Audacity to the rescue!

In my program, we have a final exit exam that all 5th graders take from which we gather data about the effectiveness of the program. Part of this test is an individual assessment of oral comprehension skills. This part is long and annoying! I have to record all the students and go back and listen to them later to grade them, which isn't that annoying I suppose. The reasoning is that some students will be anxious if they know you are grading them at that time or if a teacher makes a face or tries to write down a lot of notes during the "interview". So, we have traditionally used cassette tapes for this recording. This is where it would get annoying. I would have to switch tapes around for each class, watch to make sure the tape doesn't run out, and deal with bulky equipment. Then, cueing up the tape if you decide to go back and listen to some students (to grade them) can be a nightmare (if you don't listen to everyone on the tape).

Anyway, last year was the first year we were allowed to use Audacity. The difference it made was amazing. I can easily save each student's conversation in their folder and then go back and listen over and over again if I want. The quality is a lot clearer as well, which makes grading them much easier.

Last year, it was optional to use Audacity instead of tapes. I was surprised at the number of teachers who chose to continue with cassette tapes. Those of you reading this who have used Audacity know how simple this program is. It takes about 5 seconds to open the program and begin recording. This year, using Audacity is mandatory (probably because they realized that buying cassette tapes was a huge waste of money).

It is amazing how much technology can help simplify tasks in educational settings. I look forward to finding more of these types of instances in the future!

Not a clue what to write about, so why not....

talk about how happy I am that I did the ITS program?

Seriously, I am so thankful that I somehow came across this program and decided to do it. This past weekend, my sister-in-law asked me if I felt like I had learned anything new in "that fancy master's program" or if it was just a means to a pay raise. I answered her truthfully: It is as if a veil has been lifted from my eyes.

I am not anywhere close to being old, but I honestly cannot remember what I learned in college about being an educator. I don't know if I really didn't learn that much or if my much smarter brain has decided to just block out all the nonsense from that era. I am not kidding, I really can't remember what I learned. It feels like I learned nothing! Looking at my teaching now compared to before ITS (should that be BITS?), I am a completely new person. I use really different teaching methods now. My students are collaborating! I know to give them the full answer if they ask for it (because they are approaching the ZPD) whereas before I would limit their information due to their age.

If there happens to be someone reading this blog who is not an ITSer, please do yourself a favor: sign up now!

Conversations

This is a free service called Conversations. I found out about this from a previous ITSer last week at our ActivLoudoun Plus conference. The thing I like most about this program is that it can be used at home or school, seems to have unlimited storage space, and is very easy to use! Oh, and did I mention it is FREE!?!? As a teacher, that is like music to my ears.

To use it, click Allow in the pop up box. Then, just log in with your name (don't worry, you don't have to save at the end). Click the Real Time button. You will see a video of me and you should hear me talking to you. Of course, my laptop hates recording, so the sound is not very loud or clear (sorry!). Once my question is over, it will start recording your response. When you finish your response, click Stop Recording. You will then see me again and hear a second question. I have three questions set up. You don't have to actually say or do anything of course. At the end of my third question, you will have to click Stop Recording and then Cancel. If you click Submit, it saves your recording (and if you have a webcam, your video too) and I can go log on to the website and see/hear it. The nice thing about listening to the responses is that you can skip listening/watching yourself and only see the student response. Pretty neat, eh?

This is going to be used a lot at my school next year, by me! I love the idea of having a real "conversation" with each of my students like this. I could even have a native speaker make the videos and then this becomes even more authentic.

Voki is fun!

I was introduced to Voki this past week! I used it to do review with my 5th graders for their big final test that we do in LCPS for all 5th graders take. It is sort of like an exit exam. I also have instructions for embedding them directly into PowerPoint. When I put mine together, I made objects on the slide and then hyperlinked the shapes to the Voki. The students loved them!! They clicked on one to hear a question, then they were to think about their own answer. Then, to check themselves, I made a second video for each question that had a sample answer. I believe the students were very engaged in the activity and learned a lot from it. I heard from many of my students how much they liked the activity. I look forward to using it more next year!

Oh, and there is a Voki Classroom link on the top right corner. Some teachers at my school have a Voki classroom, but I don't know anything about it yet. If you have your own classroom, you might want to check it out!

Video editing

Well, I can't say much about video editing honestly. I have done video editing by myself for an after-school activities class, but I haven't really done this with students. I showed those students how to do it, but we were too busy with the other steps of making a video (writing the treatment, storyboarding, rehearsing, taping) that there was no time for them to do the editing at the end. Perhaps next year when I am teaching in a middle or high school, I will have the opportunity.

