Remote Elementary and Secondary Teaching

It's been awhile so forgive me for the long post but I feel I have to write something in the age of Zoom and remote emergency teaching because I am hearing a lot of horror stories coming from parents about what has been sent home and how much screen time students at all grade levels are being asked to consume. About children crying, about parents crying and teachers too.

So let's all start by taking a deep breath. And then just read and breathe.

1) Online/remote emergency teaching is not going to mirror classroom teaching ever. So don't even think it will.

2) As a teacher, if you are relying on old lessons plans that you've used for years, stop. While the material might be solid the delivery method isn't. Forget worksheets, fill in the blank and colouring sheets.

3) How long are you expecting your students from Grade K-12 to be online? Here is a visual guide for the amount of screen time students should be consuming from all media. And you are now, as a teacher using online teaching, part of the time usage for consumed media. So don't expect to lecture for three hours to students and expect them to absorb this information. It's not going to happen.

4) Students are on lockdown. They are worried and they are scared. Their parents are worried and they are scared. And you are worried and scared. Remember everybody's emotional and mental health in this time.

So what are you going to do to deliver the curriculum?

1) Remember nested units? These are your friend. A little more complicated to deliver but much easier to have students work at from home. My advice? Nest art or ICT curriculum into every activity. Most students will find it easier to complete this way. Why art? Art actually has a huge amount of procedure and technique involved in developing competence. ICT curriculum is the same. And what is easiest to teach online? Procedure based tasks. So hang all work off of procedural based tasks. Remember when a student creates a video or audio recording of an assignment this requires creative thinking, problem solving and the understanding of procedure on their part.

2) If you are going to teach online create no more than 5 minutes of video of what you want students to learn. Show an actual example and walk your students through the procedure/task/concept you want them to master. Use lots of pictures, examples and diagrams. Send up a follow up email with all of the tasks you want then to do listed so if they didn't understand the visual /audio cues in the video, they have it in text form. If this is high school coordinate with your fellow teachers as to when an assignment is due so as not to overload anyone. Why do this rather than face to face through Zoom? Online meeting are exhausting both physically and mentally for both you and your students. By creating online videos and or PDFs this allows students and parents to make the decision on what time is right for them to do classroom work according to their schedule. And it means the student can review the video or text over and over again.

3) Use the time you were supposed to be teaching in a classroom to make one on one connections with your students and parents. Where are they having problems? Is there anything you can clarify? Be available by email, Skype or Google Hangout. Zoom unfortunately has privacy issues. Make a weekly or bi-weekly calendar and have parents and older students sign up for a 5 to 10 minute chat. Make sure you contact every student if only just to check in and maintain the bonds you have already forged.

4) Be creative. But there are lots of teacher created videos and material on the web. Not everything has to be created by you. You need to be kind to yourself too.

5) Take advantage of online supports that already exist. For instance, the National Writing Project in the USA is celebrating National Poetry Month in April.  The poetry prompts start April 6th. In Canada, Indigenous Arts and Stories provides resources for teachers at all grade levels. There are tons of great resources just waiting for you.

6) Use this time to master a few online tools that will make your life easier. Where I learned a lot of the tools I currently use now was here and here. Seven years later I am still using many of the tools that were taught in these two courses and I am still in communication with many of these brilliant people. When you look at the list of who put these courses together some of the best educational thinkers today were way ahead of the curve. It wasn't just mastering the technology, but showing how to incorporate it into my practice that was so useful. It's okay to try and fail with this stuff, because it is how we all learn.

7) Embrace the online design experience. To teach online content you need to be very clear in your own mind about what the outcome is to be. What do you want the students to learn? Good online design means thinking about what you want to achieve first, then how are you going to measure that achievement and then creating the content that will get students to the place they need to be. It will actually improve your face to face classroom teaching when you get back.

And if your stuck? Don't know what to do or how to do it? Sign up on Twitter. And then post a tweet to someone in the #etmooc #clmooc world. A Great Teacher will get back to you soonest and help. I know. I reach out to them all the time.

Be safe and stay at home. 

Books is Making Me Stupid

Confession time: I still haven't watched the video for topic #4. Instead I made a video on, you guessed it, "Books is Making Me Stupid." The title seemed appropriate.

