Nance Wilson and I talked with Mike Kranitz of EventSquid about #beyondtheapp #bta Beyond the App: Cause and Conference, which strives to support teachers’ professional development and coach literacy experts in one of the most creative ways possible in response to COVID, and their model may just change the game.
“We wanted them to know that they weren’t alone in the things that were causing them to struggle and we wanted them to know that people whose books they read… are also people they can talk and work together with.” – Dr. Thomas Wolsey
“It’s about leveraging the technology that’s out there to think about, ‘Well, what could this do for me that would be better and or different and would allow me to have similar quality practices that I had in the face to face?’” – Dr. Nance Wilson
Beyond the App is an interactive online conference for middle grades teachers, teacher educators, parents, and educational leaders. For just $10 you get to work with experts in the field to improve your online teaching of literacy.
Visit our website and register (Your registration helps us fund the conference in the future): https://bit.ly/beyondtheapp
If you are registering from Africa, please send a note for special instructions to BeyondTheApp@Cortland.edu
In addition, participants can choose to donate to our EgyptReads! Initiative to put books in school libraries.
Some of our speakers:
Jack C Berckemeyer Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey Maha Bali Vicky Mac Arthur Cardullo Zoi Philippakos Troy Hicks Emily Smothers Howell Ian O’Byrne Danny Brassell Keisha Rembert Jill Castek Timothy Rasinski Julie Coiro Richard Beach AND MORE!
Beyond the App invites teachers to interact with experts in online and traditional literacies. In contrast to many professional development activities, Beyond the App participants will co-construct approaches to teaching upper elementary and middle school students with colleagues around the globe. The event is a joint project with the Literacy Department at the State University of New York at Cortland and Graduate School of Education at The American University in Cairo.
Participants will have the opportunity to choose strands or themes such as building fluency, motivation for learning online, assessment practices, and more. You are likely familiar with the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model represented by the phrases, “I [the teacher] do, We do, and You do.” Our focus is on the difficult challenge of providing appropriate literacy practices within the we do [it together] phase when teachers are working online, and students are learning. But, how do you do that when you are teaching online?
Join us to go Beyond the App.
Sign up for details via email on our LeadPages site.
School buildings closed for the rest of the year and universities shuttered their doors, but education must and does go on. In my formerly face-to-face classes, presentations we scheduled for live audiences are now going to be online. Alternatives to live presentations are many, and I will share some of them in this post.
First things first, though: How do you choose an online presentation tool?
Determine what aspects of the presentation you will assess and how that will be done. What gets assessed depends on your tolerance for new technologies (or willingness to try them) and that of your students. Remember that many of them will be trying out tools they have never used before.
Are you able to support your students as they try out new digital tools? If not, are they able to find the support they need? Check out this post on the lazy classroom for a few ideas about how much to challenge your students to try new tech tools.
Onward to some curated resources that you may find helpful. Add your own in the comments, and you might enjoy this post by our colleague, Renee Hobbs where she shares examples of some digital tools she uses.
There are a variety of free digital, web-based resources available for instructors, educators, and learners to create useful and meaningful multimedia presentations. Keep reading.
MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION TOOLS
Tool Options
Glogster: Tool for creating interactive, innovative multimedia posters, glogs, and more. Read more here.
Prezi: Tool for creating visual presentations that allows you or the viewer to zoom in “to the details” or out to show the “big picture.”
VoiceThread: VoiceThread is an interactive tool that permits creators to add video, still images, audio, and text using a variety of tools. Creators can enable comment features that permit viewers to add their own thoughts to the presentation.
Flipgrid allows users to post short videos to which others can reply asynchronously.
Narrated PowerPoint® posted to SlideShare, AuthorStream, Vimeo, or YouTube. PowerPoint includes a narration/dictate option and can be uploaded or converted for online presentation using one of the tools linked above.
PowToon is a popular and powerful video tool that is user-friendly.
You can also read the following reviews of some of these tools and a discussion of other tools here:
Remember when designing your multimedia presentation:
Simplicity adds value.
Aim for a few words or phrases on a slide (the nugget of information).
Aim for one powerful image on a slide. That image could be accompanied by minimal text, a symbol, or no text at all.
Be creative in capturing and maintaining attention.
Eliminate distraction: use animations, flash, or sound effects sparingly and only when necessary to get the point across.
Avoid slide transitions.
Design artfully:
What does your audience already know?
What do you want your viewers to learn?
Check PresentationZen for more ideas on artful presentation design.
Learn more about Multimedia and Fair Use
Working with multimedia, almost invariably, means incorporating the works of others into a presentation (cf. Huffman, 2010). Teachers and students do have some latitude, called Fair Use. However, it is always an effective practice to make sure that the intellectual property of others are attributed or cited in any presentation. While there can be substantial penalties for infringing on the works created by others, the most important point, arguably, is that attributing the works of others is simply good citizenship. Creators want credit for their work, and any user is a potential creator, as well. In digital environments, creators, authors, and users, take care of one another by properly attributing the sources they use. Though teachers, professors, and students are very familiar with citation of text-based sources (e.g. APA, MLA, Chicago), these style guides often do not provide sufficient guidance when a student, for example, wants to incorporate images, audio, or video created by others in a multimedia presentation.
An excellent place to begin learning about digital citizenship and fair use is the MediaLab at the University of Rhode Island. Teacher and student resources can be found on the MediaLab website.
Though not exhaustive, these websites provide a place to begin looking for music and image sources that students and teachers might use in their own multimedia presentations while considering the rights of others who have contributed their works.