I am using videotaping with my third graders right now. I know I've written about it here before, but I didn't really talk about how it is going. My students are so excited about this project! We have discovered little things that students do not know though. I talked with my students about writing out our skit during all our discussions, but I started referring to it as a script. I wrote the character's names on the board for them (waiter, customer) and talked about writing out the person's name for each of their lines, because otherwise it would be impossible to know who was talking when. I thought that my detailed instruction was enough. After working on the scripts for a day, I visited each group and really looked at their scripts. I had 2-3 groups (total, out of 20) who had basically done nothing! I talked with them and realized, they have no idea what a script is! They were unable to put together my details about what they are writing with the word "script". This is such a silly little detail that I would never have thought about, until now. I was actually impressed with myself for planning out a lesson on how to do the script, but I never thought to actually define the word itself.

This just goes to show, we really learn something new every day. On Thursday, I learned to always define new words or phrases that I plan to use often, just in case.

GoAnimate!

I haven't found many collaborative Web 2.0 tools that I can use in my current program. I only see the students for 30 minutes at a time and our curriculum is bursting at the seams. One tool I have managed to use in class that is quick and wonderful is goanimate.com. I got the idea from Lori when she used it for our online class this semester. I have used in a few of my classes now and the students love it! Not only does it capture their attention, it also affords something I cannot do: it shows adult characters speaking in Spanish, using the vocabulary we are learning. It is very difficult to find any videos out there that use the exact thing we are learning, much less in Spanish! With goanimate, I can make a dialogue using vocabulary and sentence structure that I am teaching quickly and for free (!!) to model something, rather than trying to do it all on my own. I have had students not understand that they are having a conversation with another person and try to say both question and answer on their own because of not being able to more properly model this skill. Now, I can set up a video beforehand that students can watch to see how things are really supposed to go.

This tool has other affordances also! I can easily get the laptop cart and put the students in small groups to make their own videos, showing that they understand the material in a different way. My students have plenty of opportunities to speak in front of one another and are bored out of their minds with it. If they were watching each other's videos, I am sure they would be more interested and could have the opportunity to learn new things from each other. They would have to design their dialogue beforehand on paper, of course, which would require a lesson on designing. They would also need some way of saving the videos so we could all watch them together. I wonder if I could get headphone splitters and just have them leave the videos open on the laptops and circulate around the room watching and listening to them? That would certainly make it faster and easier than trying to save them all and open them on the computer attached to the Promethean board. Or, I could just attach each laptop directly to the Promethean board. So many possibilities...

There are so many things to think about when trying a new tool in the classroom! I have found that even with all that thought, if I talk about it with other people, they will always have a different perspective that leads me in a new direction (hey, isn't that collaboration?). Of course, I am so energetic about this stuff that I can't help but talk about it with my colleagues (and sometimes even parents).

Holy smokes! This stuff works!

I just had to post what I just received via email from a parent. To make sure you fully understand this, let me give you some background:

Our FLES program is being cut completely from 1st-3rd grades for next year and the 4th-5th grade is being reduced to only once a week, down from twice a week. We have tried as a FLES department to educate the School Board on how terrible this decision is, but we are not really getting through to them. We have a Facebook page and a petition out there too (which you are welcome to sign!) that we are trying to use to prove that people in this community are not happy with this decision.

Also, you need to know that my second unit for my practicum this semester is dealing with restaurant and food. The authentic problem I came up with (with a lot of help from Priscilla :) ) is to have the 3rd graders make videos teaching manners in restaurants for Sesame Street. So, I have started this project and the students are in HEAVEN. They are so excited, the entire school is talking about it.

So, back to how "this stuff works". I just got an email from a third grader's mother saying that she emailed the School Board in favor of FLES (she included the email and it was awesome!) and that she has signed our petition and emailed it to 30 of her friends (yay!!). She ended the message by saying:


"Thank you for all that you are doing to teach our children about the world outside of Loudoun County.   Brendan is very excited about the Sesame Street puppet show that you are working on with the class!"


This makes me think that the real reason she is being so outspoken and standing up for the program is because of the authentic learning her son is experiencing in my classroom!! I know the other part is how great of a teacher I am, of course ;). 


I hope you are as excited as I am right now!! I hope that word gets out more and parents see how an effective teacher can inspire real learning-something which we should never be removing from our schools. 


:D

Let's Go Shopping!

Over the summer, we developed an online project idea that could not use Web 2.0 ideas. My project idea was for a telefieldtrip dealing with shopping, food, and money. The idea was that anyone could submit a video to me of them giving a tour of a store and talking in their native language about the prices of things and what things are in general. They would then go through the check out and talk us through the purchase. The videos would be posted to a website for viewing only. This project was meant for all languages and age groups, so as to be more global.

Now that we can think about it in a Web 2.0 environment, I am seriously considering implementing this idea. I could very easily create a wiki that is open for public input. There would be pages for each language and then a listing of the different type of store (grocery, clothing, hardware, etc). The nice thing about it being Web 2.0 is that is would not require as much work from me, while at the same time allowing me to moderate the project to keep it age appropriate. Also, it would be search-able, which would be more difficult to do in a Web 1.0 environment. Also, people could write comments to each other. The only problem is having enough server space to keep all the videos up. To alleviate this, people could just upload them to youtube and then just link to the videos on the wiki. Creating an account with youtube and uploading a video is very easy and free! I just did it! The best part is you can set the privacy settings to make the video only available if someone has the link or if you designate them as a viewer.

