Formative Assessment with Google Forms and a Video

A great hint I learned last year from a colleague Steve Voster at UWCSEA, is to repurpose a Google Form to help students engage with a simple video tutorial.  Whilst YouTube is full of many suitable tutorials such as the Crash Course resources, the struggle is getting students to engage and to elicit some feedback on their level of understanding whilst they watch. Within a Google Form you can now embed a video which opens up a new realm of possibilities for getting students to engage with a video. 

LINKING GOOGLE FORM AND YOUTUBE

Google Forms are a simple way to collect some feedback. Create one from your Google Drive, then play the video whilst waiting for a few key points. I try to develop "hinge questions" which really highlight if the student gets a concept, these are explained in the work of educationalist Dylan Wiliam. Less questions the better !

Recently, Google Forms was updated so you can embed a video directly into the form. Once you have finished share with your students for homework. The feedback spreadsheet of student responses is a great discussion starter/plenary at the beginning of the next lesson. 

Google Forms can now be shared with colleagues so others can reuse and recycle your task. Just remember your colleague needs to make a copy of your form.  Whilst this isn't revolutionary it is just a nice example of repurposing a few tech tools to make learning a little more interesting and effective, it sure beats reading the textbook each week.

As shown below, you can access the student responses via the associated spreadsheet, or scroll through via the "Show Summary of Responses" button in the Google Form.

Summary of Responses as a spreadsheet.

Full tutorial to get started.

Essay planning and drafting with Mindmeister

Brainstorming or creating a mind map is a common process to help students develop ideas and to encourage ideation. In many classes, a brainstorm is used as the first planning step in a writing process which flows into drafting.

Online tools such as mindmaps can be a simple way to enhance the planning stage of student writing. When the tool is mutable ie. student can reorder, change and edit their thoughts on the go it should support deeper thinking and exploration of ideas. When doing a similar activity with paper, students are constrained by the size of their paper, frustrated when they need to erase or make a change and struggle to reorder the hierarchy of their thoughts. Whilst you can also plan in a word document and rearrange ideas, the visual element of a mindmap should be an important consideration.

Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool that our student can use to develop an essay outline and then translate these notes into a text document. A clever export function allows students to export the structure and contents of their mindmap as headings and bullets in a word document. As shown below, this simple trick takes thier ideas into the an essay plan, helping them to draft potentially each paragraph and sentence.

Few tips:

1. UWCSEA subscribes to Mindmeister and this is linked to each students GApps accounts.
2. This can be accessed from the grid app icon at top of GMail/GDrive.
3. Students can click share, to send a link to the teacher or class site / learning platform.
4. They can also invite collaborators, but this slows the speed of the website down considerably.
5. Small downwards arrow at bottom allows export function - MS Word translates document into headings, and sentences, but unselect all of the options to get a cleaner look with only text.

See video below for a full walkthrough.

Angles, iSight Screencasts & Misconceptions

Before/After Videos for Learning

So you want to make a screencast, but you don't have an iPad?

No problem.

Here's what I call an iSight 'Screencast', yes it's not capturing a screen, and yes it's really just a form of video capture, but you get the idea.

In fact for the lesson I used, this is actually a better way to capture what kids can do than using a screencast, yes, I said it.

Before & After #1

The context for this activity was a Grade 4 maths lesson on using a protractor, I wanted to capture their technique, but I can't possibly watch all of the kids in real time at the same time, but a video cam can. Did I watch all 22 videos? No. Did I need to? No. Did the kids think I might? Yes. Did that spur them to do the best they could as if I or their parents would be watching, well, yes, I think it did (and their parents probably will).

Here's the simple setup:

1 Macbook (with built in webcam), 1 piece of paper, that's it.

Here's the lesson in 7 succinct snippets:

1. Draw an acute angle on the board
2. Show kids a protractor, tell them it's for measuring angles
3. Tell them to make a short video* that shows how they think it works
4. Watch them as they try this - look for at least one kids that can...
5. Ask kids to upload their video to a shared space as soon as they're finished**
6. Now show the class a good example from their peers.
7. Now they go and try again, see of they can do better, or better still impress me! (not doing, the video shows what they were doing)

*They could use Photo Booth, but I advise using QuickTime, which easily allows the kids to flip the video once they've finished the recording, otherwise their work will appear upside down.

Before & After #2

Here's the student video I used to teach the kids this skill:


Protractor Student Demonstration from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.


I love the fact that the angles they were measuring were actually harder than the conveniently rounded angle they saw demonstrated.

Finally, share their before/after videos on their Learning Journals, with a short reflection on their learning.

• Misconceptions captured? Yes

• Misconceptions addressed? Yes

• Evidence of learning? Yes

• Differentiation? Yes, the few kids who could do it the first time perfectly, went on to show how they could measure reflex/obtuse angles, etc.

A nice bonus is that as I have all of their before/after videos accessible online, I can review any of them at any time if I have any desire to check on a particular student's grasp of the skill.

