Promoting Literacy via Technology

This last term, our school librarian, Stephanie Ellis, and I got together to think about boys and literacy. High school boys don't like to read much, if at all. In fact, it isn't unusual to hear a boy bragging about how he "hasn't read a book all year!" Depressing, eh? So Steph and I put our heads together and came up with a multi-faceted unit to help promote literacy throughout the school. Stephanie offered up the "Read for a Feed" programme, where a class can win morning tea by reading, cumulatively, the most books for the school year (Terms 1-3). My Year 9 class had the option of using one personal reader for their second studied text for final exams. Together, we created a reading, viewing, and speaking unit that culminated in a product the whole school could use.

We (the class and I) created "book trailers" (like film previews) for our chosen books. The task was to combine text, image(s) and sound in a coherent moving image that would produce a sense of excitement in the viewer. The trailers were created in .ppt and then saved as a Windows Video File. As the boys cannot access youtube themselves, I then uploaded all of their videos to my personal account so they could create QR Codes for their books. These codes were then printed out in two sizes: one for the book cover, one for the bookcases/display areas.

Lastly, the boys each created and edited a 30-60 second video on their view of the state of technology in secondary schools (will post some of these as they finish). Some of them have come from very highly resources intermediates, so these were quite interesting! This video will be used in a presentation to the BoT next month, when Steph and I present our literacy initiative. 

 Very lastly, I created a survey in Google Drive so the boys could vote for the best trailer (prize: one of my final Twinkies!). I also surveyed them after the unit to see what they enjoyed the most (or didn't), what skills they had learnt (or taught), and what they would recommend to other students (and the BoT). I highly recommend giving it a go. Although the boys weren't too happy to be limited to creative commons (and a couple tried to get around it!), they came up with some integrated concepts. 

 Of course, the project was not without its pitfalls. The boys couldn't directly download sounds from the soundbanks, so they had to find the ones they wanted, email the links to me, and I would download them and put them into Student Data. They also cannot access youtube, so they emailed me again when their videos were completed, and I uploaded them from their network accounts. I then emailed them back the link to make the QR codes, which they printed and gave to Steph, who printed them on colour paper, laminated them, and posted throughout the library. Now all we need is wireless! Total amount of non-teaching time for me to do things they should have been able to do themselves: 6 hours (there's 30 of them; 1 of me).

Flip cams & other things

so, my last post was about using flip video in the classroom.  and no sooner had our department bought a whole set then the mashable article came out about them being discontinued.

i have a couple of thoughts on this.  one, i find using the video recorded easier with my own version of the flip video. i have a VADO i bought it at ulearn09. since it automatically saves files in .avi, i find it much quicker and easier to use for editing after videoing, so i personally won't miss the actual flip video brand, but hope that usb video cams stay viable. i think they are an important tool in the toolbox for both staff and students.

secondly, having had our staff record their speeches on flip video cams made my job of preparing for external moderation so much EASIER. before, i had to wade through heaps of random audio & videos files that required converting, then manually plow through each because the file didn't "cut" at the end of speeches, but rather linked two or more together and ended wherever it wanted, so i might have up to 25 pieces of video for one speech and a half, yet just 1 piece for another two or three. added to the fact that i didn't know all the students by sight, it made for a headachy time and took about 8 - 10 hours to put together 8 candidates.

worth noting is the fact that before i took on this task, my department had never (as in EVER) had speeches properly externally moderated via viewing the speeches. moderators were given a DVD with the original video files (which were unplayable) and the assessment sheets, and each year they would come back as not moderated due to unplayable video.  because of my dedication to tech (i produce a video with title cards of candidate names and marks before each speech to match the assessment sheets, saved as a video that can be opened in any common media player), we are now properly moderated, and i am pleased to say that we have 100% moderation mark agreement. it is nice to have that confirmed so that all staff are standardised.

i have had some other things on my mind lately, and i may share some of them with you during the holidays. i'd really love to get your feedback on them.

enjoy your time off for holidays/spring break,
kelly

Flip Video in the Secondary English Classroom

our hod made the decision to spend some of our budget last year on 15 flip video cameras (yay!). i am in charge of tomorrow's pd session, seeing as i'm the only one who has used one.  i bought my own at the 2009 ulearn conference in christchurch.  best buy ever!  however, i didn't want to remake the wheel for pd, so i've spend this afternoon doing some 'net research ... and what i've found is that there is room for discovery in secondary english. this may be exactly what i've been waiting for since moving to nz - a new opportunity to conduct research and present findings, something i did in my old life as a university lecturer in the states. i'm happy about that.

