Comment on Roopa's blog

Here's a comment I made on my friend Roopa's blog, followed by the url.

Nice post, Roopa. A good demonstration of how ICT can be used to facilitate cooperative learning, and how cooperative learning can help in building knowledge of ICT. Why don't you check out http://tesolation.blogspot.com/ for a philosophical investigation of ICT, Risk, & Experimentation in the Classroom. I think you might find it edifying.

http://rj-elearner.blogspot.com/2011/09/ict-in-classroom-assignment-1-part2.html#comments

Audacity

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been having some fun with Audacity.

The first thing I did with the program was to record some interviews with teachers for the case-study on inquiry learning that I have been conducting for my Humanities Method Subject. I think students could use the program to record interviews for their own research/inquiry-based projects, too. Using the program in this way, you're not really doing anything that you couldn't do with a tape-recorder. However, lap-tops are more prevalent than tape-recorders (even the MP3 variety) these days, and audacity is free to download, so students using it for interviews seems to make sense.

The next thing I did with the program was to try and make some music. I thought this would push me to learn more about what Audacity can do.

My initial plan was to sample and loop a beat from one of the tracks in my iTunes library. That went off pretty smoothly, and the next thing I knew, I had added a bunch of other samples, including a bit of Bartok piano, a darbukka, an oud, and another bit of piano. Here's the track.

I had not done any of this sort of thing since the mid-nineties, when I had access to a sampler and sequencer that were already about five years old at the time. I have had some experience recording with Pro-Tools in the intervening decade and a half, although I have always played an instrument (usually guitar) whilst someone else had taken care of the technical tinkering.

I found Audacity much easier to use than the old sequencer-sampler combo. The main advantage is that with Audacity you can manually quantize your loops by eye, instead of having to rely solely on your ear.

I’m not a music teacher, so you might assume that I wouldn't get many opportunities to teach students how to loop beats. However, I am an ESL teacher, and it’s not that unusual for students to be asked to put together raps in ESL lessons. So, I might be able to put together some beats for that purpose.

Here's a YouTube video of a particularly hip ESL teacher, Jason R. Levine AKA Fluency MC, who makes rap to teach his students irregular verbs.

Fluency seems to be onto something. In her article "Music for Engaging Young People in Education", Carmen Cheong-Clinch writes,

Observations indicate that the use of music as a tool for engagement ... was effective in meeting the therapeutic objectives of increasing self-esteem and self-expression, building peer relation- ships, and increasing language skills.


I think there could be some other uses for the program in the ESL classroom. Specifically, I think that students could use it to record dialogues which they could then transcribe. Alternatively, they could - with permission of course - use the program to record their chemistry or biology lessons, and then work towards creating transcriptions of these lessons. This would help them to build mastery of subject specific lexicon, which - as Fang and Scheleppegrell point out in their article, "Language and Reading in Secondary Content Areas" - tends to be a problem for ESL students.

References:

Cheong-Clinch, Carmen,(2009) "Music for Engaging Young People in Education", Youth Studies Australia VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2.

Fang, Zhihui & Scheleppegrell, Mary J. (2008) "Language and Reading in Secondary Content Areas" In, Reading in secondary content areas: a language-based pedagogy (pp.1-17). University of Michigan Press.

Learn more about Fluency MC at <http://www.colloandspark.com/>

 

ICT Assessment 2 - Group Presentation

Here is our presentation on the topic of Cyber Safety in the Context of Social Networking for Teenagers. The presentation was put together by Roopa Jakkilinki, Richard Wang, and yours truly, using Voicethread. Check it ;)

ICT, Risk, & Experimentation in the Classroom

ICT provides a rich and flexible learner-centred environment in which students can experiment and take risks when developing new understanding. (Victorian Essential Learning Standards, Structure of the Information and Communications Technology Domain, <http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ict/structure.html>)

This statement leads me to think about the relationship between experimentation and risk, how this relates to learning, teaching, and ICT in the classroom.

Think of the relationship between a tightrope walker and her net. At first, we might think that the presence of the net allows the tightrope walker to experiment and take greater risks with her routine than she otherwise might. However, on further reflection, it seems that this is not completely right. Surely the presence of the net greatly reduces the negative consequences of failure for the tightrope walker, and thereby reduces the risk involved in attempting unfamiliar manoeuvres. And if this is right, the presence of the net does not allow the tightrope walker to take more risks per se. Rather, it facilitates greater experimentation on her part by reducing the risks associated with such experimentation.

