Ms. Galland’s Advanced Placement Language and Composition class read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, analyzing how a moneylender named Shylock demands repayment from a debtor named Antonio. Shylock asks that Antonio repay him his 3000 ducats with a “pound of flesh” as promised in the verbal contract they agreed on.

The AP students held a mock trial in class before George Galland, who is an attorney in Chicago. Mr. Galland played the role of judge over Skype. The plaintiffs used legal opinions, evidence from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and other web sites and articles documenting the climate and laws in Elizabethan England to present and defend their cases. Mr. Galland decided in favor of the defendant, but was very impressed with the preparation, presentations, textual citation and courtroom performances of all the AP students.

Acknowledgment: Hilary Galland helped author this post.

After the initial recording session, the 8th graders reviewed their videos while making notes about their presentation skills. Whether it was poor eye contact, low voice output or killer smiles, the students found themselves facing undeniable evidence of their weaknesses and strengths as public speakers.

We could have used a camcorder and had the students take turns presenting but this would mean taking time to transfer footage from the camera to each student’s laptop. Students would also spend even more time sitting and watching classmates present when they could practice themselves and get immediate evidence of their progress. While we do set aside time for whole grade practice sessions, we are hoping that our version of the valuable technique of videotaping presentations will help our many ESL students not only feel more comfortable in their speaking but will push them to practice more on their own.

A coinciding use of the MacBooks is taking place in our 7th grade Language Arts class where Thomas Perkins has his students constructing a presentation skills rubric. The students first worked to create the rubric on paper. Now they are “laptop” videotaping themselves presenting for each of the criteria at the different score levels. Score a “4 out of 4” on the teaching rubric for Thomas in having his students engaging and learning about presentation skills by using thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Thomas also gets bonus points for using technology to support and enhance the learning.

This was first posted at U Tech Tips.

How connected are your students, teachers and parents to the mission statement and student learning outcomes of your school? We often spend a great deal of time working in committees developing these guiding documents but fail in our efforts to communicate and embed them into our school cultures. Sometimes the sharing is little more than placing copies of our mission statements and learning outcomes on classroom walls. This really doesn’t slice it in our media rich world. Our students’ brains want a much richer media format that can start discussions, develop ownership and build understanding.

Much like our efforts to integrate technology and various literacy skills into the curriculum, we need to think about ways to combine technology and learning to deliver our respective schools’ mission statements and student learning outcomes into the classrooms and out into the larger school community. One idea is to pull together a team of students to go through the video production process to create videos that paint the picture of the mission statement from a student perspective. This real world, project-focused effort can be done at each school division involving the usual steps that go into videography production.

Multiple intelligences come into play as student teams apply their language arts skills to storyboard, write the scripts and contact the “talent” for each of the scenes. Roles for actors, camera people, director, music creation and video editors are also assigned.

Once the videos are produced, they need to be shared in as many possible venues as possible. Play them on your closed circuit TV system along with your normal student news shows. Post the videos to your school Web site and make sure you have links on your prospective parent and employee pages as well. Also, think about getting your school leaders to add the videos to their blogs. Ask them to post about their plans and actions to move the school community towards making the mission and student learning outcomes a focus in how decisions are made.

Strong connections are made with the viewers due to the social and visual nature of our brains. Students want to see the work of their video producing classmates and we know they really connect to images over text any day. They also will see the mission statement as more meaningful when explained by fellow classmates and teachers. You probably will find more success with your elementary students interviewing adults to explain the various segments of your school’s mission statement and/or student learning outcomes. As you move up in divisions, the students can take on more independence interviewing each other as well as adults or work to create scenes that depict their own interpretations of what the mission and learning outcomes look like.

To get you started with an example, here is a link to one of a five part video series created by Mrs. Brings’ Third grade class to promote the Hong Kong International School’s mission statement. It is a streaming WMV file so hopefully your media player can handle it.

Service & Global Understanding

Note: This story was originally posted at U Tech Tips.

Here are links to resources to help you learn more about Mathcasts:

Introduction to Mathcasts home page
What a Mathcast looks like
A Directory of Mathcasts by grade level
How to get started

Patty O’Flynn shared how she is using Mathcasts with HS students. Check out her blog on mathcasts.

