This week, personal and university assessment related time constraints meant that I couldn’t look at the material for Week 5 until later in the week. When I saw that this week focused on presentation tools and specifically PowerPoint, I felt relieved. I have used PowerPoint on many occasions so I thought that I would be able to produce the evidence of technical skill required and talk about the technical features of the program very easily. Needless to say, my exploration into PowerPoint and the use of it as a multimedia authoring tool did not go to plan and I was challenged, frustrated and inspired all at once. Prior to this week, my experience with PowerPoint has been purely as a presentation tool to support oral presentations. In this sense, it is a functional, practical and universal platform where a number of slides can be loaded with key points or information to support the author’s presentation. It can also be shared afterwards as take home notes. This week, I was challenged to use PowerPoint in a different way. I was challenged to think about how I could use it to engage contemporary learners, to target the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and to use it to redefine learning experiences in the classroom. I chose to create a two part experience to try a number of new tools. The first part of my example is a video presentation in which I created a number of information slides and embedded an audio file to accompany the text. The second part of my example was an interactive quiz based upon the content in the video to test the student’s comprehension of the knowledge.
To begin my exploration, I carried out tasks I had done numerous times. I set up a new Presentation and formatted the blank slides. PowerPoint provides a myriad of formatting options; background colours, themes, text colours, fonts, effects and layouts. If a student has formatted a Microsoft Word document, then they would be easily able to create and format a PowerPoint presentation. The functions are set out in the same way and are very similar. PowerPoint provides a handy option of applying some functions such as background, themes and layouts to all of the slides in a presentation at once rather than having to amend each individual slide. This is time saving as well as enabling the author to achieve a consistent looking presentation. I added my content into the presentation and then started to set up the animations for each slide. Depending on the extent of animation required, this can be time consuming. The slides can be further enhanced by adding images, shapes, charts and tables. It is also possible to embed objects such as Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, Adobe Acrobat files or other PowerPoint presentations. Videos and audio can also be added which can assist in building engagement with the learning tool. Adding audio to my presentation is where I encountered my main issue with this task. I initially used the Record Audio option in the PowerPoint menu bar and the microphone on my laptop, however upon listening back to my recording, I was not happy with the quality of it. There was lots of background static and it would have been distracting to play alongside the content. I re-recorded the audio using my phone and then emailed the audio file to my laptop. When I attempted to insert the audio, PowerPoint alerted me to the fact that the audio wasn’t in the correct file type. After correcting this using an online converter, I finally managed to get the audio into my presentation. At this point, you can either choose to have the audio running across all of the slides or you can trim the audio on each slide to reflect the slide’s content. I initially set mine up the latter way. I split the audio file across each individual slide and set my timings accordingly. Once set up though, I encountered some issues in the way it played back so decided to re-do the audio so that it played across all of the slides. This allowed me to achieve the outcome I was after. At this point, I embedded the presentation into my blog using authorSTREAM. Once it had loaded, I played it back but to my dismay the timings of the audio file and the animations did not match up as they did when I set them in PowerPoint. After numerous attempts to rectify this, I found information on the authorSTREAM website which informed me that “We do have sync problem in some cases. We are working to fix the problem”. (authorSTREAM, 2010) This is disappointing and raises a possible issue with embedding PowerPoint into a website. Political Parties PowerPoint
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In the second example I created, I explored using hyperlinks to create a quiz and assess the student’s knowledge from the first example. I found this very easy to set up as I used text boxes to create the ‘button’s’ and then use the ‘Action’ function to hyperlink the buttons to the relevant slides. I was very happy with the result and I feel like an interactive quiz created on PowerPoint could be a very useful formative assessment tool to use with students. It is fun to use for the students and would enable them to access the quiz as many times as they need to in order to revise.
Due to the offline nature of PowerPoint, it does not raise any safety issues for student use in the classroom. Internet access is not required and therefore students are not exposed to inappropriate material or commenting from outside members of the community. Students can easily reference their work when creating a PowerPoint presentation as they can include a reference page at the end or reference images etc. on each relevant slide.
