I'm a little concerned by the word, "pilot."
I'm in the midst of ramping up my students for 5 solid weeks of self-directed learning related to climate change. Uncharacteristically, I cleared the proposal with my principal and the science curriculum director before going forward with the plan. I was given "permission" to pilot this program.
Despite all the recent "21st Century Skills" and "self-directed learners" talk around school, the standard-driven CAPT (our state standardized test) reigns supreme. My 9th grade Integrated Science class has a rather extensive list of content standards I'm supposed to cover. I know my 5-week self-directed unit won't cover as many official standards as 5-weeks spent teaching a traditional curriculum.
I'm attempting to more efficiently use class time by exporting some of the content delivery outside the classroom. I saw a video some time ago about chemistry teachers who did something similar, and was recently reminded of the video by a tweet from Ben Grey.
After playing with several options of how to record & publish the video podcasts (I found Wes Fryer's recent posts on LectureCasting very helpful), I created a new subdomain (http://sciencecast.benwildeboer.com), recorded video through UStream using CamTwist, then published the podcast to a WordPress blog & uploaded the video to Vimeo as a redundancy backup. I've submitted my podcast to iTunes so the video will be viewable on students' mobile devices1.
A few observations about the process:
- It took longer to prepare, record, edit, and post than I would like. I know it'll get faster the more experience I have, but I'm not sure I have the time to do this for every section.
- There were lots of failures. I can't tell you how many times I had to sit down and work through some issue I was having.
- The end result is pretty boring. Some students said they parts of it funny or interesting, but I think they were just being nice. To be fair, it'd be boring in class, as well, right?
The first episode (The Periodic Table [& valence electrons]) is below. What do you think? Is this worth the effort?
The Periodic Table (and valence electrons) from Mr. Wildeboer on Vimeo.
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- Update: The podcast has now been approved and is available on iTunes. I'm waiting to hear back from iTunes about its approval. [↩]
You feel that your video is boring?
You probably feel that way because:
* for me, the video is much too long.
Tips:
* You could split it up in smaller chuncks.
* create a video per sub-subject
* for students, there's no difference with classroom frontal teaching. There is no interaction. No questions asked. You could make a learning path of it (working with a learningplatform like Blackboard).
* also, make your point of what they need to know outside the video. The video needs one message only.
* Get some music involved with the drawings. This gives students time to reflect on what they see, before you go on about something deeper of further.
(english is not my native language)
(I'm better at discussing than doing...)
(if you'ld like to talk about it... email me
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm still working through exactly what I want from this, how it should work, and whether it's something worth pursuing in the long run. I appreciate the suggestions & feedback.
I do like the idea of splitting the video up into smaller chunks. It would be a little more post-production work for me, but it may be worth it. If students need a quick refresher on ionization energy, they could simply watch a short clip on that instead of needing to wade through the 29 minute video to find it.
It is essentially a classroom lecture, but my goal with the whole thing was to get across the basic content out of school so we could really spent our class time diving into the content. After students watched this we did an activity where students analyzed the patterns that exist on the periodic table and discussed why those patterns exist. I didn't want it to be "homework," in the traditional sense.
There are definitely lots of design and production improvements I could make. I'd like it to be of higher quality, though I need to keep the overall production time down to a reasonable level. Hopefully the quality improves as I gain experience and the recording & publishing aspects become less of an obstacle for me. I've committed myself to continuing this basic format for at least this quarter, then re-evaluating its effectiveness.
I've been interested in trying this for a couple years now. I'm sort of paralyzed by 1. the lack of internet access at home for my kids 2. what to do with the kids who don't watch it.
So...how do you get access to the kids who don't have it? Home internet penetration at my school is below 50%. The cell phone/ipod contingent almost completely overlaps the internet at home group (you've got the money or you don't)
Imagining I solve number 1, I imagine myself reteaching everything from the video because nobody watched it. What's your approach here?
@JYB: You pretty much nailed my two big worries about this project.
(1) The potential lack of Internet at home is a big concern. It'd be discriminatory to simply ignore the issue. I did take an informal survey of the class to see how many students had access at home, and 100% said they do have access. However, I also told the class that if they can't access it they can come in before or after school to watch it either in my room or the library. I can also burn the file to a disc for students to watch if that's easier. There are definite issues to be dealt with here & I'm sure things will come up that I haven't thought of.
(2) There are no grade associated with watching the podcast, though, to me, it's important that I have engaging activities that require some of the knowledge included in the podcast. After this podcast we graphed the values for atomic mass, atomic radius, electronegativity, and ionization energy. Students then had to think through why they think these patterns exist. Those who didn't watch it (which there were some) had to figure out what things like ionization energy and electronegativity before they could do that. Some asked friends in the class for help while others watched parts of the video right then. I'm not sure if there's a great way to deal with the fact that some students won't watch it other than attempt to make sure the information covered in the podcast is important and relevant to what we're doing in the class.
Ok a few comments:
If you can create dvd's you should be solid /w respect to access. I sometimes think we underestimate the access kids have to the internet.
Re: the video - I think you did a great job for a first effort... here are some things you might want to consider:
1. After watching most of your video... you might have shared the same amount of information in less time if you focus in on your goals for the video. There seemed to be some extraneous stuff in there...
2. Loved your addition of the video clip - action is always good. Keeping an energetic pace makes it easier for the kids to stay engaged.
3. When introducing a new vocab word, you might consider having a slide with just that word or creating a quick flash animation of the word for emphasis. This might also help if a kid wants to go back to a certain part in the video and is scrolling through...
4. You might have question slides with VERY BRIEF pauses to allow students to digest and think before you move on...
Don't know if that helps at all, I struggle with the same issues. It def. takes lots of time to put these things together... don't feel you need to reinvent the wheel if you find something someone else has made available. Love to hear how it goes... Good luck!