Reflections on COETAIL Course 3

Course 3 resonated with me because it confirmed all of my beliefs about the power visuals have of extending and deepening learning in the classroom. I found course 3 to be the most useful to me in terms of applying what I have learned here in COETAIL in my classroom with my students. It was valuable to have time to explore ways of presenting information visually during class and then actually creating presentations that I can use with students. I also appreciated learning about the Flip Cam and what we can do with the software from Mark. Even though I've always known that the flip cams were available for us to use, it wasn't until I actually had time to play around with them during class that I understood how easy it would be to integrate them into class activities and projects. Having time to tinker with technology helped me to get my creative juices flowing and my lightbulb of ideas to shine.

One of the results of this course is that I find myself not only thinking of ways I can make language learning more visual, but which visuals will have the deepest and most long lasting impact on student learning. It's also helped me to have conversations with my students about why and how images help them in their own learning and how they can use this awareness to use visual depictions to communicate effectively to an audience. For example, one of my students who was writing a story about a maid who was trying to figure out who ate all of the pizza in the kitchen drew this:

We later discussed how this picture would help the audience understand the story. What if it were a different picture, perhaps just a picture of a pizza box or just the maid? The main point that the maid was trying to figure out the mystery of who actually ate the pizza could have been lost. But, because she drew the maid scratching her head with a perplexed expression and an empty pizza box the reader has a better idea of what the message is communicating even without the use of language to reinforce it. In the future I'll continue to have conversations with students about how they can effectively use images to convey meaning. Fortunately, this course has given me a better sense of what visual literacy is and how to start talking about visual literacy with kids.

I was happy that digital storytelling was one of the focal points of this course. I am very interested in incorporating digital storytelling into my classroom on a more regular basis. This course gave me the opportunity to reflect more about how to use images effectively to tell a story. My final project is centered around digital storytelling and specifically encourages students to use images to help "tell" their story and make it appealing to a wider audience.

I'll post student examples of digital stories soon!

My Students are FLIPPING Out!

I am in love with the flip cam! I think the thing I like the best about using the Flip cameras in class is that they are so simple to use and the software to create magic movies is equally as simple. I spent no more than one minute explaining to students how the camera operated and I don't even think they needed it! They picked up on how to use them right away! Students created short videos narrating their stories in Spanish last week. Having the flip cams in class added a new level of fun and excitement to story retelling. It was easy to use, fun, and it got kids speaking in Spanish! ¡¡Me encanta la Flip!!

I Dig Digital Storytelling!

Saturday's class was fantastic because I got to do something I love best, create stories! I am really excited by the use of storytelling in world languages and I discovered a really great tool to create stories digitally for my Spanish class. Prezi is not only fun, but a really powerful tool for creating stories with zooming images and text. I can't wait for kids to try it out. In the past, we have always used Notebook and Voicethread to create stories since they are simple and inserting images is easy. I will still use both of those tools. Voicethread is so valuable to world language learners since it has the ability to record oral language. But, I'm now really excited by the possibilities of using Prezi with kids to write and tell stories in new and creative ways.

I created this presentation that I will use for my 3rd grade Spanish class (another reason I loved Saturday's class is that I got a lesson done!)

Mini-Cuento on Prezi

The process of creating this story was both exciting and frustrating. It was exciting because it's been awhile since I've seen technology that is so flexible and creative. It was frustrating because It took me awhile to get the hang of how to edit and add pictures and manipulate the "zebra" wheel. It was almost like learning a new sport and my fingers had to develop muscle memory to be able to control the zoom feature, etc. It helped sitting next to Laura who had just learned about Prezi at a conference in Shanghai. She was able to answer most of the questions that I had.

One of my goals as a teacher this year is to use storytelling to provide comprehensible input for my kids so this COETAIL class was really helpful to me. It allowed me the opportunity to not only learn about new ways of tellling stories, but to actually implement what I learned.

iMovie by Trial and Error

In August, I created a video for Back to School Night to highlight for parents the TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) method that I use in my Spanish classes. It was my first time using iMovie and I have to admit, I clumsily made my way through the process. Nevertheless, it was fun playing around with it and in the end I was just happy that I produced something. However, I know that the presentation I created with iMovie could have been much better in a couple of ways. Here is the video that I created:



The transitions and the subtitles were the most difficult part of creating the movie.

