STaRT Tech Learning Community

My question for the project is: Will using Nano recordings of my students' voices, help them to develop their French oral skills? I am also hoping to put the student's recorded voices on the class audio website. You can check out the website so far at division17.notlong.com.

I am hoping that the parents will be more inclined to use the website when they can hear their child's voice. I hope this project improves student oral development and parent participation in our classroom.

Has anyone out there used Nano's in their classroom for the same purpose as me and how did it turn out? How did you assess the changes that followed from your project?

Labels: description audio French website Nano

Multimedia and Web Integration in the Classroom;

Its Effect on Student Achievement

The increasing integration of the internet into daily life has created a shift in the way students acquire information out of school. Information on the internet is presented in a variety forms with the majority of material presented in pictorial or video formats. The majority of material presented in the classroom is the opposite form to this, and instead focusses on text-based modalities.

This study looked at the effects of including multimedia into classroom instruction on student participation and academic achievement. The second portion of this study focussed on the effectiveness of a class website in disseminating information to students and parents. Moreover, a variety of multimedia modalities were incorporated into class websites and their effect on student achievement was observed.

Observations and Inferences

The initial stage of this study included the use of a website in a Biology 11 class to display class material and help students keep organized and up to date in their studies. The website continued to grow, and included answer keys, worksheets, and study guides that students could access from home in case they were absent. The next stage included multimedia links to animations and short movie clips that were originally presented in class.

The use of the Biology website was augmented by a change in the way material was presented in the classroom. Biology is a highly language driven course that requires students to learn a multitude of terminology. This prerequisite of language mastery may stifle many students’ chances of learning the underlying biological concepts. Moreover, the demographics of our school include many students who are learning english as a second language. This compounds the difficulty of concept mastery and may make it very difficult to teach an upper level biology course to ESL students. Thus, the amount of text-based material was minimized or combined with visual aids to create an inclusive learning environment for ESL students and to cater to the shift to today’s internet-dependent youth. This was achieved through the use of lesson formats that revolved around Keynote (Apple software) presentations that minimized the use of text in slides and incorporated video,graphics, and flash based animations directly in each slide.

The response from students was very positive form the outset. The changes in attitude and interest should be noted even amongst the weaker students who expressed greater interest in their marks and their own understanding of concepts. The tangible changes visible in testing scores improved dramatically. The overall class average was in the mid fifty percentile but improved with each Unit test after implementing the above mentioned strategies. The average class mark for each unit exam rose from an average exam score of 61.5% to an average exam score of 70%. It should be noted that no conclusions can be drawn from this data as there were no control groups to compare to. However, the overwhelming positive response and enthusiasm from students and directly and from parents underscored the impact these strategies had on student achievement and interest. Furthermore, the three ESL students in my class improved their grades after the incorporation of multimedia and commented on how much easier it was to learn concepts when a visual cue was present.

Biology Website: Biology 11 Webpage

The second stage of my study looked at the use of a class website to display and incorporate the latest digital innovations displayed on the internet today. These include flash movies, blogging, and galleries. The initial test of using a basic website in Biology spurred the idea of developing a website that would include blogging directly into the main page along with flash movies and tutorials to provide parents and students with a unified resource that could be used from home. These ideas came to fruition slowly as my skills and experience with web design developed over time. The result was a web page that was used in Math that included an online diary and links to material and keys presented in class. This website was scrapped and replaced with a much more elegant and powerful website that allowed the user to embed a blog page from blogger.com directly into the body of the website. This allowed me to include any links to material directly in the main page and improved the organization and navigation of material for students to find. Blog pages allow for RSS feeds to be added that students can subscribe to and quickly find what was covered each day without having to scroll or navigate through pages on a website. Most handouts were uploaded to the website along with homework check keys on a daily basis in PDF format and were displayed as links directly in the blogs. In addition, Special Keynote presentations were saved on a regular basis as screen-casts, which were subsequently re-encoded into FLASH format, and embedded directly into the blog main page. This greatly simplified the organization and maintenance of the website and provided students with short FLASH based tutorials that they could watch from home to help them with their assignment or studying. The use of FLASH video simplified the need for specialized codecs to watch a video.