Because of the many ways that PowerPoint can be used, I believe it is an asset in the classroom and can effectively be used to target all the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy: from knowledge through to evaluation. As an easy to use tool, students can use it as a multimedia creation program and it can become high end digital pedagogy which is integral to the learning experience. When considering both Bloom’s Taxonomy and the SAMR Model, PowerPoint could be used in the following ways in the classroom:
In conclusion, PowerPoint is easy to use and widely available and is a tool that presents a variety of options for use in the classroom in ways that will target higher order thinking and high level digital pedagogy. REFERENCES authorSTREAM. (2010). Converting ppt to video. Retrieved from http://www.authorstream.com/Forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=201 Jones, A.M. (2003). The use and abuse of PowerPoint in Teaching and Learning in the Life Sciences: A Personal Overview. Retrieved from https://www.csun.edu/~vceed002/ref/presentation/powerpoint/powerpoint_use_abuse.pdf
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I must admit that the materials this week overwhelmed me and I was unsure if I was going to have enough time to complete the work and present my blog post. While images, audio and video are not new concepts to me, the notion of actually creating these seemed unachievable. I chose to more thoroughly investigate videos for this week’s task as I am very interested in how they can be used in the classroom to not only reflect higher order thinking but how they can improve engagement of the students with the activity. Videos are not new to the classroom; in fact, I can remember when I was at high school, a TV on a stand would be wheeled to the front of the room and a cheesy, overacted educational clip would play. It was merely being used as a substitute for the teacher delivering the content themselves. After exploring a variety of video creation and sharing tools this week, I can see that video is now able to be used in a transformative way which really does target the synthesis and evaluation levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
I spent time on three video creators this week – Flipgrid, Powtoon and the YouTube video editing pages. I am going to provide an overview of both Flipgrid and the YouTube video editing tools as I see a lot of learning potential with both of these. Flipgrid Flipgrid enables a teacher to create a ‘grid’ and then to add topics to the grid. By using a unique grid code or topic code, students are able to access the grid and/or topic and post a video in response. Flipgrid can be easily used on any device (I used it on both my laptop and my mobile phone) and use of its basic functions are free. From a teacher’s perspective, the interface is extremely user friendly. When setting up the grid, there are a variety of options for teachers to select which allow customization of privacy settings and notification settings.
These settings would be helpful in ensuring the student’s safety on the internet while the moderation of responses option would allow the teacher to vet any new videos for inappropriate material. The dashboard page provides the teacher with a quick snapshot of student engagement with the grid which would be helpful in ensuring all students are participating. The free version of Flipgrid could be used very effectively in the classroom, but for an annual fee, there are some fantastic tools that are unlocked. Once the teacher has set up their portion, students are able to record a video on any device and upload it as a response to the topic. I set up the page using my laptop but recorded my response video on my phone. It was exceptionally simple to download the app, enter the unique code and then record my video. The short video time (90 seconds for the free version) would encourage students to be succinct in their answers and to order their thoughts and ideas logically. Students can review their video before they post it and can re-record easily if need be. Students can also access the topic and watch other videos that have been submitted. One of the main issues I see with this type of tool is copyright and how students appropriately reference ideas or quotes. There doesn’t seem to be any way of attaching notes to an uploaded video and a 90 second video doesn’t allow enough time for the addition of a verbal reference. With the ability to password protect the page and also for the teacher to moderate submissions, I am quite confident that the students could use this tool quite safely and ethically. The link to my Flipgrid is below:
YouTube Video Editing
I also spend some time investigating how to use the YouTube video editing tools. To begin, I recorded a video on my mobile phone. It would also be possible to record using the webcam of a laptop or a tablet device. I encountered some issues transferring the video from my phone to my laptop. Initially the video was too large to email so I compressed the video hoping this would fix the issue. Again, it was still too large to email. At this point, I realized that I had the YouTube app on my phone so could upload directly to YouTube using this. This worked perfectly and then when I accessed my YouTube account on my laptop, the videos were there. Depending on the type of devices being used to record the video, this uploading issue would definitely need consideration for a classroom situation. I found this editor quite simple to navigate around. It has an Audio Library page which contains a huge amount of free music and sound effects. Some of the audio tracks require a statement referencing the author in the video description and some don’t. This tool would be very helpful for students so they could ensure that they weren’t infringing on copyright while they were creating their video. I was able to add an audio track to play over the top of my video as well as adding text and a still photo. Initially, I couldn’t work out how to make my ‘Week 4’ text disappear after a certain amount of time. After some trial and error, I found the ‘split clip here’ tool which enabled me to make a break in the video and delete the text from a certain point. This tool would be very useful for cutting together content from different videos. The Editor also allows you to add filters, adjust the brightness and also add slow motion to your video. Once I had finished editing, I created the video and it was published to my channel. I was then able to easily embed my newly edited video into my blog.