in the meantime, i'd love to hear from other secondary teachers, specifically english, but not necessarily, as video is well advanced in other departments (and may get the pe dept to buy their own cameras instead of stealing ours - yes, this resulted in a new locked cupboard! not that we don't want to share, but they don't sign out or return!). in my desire to integrate tech into the classroom, i've really enjoyed the sharing of ideas across the disciplines as well as from the primary/intermediate areas - just about any idea can be extrapolated into the secondary/english classroom with some thought.

i have used my flip video for:

1. videotaping practice & competitive public speaking students, then using the video for critique and further practice
2. videotaping our drama students for same
3. student-created video for their blogs, re "how i have found my first year of high school" where they reflected on their hopes and fears at the beginning of the year, and contrasted them with the realities they experienced.
4. student-created video for a video competition that they edited themselves (you may remember this from two years ago)
5. more student video for responding to texts - video book reports, feedback, critique, etc.
6. an NCEA internal assessment where a student was unable to write the response was recorded via flip video
7. NCEA level 1 speeches recorded via flip video - this makes external moderation at the end of the year so much easier!  each video clip is saved under the student's name, with mark, for easy collating onto a video DVD for NZQA. staff that do not have to put together external moderation have NO IDEA how time consuming it is to go through their unconverted, unlabelled videos! i get 1 hour a week to do my job, and just putting together last year's moderation took 8 hours. that's 2 months of my paid time, for one tiny job that next year can be done with ease in about 10 minutes.

these are some of the ideas i came up with, and i'm not a horribly creative thinker.  so for pd i'm going to utilise both richard bryne's post Many Ways to Use Flip Video in the Classroom (you'll know richard from Free Technology for Teachers) and tom barrett's 43 Interesting Ways to Use your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom (you know tom from his edte.ch blog), a collaborative ppt created by teachers and published under Creative Commons in Google Docs.  this year i am hoping to have my junior students utilise the flip videos and their own cell phones, but thus far, a lot of stuff if blocked again this year for students (i'm talking access [uploading the video] and editing), and that's fodder for another post.

cheers,
kelly

Digital Footprints

i haven't posted in a while, mostly because everytime i looked at my year-end post (still in draft form) it was depressing.  i have no access to a lab this year, and so am "stuck" using only my laptop and data projector in my classroom.  ...that's how i felt for awhile, anyhow.

when i started out with this bad attitude, i found it made my teaching more difficult.  i tried having a year 10 class make hero facebook pages as part of their creative writing unit, but we could only get in the lab once a month, so it took forever and most never really finished the project (after 4 visits).  going back to a theme we'd finished three months in a row was tedious, and having no continuity made their progress nonexistent.

i have recently been able to book our mobile laptops for several consecutive class periods for my level 2 media students (years 12 and 13, aged 17 & 18).  with this opportunity, i decided that i would tackle a unit that is important to me:  digital footprints.  when surveyed at the beginning of the year, only 1 student (of 24) knew what a digital footprint was.  many of them lack basic computer skills, and i am always surprised at how reluctant they are to a) type an address in the address bar and 2) toggle their windows to full screen! both things that save time in the long run :O)

i have been using My Footprints as a teaching tool.  I found Mallory's vlogs on losing a placement at a study programme and problems with sexting, and Anthony's vlogs on online bullying and downloading especially discussion worthy.  we are also using Spezify to create a picture of our footprints specific to user names (mine is here.  shocking to find my husband had left a less than pleasant comment on youtube under my account! a good lesson for my students.)

we are currently creating a wiki site with our own understanding of what it means to have a digital footprint, as well as working on putting forth a solid footprint to leave behind.  i will update when the site is more than a skeleton (we've just begun).

problems encountered?  we lose about 15 minutes a period on administration: i must accompany the students to retrieve the laptops (they are in large rolling carts), leaving 22 students unattended; laptops must be handed out in numerical order to the class (iow, everyone is assigned a laptop); they have to be put back properly, so we have to stop 10 minutes before the bell to ensure the process is done right (which i totally get - teen boys are not the best at doing things properly!), then i have to accompany the laptops back to their closets, which allows my next class free entry into my room and several minutes unattended, which can lead to other problems.

but that is the easy part!  the problems are really a) students being unable to log into their accounts on the laptops ("domain p is not available"), incredibly long lag time for page loading (well over 2 minutes per page - and this is text only - and sometimes much longer!), and students creating work then not being able to save it because they were unable to log into domain p but went ahead anyway.  we spent one whole period doing nothing more than creating accounts on wikispaces.  that's right: a whole period for them to type their usernames, passwords, and email accounts on one page, then make one click. that's the kind of loading time i'm talking about.  unbelievable. 

but in the end, i'm looking forward to seeing what they learn about their own digital footprints, and what they have created to make their footprints something they want to leave behind.

until next time,
kelly