but it was still really tough going. There were several concepts that she was trying to convey, but they all seemed to come back to the same thing. At the beginning of the article she described sense-making as “a set of methods which have been developed to study the making of sense that people do in their everyday experiences.” She explained how we all see and interpret things in a variety of ways and how what we perceive initially can be translated differently by different parts of our body and we can get many messages to interpret. She suggests that by discussion and observation that humans can arrive at more stable observations. She tells us that sense-making really just focuses on behavior and the steps taken to understand the world around us. When we have a new situation to solve, different people will want to resolve them in a variety of ways depending on their past behaviors and experiences. Situations can also be interpreted differently depending on when they happen and what the actual situation is.
According to Dervin life is unpredictable and we create new responses to situations depending on our class, income and education. As humans we are trying to bridge the gap, by using former knowledge and behaviors, to solve a problem. Dervin is trying to define what actually helps us do this and she gave 6 exemplars to demonstrate this; from the 1st exemplar she determined that race can predict what channels and sources would be used to get answers. She shows us that people’s predisposed opinions affect how they perceive people and places. She suggests that sense-making has both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. Certainly the key to understanding this article is to break it down into bite-sized chunks. If I were to introduce it to a group of high-schoolers, first of all I would find graphics and videos that explained the concepts succinctly so that they would get an initial impression of the theme of the article. I would then get students into pairs and I would assign them a small part of the text to read together. I would get them to underline and highlight the main ideas together and then get them to discuss what was being said in their portion. While the pairs were working as a teacher I would circulate the room in an effort to give them advice and guidance and act more as a facilitator. Once they had formed their conclusions I would then ask them to present their findings to the class by making some kind of PowerPoint or visual aid to describe what they had understood from their part of the article. They could also share this document with the class for later reference and review. While listening to these presentations, students would then take notes and ask questions. At the end of all of the presentations students would have complete notes on the full article. At home they could then read the article themselves and ask further questions during the next class. This was a very informative day and well worth attending, from Jon Corippo as the keynote speaker showing us how to use Socrative with Emojis to get students to improve their writing schools to workshops on google classroom and using QR codes and M-learning.
All of the presentations I saw had good takeaways for teachers and gave inspiration for further thought. F for Feedback was one of those such presentations. Matt Kelly and Kelley Miller showed us the importance of rubrics and how those can be used in the class as a whole to give feedback and then used more individually in pairs. A further discussion with Dr Redmond gave me ideas on how I could use this type of feedback as data in my capstone project, which was very exciting, as I’d not thought data could really be evaluated in this way for my research. I will certainly use this idea in my class when students are working on projects/presentations. I already provide a rubric to show students how they will be graded. Taking samples of good and mediocre projects and projects that need to be worked and showing them to the class and getting students to grade prior to being complete will be invaluable I think in getting students on the right track to what is needed. Kate MacMillan and Jennifer Baker introduced us to many digital resource tools that we as teachers can use in our classroom. I was excited to learn that Encyclopedia Britannica is available in Spanish, and so students can use this directly to access information about projects they may be researching. Tumble books, available through the public library, also has a collection of stories in both French and Spanish. It would be really interesting to read a story in class and then get them to design a story of their own. My Spanish 4 students attend Napa Valley Language Academy where they help out in the classroom. It would be nice for them to be able to present a story of their own, as they often spend time reading short stories with the students. Kate MacMillan also offered to come to our school to help look at the resources we have at our school and how we might go about using them, which was great. I also attended workshops on google classroom where we were shown the basics on how it works, how assignments are added, and how we can go about adding a grade for our students. Google are still apparently working on some kind of a grading program/ how to link it to a grading program. At Justin-Siena we’ve had some teachers who have piloted Google classroom, but we currently use Schoology as our platform. I’m not sure which direction we are ultimately headed, but it was certainly useful to gain an insight into how we might go about using the program. My favorite workshop was probably the last one that I attended, the QR codes and M learning. I thought that the presenter was going to focus mainly on QR codes but I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of apps he included as part of M learning. He talked about Ed puzzle, Quizziz to name a few, but Flipgrid was of real interest. The presenter showed me how you can locate teachers in different countries and make connections with them and their classes. I have been looking for a way to easily find other Hispanic or French classes to correspond with, either just by skype/video or even email so that students can get a chance to practice their language skills with a real live native speaker – this was awesome! This really was a great opportunity to network with other teachers, collaborate and get some great new ideas on how to incorporate more technology in our classroom for the benefit of our students. The use of technology has become key in our everyday lives; therefore it is imperative that students adopt digital citizenship and behave on line as they would face to face with an individual. There are two important mottos that we need to instill in our students when online: “Treat others as you would like to be treated, and when in doubt, talk it out” and “if it isn’t right to say it isn’t right to post.” Fortunately for educators, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) have listed standards that they would like to see resources adhere to; games and learning apps, educational learning software, online courses, professional development programs can all apply for the ISTE seal of alignment which can be posted on their website/product if they are compliant. This is a way of helping people know that the resource is trustworthy and aligns with the standards set out by ISTE.
I teach both French and Spanish to grades 9,10,11,12 and generally I ask students to research using the internet when they are going to work on a project and gather potential information about topics of their choice within a certain area. For example, we could watch a movie about a pop star such as Selena, and then students would be expected to choose another Hispanic group, whose music they liked, and make a presentation about them, including a history of the musician, samples of their music, details of awards won and a comparison with an American artist. It is important that students are able to recognize if information that they are given on the web is authentic, otherwise they will be presenting false information to their peers, and potentially outsiders as their presentations sometimes get posted onto the school website. I already review with my students a little how to get authentic information, but I know I need to do more. Looking through the common sense website I found many lesson plans which I could incorporate parts of into my teaching. For example choosing good key words when searching for authentic information. We would try some potential searches together and try and ascertain which websites looked legitimate and which didn’t. I normally tell my students that they should find other sources that back up information they find to make sure that it is accurate. Having attended an interesting conference at the weekend, I found out that the school district has access to search engines which help filter out websites which are not legitmate – this could be an invaluable resource for my students. It is really important to make issues personal to students, as they will be able to identify with them much more readily. Therefore I would ask students to give examples of when they had not taken the time to corroborate the information that they had found out that the information was not correct. How did that affect others? If they had shared that information/website with others, when it was incorrect, potentially what problems could that cause? It will be interesting to get their take on those issues. Copyright is also another area, where sometimes my students struggle, especially when trying to find their information on a legitimate website and accrediting it correctly using MLA format. The common sense website had some good lesson plans on this topic. Potentially as a class we could discuss why it is important to give credit to sources from a legal and ethical perspective. I would ask students how they felt when another plagiarized their work and get them to explain what happened and why it wasn’t ok. Going over the law and fair use policy is important so students can get an understanding of why they should accurately give credit to resources from legitimate websites. Looking through the curriculum on common sense website, I found that some of the lesson plans were in Spanish. These also provided worksheets for students in the Spanish language. It would be interesting to introduce some basic vocabulary surrounding the topic of digital citizenship and then get students to discuss some of the issues. There was a survey asking students several questions in the Spanish language about the advantages and disadvantages of using the internet with Spanish language statements to choose. It also talks about digital citizenship and digital media. I think it really helps internalize some of the issues when they are given the time to discuss them in depth with their peers and then have an in class discussion. I want students to speak in the foreign language as much as possible, so these Spanish lesson plans/survey could really enable my class to have lively discussions in the target language. |
AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. Archives
March 2019
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