FINAL PROJECT: STUDENTS BECOME THE TEACHERS WITH EDUCANON

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.

RESEARCH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

WHAT MAKES A GOOD RESOURCE?

We have been discussing the tendency for teachers and students to evaluate resources on the web with rather simplistic guidelines. It is important to keep in mind that the resources should be determined to be reliable based on the content rather than factors such as the recency of the publication, credentials of the author, or the domain name/extension. Resources should be cross-checked to discover inconsistencies and the existence of cited information. Students should be encouraged to seek out in-depth sites and to find supporting evidence where conflicting views exist.

WIKIPEDIA: THE MOST POPULAR INTERNET REFERENCE WEBSITE

Wikipedia is the most widely used website for referencing information. Many teachers frown on the use of the site for research purposes, but the reality is that most of us use it when quickly looking up the answer to a question. For this reason, it may be of value to learn how to evaluate the reliability of a Wikipedia article as they are not all created equally. There is more control over the information posted on Wikipedia nowadays compared to when it was first launched and it is beneficial to teach students how to check revisions and recognize sites that may be more strictly monitored.

EVALUATING A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE

My partner and I decided to put Wikipedia to the test by looking into the entry on Japanese Cuisine. Overall, the information seemed pretty thorough and accurate. The information ranged from regional dishes and etiquette to cooking techniques and imported/adapted foods. There were a lot of reliable and easy to locate sources of information. There were also many statements marked as needed a citation, but having lived in Japan and listened to many students talk about the characteristics of Japanese food, I would say most of them were accurate. A few statistics were given on the change in eating habits of people in Japan and it was easy to trace these back to books or studies published by experts in the field. There were two main problems with the article that we were able to identify. First was the imbalance of the amount of information given for some items but not others (there was only one sentence on tea). Secondly, there was a lack of information and citations on the imported foods section. The article claims that dishes such as okonomiyaki and tonkatsu are adapted or imported foods but there was no citation or any indication from where the influence came from.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

This assignment was an interesting activity in experiencing what it means to research a topic. Having had background knowledge in the topic, I was able to evaluate information and learn additional facts of which I tried to verify the validity. It is very difficult to evaluate resources as being truthful if one does not know anything about the topic. This assignment illustrated the importance of mindfully framing research projects or papers that are exactly that. Too often research projects are assigned as a way to create a final product, to teach the mechanics of writing rather than to develop strong, critical research skills. Rather than assigning a topic that requires students to retell facts they have learned, it may be a better practice for them to evaluate the reliability of conflicting information they encounter. When thinking about resource reliability, we should be creating awareness among our students about the strengths of peer edited sites as opposed to information that is controlled by few.

GOOGLE EARTH PROJECT

GOOGLE EARTH IN THE CLASSROOM

Through the use of satellite imagery, Google Earth allows users to travel the world, under the sea, or even to the moon. You can view maps, 3D terrain and buildings, and recent change through historical imagery. There are many options for how you can view a location, whether it is from an aerial or a street view. This tool has a lot of exciting potential for use in the classroom.

I searched the internet to see how other world language teachers were using Google Earth in the classroom. Here is a list of both my own ideas I thought of while playing around with the tool and those I found on the web:

• Construct guided tours of countries, cities, or important sites across the world
• Discuss and locate various dialects in Spain
• Make a map of where important works of art are in the world
• Build a travel guide
• Present a historical timeline of when Spanish colonies gained independence
• Draw a pathway to show routes taken by historical figures or highlight locations in a novel
• Map out regional dishes
• View historical imagery for locations that may have changed in recent decades

Here are some examples of what a Google Earth search turns up. The first one is a 3D image of the ruins of Tikal in Guatemala.

You can also get a more realistic view when dropping into street view. Here is a shot of the Giralda in Seville, Spain.

Google Earth also allows you to go inside buildings. Here is a screenshot I took inside of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. This was really interesting and allowed me to see a lot of details I did not notice in visiting the location in person.