Today, I am posting a few resources for those in PK-12 and higher education who must convert their instruction from face-to-face to an online format in a hurry.
Image: CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAMS
UNESCO offers a list of distance learning solutions with links here.
Our colleague, Greg Mcverry, has created a series of videos, “Moving Online In Time of Crisis,” on converting to online quickly.
And Peggy Semingson, featured here on Literacy Beat, shared this curated list of remote learning tools during Covid-19 from Laura Pasquini and these tips for remote teaching from the University of Texas. Peggy regularly shares her own resources and those of others on her LinkedIn profile.
TechSmith Corporation, one of my favorite digital solution providers, shared this website full of tips and resources.
Resources added April 6, 2020
Publishers I work with shared these open access resources:
Science teacher Kathy Blakemore has inspired generations of seventh-graders to take better care of our planet, to be curious about all its inhabitants, and to learn more about what makes its ecosystems work as they do.
Recently, Kathy and her students at Elsinore Middle School in Lake Elsinore, California decided to take their learning public. Using Book Creator, the students published a book titled, Incredible Invertebrates. Students worked in teams to identify sources about various phyla and then synthesize graphics and their reading. They learned about what it takes to write a book that is appealing to their audience as well.
Each chapter is organized describing where the invertebrates live, what threats exist to their survival, and what fun facts the student scientists and authors uncovered. I was very impressed that the students cited their sources and identified key vocabulary that their readers will want to understand.
Congratulations to Mrs. B and her 7th-grade GEMS students on a job well done.
In this post, I share an infographic representing the ideas in the article, “Accuracy in Digital Writing Environments: Read Up, Ask Around, Double-Check”. Access the article by clicking here and scrolling down to the article.
You are welcome to share this infographic in your classroom or for nonprofit educational purposes.
In backpacks, pockets, and purses, students bring their connected devices to school. But “connected” may be the wrong term; perhaps “connectable” devices is more accurate. Bandwidth means that a network can deliver data in a specified amount of time. For many schools, bandwidth may be a limitation. For some teachers, there is nothing more frustrating than planning a lesson that requires students to access the internet only to find that the bandwidth delivers data at speeds at which snails would sneer.
Students at Maya Jaguar using RACHEL
Some educational settings require restrictions on access to the internet, such as those that serve incarcerated youth or adults. Others are so distant from internet connections that it is prohibitively expensive to ensure all students have access.
EduForum 2018 at The American University in Cairo, New Cairo, Egypt
November 3, 2018
Assessment is the fuel of learning. Confronted with mountains of data, teachers can feel overwhelmed. Particularly frustrating, some assessments interrupt instruction and distract students. In this session, we explore how to make the climb over the data mountain manageable. We will investigate effective practices to align assessments and learning outcomes through technology-driven formative assessment. Embedding assessment directly into learning activities can help teachers adjust instruction and engage students with their learning at the same time. Learn how to create electronic exit tickets. Make a game your students will enjoy while making real-time use of feedback based on their progress through the game environment. Assessment need not be a tedious chore. Put learning assessment in service of engaging learning environments.
As part of today’s presentation on digital tools for formative assessment, we used Survey Monkey to conduct a pre-assessment of what we know about assessments.
Games are great learning tools, but they can be very useful for assessment, as well. Three online games and assessment tools we tried out were OLogy, Sim Scientist, and Kahoot!
The power of the teacher’s human voice coupled with images of a student’s own work were the focus of our exploration of screencasting. Cambridge English videos showed us how to use screencapture and a free screencapture program, Jing, were demonstrated.
Online tools make generating rubrics a snap. Check these out:
Finally, we examined the role and possibilities of Big Data and educational assessment. Read more here and here.
Want to join our classroom? Navigate to classroom.google.com and enter the code in the image below. Some of the tasks have expired links, but you can see how the demonstration was set up.
This semester, I assigned my undergraduates to create a photo essay defining the places that have had the most impact on who they are and who they might become. Their photo essays are due next week, so this week I am sharing some of the photo essay websites and software tools they are using. Today, they explored the affordances of each. I provided a list of questions (you will find them below) to guide their choices.
Dear Literacy Beat readers, if you have a site or tool to share, please add it in the comments.
Pro-Tip: What’s your statement about the photos you choose? Can you write one (or maybe two) sentences that capture the main idea of your photo essay? Is it unique enough that others will want to view your essay?
A note about intellectual property: Any work you use that you did not write or create must be attributed. This includes music (and be aware that using copyrighted music could result in your project being taken down by the platform or host).
Pro Tip: Create a rough draft of your essay in order to check out the features of the platform and tools you use. Try different ways of arranging your photos, text (including captions), and titles. Later, you can hide or delete the rough draft.
Questions / Affordances
Check out the sites and tools (software) on the first page and review a couple of examples. What affordances does each offer your project?
What does it cost?
Do you need an account?
Can you make the site available to anyone?
Does the site privilege images, text, or both?
What features does the site or tool have that others may not have?
Is the site or tool mobile friendly? Laptop friendly?
Does it have sharing tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter)?
Are there advertisements? How intrusive are they?
Is the platform easy to navigate and provide tools that make it easy for you to create a photo essay?
Two notes about color:
Don’t overdo it!
Make sure the colors you choose for frames, text, and so on are easy to read against the backgrounds you choose
Bridget Dalton
berdwyer
Blaine Smith
danagrisham
jillcastek
TDWolsey
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