Information Overloaded

I was talking with a middle level math teacher last week who showed me a screencast that she made of her math test answers.  She took the test and worked out the answers and described her steps by recording her voice  so that students could watch the video and understand where they made their mistakes.

Great idea!  I love screencasting.  I am hoping to grab a small piece of her video so I can post it here for all of you to see!!

Boy, if my math teacher had made screencasts for me in 1984, who knows, I might have been the next John Nash!

We have had a few District Wide PD days this week where the High School Science and Social Studies teachers came in for training on wikis, podcasting, digital storytelling, advanced searches, screencasting and Smart Board. This was an excellent day and a great opportunity for teachers to sit down and experiment with some of technologies they are able to use with their students. Exciting!

On the second day, we had the teachers from our 1:1 notebook school in to do training on advanced searching with Ebsco and E-Library, wikis and digital stories. And I want to talk about my two favorite parts of the day.

Favorite Part of the Day #1:

During the digital storytelling session, I gave the teachers 6 pictures and they were to create their own original story from the pictures. Everybody had the same photos, but what was amazing was the different story lines that emerged from those 6 pictures. We played some of the stories at the end. We had a great time! Teacher PD needs to be engaging, hands-on, and fun in order for it to be effective.

Favorite Part of the Day #2:

After the sessions were over, a teacher showed me an excellent webquest that she developed. She told me it was fairly easy to do because she had previously taught that unit and was familiar with the content. That got me to thinking….when teachers are very familiar with the content, the tech learning curve is not so steep. What a great tip she has given me for helping other teachers who express anxiety over integrating technology into their lessons.

This is true for students and technology as well. A month ago, I brought down some students to do screencasting. They had just received their laptop a month before. We were working on mental math strategies that they were not comfortable with on two brand-new programs. So, I had set them up to fail before we even began……new format [screencasting] to showcase their work, two new programs to build the work [Smart recorder and Moviemaker] and a new strategy in Math……not a good idea!

I guess what I learned from my PD sessions is that in order to learn, people need to be engaged…it needs to be fun….Also, in order to learn, people need to build on what they know. You have to have some familiar ground when you start.

Thanks Cheryl. I had a great revelation from our webquest talk!

I have been working with a teacher at one of our schools with 1:1 laptop program and we were trying to come up with ways the students could use screencasts in Language Arts. Screencasting is all about showing, not just telling. This medium allows students to quickly produce a video of what they know.

So, I put my thinking cap on, and here are some ideas I came up with:

1) Students could brainstorm ideas during the pre-writing process using Smart notebook and record themselves explaining their thoughts as they write them down. This would give teachers insight into how students are organizing their thoughts and writing.

2) During a poetry unit, teachers could make quick screencasts of the structure of various poems and students could use them as a reference. For example, if you are teaching students how to write a haiku, you could explain, through the screencast, the poem’s structure and rhyme scheme.

3) Teachers could create screencasts to model reading comprehension strategies; the teacher could bring up a piece of text on the computer and record themselves reading and talking about the strategies they are using to understand the piece they are reading.

4) Teachers and students could screencasts on grammar rules and ways to punctuate. They could record themselves annotating sentences in a word document or in Smart Notebook.

5) Teachers could screencast themselves marking student writing. Students could watch the screencast in order to understand how they were evaluated and why. This type of evaluation would be very comprehensive, but would be somewhat time consuming.

Can anybody else think of ways teachers and students could use screencasting in Language Arts classes? I would love to hear from you!