Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Audio (page 1 of 2)

Photo & Audio Documentation to Support Wellness

In previous posts, I mentioned the importance of documenting one’s wellness efforts. Specifically, I wrote about recording to reflect upon exercising our character strengths within each of the PERMAH pillars. This process includes taking photos of, recording a short video, and/or voice recording descriptions of our wellness actions/activities to then be added to a school-developed wellness app or if there is a commercial Positive Psychology app that offers this functionality.

Other options include uploading the wellness in action photos, videos, and/or audio descriptions to one’s portfolio and/or to a wellness journal with provided reflection prompts if the school offers either as part of their wellness program for the community. I say community to include students, staff members, and parents. The bottom line is that, yes, we need to understand the principles of wellness. Still, even more importantly, we need to be actionable with our wellness knowledge to live and reflect upon that knowledge in our lives.

Drilling down on this documentation process, one tool we can pull from our wellness toolkit is the smartphone/tablet that is ubiquitous in our society. Whether you are engaging your strength of creativity to come up with a nutritious smoothie recipe within the H of PERMAH or you are in a flow state writing a poem within the Engagement pillar, you can take a few seconds to snap a photo and/or record a quick voice description of your action(s) to later go into your wellness app, portfolio and/or journal. 

One specific documentation effort can be part of your periodic or daily gratitude effort. Whether taking what I call a “beauty break” to take in something beautiful in your environment and/or simply thinking about a person, event, experience, etc., that brings forth grateful thoughts and emotions, you can record that moment at the moment via your device.

We definitely want to stay in those mindful moments, so the recording should be limited to a very short interruption so we can remain in the experiential state. The shadow side of this process is getting caught up in recording instead of experiencing. And, of course, if one extends the sharing to social networking, there is the positive of community support and of potentially bringing beauty into the lives of others which is countered if the effort is intended for the sake of digital likes instead of simply enjoying the P of Positive Emotions that can accompany the wellness moments. 😉

Audio Image | Photo Image

Tech Titans: Sketch- Creativity and Innovation

Sketch

The following information comes from the FCPS page listing Sketch, the Tech Titan, representing the NETS Creativity and Innovation standard. My comments are at the end of each passage.

Unique Traits

Sketch thinks outside the box, using a variety of technology tools to develop new products, processes, and ideas that solve real-world problems. She is a modern day Leonardo DaVinci, Ada Lovelace, and Thomas Edison!

My Take: Analyze this excellent drawing of Sketch to see how she pulls creation tools from her toolkit – Personal Learning System to innovate. One can see students connecting to the image when asked, “what tools do you use to create and innovate?”.

Special Skills

Sketch has a keen eye for design. She creatively selects and blends photography, music, images, colors, fonts, and other elements to express herself. She continually reflects on her work and the work of others and strategically adapts in order to improve her work.

My Take: The words “design…select…blends…express” really nail this skill listing. I cannot say enough about the importance of teaching design to our students while allowing them to choose media, blend it and express themselves. Awesome!

Digital Tools

Sketch utilizes creativity and drawing applications, programming tools, digital cameras, audio recorders, digital music creation and mixing tools, and more!

My Take: This section connects to students’ technology literacy in choosing the right tools for the task. As our students gain experience using specific tools, they gain the needed fluency to create while also being efficient with their time. Sometimes we have to work with our students who might spend too much time in the decorative phase of creating learning products. 🙂

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Students Adding Their Voice to Monuments

monument

A talking bull? In a way, yes. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, a British public art society sponsors the process of adding voice-recorded interpretations to 27 statues throughout Chicago. Writers and artists are recording two-minute monologues offering their takes on the statues.

To access the audio files, one needs to scan the QR code beside each statue (see the image to the right). So how does this connect to authentic learning for our students? I am reminded of a Grade 5 unit on the American Civil War at one of my international schools. The unit common assessment had the students apply their research to design and construct a monument around an idea to communicate the effect of an event or action.

