LearningTimes Green Room

On this Thanksgiving week in the United States, Dan and I would like to extend our heartfelt appreciation to our loyal listeners. Your comments and engagement in the LearningTimes community keep us going. We’ve enjoyed getting to know you and thinking out loud with you. Some of you may be traveling this week, and so if you have not caught all of our episodes, consider downloading and listening to us on your journey. We love to travel! And for those listeners who are not celebrating with us in the United States, we are equally thankful for your international presence. Finally, we want to thank John and Jonathan from LearningTimes for their constant support and encouragement in the production of this podcast. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Susan and Dan are joined by Stacy Behmer who shares her experience with digital storytelling (DST) in elementary and middle school classrooms.



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Show notes:

Stacy Behmer joins Susan and Dan to talk about her experience with digital storytelling (DST) in elementary and middle school classrooms. Stacy researched DST as a graduate student at Iowa State University and has made her resources available at http://ctlt.iastate.edu/~ds/Behmer/. Throughout this interview, Stacy references Jane Schmidt, a middle school English teacher in Maquoketa, Iowa, as well as her major professor Dr. Denise Schmidt. Both women were instrumental in advising Stacy through her research.

Defining DST: combining story + music, audio, video, photos and other media.

Stacy’s research was with 7th grade language arts students. She walks through how she became acquainted with DST and how she saw the connections to teaching/learning and standards.

The end product of her research were stories created by groups of 3-4 students on the theme “Everyone has a story to tell and we’re going to help you to tell it.” These stories came from interviews of community members; the project extended over a four week period. Stacy shares all the details of how she implemented this.

A couple insights/questions to listen for:

• What happens when a group doesn’t follow the prescribed steps?
• The importance of flexibility
• How kids latch on the technology
• Mac/PC alternatives iMovie versus MovieMaker versus PhotoStory3
• Connecting your project to standards (think language arts)

What would she change? Building in assessment measures throughout the project.

Can this transfer to higher education classrooms where faculty do not have students every day for large chunks of time? Stacy tells about pre-service teachers and their DSTs.

Stacy’s biggest surprise was the level of engagement.

Again, go look at Stacy’s website at http://ctlt.iastate.edu/~ds/Behmer/ and see the stories!

Listeners, Susan and Dan want to hear your stories about DST projects you’ve tried and how they’re working!

You can respond using the “Comments” link below or talk to us in LearningTimes. Or call us at 1-800-609-9006 x8055 (US and Canada) or 678-255-2174 x8055 (outside US and Canada). Join us!

In this episode, Dan and Susan talk about the use of video in online
instruction.

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Show notes:

In this episode, Dan and Susan talk about the use of video in online instruction.

Beginning with a story of how easy working with video is today, Susan senses more instructors are introducing video and multimedia.

A couple schools are studying YouTube and social networks. One example is Pitzer College. Here is an interview on CNN about the class.

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist at Kansas State and has, along with students, produced several popular videos, including “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” and “A Vision of Students Today”.

YouTube, Google Video, TeacherTube and SchoolTube are all examples of services that make video easier for teachers to produce and get video hosted. A brief discussion of the problems with the openness of a service like YouTubes and why TeacherTube and such services have cropped up. Another service Susan couldn’t remember correctly was SciTalks, which shows science videos.

Susan reflects back 5 years about the difficulties of working with video then. Software has become easier and more accessible, and more people are playing around with their personal cameras!

Why would someone want to include video? Social presence. Demonstrations. One to one problem solving.

Digital story telling and student productions. The value of bringing out point of view. Dan references Jonathan Finkelstein’s Real Time Minute videos. Susan suggests you could ask student to use cell phones to do the same.

Coming back to the idea of using a public social network for such work, Susan shares a comment left by a reader/viewer after watching one of the college-produced videos:

“Huh. I was just magically transported back to college and all of those worthless, boring liberal arts classes I had to take.”

“YouTube is … supposed to be more interesting than this. YouTube is … not an education device. YouTube is … a distraction from the intellectual rigors of college, not a substitute for it.”

Hmmmm, so you can overdo it with inappropriate use of social media. Susan and Dan also want to be clear that they are not recommending that we all videotape ourselves lecturing.

The Dramatic Question – Dan’s favorite idea for production.

We want to hear how you all are using video. What were some of the challenges?

After the fact resource: another video worth watching “Pay Attention Video” - about the need to infuse technology into teaching.

You can respond using the “Comments” link below or talk to us in LearningTimes. Or call us at 1-800-609-9006 x8055 (US and Canada) or 678-255-2174 x8055 (outside US and Canada). Join us!