PowerPoint: Zzzzzzzzzzz

Do teachers really have time to

• find fabulous and ever-changing technology tools
• get across the tools’ technical specs and genuine pedagogical possibilities
• develop meaningful and student-centred lessons around them

without working until the wee hours every night? I don’t function well on less than a good eight hours sleep.

If we accept the theory that the use of verbal and visual communication, rather than just one mode or the other, leads to increased student engagement and higher levels of student cognition, then what is wrong with at least falling back on the pedestrian PowerPoint?

Oh yeah, that's right - there are better presentation tools. Prezi, for example, is beautiful, playful, and fresh. (I might review it next week…) But it takes longer to create, all that fiddling about with the ‘Edit’ function and fonts, and being forced to make time-consuming (=meaningful) decisions about the interconnectedness of your presentation, the hierarchy of your points, and so on.

If you’re out of time for labours of love, and you really need that sleep, but you want to boost your class discussion, then pulling together a few PowerPoint slides is still a good baseline.

How to do it well…

I have scanned the web for some top tips that might apply to the secondary classroom (most sites talk to corporate America). I came across a site belonging to Dave

who writes professionally on slideshow presentations (the new job market). He has polled thousands of people since 2003 using his ‘What annoys you about bad PowerPoint presentations?’ survey and says the overwhelming response indicates: Audiences are fed up with presenters who fill their slides with too much content and are then compelled to read it all to those seated in the room.

Brilliant for its sheer obviousness.

Taking Dave’s advice, I thought it might be interesting, calling upon some of the ideas in my earlier posting ‘The Word’, to create slideshows that

ONLY USE ONE WORD OR A SINGLE IMAGE SANS TEXT PER SLIDE

as a backup to class discussion. Students' attention would not be pulled in two directions: reading the text while also trying to listen to me. I would not be lecturing to them with a wall of text. 


A well-selected image would enhance their cognitive processing and a single word could foreground a key concept. And I could create my slideshow at the traffic lights, over breakfast, at recess, or in the wee hours if the urge arose - but just for five minutes. M

Edmodo: a little anarchy please

Edmodo... the 'Secure Social Learning Network'. 'The Facebook for the classroom’. I have spoken to two teachers in the last 10 days who use it — they were both animated.

But what can it do for my students’ learning?

Sure, it has the very obvious benefit of mimicking a social tool that has most students enthralled… OK class — we are going to ‘Facebook’ our English lessons… All hands on deck.

And, true, Edmodo does allow me to establish effective communication channels. Teacher–student, student–student and teacher–parent. It also enables an online point of exchange. I can provide students with resources, information and feedback; students can submit assessment tasks and other materials.

But this is just effective housekeeping. What about quality learning? And learning that is tangible, that I can measure and evaluate and provide feedback on?

I can ask the class to participate in online discussions. But I can see this falling into two categories: 1) the teacher leads discussion on a topic and the students obligingly bumble along, wishing they were in the real Facebook, where they have greater agency; or 2) the students respond but utilise the same quick-fire, three-word language forms they use in Facebook.

How can I utilise the social, collaborative, ‘community of learners’ quality of Edmodo while at the same time directly developing my students’ language and meta-cognitive skills?

Here is my idea* (and I think this could work for any student cohort; some would need a greater level of scaffolding than others, naturally): student-led and moderated class discussions.

*(Actually, this idea came to me from a University of NSW academic. See his excellent co-authored paper on student moderation for a more scholarly coverage.)

The logistics:

Throughout the year, students are assigned a week in which they will moderate the class discussion on Edmodo. The moderator is expected to post a discussion paper a few days before their week begins. This could be a mere few hundred words or, for older or higher ability student cohorts, a several page exploration. The discussion paper would require some degree of research.

The moderator would post up the paper with a set of discussion points and/or questions. The class would then read the paper and respond to the points or questions. The moderator’s role is to develop the discussion.

The teacher’s role is simply to inject extra information or direction if necessary. If the exercise is well scaffolded, the teacher’s role would be largely invisible.

