Screencasting with Quizlet

Quizlet is a learning tool that students and teachers can use for formative assessment.  It allows users to create study sets and then practice the material, much like we used to do with paper-and-pencil flashcards, but with much richer options.

As you can see, in addition to flashcards, students can create self-scoring quizzes and tests, and they can also play a variety of games.  From an organization standpoint, users can also create classes and folders to help keep information organized in a meaningful way.

Third VDWC Session: Composing and Reflecting with Digital Video Poems

Composing and Reflecting with Digital Video Poems

David Bruce and Suzanne Miller

If you teach English, this webinar is well worth watching.  Presenters David Bruce and Suzanne Miller share how they extend the concept of teaching writing into teaching composition, which they do through the use of digital video composition in their classes.  Here is how they define composition:

Essentially, they are presenting a transmedia approach to teaching poetry.  They offer two examples of student-produced videos that demonstrate composition of a poem.  In both cases, students created a video of a famous poem that included still images, moving video, spoken audio of the text of the poem, music and ambient noise.  

One video was of William Carlos Williams poem "The Red Wheelbarrow": 

The other video was of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry";

In addition to the final video product, they also asked students to use a “Reflection Heuristic” to explain their intentions as they created their video.

So, instead of reading a written poem and answering questions or writing a literary analysis, students are asked to create a video, which is essentially a multimodal analysis of the poem.  The reflection is an important part of the assignment, and students will need explicit instructions on making intentional choices relevant to the text.  The samples provided in this webinar demonstrate a high level of metacognition, and would be well worth sharing with students as an example.  Here is a slide from one student's reflection:  

This webinar provides a blueprint for engaging in transmedia activities in the classroom.  The examples here focus mostly on poetry being translated into video, but the concept of writing or thinking through video could be applied in a variety of ways in any number of content areas.  I am certain I could use the ideas here for teaching poetry, but I can also imagine having students doing a close reading of any passage in literature by creating a video and doing a reflection of the choices they made in creating it.

Second VDWC Session: It’s the Process, Not the Product

Summary of  "It's the Process, Not the Product:  Improving Student Research with Digital Organization 

Rachelle Wynkoop presented a webinar on improving student research with digital organization, focusing on the process of research rather than the product.  She interacts effectively with the live participants to tailor the content to her audience, and she provides some modeling and practice with a sample essay to guide participants through the process of summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting from research.  She suggests that we always explain to students why they are using research.  Specifically, she suggests that we teach students that documenting our sources is a tool we can use as writers to go back to the research so we can clarify our writing.  She argues that this explanation will be more meaningful to students than explaining that students must give credit to the original thinkers, because students are so used to the sharing, participatory nature of the web.

                The second part of Wynkoop’s presentation focuses on actually creating digital notecards, and she lists several drawbacks of analog notecards that can be lost or become unwieldy.  She suggests using Google Slides to create digital notecards, especially since many schools and students already have accounts set up.  She shows some screenshots of how to use the Research tool within Slides to conduct research, and also how to use Revision History to show students how they can demonstrate accountability, especially if there is collaboration among students.  Live participants than joined in a shared Google Slides deck to demonstrate the features, including creating a format for each kind of slide and also creating a graphic organizer.  In the archive of this presentation, the links to the slide deck were in the chat, which was inaccessible, so that was a limitation.

Personal reflections

I absolutely see the value of generating and storing notes digitally.  As Wynkoop mentions, some students will lose their paper-and-pencil notes, or forget to bring them to class.  It has also been my experience that students who record notes on paper often forget to accurately document which source they are using for the information, or they will jumble up information from multiple sources onto one notecard about a topic.  Providing students with a sample slide deck that they can copy and add to with their own research would be so beneficial for students who require tangible examples and formats to guide their work.

Impact for teaching and students

Wynkoop presents a tool that will be valuable for a wide variety of teachers and students, and she effectively explains the logic for scaffolding research assignments as well as moving the research to a digital platform.  She mentions that a number of other tools could perform similar tasks, including Word/Powerpoint, Evernote, Citelighter and Noodletools.  For teachers and students that aren’t using Google Classroom, these would be worth exploring.  I’ll make a plug for Noodletools, which is a subscription-based product I have used extensively with students.  It is a citation generator that can be used for MLA, APA and other styles, and it allows for digital notecards that look like this: 

It provides helpful hints throughout the process and can be customized by audience, offering fewer or more choices in pull-down menus so that younger students won’t be overwhelmed and more sophisticated researchers can document everything they find.

Overall, the title of this session is an important reminder for all teachers that no matter what tools we use, we must spend valuable class time and instruction on teaching the research process, and not just assigning it and looking at the final product.

Reflections of "Helping Students See Their Growth Through Digital Writing"

I watched “Helping Students See Their Own Growth Through Digital Writing,” featuring Aram Kabodian, a middle school English teacher and writing fellow.  This video appealed to me because I am also a middle school English teacher, and I’d like to find some ideas of creating a more meaningful scope and sequence to the writing I do with students.  The goals of this webinar include examining the pros and cons of using portfolios with students, and how digital portfolios and wikis can help students see their own growth in writing over time.

                Kabodian defines digital portfolios as a collection of authentic works or artifacts that reflect the knowledge and skills, allowing students to reflect on them.  Participants identified several benefits to developing digital portfolios, including increasing an audience for student writing, providing multimodal opportunities, and providing an opportunity for students to see growth.  Participants also identified some pitfalls, including a lack of access to technology, uncooperative administrators, and privacy concerns.  Kabodian identifies his top reasons as developing 21^st century skills, aligned with Common Core goals, as well as the metacognitive activity of reflecting on their learning.  Furthermore, digital portfolios have longevity; they can’t be lost or thrown away in the same way that paper portfolios can, and they save paper.  Digital portfolios offer another opportunity to accommodate a variety of learning styles, allowing reluctant or introverted students to fully participate, for example, or allowing the blossoming of visual and hands-on  learners.

                Kabodian also demonstrates a student example of a well-organized digital portfolio, with examples of reflection, and he shows some assignments and rubrics he uses to help guide students through deeper reflections on assignments.  He acknowledges that assessing digital portfolios is a topic he struggles with, although he links to some rubrics that may work for you.

                One of the most important things that struck me in watching this video is the challenge of modeling and teaching reflective writing to students.  He links to a useful video about reflective thinking that I would want to use  in my classroom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoI67VeE3ds&feature=youtu.be

A participant in the video suggested that the reflective writing piece that analyzes digital portfolio could be a letter for a family member, which I think is a worthy idea that builds in an authentic audience and important stakeholders in the learning process.

This video focused more on why you might want to use digital portfolios and less on the how to create them.  I see the value of using digital portfolios, but I could use some concrete suggestions on the mechanics of creating portfolios on digital platforms, especially in terms of how to keep the privacy of students.   As a teacher of students in special education, I worry about sharing content on the open web for all to see, without parental permission.  I like the idea of having an authentic audience, but I think the privacy issue can be a real concern, and I’d like to see a closed platform that requires some sort of authentication rather than an open one.

Overall, this video can help teachers conceptualize why they might want to use digital portfolios, and it offers useful links for further exploration.