HOW TO CREATE A NARRATED GUIDED TOUR

When using Google Earth to create a tour, there are a few basics to keep in mind. First you need to create a folder. As you are searching and placing a pin on various locations, be sure all of the places are inside of the folder. At the top of the tool bar, there is an icon of an envelope that allows you to take screenshots of your places and email the files. You can also create a narrated guided tour by clicking on the video camera icon and selecting record. If you would like to add audio as well, the microphone icon is found next to record. There is also an option to add music. All of this was quite easy to use and there are many tutorials available for any questions that may come up.

This short tutorial shows some of the first steps of recording your tour:

After you have found all the locations you want to include, you can bring them alive by adding images to each. I had a little trouble remembering the steps for adding an image to my locations. This tutorial was very helpful:

This video gives more details on how to add images and recording:

Unfortunately, Google Earth tours are not saved to your Google account. Be sure to save any work on the computer you are working on and then email the file to yourself.

THE ADDED VALUE

Google Earth gives students access to so many places in the world, allowing them to explore details of whatever locations they visit in a way that was not previously possible. Features like historical imagery can give viewers an understanding of the change that is occurring and the impact of population growth. The ruler tool allows users to measure the height of mountains or skyscrapers. Other applications include the ability to examine weather patterns, star maps, and 3D views of buildings and monuments. Exploring the possibilities of this tool was a lot of fun. Not only does it allow users to “travel” for free, it also gives them experiences they would not otherwise have access to, such as aerial views of animal migration, the exploration of shipwrecks, or flight simulation. Google Earth would be a great tool for student-centered, inquiry-driven projects and it is relatively easy to use for creating personalized tours of the information they discover.

MY GOOGLE EARTH TOUR: THE ANCIENT MAYA

STANDARDS: Communication Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics. Cultures Standard 2.2: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the products and perspectives of the culture studied. Comparisons Standard 4.2: Students demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own.

OBJECTIVES: Students will research and identify at least 5 locations in Spain or Latin America pertaining to a theme of their choosing and create a narrated digital tour using the verb estar, adverbs of location and vocabulary to describe buildings/monuments with at least 80 percent accuracy.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING

DIGITAL STORYTELLING WITH iMovie

iMovie allows users to easily create a video of drawing, photographs, or live action. There are so many interesting features such as sound editing, special effects, and

CREATING A STOP MOTION RECIPE VIDEO

For this project, I envisioned a unit on food that would culminate in students creating a visual recipe book. After researching various traditional recipes of Spain or a Latin American country, students would demonstrate what they learned about food vocabulary and measurement units. When I originally came up with the plan to create a stop motion video, I thought I would use a digital camera and a tripod to ensure the images matched up. However, it ended up being much easier to set up my laptop in front of the cutting board and snap a photo after each movement of the ingredients. I was actually surprised with the results and how simple it was to photograph and then label the images using iMovie. For the audio, I ended up going with a song, but had I a bit more time, I could have used some of the many sound effects or even recorded my own. After completing this project, I can see how this using this tool in the classroom would allow students to create an interesting and more easily comprehensible presentation of their research.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CREATING A STORYBOARD

Creating a storyboard before recording the video allowed me to save time as I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do. It also helped me focus on the text and how I wanted to use the images to support what I wanted to say. In working collaboratively, it is important for all members of a group to be able to plan ahead of time the steps in creating the production so that they can build of each others’ ideas filming can be efficient. Storyboarding places the emphasis on the research and the message before exploring all the features of iMovie.

           

THE ADDED VALUE

This year I have put a lot of effort into designing more engaging and worthwhile experiences to meet the presentational speaking and writing world language standards. Many times, especially in novice level classrooms, presentations are difficult to understand because the information is presented only once. They can also be boring if seen all at once. Finding technological tools that allow students to record their presentational speech is beneficial to both the presenter and the audience. Students tend to prepare and rehearse more when they are recorded. It is also a great way for beginners to be able to listen to the input multiple times. Having access to the students’ presentations before they are presented would give me the opportunity to create meaningful and beneficial supplementary activities that would foster more engagement. These activities would allow me to access comprehension during presentations in a way that has not always been possible.

