As a Digital Media teacher and a total fangirl of Adobe, I often get so excited to introduce my students to Adobe, but feel that this amazing introduction fizzles when students move out of my introduction class and no longer use the tools in other classes. Some move on to upper level classes, but many do not. What is the point of gaining skills and competencies that will soon be forgotten due to disuse? How do we get those creative skills to translate into other classes more seamlessly so students can continue to grow on their path toward digital citizenship? How do we allow for a more integrated approach to digital creative learning for students while still providing experience with high end "grown up" software that prepares students with 21st Century Skills? In a conversation with one of the Principal Product Managers at Adobe, Tom Nguyen, we talked a lot about what is currently happening in my Digital Media class at New Tech High. He asked all the great "empathy" questions to get a better understanding of his end-users' pains and likes. I answered from the teacher's perspective, but in reality, I know it's so much more powerful to get the students to give their input and thoughts about becoming new Adobe Creative Cloud users. Based on our conversation, my understanding of Tom's inquiry question is in alignment with my own questions as a Digital Media teacher. "How do we get Adobe tools into the hands of students so that they can continue to deepen their creative skills and their understanding of core concepts in all other curriculum? How do we eliminate the obstacles that currently exist in getting students access to Adobe software? What are essentials and what are the extra fun things needed in order to draw students in?
So, I propose that we bring in the students and open up the conversation. I've invited my students to comment on this blog post and answer a few of the questions I've got for them. And if you are not one of my Digital Media students but have something to say, you are welcome to join in on the conversation! Please leave your comments!
If we want to move ahead and truly prepare our students for the future, we need to provide access to the tools needed to succeed, and not just in an isolated computer lab. What do YOU think? How can we get there? What would you like to see in the education world? What would be ideal? Where can we integrate Adobe knowledge with other Common Core and STEM knowledge?
24 Comments
What I learned from a wonderful keynote speech by John Seeley Brown In the process of watching this keynote speech, the concept of peer-based learning or learning cohorts really spoke to me. The speaker said that the key factor that determines college success has nothing to do with high school grades, ACT or SAT scores, high school ranking or any of the typical measures we think of. The most influential variable in success in college is whether or not the student participates in study groups. He went on to talk about a group of 5 kids from Maui. One of the 14-year-old boys decided that he was going to be a world champion in surfing. No one from Maui had every climbed the ranks of the surfing world. This young boy decided he would do it. He gathered his buddies around and that created what Brown calls "Joint Collective Agency" or a "Questioning Disposition." This mean that they would watch each other surf, they would watch a ton of videos of those who were at their peak performance, they would go out and try new moves, give each other feedback, study related sports such as skiing, dirt biking, sailing and many other ways to move the body through the air and water. They studied the shapes of boards, they looked for new moves in skateboarding, ski boarding, you name it. And they supported each other in a cohort of learning. So, that one determined boy grew up and realized his dream of becoming the first world champion coming out of Maui. But guess what? Those other boys also grew up to become world class champions as well. This hit me particularly hard as I have a son of 16 years old who is hoping to one day soon play professional tennis. Tennis can be one of the most isolating sports out there. It's just you against your opponent across the net. But what if he could find himself a learning cohort, a group of high level players that he could study with? This speaks so closely to my heart. It is like my children's nursery school teacher always says, "Together, We're Better." I work hard to create a community of learning in the classroom, where we ALL make each other better simply by pursuing a craft and body of knowledge and skills together. In my practices with putting together learning groups for projects, often I build a team that I think will be balanced with different leadership styles, personalities and abilities. However, I wonder if instead, I ought to be building groups based more around interest than around the concept of balance. The only way you can truly get a cohort of like minds, is to let those like minds gravitate towards each other and toward the subject matter they are most interested in. I am going to continue to experiment with how to create groups that serve everyone in my classroom, that allow for that "Questioning Disposition" due to shared interest.
There are a number of tools I will be leveraging in my Action Research project for my graduate work. I am exploring the question, "What affect does the use of digital tools in the classroom have on reading comprehension, engagement and stamina?" There are two ways that I will use technology for this research, the first is to introduce new technology to the students and then measure it's effects. The second is to use technology as a tool for recording observation. In the first case, the technology I am testing is the Nearpod application, an interactive digital response system for students. I was first introduced to Nearpod last year at a Northbay CUE (Computer Using Educators) conference at American Canyon High School. I was immediately impressed and began experimenting with the free version of the software.