This has so many applications in the classroom. Wouldn't it be cool to post a video of your students doing something and then send home the link to the parents? It would be like the parents were really there and they could see all the learning going on in your classroom. They could share the link with anyone they trust and not have to worry about the video being available to the public. Or your school could post a video of a school assembly that only the parents can view. But I digress...

The people submitting to the shopping wiki could put a short description of the video along with the link, to make it more like a resource than just a listing. I think this project could really bring people together in a different way and would make learning a foreign language and using math skills more meaningful. How cool would it be to see what stores look like in Japan or South Africa or Peru or Iran?

I hope you enjoyed the video of my cat, by the way ;) He doesn't freak out nearly as much when we put the harness on him now. That was his first experience, as you can tell.

Podcasts in Spanish....yikes!

So, this week we are thinking about podcasts and how we could use them in our classrooms. All I can think is "Yikes!!" This idea sounds like such a great idea but I have way too many questions about it (many of which are the same questions about wikis). I think that since I will be teaching secondary Spanish next year, perhaps I will be able to come up with some awesome application of wikis and podcasts for high schoolers. In elementary school, I only have 30 minutes with them; in high school I'll have 90! I am already thinking about having them create an online portfolio. I can come up with prompting questions or ideas and they will record their responses using Audacity. Then, they can post them on their wiki (or maybe we'll use blogs for that...the wiki could be a different class project). The nice thing is, theoretically, they could continue the same portfolio throughout their years in foreign language. They would certainly get to see how much they had learned throughout the years that way.

See? Now my gears are turning. That is really the problem with time. It can really destroy the best intentions of educators.

Wikis?

Wikis seem like such a great tool for the classroom according to everything I have read, but I really can't figure out how I could use it in the program I currently teach.

I guess I could have the students create a wiki for their year of Spanish, with each new page entailing the new sentence structures they had learned and new vocabulary, but that just sounds boring. And, what would be the purpose of it?

If I were teaching high school Spanish, I could probably come up with some neat ideas. One idea that comes off the top of my head is a resource for verb conjugations. It could have the rules, examples of the major verb types (-ar, -er, -ir, and irregulars). Then, it could have some real examples of the use of the each type of conjugation. For example, there would be a page about the present tense and perhaps that would be accompanied by some dialogues that naturally would use the present tense. I think this type of wiki would have a lot of use for the high schools for studying purposes and also a relearning activity. They would have to make sure they really understood the information, because they are sharing it with the entire class. I think I would try to get the teachers who got the groups after me to allow the students to expand their wikis and continue having access to them.

The problem is, I don't teach high school Spanish (yet). So how can I use wikis in the program I teach now? I think I'll have to keep thinking about this one.

Pretty cool ideas!

I can't take the credit for this one, but I wish I could! My neighbor just sent me this link that I think anyone who is thinking of starting blogs with students might enjoy. Basically, it is a list of fun services that you can use to create an avatar with your class, so you can avoid using pictures of them for safety reasons. What student will prefer their own picture to their SUPERHERO self?!? I think we all know the answer to that one. So, check it out!

The power of blogs

This past week, I got some really terrible news. The FLES program (Foreign Language in Elementary School) has been cut from grades 1-3 and downgraded to once a week for 4th-5th grades (down from twice a week). I have been doing everything I can to advocate for the program this week. Basically, I've been living the Teacher Leadership class, the game we played the first week back, and the Wiki my group chose to do (on multilingual education). So far, I have a few people moved across the board, but not far enough yet ;). So, part of our Wiki is to write a position paper, right? I decided that I really needed to tackle that one since it is so close to my heart right now. One of my group members, Lori, posted a bunch of great resources in the References section of the Wiki. I decided to start my research there. The very first one on the list was this blog! I was literally tearing up while reading it. This is definitive proof that my program should not be cut. I ended up writing to the author and hearing back from him. He is a really nice teacher in Rhode Island (as you can tell from the title of the blog) who is having to fight for their secondary French program right now. His article was such a huge help with my paper and I also sent the link to the school board and posted it on our Facebook advocacy page. I have to admit, I never really saw blogs as something that I would appreciate as much as I am right now. I hope that I will have the opportunity to write something so profound that people will tear up while reading.

Back for the last semester!

Well, we seem to have made it! It's finally the last semester of grad school. I am very happy I have done this and I wouldn't change anything (except maybe less procrastination) if I had to do it all over again. That being said, I am SSSOOOO excited to be nearly finished! So, let's hope I have some awesome stuff to talk about this semester....