DIGITAL STORYTELLING PROJECT: STOP MOTION RECIPE

STANDARDS: Communication Standard 1.3 Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics. Comparisons Standard 4.2 Students demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own. Cultures Standard 2.2 Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the products and perspectives of the culture studied.

OBJECTIVES: Students will research typical recipes in Spain or Latin America and will make a digital story on how to make the dish of their choice accurately using food and food measurement vocabulary as measured by the rubric below.

RUBRIC

Recipe research notes and bibliography   5 points

Creates digital story of recipe, identifying name and origin of a dish  10 points

Correctly identifies at least 6 ingredients     5 points

Correct use of food measurement vocabulary     5 points  

MINI-LESSON: TRANFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION IN THE WORLD LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

THE “LOST C” IS FOUND WITH TECHNOLOGY

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, divides the world language standards into five broad categories (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, Communities), also referred to as the five C’s. The mini-lesson group project really opened my eyes to different resources for addressing the Communities standard. This standard has been dubbed the “lost C”, as many world language teachers struggle to find ways to meet the criteria. Many teachers are unsure about how to find ways for their students to “participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world…[and] use the language both within and beyond the school setting”. By exploring Skype in the classroom, I found a whole network of teachers who connect their classrooms with others around the world.

The mini-lesson also gave me way to achieve the Cultures standard while still making the curriculum student-centered/driven. A lot of the time world language teachers act as the expert on language and culture, depositing this information to the students directly or with the use of a textbook. I have found with many of the pre-made materials  a simplification or perpetuation of stereotypes. Through Skype in the classroom, students will be able to discover the culture of a Spanish-speaking country on their own from individuals who actually live there.

Click on the link below to read an overview of the tool, as well as suggestions on how to use it in the world language classroom.

LINK TO SKYPE IN THE CLASSROOM MINI-LESSON

CREATIVE COMMONS

An essential part of instruction in any class that requires students writing is learning how to cite sources and write a bibliography. However, when using technology to make presentations, blogs, websites, etc. students (and teachers) may fail to cite their sources, simply dragging images from Google onto their work. Today we talked about Creative Commons and the tendency for students and teachers to use a lot of material that is not theirs to use. It is important to pay attention to copyright licensing, use images that are available for public use and to include proper citations. Perhaps even better is assigning projects that encourage students to create original work.

Here is a useful flowchart, which was created by Pia Bijkerk, Erin Loechner and Yvette van Boven, that can help determine whether or not an image should be used.

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USEFUL TOOLS FOR INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY

As we prepare for a mini-lesson in transformation level integration of technology, we went over a list of helpful tools to use. This list is broken down by content area.

AN ELEMENTARY TOOL INDEX

There is a sampling of lesson plans incorporating useful tech tools on the Wikispaces link below.

TECHNOLOGY TOOLS IN ACTION

USING SCRATCH IN THE CLASSROOM

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PROGRAMMING WITH SCRATCH

Today we played around with a free program called Scratch that allows users to create interactive games and stories. According to the website, “Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.” This tool was really fun to explore and gave me a basic understanding of coding.

COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

As we tried to figure out how to put all the pieces together to create our game, I noticed many of the students in my class working together to solve problems. There was a lot of collaboration as well as full engagement in working independently to build our own unique program. I could definitely see how students would be motivated to work on this even outside of class…I could have spent the whole 4 hour class on it!

We worked on building a game that would help students to practice addition. I left curious about how this program could be applied to other content areas besides math. I found this YouTube video below useful in learning how to use Scratch for drawing and strengthening students’ understanding of coordinate planes. The teacher in the video also applied Scratch to simulate the work of Jackson Pollack. This was a good way of having the students experience the type of choices made by artists (composition, line choice, rhythm) while helping them better understand of abstract expressionism. Watching the video also helped me to learn about many functions that I didn’t discover on my own, such as how to create various consequences for choices made by a player when creating a game.

