iMovie Challenge

Getting started:

The work for today:

Either individually, or with a group of your choosing (approx. 3 people per group) create an iMovie using your iphone, or an ipad that you have signed out from the Learning Commons

You could:

• Create a book trailer
• Demonstrate a skill for PE
• Recreate a historic speech, biography of someone famous or moment in history
• Create a hype video for a school event or extra-curricular activity
• Create an expectations or safety video

OR….a creation of your own choosing (just check with me first :)

By the end of the lesson you should:

• Be comfortable with the use of imovie
• demonstrate your learning by presenting your imovie

Work on it:

Watch an iMovie tutorial on youtube
For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVjXyT8tXH4

Choose a theme for your imovie and film using the criteria listed below:

Show it:

Basic

• Pick a topic or theme for your project
• Use google images to save pictures to the camera roll
• Use the iPad camera to take pictures and videos
• Play with the iMovie app and import pictures and video

Intermediate

• Meet all basic requirements and…create an iMovie project with titles, music and transitions
• Save your project to your camera roll

Advanced

• Meet all basic and intermediate requirements and…include a voice-over or spliced audio
• Try uploading to google drive

*** When you finish with your project…. Please ensure you delete all of your content and be sure to sign-out of any accounts

SIDES wrap-up and review

What elements of SIDES’ courses struck you as most valuable in supporting student learning?

The overall pedagogical theme of "get started, Work on it, Show it" is great. I also, as I have mentioned in a previous post, really found the “lesson objectives” very helpful. I am not sure how much a middle school student would get out of it, but I imagine that it would be helpful for myself, as the instructor to keep the assessment of the lessons on point.

What are the most important takeaways for you?

When I started this course, I thought that the biggest challenge would be in building a “voice” in the digital classroom. However, after speaking with David Evans, and others, it seems that one of the most difficult aspects of distance education is the asynchronous entry of its participants, and the struggles to help students in various different lessons across subjects and even grade levels.

What features would you most want to highlight if you were creating a course?

I think that I would want to highlight the “lesson objectives” and the “work on it” sections. I have felt, from taking this course, that lessons that don't require me to produce anything tangible were given less focus than those that asked me to hand something in. While I understand that learning is it's own reward, I think that students need something to do to cement their knowledge.

Descriptive feedback: Beyond "good job"

If there is one area of my teaching practice that I would like to improve on the most, it would be descriptive feedback. I just have a hard time with it. It seems to me that one of two things happen; either I spend a long time on each assignment carefully crafting a comment, only to find it later in the trash, or I give it the old "good job" and I find it later in the trash.
Clearly, the assignment has little value for my students if they feel they can simply dispose of it once they have their "grade". It also seems clear to me that even if I try to provide some good feeedback, it is not enough to add value for the student. Is it a failure of the material assigned, the project that was assigned, or the feedback?
Regardless, I want to get better at descriptive feedback, but where to start? I have looked at several examples online, and they all seem to lack meaning as well. In other words, they say the same thing as a "good job", but in a more complicated way, not necessarily adding much to the understanding of the student.
How can I use descriptive feedback to increase meaning for students? How can I do this quickly, not spending hours and hours marking assignments? How can I increase student engagement so that I find fewer assignments in the trash?

In charge and Online

Grade/subject area: Grade 6/7 Math

Description of concept: This is a mini lesson on dividing decimals. This concept is difficult for many students because the addition of decimals to a concept that students often struggle with like dividing, makes an already tricky subject that much more difficult. If I were to do this again, I would try to slow down a bit and explain the steps to solving the two questions a bit more fully. I would also get a more reliable camera-person that would stand behind me so that the video didn't seem like it was upside down.



Hi Steve, I heard you were having a few issues with dividing decimals. Dividing decimals can be tricky if you get confused by the steps, but once you know what the steps are, and the order to do them in, it's not any more difficult than regular division.
I have made a quick video of myself completing two different dividing decimals questions, one with a whole number divisor, and a slightly more difficult question with a decimal divisor. You can watch the video here:

I have also emailed you some notes that show the steps so that you can use these to follow along.


Hope this helps, but please feel free to email me again if you are still stuck and we can arrange a face to face.

Part 1: Explanation of core competency

In the above excerpt I am trying to implement "Strategy 5: Design lessons to focus on One aspect of Quality at a time". I want to make sure that my fictitious student has developed a reasonable competency and confidence with dividing decimals before he tries to tackle anything more challenging. from the lesson, "You can then offer feedback focused on the component you just taught, which narrows the volume of feedback students need to act on at a given time and raises their chances of success in doing so, again, especially for the struggling learners. This is a time saver for you, and more instructionally powerful for students."

Part 2: How would issues such as distance and asynchronous learning play into your practice?

I think that distance and asynchronicity would not be particularly challenging to my math program, because it is already designed to allow students to work at their own pace, challenging themselves at three different levels. However, some of the assessment for learning techniques could be better built in to increase student engagement. As Ceara Mullin wrote I could, "build activities into the course that require regular checks of understanding or competence. These could be for the student to see only, such as check your understanding questions with answer keys, or short automatically marked quizzes with the opportunity to see mistakes and correct them."