OVERVIEW OF THE LESSON
In this lesson, students in a high school Spanish language class design interactive lessons using their own recordings of a tour of their city. After making a video expressing the things they like to do and places they like to go (favorite restaurants, cinemas, parks, shops, etc.), small groups analyze their work and write comprehension questions and highlight important information using eduCanon. After completing the projects, students are assigned to watch and complete the other groups’ interactive video lessons.
STANDARDS AND OBJECTIVE
STANDARDS: Students will meet Communication Standard 1.3 by filming a video in which they narrate a tour of things they enjoy about their city and designing an interactive lesson with written comprehension questions. Communication Standard 1.2 will be met by assigning students to watch and complete the lessons created by other groups in the class. By making their own video lessons and comparing them to the eduCanon Bulbs completed earlier in this unit that featured native speakers giving city tours, additional standards covered include Cultures Standard 2.1 and Comparisons Standard 4.2
Objective: Students will work in small groups to record a 3-5 min city tour video which they will use to design an interactive lesson on eduCanon including at least 5 questions and 3 highlighted reflection statements.
OVERVIEW OF THE TECH TOOL: eduCanon
To meet the objective of this lesson, students will upload their videos to YouTube and then use eduCanon to add comprehension questions. eduCanon is a free website that allows users to easily crop and embed questions into their videos. At the basic (free) level, eduCanon allows users to build what they call a Bulb, which is an uploaded video plus activities. Users of eduCanon can upload videos from a wide variety of sites including YouTube, TeacherTube, National Geographic, and TED-Ed. After adding a video to their Bulb, teachers can design interactive video lessons by inserting a multiple choice question or a statement for reflection. When writing the possible answers to a question, images can be added to support meaning and explanations for why an answer is correct or incorrect can be given.
For $89 a year, teachers have access to more functions including the ability to add free response questions, auto-graded fill-in-the-blanks and external website links. Paying the annual fee also opens up access to public lessons which can be copied and edited. It also makes it possible for students to create lessons through the account. The student created Bulbs are videos that are assigned to the students, allowing them to build questions, activities and links around their work.
LEVELS OF BLOOM’S AND 21ST CENTURY SKILLS SUPPORTED
eduCanon allows teachers to create lessons based on authentic sources of language. Through this tool, teachers are able to monitor comprehension and can identify any concepts needing more attention. By assigning this as homework, teachers can use class time for collaborative, student-driven projects that go beyond the lower level processes activities that are commonly found in world language classrooms. Rather than requiring students to memorize and exhibit simple comprehension of the target language, this lesson aims at higher level processes of application, analysis, and creation. Students will apply the language they have learned to express their own preferences in their video. As designers of lessons, they will need to analyze and predict what types of questions their audience will be able to answer and what kind of support they may need.
According to the International Society for Technology in Education, creativity, collaboration, and decision making are some of the skills students need to develop in order to “learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly global and digital society”. Using both the target language and technological tools, students in this lesson work together to produce original material that they will evaluate and improve upon. They will construct the knowledge they determine to be most important and use technology as a way of communicating more effectively to a wider audience.
RATIONALE OF TECHNOLOGY TOOL USE
In using eduCanon for this project, students are not only collaborating on creating their own work in the target language, they are also becoming the teacher. After planning, writing, and filming their videos, they would need to work together to analyze their work to identify the main takeaways they want the other students to have. In becoming the teachers, their use of the target language would be richer and more varied.
Many times in world language classrooms, the pacing of the class is teacher controlled, based on routines of the teacher asking a question, the student responding, and the teacher evaluating the response. Student produced language is limited in this routine and they have few opportunities to expand beyond the target grammar or vocabulary of a particular lesson. By having students work together to build lessons around their work, they would gain practice in asking and responding to the questions and evaluating what is being said. The pattern of the teacher as being the producer of language and the students as receivers and occasional mimickers would be broken. The teacher would be able to move into more of a guidance role as students discover gaps in their language.
I also feel this tool is really an essential part of this experience as viewers of the Bulbs. By having the presentations recorded and corresponding activities that are assigned to each student, eduCanon helps encourage full participation from each student, while allowing for individualization. Students would be able to pause or re-watch segments if they needed to in order to answer the questions. An additional benefit to having the questions embedded in the video is that students would receive instant feedback on their answers. If they answered a question incorrectly, they would be able to listen to the material as many times as necessary. This encourages greater acquisition of the target language compared to filling out a worksheet with questions that would have to be corrected after finishing with the video. Using this tool also allows the teacher to monitor student participation and comprehension of the activities. eduCanon has a function that reorders the answers each time the question opens up, which means that students would need to listen again rather than just select a different option.