I really enjoyed exploring the site on my own and coming up with a lot of questions, rather than learning all the steps beforehand. It made for a memorable lesson and reminded me that many times the best way to learn something is by problem solving collaboratively and teaching others.

THE ADDED VALUE

I think a lot of my special education students would love exploring this program as deliverable for their projects. It would also be a great way to create a more meaningful experience for some of the students I help with math. Too often math classrooms are teach-centered, based on drills and individual work from a textbook. Incorporating a tool like Scratch into the classroom allows for creation and a stronger understanding of the concepts. The lesson would be more memorable and the final product would be useful as a tutorial for others or for the student who created the game. I am excited to play around a little more to see how I might integrate Scratch into the second language classroom as well. I found a Scratch educator resource page with a lot of resources and curriculum ideas.

Here is one of the things I have created so far (link to game to come).

21ST CENTURY TEACHING AND MEANINGFUL TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION

THE 21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM

According to the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, “we live in a technology and media-suffused environment with: 1) access to an abundance of information, 2) rapid changes in technology tools, and 3) the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale. To be effective in the 21st century, citizens and workers must be able to create, evaluate, and effectively utilize information, media, and technology“.

Many teachers feel the need to incorporate more technology into the classroom. There is a wide range of motivations. Some have a desire to give students who have little experience with technology outside of school more access to close what Wagner (2008) calls a global achievement gap. Others work for districts with initiatives to increase the use of technology and promote individualization by going as far as requiring each student and teacher to have an iPad. There is no denying that students become more engaged when teachers use technology in the classroom, but is there a right and wrong way of integrating it? Before enrolling in this class, I felt overwhelmed by the number of programs and apps out there and had many questions. How often should technology be a part of my lessons? What are the best apps or programs for using in the world language classroom?

After today’s class and discussion, my view on how to incorporate technology into the classroom has shifted considerably. I now have a very different set of questions. First, is the way I am bringing technology into the classroom necessary or is it a substitution for other materials that had the same function? Is the integration of tech actually teaching students what they will need to know to be prepared for the future? How can I use technology as a tool to transform the way language has been taught in the past and change the learning process? What tools can be used to encourage collaboration and student driven inquiry?

MEANINGFUL TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION

According to Hughes (2006), meaningful technology integration goes beyond simply replacing or amplifying current instructional processes. To truly meet the needs of the 21st century classrooms, the use of technology need to be at the Transformation Level. This means there is transformation:

• the instructional method
• the students’ learning processes
• the subject matter

Hughes (2006) explains that, “Reorganization of content and flow of cognitive processes involves…[changing or expanding] the actual mental work…[and the development of] new opportunities for different forms and types of learning through problem solving, unavailable in traditional approaches.”

THE FLORIDA TECH MATRIX

Today we worked with the Florida Tech Matrix which discusses various levels of technology integration in curriculum: Entry, Adoption, and Adaptation, Infusion and Transformation. Combined with these levels are the characteristics of the learning environments: Active, Collaborative, Constructive, Authentic, and Goal directed. The site also features a long list of videos, showing classroom examples of each level and characteristic. I found the video links below especially helpful in understanding what it means to really change instructional methods and student learning processes.

Transformation/Active video – Social Studies: Virtual Vacation Travel Guides

Transformation/Authentic video – Science: Project Based Learning

THE SUBSTITUTION AUGMENTATION MODIFICATION REDEFINITION MODEL

When thinking about how to and how not to integrate technology, I found the SAMR model a useful complement to what we learned today.

                                                                              

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Hughes, J., Thomas, R. & Scharber, C. (2006). Assessing Technology Integration: The RAT – Replacement, Amplification, and Transformation – Framework. In C. Crawford et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2006 (pp. 1616-1620). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).