Digital Story with a Cell Phone

All pictures and video clips were created/found with my cell phone, but everything was spliced together with Adobe Spark.

I hope you enjoy! (Sorry it's so late)

Francis--you.com

I created a website that could be used as my online portfolio and shares a little about me as a teacher and a technology student. You can view that here.

I decided to use wix.com to create my website because I've heard a lot about it and I wanted something that would give me some pre-planned templates. The actual layout of the site was fairly easy, but I found it difficult to decide what all I wanted to add to it. In all fairness, I have been creating blogs, tumblr sites, and other pages that have documented my journey through the technology-in-education-land, so I decided that I would create a page that brought all of that together, plus told a little bit about me as a teacher, and showed a real-life example of how I use technology in my high school English classroom.

The process was easy (well, kind of), but very time-consuming. I hope you enjoy it!

Broadcasting Myself

I'm a teacher, so you would think that broadcasting myself live would be no big deal. I found out, though, that with live broadcasting, you're staring at yourself as you give a talk to invisible people who may or may not be judging everything you're saying.

I decided that since this was my first live broadcast, I was going to keep it pretty casual and talk about something low-stress. I discussed different ways that teachers can make sure that they go back to the grind refreshed and ready to deal with the hours of work that none of us ever account for. I, for one, know that there are always so many activities and piles of paperwork that I never am prepared for at the beginning and throughout the school year. Making sure that we are as prepared for that as we can be is really important, I think, to our mental and spiritual health.

The first thing I had to do was make sure that my microphone and my camera on my computer were working. I used uStream, and they had an automatic check of all the features that live broadcasting used. It was really nice that this was an automatic feature. While filming, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary. I could see my two (yes, two!) people who were viewing my video. I don't know who they were and if there was a place for them to comment, I didn't see it, nor did they seem to comment. I was really okay with that.

It was also really nice that the website made it easy for me to share the link to my live broadcast. Honestly, I put it on facebook because I have more followers there, but I did not tweet it because that is mostly students who follow me on Twitter (other than the random other people who followed me back after I branched out on Twitter for a previous assignment). 

One issue that I had was the "broadcast" and "record" buttons on the uStream. While practicing, I hit both so that I would have the broadcast recorded (obviously). It worked well. When I wanted to finish the whole thing, I first stopped the recording and then stopped the broadcast. When I tried it a second time, I reversed the process, and that did not work well. It resulted in lots of spinning and waiting and the whole time I was still "recording."

Next time, I knew that I had to stop the recording before the broadcast. It made things run a lot smoother.

The whole process was pretty daunting and scary and I felt like I had to be as great as those teachers who constantly post videos of great ideas and beautiful resources to their Instagram stories. In reality, it was just me--very rough, very real, with lots of "ums" and stutters because I didn't script anything out (which I probably should have done). This was probably one of the hardest assignments I have done and I really think the majority of it being hard was that I could watch myself the entire time and not see me audience.

I'm not sure how or if I would use this in my classroom in the future. I've tried to think of ways I could use it in a secondary English setting, and I just don't see one, unless my students were watching a live broadcast of someone who could help with an assignment or idea that we were working with in class. I don't think I would have my students actually broadcast themselves because of legality concerns and the amount of parent permissions we would have to deal with. Plus, I'm not sure how that would benefit their learning in the long run.

Attending a Live Webinar

I've attended live Webinars before for other classes and for professional development, and I'm always amazed at how different they can be depending on the platform that is used.

I attended a Webinar given through EdWeek that focused on teaching students writing. The first thing that the lead presenter did was to give a few moments for everyone to check their audio and visual feeds. She posted in the comments section (because there was a comments section) that everyone should be able to hear her talking because she was live with audio. I had to click on the "allow flashplayer" icon that showed up on my screen to see the PowerPoint that she was running during the Webinar itself. What was the most interesting is that there was a list of resources, even a troubleshooting resource, available for attendees along the side of the webinar.

There was also a transcript available for reference if anyone needed it later or for audio-impaired attendees.  I also really appreciated that there was a space for us to post questions and one of the commentators would reply. Their response was in bold, so we could tell the difference between those who were running the show and those who were attending. Others could also respond to questions posed, but not many people did.

The Webinar that I attended was also very interactive. The moderators posted polls and questions that we could click on the answers and a few moments later, they gave us the data that they collected. I thought that was really interesting! There was also one head moderator who was joined by other teachers/administrators and educational specialists from around the country, but I believe only one person had control of what was on the screen. It was nice to hear input from more than one person on the given topic.

One thing that I wish could have happened was that more than a PowerPoint was shown. At times, the moderators were just reading from the slide, and that wasn't helpful at all. I've seen Webinars created that basically screen cast and we can watch someone on their computer as they use it. The one that I watched was an hour long, and it was basically like sitting through a lecture, but without anyone else around, and after a while, I got a little bored. Most of what I was watching was just text, and when describing how to keep education engaging for students, I think it's important to also keep that information engaging for the teachers!