A Nearpod representative got in touch with me when I requested pricing for my school. I mentioned that was about the teach a workshop on practical tech in the classroom for the Napa County Office of Ed. and they quickly comped me a premium version of the software so I could really get the most out of all they offered. As a teacher, it is tough to spend much time exploring new tech while teaching at the same time, but I did continue to present the software and use it sporadically in my Digital Media 1 class. I continued to like it, but knew I was underutilizing the functions. So, when it came time to think about my Action Research question, I knew that I wanted to really explore what using Nearpod was really accomplishing in my classroom. I wanted to take a closer look at how using the tool to it's fullest could help with reading engagement and whether or not could I see evidence that contributes to increasing reading engagement. In this way, Nearpod is at the center of the research testing. What is its effect? How can I measure it's effect in a valid way? What I am finding, as I continue to experiment with Nearpod, is that I can look back at each class session and review the answers that each student typed in during the session. I can ask both open-ended and multiple choice questions, I can take polls and use fill-in-the-blank questions. I can see student answers in real time, making on-the-spot adjustments as I teach. Students can also get immediate feedback as to which answer was correct as I share correct answers with the whole class as we proceed through the presentation. The answers are shared anonymously so those students who are more quiet, can participate and have their work shown, without embarrassment. I can see immediately, who is participating in the discussion and presentation and who is not. I can show individual answers, or the whole community's response to a poll. I am wondering that the effect is of being able to combine the elements of visuals and text questions to create a powerpoint/quiz combination that makes engaging with the material easier for all involved. I can control the advancing slides on each screen and all students don't need to see the SMART board, they only need to see their own screens. In this way, everyone is able to access the slides but we do so communally. I'm eager to see if I can record any differences in engagement from this learning tool. The data I will be collecting with be triangulated through both qualitative and quantitative data. I will be using Google forms to ask students to rate their level of engagement using a Likert scale both before and after they read and answer questions about the text. I will have them use a more traditional classroom method of engaging in text by having the students read and then answer a series of written questions first. I will than have them do the same thing after reading a new chapter, but rather than just answer the questions traditionally, they will answer the questions through the use of Nearpod. In addition to having them self-assess their levels of engagement, I will also keep a journal of structured and unstructured observations of the class from the moment they enter the class to the moment they end the reading assignment. I will make notes on what students say that pertain to the reading assignment, body language, interactions with me and between students, and then look for patterns in my observed data. In this case, the technology of choice to record these observations includes tools that make note-taking most accessible such as pen and paper and Evernote to jot down observations that happen in the moment. I also, will be accessing pre-existing data from our school data backpack including SRI data collected in the fall of 2016. It would be extremely beneficial to look at SRI data in the fall, then make a concerted effort to use SSR and Nearpod in a classroom, and then look at SRI data in the spring. I am hoping that next year, when I have more time, I can use that much under-utilized data to inform practices and see if I can find a correlation between the data and classroom practices around SSR and use of technology. I did, however, use the pre-existing data this year to get a clear picture of who my students are, where they stand in their reading levels and used that data to establish a baseline understanding of each individual student. This week's homework for my graduate work in Innovative Learning was to be about Darling-Hammond's book "The Flat World of Education" but this week turned out to be very different for me. We were also given the assignment of checking out two collaborative online apps, Voicethread and Wevideo. After a first look from all my team members, we decided that we wanted to find something more engaging and fun for the classroom. Researching new apps is both time-consuming and sometimes frustrating, if you are looking for free apps, however, there are many great apps that have a Freemium model where you get SOME of the functionality for free and if you like it, you ask Administration to pay for the premium version. What I vaguely remember from a Google summit, was the mention of Google apps for education, also known as GAFE. Yesterday my teammates, Julie, Gary and I went searching around to see what was up. What we found was a plethora of choices that can help with online collaboration. Here's the link if you want to explore. Once you download the app, or what looks like a plug-in or extension, you can then access your app, either through the apps website, or through creating a new document in google drive. We chose the bottom app show above, Powtoon, which is an app that allows you to create your own cartoon animations. It has a collaborative function that you can get after you pay for the premium version, so we simply video conferenced, shared a screen and one person drove the app while everyone else contributed ideas and direction. After we had our main script done and recorded through our Zoom/Powtoon combination, the login was shared between us so we could individually continue to work on the animations offline. This app was tremendous fun to work on and seemed to get us more engaged than we had been with the other two suggested apps. I'm really interested to explore the other apps listed above like Metta, Movenote, and Pear Deck.