The Mathcasts I looked at centered around pen and number drawing on the screen with voiceovers. Looking to expand on this especially with one’s more lateral thinking students, think about challenging students to find other ways to use visuals to teach the skill or concept. I can see story telling students illustrating their voiceover using cartoon characters dealing with situations that involve the use of math. It might be a reach but for older students, the TV show “Numb3rs” is a big hit that uses math to solve mysteries. They might find themselves as actors in their own Mathcast drama! It is all about making connections and application to new situations to really reach profound understanding with total student engagement.

We as parents often end up with poorly recorded video or images that are not close up enough to really show the child. As we usually recorded concerts, plays, etc. at my last school, we were able to connect the video camera into the sound system for excellent audio quality support by video professionally shot. The recorded video was burned to DVD and given to the teachers for their personal copy of the various performances. We did not make copies for a larger audience. I did start thinking about what a service it would be to give or possibly sell these DVDs to parents for their enjoyment in the future and to give them more time at student presentations to really be there with their children as opposed to trying to document it with their cameras.

Our music teachers began to request that I come to their dress rehearsals to get close up photos of their students in action. I would then post the images to our school gallery site for easy download by parents. This turned out to be an easy way to support the community with minimum effort.

One of my concerns in using technology is what I call the “fluff factor”. We see it sometimes in the classroom when students spend hours on Kidpix style creations or videos are made for Parent Night aimed to entertain parents as opposed to share student learning. Thus, I swayed back and forth a bit about putting in hours to record and edit videos for the sake of “keeping the parents happy” which comes up from time to time in much of what directs our efforts in schools. There is clearly a difference in videotaping a student sharing her learning and supporting that effort as opposed to supporting the misuse of technology when we use it to allow the fluff factor to take up valuable student learning time during the school day.

Our AV specialist at my last school was one very busy person so it definitely was not worth all the time it would take him to produce videos of performances unless we could figure a way to tie that time back into student learning. It would take away from his effort to support real learning in the classrooms. The same goes for my time in editing the video.

At my new school they have been recording not just student performances but PD presentations, guest speakers, etc. as a way to document and then share learning opportunities. I, in fact, recently watched a classroom presentation by an MIT professor on genetics that is a part of the archive saved by the school AV specialist Glenn Wolfe. These recordings of student performances are then put up for sale directly to parents. The way Glenn brings the effort back to student learning is to take the profits from the sales to then buy video and audio hardware that goes directly into the hands of the students for their learning.

I think Glenn has come up with a reasonable solution for supporting the community giving parents professionally created recordings while supporting learning by using the profits to purchase equipment. The line still needs to be drawn on what is worthwhile to be recorded. This can put the IT professional in a difficult position especially when the “but parents love it” argument is used when one is being asked to videotape students for parental entertainment purposes (learning is not being shared) or possibly for misguided assessment efforts where time is wasted recording something that doesn’t have an audience or purpose. I still have a cautious attitude if the recording and editing is a constant effort by school personnel. Maybe one answer is to hire an out of school production company to do the work to cover the main performances. Balance is the key.

The think-pair-share instructional strategy can be very helpful in this situation. After showing a short clip, give the students a few moments to record their thought on paper or in digital form if they have laptops. This is a terrific opportunity to use a concept mapping tool like Inspiration, Cmap, Mindmeister or Bubbl. The teacher could start the lesson by prompting the students with the central concept/idea being covered by the video that the students then place in the center of their maps. Each clip then becomes a new symbol from which the students branch out their ideas.

The class then moves on to watch all the clips stopping at the end of each to record their individual reactions. Once all the media is shared, the students then work with a partner to share what they recorded in their maps. They would also record any thoughts that come from their conversations. The maps could then be used by the teacher in several ways to deepen or connect the learning some place else. The teacher definitely has an assessment to check for understanding to see if he/she met the learning goal for the lesson.

The videos we watched were chosen by students who went into the Safari system with their assigned topics to then create playlists with title slides introducing each segment creating a sort of mashup. I liked that this was a student-centered activity and that it gave students the opportunity to work on the information literacy and communication (ICL) skills of reviewing content and then generating a cohesive presentation from it. When we think of specific ICL skills we focus on the accessing and analysis of the information but we also need to teach how to compile the information from the various media sources into a well-designed and communicated format.