We worked with the students to stretch themselves into more abstract thinking to not just create monuments on topics or people (e.g., Robert E. Lee’s horse). The teachers guided the students to the enduring understanding of the unit with the research and monument development offering students choice and no ceiling on creative thinking.

Returning to Chicago and my belief that we can do much more with our field trips, there are many directions we can go to empower students as researchers, reporters, documentation experts, etc., regarding field trips and museum visits. I have written several posts about this topic that you should check out.

What jumps out at me here is the personal angle provided by the artists and writers in Chicago. We can plan field trips to have students research monuments and museum exhibits to provide factual audio recordings. This is fine. But we can move further up Bloom’s Taxonomy to have students process the facts and respond to carefully crafted questions to elicit more conceptual thinking and personal responses.

Teachers can develop a blended approach to this process by building out a website or sharing a Google Document listing monuments or exhibits for students to review online with provided links to follow to learn more. Students then could choose a monument or exhibit to research. Upon completion of their work outside of class, class time could then be set aside to prompt and guide students to think personally about their monument/exhibit to respond to questions to move into more abstract thinking.

One could then go in several directions. Students could write up a script and audio record their insights. The sound files could be uploaded to the teacher’s Website/Goo Doc so that when the field trip occurs, the students could use their mobile devices to listen to their classmates as they view each monument/exhibit. Another direction is to have students design their interpretation of what they think the monument/exhibit should look, sound, and feel like. Who knows? This is one where the students engaging their imaginations could lead to creative expressions of understanding.

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Communicating Understanding and Documenting Student Learning

screencast

Our First and Second Graders recently completed projects using ScreenChomp to create screencasts on their iPads. The learning goal for the students was to reflect to communicate their responses to the essential questions from the units of inquiry they were completing. A big challenge was representing their thinking about their learning visually and communicating their answers to the questions in their second language (French, Spanish, or Dutch).

The First Graders responded to the following questions from the People Around the World unit.

  • What is my daily life like?
  • How is my life similar to the lives of children in other countries?
  • How is my life different from the lives of children in other countries?

The Second Graders responded to the following questions from the Weather unit.

  • What is the weather?
  • What makes the weather change?
  • How does weather affect people’s lives?

Here is an example of one student’s screencast.

Screencasting to Communicate Understanding

Spine Label

It is so crucial for our First and Second Graders at Washington International School to be skilled in knowing how to find books. Classes are constantly entering and leaving the library, which has collections in four languages. The library staff gives extra care to help students find books in their first and second languages, but there are only sometimes enough of them to help each young student. Plus, the students simply need to learn how to find books independently. For this reason, our Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) curriculum includes several lessons to teach the students how to use the online catalog to find books of interest then find on the shelves.

Doris Clingman, library assistant, and I team teach many of the ICL lessons to our First and Second graders, including an assessment task when we use Screenchomp to have students record their understanding of the spine label on various books (see image above). Here is an example in Spanish of two Second Graders and an example by First Graders in French explaining what they see when looking at the call numbers of English, French, and Spanish books.

Teacher Created Online Language Books

Book

One of the many things I am learning in a multilingual school is that finding digital resources for language learning can be a struggle. One way around this difficulty is, of course, to create our own.

A natural leader at the WIS primary school in developing and using digital tools is Rebecca Courouble. She is a French Pre-K teacher. I marvel at her Moodle and class Shutterfly websites. Rebecca uses Moodle as a resource repository for her students and their parents. It has links to learning websites, audio files, videos, etc.

Several years ago, Rebecca started to create her reading/listening books using iPhoto. She produced video books and posted them to the Web with links to them on her Moodle site. Pictures of each book page appear with her voice reading the pages. It is a beautiful way for her students to hear French while “reading” books.

Here is an example of one of Rebecca’s readings.

Support Reading Fluency with Audio Recording (Toolkit Tip)

I met with our two third-grade teachers, looking at upcoming units where our ICL curriculum might help students reach the learning goals for each unit. One request dealt with how to help students in their reading fluency. This request reminded me of how Ben Hart, a third-grade teacher I worked with in Hong Kong, used Audacity to improve reading and speaking fluency for his students. Here is what I wrote on our HKIS Teacher Toolkit Best Practices website.

