So, the video process itself is coming along fine. My successes include the ideas I have for my video. I want to make it clever and informative, without it being too boring and too overloaded with information. Some of the struggles I am coming across is being able to use pictures or audio without causing any copyright issues. I am also concerned about having to do multiple "rough edits" of the video. I feel like going back and editing a video isn't as easy as going back and editing an essay. I think this problem can be avoided though by having my first draft of my video be without my vocal audio. I am in Yosemite currently staying in a Bed & Breakfast, where it is never quiet enough to record something without some sort of background noise. That part will have to get done next week. I hope everyone is doing well with their videos!
Now that we are nearing the end of our program, we are putting together the final pieces of the work we have done. The video we are going to create will be an easy lead in to learning about the work we have done. I have 90 seconds to draw peoples' attention to what I am passionate about and have channeled my energy towards for months.
If I had been asked earlier on how I felt about recording a video and putting it together with maybe music and pictures, I would have been concerned because I had never done anything like that. But during this program I have had the chance to work with someone of the online recording and video editing tools that I think have helped give me some knowledge on how to do it. I haven't done anything like this before, but I am not worried. I've put together mini lessons and recorded things. The tools we have available to us are easy to use, and have tutorials if we get stuck. I think the more challenging part will be deciding what I am going to say... As a teacher, I have only used Google Forms to take forms sent to me by others at my school or from the district. I have never actually used them in my classroom, probably because I didn't know how to make them, and that I could make them. Until now!
Building a general form was very easy! I made a basic one with questions I give to the students in my music appreciation at the beginning of the trimester. They are simple questions for me to gather information about what students already know about music, and what they are into. Normally, I print the questions out and give them to the students and they fill them out in class and turn them in. Then I am stuck with a pile of questionnaires that I usually misplace. I am excited to use Google Forms to make this process way easier! I have seen forms used when planning events and such at school, and I think it could be a good tool. With one of the add-ons I looked into, Choice Eliminator, this would be a good tool to add to the form if maybe you were planning an event and were trying to get people to bring food. If there is a list, each person can choose an item from the list, and it isn't available for someone else to choose. It is similar to gift registries in that sense. It makes a data collecting tool beneficial for other purposes. Keith Hamon's article about "Harnessing the Power of Google Forms for Just-in-Time Teaching" was a great article for beginners, and maybe even those who already use Google Forms to see a list of the many things Forms can do. I bookmarked it to go back to once school starts to get ideas! Messing around with the Add-ons for Google Forms was really interesting. For starters, I didn't know these types of additional features existed for any Google features. The ones that have been created for Forms really makes things easier on the teacher if done right. DocAppender is an awesome Add-on to increase efficiency when looking at form responses. FormLimiter can make things easier for the teacher and boost accountability for the students without giving the teacher any extra effort. Choice Eliminator is a great tool for situations where perhaps students need to sign up for things, or only one response can be taken by one student. I didn't get a chance to really play into these since it was just me messing around with the form and not a class of students. But this was good practice to see how to add the tools to the forms, thanks to the tutorial videos available. And just knowing these tools exist to save time and give more opportunities to teachers is great. I will definitely be playing with these more this year!
Before class, I knew a flipped classroom to be a type of class where students learn the content at home via instructional and interactive videos, and then practice the materials in class. This alleviates the time spent going over the material in class, and having students do it wrong at home.
I think, after reading the chapter from Bergmann and Sams' book "Flip Your Classroom", I agree that there are many benefits for students and teachers. It helps the students who miss class get the chance to learn the material. It gives students the opportunity to go back and re-listen to something the teacher said. I can see that it benefits teachers in the management part of class, because kids don't have time to get distracted while the teacher is teaching. And that it is great for teachers who are absent for kids to still get the material without having to rely on a sub trying to teach it. I think there are drawbacks to a flipped classroom. I think that although it may be beneficial for students to be able to go back and listen to something they didn't quite catch the first time, they can't ask a question if they are still confused. And if they are confused on a concept, it may be hard for them to grasp the entire lesson as a whole. Teachers also don't have the opportunity to check in with students on the concept to see how they are understanding so far. Other drawbacks include not actually being able to implement this in classrooms. I feel flipped classes work well with certain content areas, but not all. Some classes are more structured based on the needs of the students, where material needs to be covered in class. I also think it is hard to mesh with some of the PBL practices we use in NVUSD because students spend so much time doing their own research and collaborating that there isn't a high need for flipped lessons. I would not use flipped lessons in my class to help students learn because they would not work with my class and my community of students. I teach Read 180 which is a very structured and scripted program, with very little wiggle room for anything else. Also, the needs of these students are so high that we already work in small groups in class to get closer student to teacher interaction and help. They would struggle learning the material at home without being able to ask questions until class the next day. I think the only time I could find a way to use a flipped lesson is in my dance elective. I created a flipped lesson last semester where I used a video graphic to teach them how to do the moonwalk at home, so they could come into class knowing the move already, and we could just practice it instead of wasting class time showing them how to do it. |
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