We agreed that Powoon would be a GREAT app for 4th-12thgraders. The animation we made was about Creativity and when we are done with it, I will post here. In the mean time, check out GAFE and find some great online collaboration apps and digital storytelling tools! Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert is an educational researcher whose work examines literacy, learning, early childhood development, teacher development, writing and children's literature. "Freddy" is CEO/President of The Text Project. According the Text Project website: " Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) has had a long career as a literacy educator, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Her research, which addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts, has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the Study of Reading, 1985) and Every Child a Reader (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, 1999), she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Hiebert’s contributions to research and practice have been recognized through awards such as the American Educational Research Association’s Research to Practice award (2013)." The Text Project provides high quality and open access resources for teachers, teacher educators, parents, tutors and students meant to strengthen essential reading skills. The online resource provides the latest current news on literacy from Common Core State Standards to information on text complexity, vocabulary and assessment. The primary focus of "Freddy's" work has been on identifying text features that support reading development among beginning and struggling readers. She has also contributed to related literatures, particularly on how knowledge of vocabulary influences students' learning from text. Hiebert has recently addressed the issues of how words should be selected for instruction in reading and how word selection differs for narrative compared to informational texts. This is a particularly relevant issue as the CAASPP pushes students to read more informational texts than previous tests. As we move toward a more modern, digital world, she is encouraging teachers to revisit Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) in the classroom. She also encourages teachers to understand how to choose the right level text for each student during SSR. Her work with studying reading focus, stamina, comprehension and speed helps to inform my action research, as I explore SSR in my classroom and how reading can be deepened through digital tools. The idea of work stations is something that I'm very familiar with, since this is the learning model we used when all three of my kids attended a cooperative nursery school. It allowed for student choice, one-on-one attention when needed, time to explore and to go at their own pace and engage with the learning at their own level. I see, now how that model can be adapted for high school and that really excites me. In this video case study found on teachingchannel.org, the teacher worked on creating five different work stations for providing an environment that allowed for personalized learning. Before breaking into groups to work at a station, a mini-lesson was taught from the front of the room about how to engage and interpret informational text. What I saw happening was a lot of independent learning. Students were able to access expectations for each station through assignment sheets, examples of final product provided through written and video product. There was also an overall expectation of trust that students would work while the teacher was working with others. The students were able to meet one-on-one with the teacher to get their answered while others were using the assignment sheets to make sure their learning was directed and focused. I also LOVED the logs they were expected to keep at each station that required that they talk about what they did that day and, more importantly, how it went. The teacher could then go back and read those notes to see how things were progressing with each student. We do a lot of independent work on projects and I often feel out of touch with certain quieter students. If they had a way to write out how they are doing, it would help me identify who needs extra help and who does not. In many ways, this log echoes what we do in our stand-up meetings every day where students report what they have done and what they plan on doing that day, as well as any impediments they might experience in getting closer to their goals. However, I do not attend every group's stand-up or Scrum meeting and so am no privy to what is discussed in each group meeting. The logs make the learning visible to both the students and the teacher. The other piece that hit home for me was how the students interviewed experts out in the field at the beginning of the project, when they had the most questions. I really keyed into the idea that students need time to prepare ahead of time with their questions and that working in smaller groups gives the interview a more genuine and intimate feeling. Students in a smaller group are then required to participate and may feel less intimidated to ask a question than if they are interviewing someone with the whole class. We do a lot of video conferencing with adult experts but it's generally with the whole class, and although many students are engaged and excited about these sessions, I know I'm still missing those quieter students who tend to stay under the radar. I also think that in smaller groups, the students can really OWN the conversation and would take a more active role in asking questions and giving answers.