Audacity can also be used to help students with their reading fluency. Have them record their reading of different books throughout the year. This stored portfolio of MP3s can also be used for individual reflection and peer review. Peers, after listening to a recording, can then record their comments and suggestions back into the student’s reading folder. It is helpful to develop a short list of questions and vocabulary that students can use as scaffolding to understand better what makes for good fluency in reading.

Mimi Worrell, one of our third-grade teachers, then built upon Ben’s idea as she proposed that we have her students not only follow Ben’s learning activity but also look to share their newly recorded audiobooks with our younger students. This hook is strong as we already have a buddy system in place with our Middle School students mentoring our youngest students. Our third graders will enjoy being the elder buddies now that they are much older than the kindergarten students. 🙂

 

Publishing Moguls and Electronic Textbooks

Project-iPad-Only-Magazine

I wrote a post back in April about my hope that further advancements would occur in digital textbook creation, as well as the need for information brokers to provide services to help teachers develop their electronic textbooks. Recent news of Richard Branson and Rupert Murdock’s efforts to publish magazines and daily newspapers constructed just for the Apple iPad (and I am guessing eventually other tablets) has me hoping their efforts will break new ground for digital textbook companies. The key is to develop a format that takes advantage of the Web connectivity of the device as well as the multimedia playing functions to make the “reading” of the text much more multimodal and immersive.

While electronic textbooks have been around for some time, the iPad’s efforts to publish for it will further the discussion and possibly push for some innovation. The November 2010 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology has a point/counterpoint debate over digital textbooks. I would add to the discussion the points I made in my April post about teachers being empowered to create their e-textbooks to move past the current commercial textbook publishers, thus supporting Michael Cody’s point that online resources provide far richer resources than static, one-size-fits-textbooks.

It would be nice to combine the online resources, audio/visual media sources, and teacher-crafted text sources in a textbook individualized for reading levels, content background, etc., so students can have their “textbook” on whichever device they choose.

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Voice Recording (Instructional Strategy)

I have written in a few venues about using voice recording software like Audacity or GarageBand to support learning. Working with my 12th-grade IB history students, I discovered a new strategy to fit the needs of these students who have to document their learning to study for the external exams and to help them have one more way to construct their understanding.

I am having my students take the topic list, essential questions, and unit questions for our study of the Interwar years and have them voice-record their current understanding of each. This should help those students who struggle to get their ideas down from their minds through their fingers into Word documents. It should also offer another modality to support their efforts to take notes and outline. I will be interested in surveying when students review for their external exams to see how helpful it will be for them to listen to their sound files.

I keep reminding them that with six area exams, they will be on information overload trying to put two years of learning into their minds this Spring. The more they can hear their calm, confident voice recordings before they take their exams, the more they will quickly remember and connect to their past learning. 🙂

Visual & Audio Immersion

Do you want to “hook” your students into your topic of study? How about immersing them in the images and discussions of your subject? While we use bulletin boards for images to display information about our units of study, how about also displaying information digitally? You can create a slide show to run continuously on your classroom television, projector & screen, and classroom computers to surround your students with images from the unit you are studying. An example would be to show people, architecture, art, food, social scenes, etc., for a social studies unit. As inquiry-driven educators, we want to put those hooks out there to lead our students to pursue answers to their questions.

With so many recordings of famous speeches and podcasts on many topics, it also works to download the files when possible or set the home page in your classroom browsers to have direct links to podcasts that tie into the subject matter. If you are a 1:1 laptop school, look to create a Web page with podcast links, images, and research links for your students to add as a tab to their browser home pages.

An excellent source for images and screensaver software is Webshots. Download their slide show presenter and add images from their vast photo database to construct a show that fits your curriculum needs. Remember to check out their community pages, where Webshot members share their best shots for you to download. Also, consider challenging students to find more images or draw their own (think literature lessons where students draw pictures of characters and scenes) to be added to the collection.

Cheers to Mike Lambert for starting this practice many years ago in my son’s classroom. 🙂

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