Now, it is often remarked that it is very important for students to experiment and take risks. But, this is surely not quite right either. Whilst it is true that students learn best when given an opportunity to experiment with knowledge, skills and understandings, it is precisely the reduction or removal of risk that makes it more likely that such experimentation will occur.

In many ways, the role of ICT in the classroom is analogous to the role of a net in tightrope-walking. Think about the role of a word-processor. Word-processing allows for experimentation on the part of students, because it makes such experimentation less risky. When using a word-processor, you can “save as”, cut and paste to radically rearrange what you have done, and then go back to the original version if things don’t work out. And, although spelling and grammar checks are seen my many as making students lazy, they also provide students with a kind of safety net; allowing students to experiment with vocabulary or sentence structures that they would not otherwise be prepared to use.

But how does this make learning more student-focused? The answer is quite simple. Because students can – through the use of ICT resources - engage in  relatively risk free experimentation, teachers can afford to let them work things out for themselves. This leaves the teacher free to act more in the role of a guide, than of a transmitter of knowledge. 

When browsing through the VELS learning foci and standards for ICT, I was struck by how much emphasis is placed on experimentation and exploration at the early stages. For example, “Students begin to explore contemporary ways of communicating ideas and information”(Information and Communications Technology - Level 3, Learning focus), “Working in all areas of the curriculum, students explore a range of ICT tools … and simple techniques for visualising thinking,” (Information and Communications Technology - Level 3, Learning focus) and, “In their learning of new material, students experiment with some simple ICT tools and techniques for visualising their thinking”(Information and Communications Technology - Level 2, Learning focus).  However, as we move into the higher levels, this emphasis on experimentation and exploration disappears. As a 36 year old who has learned almost everything he knows about ICT through experimentation, I wonder whether this is a good thing. 

iMovie

Our task for this week was to make a little movie out of stills. For us Mac-users the program to use was iMovie. My prior exposure to iMovie was extremely limited, but I really got into the task. It turns out there's a lot involved in getting one of these photo-montages to look good; transitions, filters, Ken Burns effects, etc. I was pretty happy with what I ended up with.(Check it out above)

I think that using this program would be very useful in teaching humanities. Using iMovie, in conjunction with an audio editing program like Audacity, students could put together Ken Burns style presentations for their humanities classes that included maps, still photographs collected from the web,and spoken commentaries (provided by the students). I think this would be great assessment task for those students who were too shy to talk in front of the entire class, as it would involve the same kind of learning as a more traditional classroom presentation, but could be put together in the privacy of the student's bedroom.

It seems I'm not the first to have had this idea. The following article talks about the use of this kind of a learning activity by SOSE teachers in the U.S. 

Ferster, Hammond and Bull, (2006) "Primary Access: creating digital documentaries in the social studies classroom",(in) CBS Interactive Business Library, URL=<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6541/is_3_70/ai_n29261950/>

PowerPoint

I have used PowerPoint for a number of years for lectures and seminar presentations at university, so most of the stuff in the Atomic Learning tutorial (http://www.atomiclearning.com/)was pretty familiar.

In the past, I have been in the habit of using the custom animation functions, but only as a means of revealing one dot-point at a time as I move through the material contained in a slide. (I find that if the entire content of a slide come up at once, the audience tends to try and read the whole slide before they tune into what the presenter is saying).

I haven’t gotten into anything too fancy with my PP’s, as I’ve seen them more as tool to keep myself and the audience on track and focused when I’m lecturing or presenting, and have viewed the fancier entries and transitions as a bit of a distraction from the content of the actual lecture/presentation.

Of course, Prezi presentations (http://prezi.com/) tend to be even more visually stimulating than the fanciest PowerPoint you're likely to see, and people seem to love those at the moment. Mind you, I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason people love Prezi so much is precisely because it gives them a welcome distraction from uninspiring speakers.

All that aside, I did learn a few things from the Atomic Learning tutorial that I think I will apply in the future; for example the stuff on putting diagrams together (great for catering for the more visually inclined learner), and the stuff on creating custom master slides.

I found in last semester's placement that PP was a great tool in history classes for showing the students primary sources, maps, etc. Some of the presentations I used last semester did not contain any text at all, which was good. (There's no danger you'll just read from the slides if the slides don't contain any text!)

Here's a quick movie to show you a PowerPoint I used in one of my year 8 Medieval European History  lessons last semester. The topic was crime and punishment; specifically, torture devices. I put the pictures of the torture devices up before showing the text, and had the girls talk about how the devices might have been used. They were surprisingly good at working them out!