Overall, this case study gets a 5 out of 5 because it really speaks to how I already teach in my classroom, but helps me see how some structured strategies would supercharge our learning environment and help those students who need more help in directing their own learning. I can also tap into things I know so well from my preschool parenting days and bring those concepts into the classroom to foster more personalized learning. As a part of my Masters program in Innovative Learning I am being asked to create an Action Research Question. Here are the preliminary thoughts I have and where I think I'm headed with a question I would like to further explore through data collection and inquiry-based learning. I can't wait to investigate further and will share my process here on my blog as I go! Research Question: How can I foster reading stamina in my classroom? Subquestions: What obstacles do students face with reading? What cultural or socioeconomic factors come into play when students are presented with reading opportunities? What role does community expectation play in fostering reading stamina? Are we concentrating less on reading stamina at the high school level than we did before the internet? Does the 1:1 environment decrease reading stamina? Does moving to more screen work and to less book work decrease reading stamina? What I plan to do: I’m interested in reading about how others foster reading stamina and then I would like to try to apply those techniques in my own classroom. I would also like to investigate the phenomenon of lowered reading stamina to see if this is actually the case for 1:1 classrooms and how that might effect what I do in my classroom. Context/background for my question: I have a sneaking suspicion that as we move more and more toward screens, and more and more toward getting our information through video and audio, that reading levels and stamina are declining. I believe that this decline leads to students who can not access information on a deep level and that we are raising a whole generation of scanners, who only read for surface understanding. I believe that when we limit our reading to surface level reading, we lose all sorts of access to complex thinking, reasoning and discernment. With more and more information available to students through the internet, the ability to discern pertinent information on any given topic is more important now, more than ever. It is not enough to let others curate our information. We must be willing to curate our own points of view on a given topic, read all supporting documentation on a topic and be able to analyze and synthesize all that written information. Personal Biases: I have altered my own reading habits over the last few years due to the kindle, Facebook, Twitter and websites. I used to be able to sit with a book for hours at a time, reading until my heart’s content, but now, I find myself gravitating toward shorter articles, getting my news from Facebook, reading more and more about public opinion, opinion that is not necessarily backed up by facts and evidence. I find myself having a harder time sitting down with a book for long periods of time and read a lot fewer novels and more FB posts, and I used to consider myself to be an avid reader. I AM reading more current events, which feels good, but maybe not much of substance regarding those current events. I also have a personal bias toward reading in general and have very high expectations for myself for reading. My own three children are not that into reading and that alarms me as a parent. Today was the day. It happens every year. We roll the dice in Classcraft and today, pulled the random event that sets certain odd behaviors and actions into motion in my class. What normally is a very talkative class became eerily silent this morning. For all of about 10 minutes. And then all havoc broke loose as students figure out how to "game the game." Then we got to listen to speech-to-text computer voices saying the lyrics to really bad songs. Then new students chimed it by talking to each other from across the room via speech to text. It wasn't long before teenage humor mayhem took over.
There was much giggling. And more interaction between students than ever, as they prepared to present their new game prototypes to another class this week. Those who often float under the radar, sitting off to the side texting their friends, where now texting their team mates about the project. Why? Because they could. There is an inherent playfulness that I relish, in any learning environment. How do we cultivate this in all of our classrooms? Find games to play....at EVERY opportunity. We sang Karaoke this morning in my Digital Media class, which led to students humming and singing through the rest of class, a nice way to wake up on a Monday morning! We tossed coins on a big answer poster on the floor, from across the room as a formative assessment. Students begged me for another quiz question! Scratch off tests. Game Boards. Bingo. Trivia questions. Name that Tune. Thumb wrestling. (Look up Massive Multi-player thumb wrestling for a great short whole class game.) It doesn't matter what it is. Gamification is where it's at when it comes to increasing student engagement. We are writing backstories and bios in Digital Media this week to put on our school portfolios. The general gist of the process is to write two things in two different voices. One piece of writing would be the conversation you would have with a stranger over coffee and you are just getting to know one another. This portion answers "Who am I and how did I get here?" from a basic-facts perspective. This is written in first-person and can be very conversational and casual. This is your "Backstory." The second portion is your "Bio." This would be the introduction someone else would read before you step on the stage to teach a workshop or perform for an audience. It is written in third person. Bragging is expected and allowed in this section, as it is "someone else" talking about you. You are building credibility here. This writing answers the question of "Why should I listen to you?" Some tips when writing copy for the web:
You can check out my "About Me" page right here on this blog if you'd like. Thanks to Napalearns, just last year I attended a great training from Project Management International Education Foundation (PMIEF) to help teach students the fundamental skills of Project Management. This has been the year of experimenting with how to fit this curriculum into my existing Digital Media and Game Design classes. Heres what I've learned so far: Upsides: Breaking Down the Project makes it more manageable. Project Management can greatly help students to understand what is expected of them in order to make steps toward completing complicated and larger endgoals. Students often feel paralyzed in the face of answering a really big question or starting a really big project and often will choose to socialize with their friends instead of really puzzling through what needs to be done. They are simply in overwhelm and don't know where to start, so they just don't. Real world vocabulary prepares students for...well....the real world. A shared Project Management vocabulary helps students to interface with real-world industry experts and partners. I feel strongly that, in order to prepare students for jobs out in the real world, we ought to be using real-world words in the classroom. Instead of "benchmarks" and "assignments" we should be talking about "milestones" and "deliverables." Students need to be taught accountability techniques. It doesn't just come naturally. Project Management has some naturally built-in accountability tools and structures that support Project Based learning. It's one thing for a group to say "this week we are all going to come up with the ruleset for our new board game." It's another thing to say "Juan is in charge of the rough draft for the ruleset, Kate is in charge of proofreading, and the whole team is in charge of testing and feedback on the ruleset. Juan will be done my Wednesday. Kate will be done by Thursday, and after we all give feedback, the finished ruleset will be ready to go by the end of Friday." Then there are class check-ins built in to every class (Scrum meetings) to identify what has been done, what will be done and any impediments that might get in the way of achieving the goals. We need to continue to build these skills so that students remain accountable to each other and to the teacher in very concrete ways. Project Management can provide those accountability structures. Having a Project Manager means someone in the group is in charge. Oftentimes, running a project by committee can be cumbersome and not very effective. Teaching students how to lead and be led is an crucial part of learning about collaboration. Having one point person makes communication with the teacher and with the team more effective and easier to manage. Providing a chance for each student to take that role pushes the more assertive students to learn to step back and defer to their project manager. Inversely, providing a chance for a less assertive student to try on a leadership role that they might not normally choose for themselves, provides a chance for growth and risk-taking within a safe structure. Downsides: Jamming more into the curriculum can take away from other lesson time. We are already hugely strapped for time when trying to complete projects and it can be a stretch to create extra time for scaffolding PM skills. I think that the course work provided by PMIEF is really thorough and concrete, providing lessons plans and curriculum for a teacher who needs that kind of support. However, in the end, following those provided lessons would be a course in and of itself and requires more time than we have in any given day. We've got to pick and choose which tools work best in a learning environment. Some Project Management tools are too ungainly and complicated for the school environment. Planning a project from beginning to end does not support continuous development and the flexibility needed in a PBL environment. Many professional project managers say that they use a combination of Waterfall (planning from beginning to end) and Agile tools (planning in 2 week cycles) and it would be great for PMIEF to create lesson plans that reflect that blended approach. In PBL, we often solve problems from a Design Thinking perspective, which requires flexible planning and management tools. Project Management can be a buzzkill.
Sometimes you have to let students just get their hands dirty first, instead of going straight to more abstract planning. Emphasizing the organizational process can suck the fun out of a hands-on project. I've found it to be more helpful to use PM tools as small mini lessons to introduce in the middle of a project rather than a constant underlying conversation that starts at the onset of a project. The Bottom Line In PBL, where we often emphasize student-led and student-run projects, one has to be OK with a little bit of chaos and productive struggle. It's a part of what engages and excites students, as well as what frustrates them and leads toward lasting learning. Laying some of the PM models on top of a project at the very beginning can take away some of that juicy productive struggle. Ultimately, AFTER they struggle and look for solutions to solve some of their organizational problems, a teacher can be ready with some PM skills that would help address some those issues. Ultimately, the best way to teach PM skills is when there is an authentic and genuine need to know that originates from the students. Only then, is it effective to swoop in with a lesson on "The Waterfall" technique or how to run a "Stand-up meeting" in an "Agile" environment. All that said, I believe that Project management should be considered an essential tool in the tool belt of any PBL teacher. It's right up there with things like conflict resolution and personality/leadership styles awareness and encompasses important skills such as time management, resource allocation and accountability. With a little tweaking and experimenting, any teacher can make PM an important part of teaching and learning in the PBL classroom. |
AuthorLisa Gottfried is a CTE teacher with 20 years experience as CEO of her own Video and Motion Graphics Production house. She currently teaches Digital Design at New Technology High School and at Touro University in the Masters of Innovative Learning program. She loves her job and her students! Archives
January 2024
Categories
All
|