At the end of the week, the student moderator rewrites the initial paper, this time incorporating the new ideas generated from the class discussion. They would also write a briefer secondary report that reflected on the moderation process.

Students would be assessed for the quality of their initial paper, their ability to lead and develop the discussion, their ability to incorporate the fresh ideas from the discussion into their paper and the extent to which their reflective piece demonstrates a meta-cognitive understanding as opposed to a simple retelling.

Students would also be assessed on the quality of their non-moderator contributions to the class discussions across the year. They would be expected to contribute something each week.

The challenge for the teacher is high quality scaffolding. In particular, guiding students in developing that crucial initial discussion paper and in being able to foster engagement during the discussion.

The benefits for the teacher are potentially great: it is possible that within a few months students’ ability and willingness to engage in the class discussions will be self-regulating.

The benefits for students: ownership, empowerment; student-centred and directed learning; deeper, meta-cognitive learning and skill development; more relevant and engaged discussion and thus learning.

This would be a highly inclusive learning environment. There are students who never participate in face to face classroom discussions, because they are shy, or they prefer to reflect before they comment, or they are not proficient in English, or they have poor hearing. These students would find they have a voice.  

And the quality of the learning? The asynchronous nature of the discussion provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their thoughts before posting, resulting in a much more complex and valuable response than would occur in a face to face classroom.

A word of warning. This is not a way to reduce your workload. All those posts would still have to be read each week!

Cheers, M 

The Word

Words are obviously the staple of the English language classroom. Yet words tend to be studied in terms of their utility: their ability, across whole sentences, passages, or texts, to evoke, instruct or persuade.

Students who self-identify as writers or readers will often tell you that they ‘love words’. They love finding new words and finding new ways to showcase their existing words. Is this a key? Can we encourage more ‘writers’ and ‘readers’ if we find engaging ways to study The Word? Also, by focusing on individual words, and particularly those in high use, we can move straight to the heart of a text.

I want to explore here the possibilities for showcasing The Word offered by an incredibly simple tool: www.wordle.net

Wordle.net is an online tool for creating ‘word clouds’ – a cloud or bouquet of words. The user simply types or copies a piece of text into a text field and hits ‘Go’. Wordle.net then generates a cloud. The words are removed from their previous sequence and placed randomly within the cloud, at different angles and in different colours.

If the text provided is brief, the word cloud will include all the words; if the text is long, Wordle.net will select the most common words.

The clouds emphasise words that appear more frequently, by increasing their size in relation to the other words. This provides a visual indicator of significant words

The website describes the tool as a ‘toy’ and it does have a playful quality. Text can be altered in terms of the font type, text colour or word layout. The results are striking, with different cloud options evoking different moods or symbolic messages.

Immediacy

It is quick and simple to create a cloud. This enables the creation of clouds during a lesson, providing students with immediate results to view and discuss. This can be particularly powerful if the lesson is aiming to compare ideas across a specific class discussion – to show similarities and differences in students’ ideas and responses. The tool also offers an engaging ‘reveal’ when the cloud is created, with its explosion of randomised colours, fonts and layout. The immediate ‘text’ is a striking visual object; a second later, it is registered by viewers as a set of words to explore.

‘Here’s one I made earlier’

The teacher can create clouds prior to a lesson and utilise them as a discussion point. If talking on a particular topic, they may collect words from a text being studied, or from secondary sources that might illuminate thinking around a topic. Or they might record classroom discussion in words and use this to illustrate some of the ideas the class has covered.

Group feedback

The teacher may produce a cloud based on the collective written tasks of students to demonstrate key or diverging ideas or whether students are addressing an assessment task adequately. The teacher may also collate the feedback provided to all students, to give guidance to the class as a whole on some of the most common issues students may be having and/or the best aspects of their work.

