Category: events/conferences

I know this is a great tool and while it is greater for online classes, it is also good for hybrid classes. This was a hands-on workshop that lasted two hours.

Can you feel it? Enhancing social presence, personalization and community with Voicethread

Presenter: Michelle Pacansky-Brock; CSU, East Bay
Handouts could be downloaded from: http://mpbreflections.blogspot.com

Objectives: to evaluate VT’s effectiveness for fostering social presence, personalization and community in online learning and to demonstrate how to use it.

How do you engage your students in this personalized, interconnected, digital world they live in? are they engaged here in class? Am I really reaching them? In Blackboard, she felt she was very limited and could not do things she wanted to do. The challenge was to teach visually regardless of what we were teaching. No matter what she did they were not engaged. She did not reach them. That was challenging. Yet she knew that if she went outside Blackboard there is a web 2.0 boom – a dynamic community-oriented online community. She wanted to acknowledge that the world was changing and that it was time to change the way she taught as well. She wanted to encourage collaboration and foster community – that sense of being part of a group who is striving towards a shared goal where you encourage students to reach a goal that they will willingly participate in. That is what community is. Then she discovered VoiceThread.

VT is an online media output that could hold essentially any type of media but it’s strength is not in text, and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a mic or phone) text, audio, or video with a webcam and share them with anyone. A VT allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world.

There is also a ‘globalness’ in this tool because we are educating for a global society. What happens when we put students in touch with other people around the world – with students from other cultures etc. There is some great potential in this.

Sometimes she puts up pictures and lets students comment on those pictures – but she puts about 6 for example and asks them to comment on two. She always tells them not to repeat each other’s comments.

VoiceThread has of course accessibility issues – screen readers do not read it so that poses a problem. The point is that you need to choose your own tools to enhance your course.

Example of things you can create on vt: You can create a presentation using voicthread and let them comment on the presentation or on each slide. Provide a question or give them specific prompts and let them comment on it etc. Students could themselves present their material in vt.

New pedagogies emerged from using vt. She started to move to collaborative learning. Students were asked to provide definitions of certain concepts.

Participation in the application was important for student to learn from each other.

There is always an introductory slide which provides guidelines to students and what is expected of them. VT takes less of our time and the feedback we give to students is much better and it is constructive but also visual. There were fewer hurt feelings and greater collaboration, but might result in a higher grade [this would require a study].

You can embed the vt in other sites but it is not as effective because it needs to be seen on a larger scale. Vt also is planning to release a new version to let us reorder the comment threads. The comments are not time-stamped and that would be a good thing. The person who says the comment has the ability to delete it and as creator of the thread you have the ability to delete anyone’s.

More educational uses: discussion board alternative, visual and oral assessments etc.

There is a handout on her blog for the steps to create a voicethread.

Students pay nothing for the account but she recommends that as a teacher you need to pay for the pro-account which is $59.95/year. For the free account you can create only 3 voicethread.

Finally in the workshop there was a hands-on exercise on how to use it.

Fabulous session. I did not know WebQuest before and have learnt quite a bit from this session. Excellent session. I can use it in my human rights classes, but also can and will think of ways to use it when teaching technology such as computer technology or especially internet technologies. Love the idea, love the concept. Here are my notes:

The children of Argentina’s disappeared: exploring complex culture phenomena in the classroom through a webquest.

Presenter: Courtney Fell, University of Colorado.

A webquest is a web project that you create for your students, and its purpose is to guide students through a multi-step activity, using resources on the web to answer a central, open-ended question. To answer that question students must transform the new material in a creative way. The learning structure is scaffolded so as to optimize student performance. The website is a foundation so students can use for their resource.

It has 5 steps: intro, task , process, evaluation, conclusion, credits. Put resources online and put handouts and worksheets to help them complete the process. You assign group roles. The process is the central part of a webquest.

A webquest is designed to be shared and thus invites use by other instructors with its ‘Teachers’ portion of the site. This part of the site explains the audience and purpose the webquest and provides helpful tips for how other instructors can use the same activity. So it has other webquests that you can use to help you create your own.

Eg. a webquest called questgarden.com called carpetbaggers. Students explore the perspective of a Northern family who will either support or discouraging on of their relatives. Another webquest is called the us/Mexican border: explores border patrol agents, blue collar American workers, legal Mexican and illegal Mexican. Students explore this and then write a letter to a fictional US president with their perspective.

Una Nina Robada is another webquest: http://webquestninosrobados.com After seeing a film called Cautiva, students had to decide the fate of the characters of the case of Cristina Quadri. Who deserves to be punished in the case, under what charges and for how long? To establish the culpability of the participants, in class we will have a ‘day in court’ during which each of you will form a part of the accusation, the defense, the witnesses or the jury. At the end of the trial the students decided charges and then wrote a personal reaction paper about the findings in the trial.

First choose a topic – one that you taught before but did not find successful with students. The topic should be open-ended and not have a yes/no answer. Are there primary sources that could be used? [newspapers, youtube videos, databases of legal documents, official databases of photos and occurrences, online testimonials etc.]. The design format is the most fun part of the webquest. Choose a format and design pattern. Exmples include ‘alternative history, behind the book,’ etc. Students write diaries of two or more people in specific times and places while keeping to a common stucture that shows their similarities and differences. Create the content: begin with the central question that the students must answer. Next begin developing the steps. It is important to always return to the central question.

Courtney did a survey of students using it and their response papers at the end were much deeper and they had a greater understanding. They loved the mock trial in the end.

Here are my notes from the Merlot conference in San Jose.

Strengthen the link with blended videos. Gabe Mydland, Dakota State University

What is blended video? A mashup – student concept [maps], web video content, student video content. It is where students gather this information and are starting to draw links as to where those concepts affect their real lives.

Showed Video on Positive and Negative Reinfocement

What are the tools that we will use?

Why? Time spent: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation.

Students are fact learners and confuse it with knowledge. When you ask them how do those concepts apply to you, they don’t know. When using PS3 helps to shift: creation, evaluation, synthesis, analysis, application, comprehension, knowledge.

Important opportunity to talk about copyright, fair use, attribution and proper citation. Students want to follow the rules but are not sure of it.

Concept maps: link concepts bec they show relationships visually and link concepts with each other and link with other thoughts and ideas out there. Large maps are sometimes overwhelming. You appreciate the overlap between concepts and many things they share in common and many are distinct. This was a great way to help them organize thoughts together.

How do we grade this? The more you use these graphical organizers the more it becomes easy to grade. Matching the outline a student created with one you have created and you can see where they are different and what they are missing or adding.

Concept maps help us organize and transform a student into an active learner and encourages students to become self-directed learners. They have greater confidence in the comprehension of new material and shrink gap between theory and practice.

Develop skills in areas of critical thinking and organization of information and understanding complex relationships and finally they are able to see the larger picture.

Eg. are Bubbl.us; C-map [cmap.ihmc.us/conceptmap.htm]; Mind42. The last two reside on your computer.

Web video content: where to find students

Zamzar is a free on-line utility that allows you to capture video content or convert it into a format you prefer. It allows you to download video content from the web.

Student content: Let’s get digital: students are encouraged to create and/or find their own examples. Use Photostory 3 to take still images to create video content [like iMovie for the MAC].

Students spending time not only finding concepts we try to instill in them, but when we take it a step further and tell them to show us how they view that concept and engaging the digital natives where they live is a great thing.

You can use window movie maker to edit and edit the video. [go to RUN and type mk – you get movie maker].