I think Webinars would be useful in classrooms to get ideas and lessons from people outside of our school building. I think students could also create Webinars to give their ideas/presentations/even lessons to other students within our community and outside of it. Webinars could really help develop the "guide on the side" type of classroom, although I think it really just transfers the direct instruction from the classroom teacher to whoever is presenting the Webinar.

Integrating Social Networking

I have a weekly current event assignment that my students must complete. They must read one national news article and one international news article. Then, they fill out a worksheet that requires them to analyze and summarize the content. This is all due every Friday. They usually whine about it because they forget, they lose the worksheet, or they don't know where to look or how to search through everything.

I figured I could fit Twitter into this. I'm actually semi-copying what we have been doing in this class (and what I have done for other classes). I would still have students fill out the worksheet, but I would make it a digital version on their Google Classroom. THEN (and this is the new/exciting part), students would need to find that online article and tweet it. They could use an existing Twitter handle, or they could create a completely new one just for the class (I have two Twitter handles, and it's incredibly easy to switch between the two). They would have to retweet with a question attached to it for their classmates to respond to. They would also need to attach a specified hashtag, like #cefrancis so that I could quickly find and check that they tweeted. Students would also be responsible for responding to the question attached to someone else's article-Tweet with the hastag #ceresponse, so I could keep track of responses too. The Twitter idea would allow students to interact with content on a platform that they understand and is easily accessible, plus they would be reading more than just two articles every week. It seems like a win-win to me!

I might make the current events themselves due every other week and students respond to 2-4 classmates on the off-weeks, so it doesn't get out of hand for them and for me.

Here is the link for the current event worksheet that I use.

Here is an example tweet: (I know it's an infographic and not an article, but it is still worthwhile)

Goals: TSW read and respond to multiple non-fiction articles dealing with current events.

           TSW use technology to access information

            TSW identify relevant and factual information.

I'm going to think a little bit more about the logistics of this and how realistic it is that I could keep up with the grading, but I would really like to do this.

Twitterthon Review

I actually found this assignment quite daunting and difficult. Finding 50 people per day to follow was incredibly difficult, especially when trying to find legitimate educational resources. But what I found most daunting was the idea to keep up with this information. In fact, it was information overload.

I had many people whom I followed, follow me back, and I also had random others that seemed to have no connection at all to my theme follow me. Many marketing people and "brand managers," whose purpose I know not decided that I was the kind of person that would give them great information via Twitter. I assure you, I retweet information that I find interesting and relevant, but my original content comes very few and far between.

The immense amount of information that is available via twitter now is overwhelming. Following so many people, I feel that I'm probably missing some, but then again, not following them meant that I was definitely missing that information. For instance, the U.S. News Education twitter feed posted a link to study that says "reading literature is a natural way to broaden vocabulary and improve SAT results." Now, I thought this was common sense. I teach context clues in depth to my high schoolers, but when I got to think about it, I believe that people still think we learn our vocabulary the way you learned how to spell--by memorizing words. When I retweeted this, I thought of my students, and hopefully some of them saw that quote because learning new vocabulary is only one of the many bonuses of reading.

Many times, I watched interactions between educators or educational strategists on a given topic. It usually revolved around the current political climate--school vouchers, school choice, weapons/security in schools. Many kept their dialogue civil, but some became so frustrated that it became a middle school-esque battle of the minds. When watching these, I thought it would be interesting to join the conversation, but I was afraid that I didn't know enough on the subject or that I would be attacked like I was watching happen. Mostly, it was fear of not knowing enough. All of the sudden, I was the kid in the classroom who didn't want to raise her hand for fear of looking stupid to the rest of her classmates.

From this, I'm really hoping to just learn from other people who are smarter than I am. Hopefully seeing posts and linked articles will enable me to learn more about the best practices of my profession and make me a better educator all around.

Review of Mini Photo 365

Here is the link to see the photos that I chose this week.

When I first read this assignment, I thought "wow, I'm going to have to remember to take photos every day this week!" I've also seen friends post 365 photo projects on Instagram and Facebook, but sometimes they comment about how they almost forgot. When it came time to post a picture, sometimes I did forget to take a photo for this project, but I found that I had taken photos that day. We can probably blame this on the fact that it is summertime and I am documenting my fun activities that I'm doing with friends, which is where I got my theme.

My goal with this Mini photo 365 was to show the highlight of my day, whether that was dinner and badminton with friends, a beautiful sunset, or trying to fix my car. Note, the highlight of my day does not necessarily mean the best part of my day. It's really just the most memorable part, and even a few days later, it is fun to look back and see what my days were like this week.

Getting my photos wasn't too difficult, but that's only because I knew the process from a previous course. I have an iPhone, but I have the Google Drive app on my phone. I saved the photos I took to my Google Drive via my phone. I then got on my computer, and downloaded the photos from Google Drive to my desktop, and uploaded them from my desktop to Blogger. While it is a multi-step process, the steps are quick and pretty intuitive, especially when you have practice.

I really enjoyed this, and would really like to utilize it somehow in the future. Maybe I could use it with my students and ask them to capture photos that revolve around a theme! I'll keep thinking.