Thus, now student had access to a website that not only provided them with the majority of the material they covered in class but also with a video guide that would assist them in their studies due to absence or illness. The results of using such a web page are not entirely clear as this page has not been used in longevity but the results so far are very promising. Students have expressed their thanks to having a web page that they can accessed from home to help them and as a way of keeping organized. Absent students now know what they have missed and instead go to the website to gather missing materials rather than coming to me for missed work.

Unified Math Website: Math Website

Finally, my last inferences stemmed from observations gathered from a weight room website that greatly reduced text presentation and maximized visual cues and guidance in the form of galleries and video training series. My website provided students with access to information about each exercise present in our school gym and with a video guide that demonstrated an exercise performed properly along with narration. The advantage to this over traditional formats is that the instructions were presented mainly in a non-static format. Exercise is a dynamic process and teaching or providing information in text-based or static-only forms greatly reduces the effectiveness of student mastery or comprehension of exercise form. The dangers present in a weight room are numerous and without proper instruction students increase their risk for injury greatly. Students have expressed their thanks for providing them with a resource they can use to learn about weight training. The results of using this teaching tool on exercise mastery and injury incidence is not known as those aspects were not directly observed or studied.

Weight Room Website: Weightroom Website

At the beginning of the school year, I began my field study introducing the Writing Room with the focus to inspire student writing by introducing each child to wider audiences (Writing Room, Abbynet e-mail and Podcasting). However, I soon realized that I was taking on way too much as my time line did not consider that my students were not computer literate, couldn't type, and needed additional support with the rules of writing.

After a slow and unmotivating start, I decided to change my focus to Podcasting since my class has had some experience using Garage Band. Before introducing this exciting new technology to my students, I needed to first learn all about it myself. I started small, by posting weekly unit spelling words as a Podcast on my website. Each week the Podcast quality improved as I learned to add music to the presentations. Next, I chose a small group of students to record a Reader's Theatre play to post on my site for students to listen at home. I was beginning to create a Podcasting hype in our school community as students and parents were beginning to ask questions and inquire all about it, and so I created a link from the school site as well as my site to include the entire community. I even had my principal involved by creating a Podcast of 'Welcome' where he spoke about our school and its exciting programs. Since our school is located in a high ESL community, I had our multicultural teacher translate and record my principal's Podcast in Punjabi and had that same Podcast translated again into Korean by our international teaching contact. Since many of our parents couldn't read our site anyway, this was an excellent opportunity to include everyone and break down any language barriers. To listen to this Podcast, Click Here.

As soon as the Podcast link became active, I began receiving many page hits and realized that I will need to keep up with new Podcast episodes. That was the time to bring my entire class into the project. My students, after writing and publishing fractured fairy tales, recorded their stories as Podcasts. I discovered that using the built in voice recorder in First Class 8.3 had some bandwidth issues as the recordings often skipped. Since we used Garage Band already, it was no trouble for my students to use this familiar program to record their Podcasts. Now that I am teaching poetry, I will have my students record their poems and have music added to enhance the mood of their poems.

During my observations, I have found that students were very excited about using this technology. I found Podcasting particularly useful as it covered all 5 strands of elementary Language Arts (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and Representing). Based on my individual page hits, people tended to visit the links that had audio and video clips as they were the most popular. Each web page on the Internet today must compete for people's attention.....more like people's attention spans. I have noticed that people, and me being guilty of this myself, have a short attention span with web sites as people don't generally have a lot of time to read through pages and pages of text, like we did back in the 1990s. Therefore, I wanted to keep these popular features as well as important information all on one page where people would not get board and leave. For my data collection, I made many detailed observations and summed them up regularly as journal entries on my blog site. Since my class was small anyway, I did not require an on-line survey, but simply checked in with each student to determine their thoughts and feelings on the projects that we were working on.

Overall, this learning community was a powerful experience for me, and ultimately my students. With the complete phase out of OS9 in the district, all schools will have Podcasting capabilities. It is my hope that other teachers will attempt this exciting and innovative addition to their Language Arts programs!