If I had to change one thing it would definitely be to improve upon the subtitles. I had a difficult time timing the subtitles to each slide and as a result, some of the subtitles lingered too long or didn't coincide with the image on the screen. I also found it challenging to enlarge the subtitles. Some are very large and others are small (the more words per slide, the smaller the subtitle). Some of the subtitles were too small for the audience to read. The subtitles are a very important part of effectively communicating the message considering most of our parents do not speak Spanish. I feel that the power of the presentation was lost due to the lack of readability.

Since the video is a series of clips from our class, I would have liked for the transitions to be smoother and less choppy and abrupt. I think a good use of transitions would have made the video easier and more enjoyable to watch.

I'd like to keep playing around with iMovie. Maybe the second go around won't be as difficult. I'd also like to have kids start creating their own movies. It would be great to use Flip video. I appreciated the simplicity of FlipCam's software after the complexity of iMovie. Although after playing around with the Flip software, I learned that subtitles cannot be inserted into movies which is a bit limiting for language learners. Still, I think I'll give it a go and have kids grab a flip and start filming. It's a great way to get kids to use the target language and have fun with their classmates. And who knows, maybe they will teach me a few things and help me improve my video presentation for next year's Back to School Night!

The Power of Image

If you are a non Spanish speaker does this mean anything to you?

LA ESCALERA

You may have noticed that the word starts with "La" and is feminine, that the first letter is "e" and the last letter is an "a". But does it mean anything to you? Most likely it doesn't and most likely you've already forgotten it.

Now if I add a picture to this word:

LA ESCALERA

Voilá. Instant. "La Escalera" means staircase. It is through the power of the image that the word becomes real. Now that you see the image of someone climbing a staircase, maybe this will allow you to see the word "scale" in the middle of the word and help you to remember that you "scale" a "staircase".

Using images and pictures with kids has always been an integral part of providing comprehensible language input in order to facilitate language acquisition.

As a world language teacher, I know that a picture really is worth a thousand words. The bridge that connects words to meaning is constructed with images.

Using images to teach new words is valuable, but using images just to teach a list of vocabulary words is limiting. The power of using images in the classroom comes from their potential to spark great conversations. Pictures give kids something to talk about.

Take this image:

I plan to use this image in class to have multiple conversations. As a warm up, I can put this image on the smart board and ask surface level questions such as "what colors do you see?" "How many monsters are there?" I can also engage kids in deeper level questions such as, "How does the blue monster make you feel?" or "What would you look like if you were a monster?". All of these questions fulfill the same goal, to get kids speaking to me and to each other in Spanish. Without the image, the conversation seems contrived, it lacks an anchor. Kids learn best when they are having fun and let's face it, monsters are fun.

I Got my Eyes on You.

In our first COETAIL class for course 3 we began exploring web design and reading web pages.

Last year was the first year that we maintained a classroom blog. We used Wordpress for our classroom blog, which initially I thought was complicated and difficult to use and later realized that I just needed time to get used to it. I wanted our classroom blog to be a showcase of student work as well as an information site for parents and students. My aim was to make it easy to navigate and highly visual so that students and parents would come back often and not only read about but SEE all of the language learning that kids are engaged in.

After our first class for course 3, I began asking myself, "is the visual layout of my blog affecting this aim?" Is there a better way to structure and format our blog? What is memorable about our classroom blog? After watching the eye tracking video from a google study in which participant's eye movements were tracked to uncover what part of the webpage readers are looking at and consequently "thinking" about, I started thinking about how this eye tracking test would look on our Spanish classroom blog. And more specifically, what are people's eyes focusing in on and REMEMBERING.

So after a quick google search, I found a website called Clue which enables you to get a quick glimpse of what people remember about your website. I tried it with our classroom blog and sent it out to a few people. These were the results.

It's interesting to see which words and images have the most impact on people's memories. "Kids" and "Education" being in the top 3 were refreshing to see. However "Spanish" was only sited once which surprised me (and concerned me a bit since it's the main focus of the class!) Now, I find myself asking questions like "should I change the position, color, or the font of the word "Spanish" so that it draws people in?" It would be interesting to make some changes to the format (color, style, arrangement, background, font, etc) and then send out the test again to see if the results are different. If anything, this quick test helped me to think about visual content and what makes a lasting imprint on readers, important things to consider as I continue to think about and pay attention to visual literacy.