The Word as jewel

Finally, it is possible to utilise Wordle.net as a jewellery box for gorgeous words. Students may create clouds out of their favourite poem, or poem stanza, or favourite block of text. The word cloud illuminates individual words and encourages the student to reflect on them. This can be done to foster student thinking around the meaning of significant words, such as their cultural or personal power, or their ambiguous, conflicting or varying meanings. 
Alternatively, the activity could be purely aesthetic. Students could be asked to reflect on the appeal of a particular word or series of words. They might discuss what thoughts, emotions or memories the word evokes, or they may simply comment on the pleasure of uttering the word!

Word clouds as artefacts

The word clouds can be saved online or printed for display or distribution. The online gallery allows anonymity but provides students with the pleasure of seeing their clouds ‘published’ alongside other Wordle.net users around the world.

Finally, here IS one I created earlier, based on the text of this blog entry…

VoiceThread: Making poetry relevant

What do I want technology to do? I want it to elicit a sense of thrill and creativity, to foster an immediate desire for exploration. I giggled when I discovered VoiceThread.

This is a tool that enables the creation of individual or collaborative multimedia slideshows featuring text, audio, image and video files. The slides can be commented on, by the owner or others, in a text, audio and/or video format.

The tool’s highly user-friendly and well sign-posted interface makes it suitable for students of all stages, backgrounds and most levels of English proficiency. The tool is hosted on an online platform and does not require a program to be downloaded.

Why is VoiceThread special? It offers an engaging opportunity for students to read, write, speak, view and represent any form of text, to do so in a manner that is both personalised and within a community of learners. It also gives students the opportunity to develop skills in self and peer review. My favourite example is the illustrated poetry text created by a third-grade class in the US.

The empty-shell nature of the tool means it could be utilised across all disciplines and student groups and to address most learning outcomes. In particular, I think VoiceThread would be an excellent way to introduce poetry writing and analysis to reluctant Stage 4 (ages 12 to 14) English students ('Poetry is dumb', 'Poetry is boring', 'Why do we need to do poetry?').

I outline here a possible approach, which would take place over a number of highly scaffolded lessons:

Students are introduced to the VoiceThread text, to establish the sense of a communal project and text and to encourage them to start thinking about the multi-modal nature of poetry. The possibilities are instantly multi-sensory and offer the chance to create an online identity and community.

The students produce a short poem around a coherent theme, or in response to a poem or poet they are studying.

The students then produce or find an image that best illustrates their poem. This could be a drawing or a photo, etc, and either figurative or abstract.

Students are asked to produce an audio commentary in which they read the poem, then provide a brief comment on their poem and image.

When the class or group slideshow is complete, the students are randomly allocated the slides of five of their peers to review (they can review more if they wish). They can do this in written, audio or video format. This last stage completes the cycle by encouraging students to reflect on the processes of their own work and the different manner in which their peers approached the text. This step develops their collaborative, critical and self and peer evaluation skills.

Some of the benefits of VoiceThread for the learning activity detailed here include: the development of a sense of class community; the opportunity for highly personalised interactions, between peers and between students and teachers; the increased engagement with and personalisation of the poem for students by the act of ‘speaking’ the poem; and an increased sense among the students that poetry can be valid and enjoyable and, in this instance, result in a published text.

A final key reflection on VoiceThread is that it enables amendments to be made according to the special needs of students. If a student cohort includes a sight-impaired student, the class could be required to provide an audio component. If the cohort includes a hearing impaired student, the class could be asked to include a text transcript of any audio or video material they add. The same could be required if the class included students of low-level English language proficiency. Also, it enables students whose English speaking proficiency is still developing, or students who are shy or anxious, to participate in and enjoy speaking tasks without the need to stand in front of the class.

Enjoy! M

Synergy in learning

'Synergy: interaction or cooperation of two or more organisations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate parts.'

This blog is a treasure hunt across through the vast field of technology tools that can be leveraged for student-centred learning. Each week I will introduce a new tool and examine it for its possibilities in creating an engaging and collaborative space for deep learning. 

I will focus on tools that evoke a sense of play but are pedagogy- rather than technology-led: looking beyond the ‘bright lights’ to find tools that offer genuine possibilities for enhancing learning.

In the spirit of a collaborative philosophy, all feedback is valuable! M