Moving Right Along...

This was a busy week as I worked toward meeting my goals for becoming more adept at use of technology to meet the learning needs of my students.  Over and over I’ve discovered that I must be intentional in selection of learning strategies.  As I’ve state before, inclusion of technology must not be gratuitous, but rather included with meaning and purpose- and hopefully the purpose is achievement of learning objectives and outcomes. 

To further my own knowledge on this topic, and because I’ve transitioned one course to a hybrid format, I attended a webinar offered by the University System of Georgia.  This webinar was presented by Janet Sylvia, and was an Introduction to Web Accessibility.  This was a brief, 45-minute webinar, and honestly left me confused and frustrated.  There was so much information regarding making your course accessible that my head was spinning.  Brief glimpses into specific requirements was included, yet it only left me discouraged and fearful that somehow I will fail to meet the needs of my students.  It was even more concerning to realize that there could be legal implications for both myself and my institution if I fail to meet the specified federal standards.  The only thing that I found I can do immediately is to include a statement in my syllabus regarding accessibility, and who to contact if there is a problem or concern.  I also learned I must respond to any inquiries or concerns within 48 hours, even if my response is to tell them I am working on getting the problem corrected.  I hope that there will be future offerings that might go into more detail for each concern, and perhaps also a workshop that would be hands-on and help instructors make adjustments immediately.  The link to this webinar can be found below.  

Another webinar I attended was provided by the fine people at Turnitin.com.  This webinar was presented by Paul Bruno, and addressed the topic of How People Learn: What Educators Should Know.  This was another interesting session that seemed to focus quite a bit on providing feedback to learners- and to focus more on their processes of learning rather than the actual grade earned for the assignment.  I found this to be intriguing, and realized that I also get frustrated when I receive a high grade, yet little feedback.  If I did well, I would like to know why I did well so that I can replicate my efforts in future work.  Was it my grammar and use of punctuation?  Was it my ability to expand on a topic, or synthesize?  It also struck me that frustration arises when I expend great amounts of effort into a project, and then receive brief or vague feedback.  I do tend to provide my students a lot of feedback- as evidenced by the hours I tend to spend grading written work.  I hope that I’m doing right by them, and helping them truly learn.  I read all of the comments professors place as feedback, and I hope that my students do as well.  Unfortunately there is not a link to this presentation that I can share.  

Other than some personal learning, I also applied some of my new knowledge to creation of some technology-based teaching tools.  First, I have finally crafted a Prezi with no help from anyone!  I have been intimidated by this technology, even though I recognize the benefits of providing a web link rather than a huge file.  I began by revising a Prezi created by a co-teacher, and used this as a way to navigate through the site, learning intricacies.  After using the revised presentation in a face-to-face class, I felt confident enough to start from scratch.  I am quite pleased with the finished product, even embedding a brief video to catch the learner’s attention.  One frustration with Prezi is that you cannot directly narrate each frame, but instead the sound must be recorded separately and then added to each frame.  While this was frustrating, I now also have learned how to create a voice recording from my laptop!   The link to my Prezi is found below.  

Another technology I tackled was creation of a Zaption video.  Zaption is a marvelous web-based application that allows you to embed questions into a video.  The video can be a YouTube or even an mp4 file.  Once the video is uploaded into the Zaption site, you then can insert questions at the appropriate time.  An additional feature is that the video can then be presented live, or shared through a link.  Learners must enter a name before progressing to the video, which aids the teacher in tracking who has participated.  Once students view the video, you can see who has viewed, how many times, how long they spent watching the video, and also how many questions answered.  There is also information available on what each student responded for the questions, and overall responses for each questions.  I found this technology to be much easier to create than I anticipated.  A basic plan is free, and a higher level plan is only $89 per year.  I’ve released the video to my students, and a few have already completed the presentation.  I’m hoping to gain feedback from the students to see if they felt this was a valuable learning tool.  If students feel it enhanced their learning, I will definitely consider purchasing the expanded plan.  The link to Zaption, and my Zaption video, are found below.  

The final technology I explored and used was Nearpod.  For this I created a presentation to use live in the classroom.  I created slides through PowerPoint, and then imported the slides into the site.  Periodically there were poll questions embedded for students to answer.  While I have used this before as an asynchronous learning activity, this was the first time I’ve used it in class.  I do like this product, but feel it has some definite drawbacks.  First, the slides you can create within the program are dull and lack the flexibility found in PowerPoint.  Also, you cannot import the slides and then insert a poll or quiz into the presentation.  When you import the slides, they are all lumped into one section, and a poll or quiz must follow the section.  As a result, I had to break my presentation down into multiple sections just to scatter the questions throughout.  I also did not like how the presentation displayed to the class from the projector.  On their screen they only saw the student view, but for students who had no technology source, I had projected the presentation onto the screen.  As a result, the student names (and some picked fake ones that were quite interesting!) were visible, as were their responses to each question.  I like Nearpod, but I’m not sure I’ll use it in a live class again- at least not in this manner.  Likely this was a user error problem, but I could see my students disengage and become reluctant to record an answer.  The link to Nearpod is below with the links.  

 

So this has been a busy week- yet I know I am making progress.  Not only have I met all but one of my goals for this project, but I know that I am more confident in exploration and use of various technologies.  Now that I’ve learned a few, I can begin honing my skills and focus on just a few strategies that I’ve found useful.  


Links:

USG Webinar on Web Accessibility:  https://youtu.be/0In2C9ijkOs

Prezi link:  http://prezi.com/1elzs5wteyot/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Zaption can be found at www.zaption.com

Link to my Zaption:  http://zapt.io/tmya3k7y

Nearpod can be found at www.nearpod.com