Since the question/statement has been rattling around in my brain all week I started to write some thoughts down (walking the dog is my time for clarifying thoughts!) I then recorded it using Audacity and hunted around on Freesound for some background music. But none of the music matched the rhythm of what I had sung. So I just started looking for jazz instrumentals that had an underlying beat. I played the music, while I spoke the song. It's not perfect (there is some squealing in the background which came from I know not where) but overall I was pretty pleased with it. You'll notice that the final is different from the original.

Now there are some things I wanted to do differently in terms of the images I chose, but two things happened: a Windows 8.1 upgrade (yuck!) and sheer laziness. (I just didn't want to be bothered hunting around for software that strips the sound off the video and leaves me the video alone, I always seem to pick up a virus, it was late, I was tired, Windows was hurting my brain, yada, yada, yada.) So instead I just went to Goodreads, plugged in the different words, picked a book that tickled my fancy and just worked on the timings in Movie Maker. For the videos I just went online (I knew I was going to use a still from Zoolander), except for the last clip of Mariana Funes, who graciously sent it to me so I could work on a zombie video. I was having trouble finding the steamed image, when I remembered how wispy Mariana's video was and decided to use a chunk for my video. Thanks goodness for my time in DS106 that gave me some background in making a video!

So here's my final product. As always, the video seems to look and sound so much better in Movie Maker. In YouTube the music in the background is fainter. Oh well.

The Headless Waltz

In keeping with the Headless theme I have used Movie Maker to create a small movie. Please remember that I am one of the few people who have not succumbed to the lure of Apple so I have no iPad, iPod or any iEquipment. I also have the distressing tendency to use freeware wherever possible.
So I made my first gif a few days ago and I have received some great feedback. Thank you so much! I decided to keep on with my headless theme (and also because Halloween is coming!) Now this movie was quite time consuming to do (time has no meaning in DS106), not so much because of the level of intricacy required (though the sound was tricky) but because of the amount of videos I had to watch to find snippets for the movie. I found the Headless Horseman Disney track first and used that as my base. Disney was a master of background art and it really shows as you watch the forest as the movie unwinds. I then added the sound track. It was only at the end of the production that I noticed that somehow the last 3 seconds of the song had been loped off when I downloaded it. I could have accidentally removed it while I was working on the movie for all I know. I ended up downloading the song again, editing it in Audacity and adding it to the end of the movie. You can hear where it doesn't quite mesh. The Victorian photographs I found here. The Victorians really were a gruesome lot.

As I was working on it, I was wishing that I had constructed it differently, particularly as the sound proved so difficult to balance. If I was redoing this movie, I would strip the sound off of each piece of video prior to adding it to the movie or I would have picked an instrumental soundtrack so that the sound from each segment of video could have been heard above the music. I also ended up inadvertantly doing a lot of research on Marie Antoinette which is why you see two pictures of her. Believe it or not, the naughty picture is the first one! Very interesting reading (and probably why this took soooooo long.)

The part I like the best in the movie? Where the crickets look like they are rubbing their legs in time to the music. If I was redoing this, I would cut the movie so that every time the violins start the crickets would be rubbing their legs. Cricket music!

Sound

So  I've been playing with sound over the last few days. It has been a little frustrating partially because tools and devices that worked when a tutorial was built in 2008 or 2010 or 2012 may not be as useful as they once were due to the ever changing nature of software. It seems if you don't use a program regularly it may be completely unfamiliar when you open it again. So I have used Audacity before, but it has changed a bit so I did have to play around with it a little. Soundcloud was an issue because I needed to redo my password. And stripping an existing video of an image but keeping the sound will have to wait until later tonight. (Thanks everyone for the help and suggestions!)

I am very pleased to have gotten my DS106 Radio Bumper done. I do like this song by the Heifervescents. I've used it before. I like the beat, the lyrics and the ahahahah. I did use a tutorial to help with the process. Originally I thought I would have to do an overdub but instead I used a narration tutorial which was a much easier process. I recorded my voice, trimmed it using the cut tool, amplified it and then added the track after I had cut it down too. I ended up cutting out the ahahahahs. I then used the time shift key to move my voice track to where I wanted it and then used the envelope key to soften the background music. I may have softened it too much. I also don't like the way I said asleep but I can live with it for now. Off to strip a video!