I’m sure that there are other video editor programs available that have more functions and abilities, but I found the YouTube editor to be easy to learn, easy to navigate and I was happy with the overall quality of the video. There are however, some issues that I see with using the YouTube video editor. One is that to use it you must sign in with an email address. If every student signed in with their own email address, it would be impossible for the teacher to ensure their online safety. One possibility would be to have a class Gmail account and a class logon which all students would use. This way the teacher could monitor the videos being edited and also ensure that the settings are set to private to protect the students from unwanted outside commentary. As a teacher, I would also be concerned that instead of working on their videos, students were looking up and watching inappropriate YouTube videos. That behavior would be difficult to monitor and is a safety and ethical concern for the teacher to consider.
As I have previously discussed, learning activities which link closely with Productive Pedagogical principals will ensure that students are engaged and learning outcomes are achieved. (Reflection 2.2) It has been noted that “the creative challenge of using moving images and sound to communicate a topic is indeed engaging and insightful, … it also enables students to acquire a range of transferable skills …these include research skills, collaborative working, problem solving, technology and organization skills." (Bijnens, 2006) When considering both Bloom’s Taxonomy and the SAMR Model, videos could be used in the following ways:
In conclusion, I have found that videos can be used in a highly effective manner in the classroom. The various video creation tools available ensure that the technology is not only accessible and easy to use, but relevant and effective in the classroom. REFERENCES
In three short weeks, my views and ideas about ICT in the classroom have evolved rapidly. Three weeks ago, I considered using a PowerPoint presentation to convey information about a topic or using an app to deliver a multiple choice quiz to students, highly effective ways of using ICT in the learning environment. I understood that my learners would be students of the 21st Century in that they would be global minded and technologically savvy communicators, however, I didn’t understand how far teaching has progressed in order to support and engage these new learners. Teachers are now expected to be the coordinator of a learner-centered classroom which facilitates collaboration between students and teachers and uses technology in an innovative way to encourage students to analyse, evaluate and deepen their knowledge of the content. (Palmer, 2015) With this in mind, it was with great interest that I explored Wikispaces to determine its functionality and to establish how it could be used in a transformative way which would support higher order thinking and deep knowledge.
Before signing up to Wikispaces, the only experience I had with wikis was accessing Wikipedia. I knew that any Internet user could access and edit information contained in a wiki but I was interested to learn its possibilities, its limitations and how learning activities could be set up and monitored within this space. I found the initial set up of my wiki to be quite straightforward. (My wiki can be found at http://carlyrobbins.wikispaces.com/Page+1) I set my wiki up as a classroom environment as the news feed on the homepage would enable me to add a variety of projects and activities to the Wikispaces page and enable students to click through to the appropriate learning experience. I found the formatting capabilities to be quite basic however definitely enough to be able to set up the pages in a clear and concise manner. I practiced setting up extra pages on the wiki, linking with hyperlinks, adding text to the page and embedding videos and pictures. I discovered it was also possible to embed a variety of other things such as Google Documents, calendars and tables. I found that it was easy to learn the functions and capabilities of the space as the menus were clear and it was easy to keep editing the document until I achieved the outcome I was after. Once I had set my wiki up, I looked into the privacy settings of the space to determine who would be able to view and make changes to the work. I was able to establish that there are a variety of privacy settings that can be used for a wiki. I chose to select ‘Protected’ which means that even though my wiki is public, only members of the wiki can edit pages. I think that this would be ideal setting for a classroom, as the students could be added as members of the wiki page and thus access the edit function while keeping the page public would enable parents or guardians to access the page to stay connected to their child’s learning. I found the ability to track changes and also each member’s engagement with the page to be very interesting tools which I think would assist a teacher in ensuring that all students were participating in the task. During my exploration, I identified a number of areas that might need careful management to ensure that the wiki is used effectively. These include:
I believe a wiki can be used in the classroom to walk students through the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy – from knowledge right through to evaluation. When considering both Bloom’s Taxonomy and the SAMR Model, a wiki could be used in the following ways:
In conclusion, the time I have spent creating my wiki has been beneficial to me in that I am more confident now in my ability to create learning activities based upon technology which not only supports but becomes integral to the experience and fosters higher order thinking and collaboration amongst the students. REFERENCE LIST: Palmer, T. (2015). 15 Characteristics of a 21st-Century Teacher. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/15-characteristics-21st-century-teacher Australia Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2016). 7-10 Civics and Citizenship. Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/humanities-and-social-sciences/civics-and-citizenship/curriculum/7-10?layout=1#level9 |
AuthorMy name is Carly. I'm currently studying a Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching (Secondary) through Central Queensland University. ArchivesCategories |