My project is finally completed and I am working on recording the data on a day to day basis in my classroom. As a French teacher, I found it quite frustrating when my students had twenty different pronunciations of the same word, and none of them were close to the actual pronunciation! Considering that pronunciation plays a large part in their oral mark, I knew I had to find a way for them to practice pronunciation on their own time, away from their peers. Working as an "online teacher" for the past three years, I have been given many ideas on how to deliver my course material online and make it interactive for my students. I took these ideas one step further and created audio PowerPoint presentations for my grade nines to download and practice at home.

In the PowerPoint, each slide represents a different part of the word they are learning to pronounce. As the different parts of the word are highlighted, an audio file automatically plays so that the student can hear the sound while they look at it. The word is reviewed again, at the end, and there is time for the student to repeat it. I did an online survey of students to see if this was something they would use (before I took the time to create it) and the answer was an overwhelming, YES!

I then focused on tracking the results of four particular students from my class. These four students did a preliminary oral test in which they read thirteen sentences they had not seen before, but which consisted of the words I used in my PowerPoint. I highlighted the words they mispronounced. I also kept a record of each time these particular students needed to be corrected for pronunciation during regular lessons. As well, I kept track of their classroom oral presentation marks. I will do a final assessment with these students, using the same thirteen sentences, in June before they write their final exam.

Comparing the two pages of sentences, and the words they pronounce incorrectly, will be the proof I need to tell me if audio files really can help in student pronunciation. So far, the data I have collected in class indicates that it does! My students seem a lot more confident in their oral abilities as well. I consider this project, time well spent!

I have been involved in a number of student online writing projects this year. The Writing Room was our first attempt at creating a space online where students and teachers could post their writing for an authentic audience in the secure confines of AbbyNet. 15 teachers have signed on the project so far. Some classes used it for a single assignment, some have used it consistently over the year and are regular contributers. While overseeing this project I have had the opportunity to observe a number of things that I would like to share with the community.

1. Like any instructional strategy, taking students online to write needs to be modeled by the teacher as well as consistently supported if students are going to buy in. In many cases, teachers used the Writing Room to "try" online writing with their students. The trial did not extend past the first stage for various reasons. One of my goals for the next month is to survey teachers who used the Writing Room to find out what barriers they experienced in using the resource. For some teachers, the Writing Room was a good tool to connect home and school around writing. Students could log on at home and revise and edit their work as well as read and respond to their classmates work. These teachers were very focused on using the Writing Room and treated the exercise seriously. Not surprisingly, their students bought in to the strategy and produced, in many cases, very good work.

2. The second observation I made was that there needs to be training provided for teachers around responding effectively to writing. In the online world, responding to writing is a given. There are few articles on the web that do not have the ability for readers to provide feedback. Responding to someone's writing in thoughtful, honorable, coherent manner is a 21st century literacy. The Writing Room could be a great place to practice it. I will need to look for ways to provide training to teachers so that they can facilitate this.

3. Different spaces for different purposes. Soon after we had launched the Writing Room I realized that students could have benefited from a "smaller room" that would facilitate peer editing to work on their drafts rather than having to publish their work to the larger community in order for it to appear online. A classroom version of the Writing Room could have greatly benefited students. While this is very easy to accomplish within AbbyNet (FirstClass) by having the teacher create a conference on their AbbyNet desktop and then placing it on their students' AbbyNet desktops, training would be needed in order for teachers to feel comfortable doing it. I hope to have training available for this in the 07-08 school year.

4. A strategy for monitoring the writing room needs to be developed. On several occasions students chose to misuse the Writing Room by posting pictures of themselves and engaging in inappropriate discourse. In most cases the offenses were noticed early on and action was taken. However, I realize that there needs to be a more formal strategy in place for regular monitoring. To expand this concept further, I believe that the writing room would benefit by having resident writers interact with students, hopefully creating excitement and interest around writing and bringing a sense of community to the forum.

As we do our post surveys I plan on fleshing out these ideas and hopefully implement changes that will make the Writing Room a vibrant space for SD34 students to interact with other writers.

Hello Fellow Community Members. Like many of you have shared, I too have been very encouraged and impressed with the great things occurring in your schools with technology. For my blog update, I do not have a podcast or movie this time but I thought that I would briefly document some podcasting trouble that I have run into and offer a viable solution/alternative to keep podcasting alive in your school. For examples of podcasts that I have been involved with, please visit my class and school site at: http://sd34.homeip.net/shipwell/home/

With using First Class 8.3 Client for recording podcasts, I have encountered a problem with the bandwidth at my school......it is too slow and cannot keep up with the audio recording of my students' voices. The result sounds like a CD skipping, or a bad impression of the 80s character Max Headroom. I quickly realized that there was no way to fix this problem and so I have chosen to have my students use Garage Band to record their podcasts. The podcast option on this program have built in music and vocal tracks ready to go. Students record their voices on already set vocal tracks. Once recorded, students export their file to iTunes, convert it to an mp3 and then drop that file into their Home Page folders on Abbynet. From there they can access their podcast on the Internet. The only downfall, is that I have not figured out how to make the tunes have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe and download to their computers. At this stage, downloading is not a big deal as my kids are pretty excited that their voices are live on the Internet. Currently, I am recording Fractured Fairy Tales and hope to get to poetry by the end of the month.

I am always awed when I read what others are doing with technology. I still marvel at the podcasts etc. I have been busy but don't seem to have accomplished/finished much. That doesn't mean I haven't done anything. I got my parent survey on line and on paper. Unfortunately, I did not get a tremendous response. However, the information I did get was interesting. Of the people who answered it, most do use technology fairly competently and are interested in using the internet as a means of communication with me about their child's progress etc. So far so good. I am offering workshops for parents who are email illiterate but want to become more familiar with it on Thursday at our school's open house. I hope to get a few more email addresses out of this.

I have set up a wiki and tried to get my students to do some collaborative editing. There are some wrinkles in this but I could see some really promising things too. When the groups had all added to their page, they sat around a computer together and were discussing in a lot of detail how to edit the page, improve sentences, etc. I sat quietly listening the whole time while they critiqued and improved their work. Bravo!

I have been revamping my website to make it more user friendly so to speak. The kids said they had a hard time finding things. So I made a separate page for several units and folders for Regular vs. Honours etc. I am not sure that this is the best way still, but it's a work in progress.

I am mentoring 2 other staff working on Check My Mark. I quite enjoy getting emails from my students when they question something or if I missed something etc. Sure beats the line up at my desk or having them follow me around the room, etc.

I have kept up my blog and have put "bonus" activities on it. These have been different activities and then I was told about Quia.com. This is the most fantastic site. It has ready made activities in all subjects that you can link to and if you sign up for a subscription you can copy existing activities and then edit them to customize for your classes. Wow. The kids have told me they enjoy playing the games and any time I am told that 15 year olds enjoyed practicing with verbs or subordinate clauses or short story terms, I love it. Try this site out. I have made a quick game using words more or less associated with the Learning community. See how you do. You can play in flash or html. http://www.quia.com/hm/300819.html

Apart from all that, I have recorded some of the short stories we read onto my website in my somewhat feeble attempts to differentiate my instruction but it's a start. My next plan is to make a video/powerpoint of the story Portable Phonograph with various nuclear war pictures, video clips downloaded from various sharing sites, etc. with me reading the story. I hope I can get it done before we have to read it in class. That is the biggest problem. I run out of time to do all the things I would like to do and then it just seems to fall by the wayside. Anyway, this has gone on long enough and my stack of marking awaits. Keep going and keep blogging everyone. It really is inspirational to hear what everyone is accomplishing. Spring break is coming!!!

The project I chose to do was with my French 9 class, and they just began on February 5, in the new semester. I had to complete my survey and get them working on that as my first step and I am pleased that it is finally underway. Once I have collected my survey results, I will be moving on to the actual audio files that I am creating for my classroom website, to help students work on their French pronunciations. In the meantime, I am observing the pronunciation of four key students in my class to chart their progress from February to May with the help of my website practice links. I hope it really makes a difference for them! If so, it will become bigger, better and a permanent part of my classroom website.