Here's the student video I used to demo a correct method - perfect? No, so I used his few hiccups as a teaching opportunity, so you can be sure his second one was :)




**We use Google Drive

Chinese Language and the End of Worksheets

Times have changed, teachers have evolved, and we now have a new breed of learning technologists. The first changes began in the classroom itself – new technologies such as overhead projectors, interactive whiteboards, laptop computers and wireless internet have opened up the classroom to the outside world. Teachers who spent their lives managing with a textbook, a tape recorder and a blackboard are now adept at using Slideshows to present grammar, playing audio files to practise listening skills, capturing texts from the Internet to introduce reading skills and perhaps most ground-breaking of all – empowering students by giving them access to a wide range of web-based tools that allow them to publish work and engage with each other, online, in real time, anywhere, any place, and space.

At Dover campus I've been running 'Team Time' with our languages teachers for a couple of years now—meeting once a week as a team to share and develop language teaching practices by enhancing them with digital technology. Over time the group has developed a strong ethos of sharing innovative classroom practice, encouraging each other to experiment and feedback their findings for further discussion and reflection.

Clearly the 'multimodal affordances' of digital technology are especially powerful in language teaching, and gradually the old fashioned worksheet is becoming obsolete, its lack of interactivity, it's static inability to incorporate audio, both orally and aurally, are the death knells of the worksheet.

Now instead, increasingly the 'norm' is becoming interactive, multimedia activities that engage, and powerfully facilitate language learning. Not only can teachers see, but they can hear how their students pronounce, and can even model this pronunciation themselves. All the examples you see here have been shared courtesy of  Puay Kian Tan, one of our Chinese teachers in the Primary school, who is always enthusiastic in her embrace of ICT enhanced Chinese.

There are many ways this eRevolution is evident, but here are some our favourite activities that are wiping out worksheets:

• Making traditional worksheets multimodal, but turning them into screencasts.
• Using Presentation tools like Keynote and Google Slides to incorporate the student speech.
• Interactive online fora where students can talk discuss and respond to prompts in the language they are learning.
• Creating short films

If you're yearning for more examples, I've put together a portfolio of other screencasts, all courtesy of Puay Kian Tan.

Transformation

Where this process of particularly powerful is how Puay Kian Tan is 'working smart'. Essentially the tools are evolving from Grade 2 through each grade level, become ing more sophisticated each time, but essentially remaining identical in terms of their pedagogical foundation. When I asked Puay Kian Tan if she felt that evolving her practise to make use of these tools worth really worth it, her response was more than a resounding yes, it was a through breakdown of exactly how, and why:

Overarching curricular goals:

Understanding

－conduct comprehension checks to ensure understanding;

Speaking skill

 －enhance the ability to use Chinese language to express meaning;

 －elicit speaking that increases in fluency and accuracy;

 －to present orally in class, assisting and improving each students’ ability to interact orally in Chinese.

The reason for using screen recordings (QuickTime):

1. Better understanding of each child's speaking skill;​​​​

2. Allow greater opportunity to assess students' speaking skill through individual recordings, as there is rarely enough time to listen to each child properly during a normal classroom presentation.

The reason for using Mindmaps (MindMeister):

1. extract the keypoints from the passage；

2. using keypoint as guideline to learn the thinking in Chinese, as well as using Chinese language to express;

3. make use of the medium to present in class, to encourage the students' to speak fluently and confidently in front of their peers.

Stop Motion Movie Making & Child's Play

iPads are revolutionising many tasks that only 5 years ago would have been unthinkable, activities like creating short films using stop motion animation, and compiling these in a video editing application would have required an high specification computer, and professional digital editing tools.

These days it is literally child's play, as two of our kindergarten teachers, Zoë Brittain, and Sarah McHugh, have been demonstrating to an impressive extent, with their after school activity 'Stop Motion Movie Making'. At the activity the students in Grades 3 to 5, work in teams to create their own 'mini movies'. They design the story, setting and characters and then bring them to life.

Here's just one show reel, everything you see here was created on an iPad, using iMotion then exported to the Camera Roll, before compiling in iMovie; all with little or no teacher assistance.

So Your Students Want to Code an iOS App?

In the primary school, we're a couple of years into developing our coding provision, which, at least for now, we manage through extra curricular activities. This way rather than mandate that all kids to learn coding, we manage it in a way that provides opportunities for all students who are keen to learn how to code, after all, despite some of the rhetoric you hear these days, not EVERYONE needs to be coder. But those students who may have the potential should certainly be given the opportunity to try it out, to see if it's their 'thing'.

Control vs Coding

If you'd like to know more about our approach to coding, see my other post here, but it should be noted from the outset, that most of the experiences these days that purport to be about 'coding' are not really. What they are is a funkier version of what we taught back in the old days (The 1990s) called 'control' using a programming language developed in 60s for educators called LOGO, by none other than luminaries like Seymour Papert, with extremely laudable goals, goals that are currently resurgent, largely thanks to the renewed interest in coding. Only back then we were controlling a black and white triangle we called a 'turtle', (MS Logo) sometimes the turtle even looked like a turtle (FirstLogo), yes amazing I know.

'Coding' in the 1990's

Spot the 'turtle'.

Control is actually a much more accurate description of what 'coding' apps like Hopscotch, and Scratch teach, and sites like learn.code.org teach. Once the kids learn how to control, then they are more likely to be ready to learn how to code.

The ability to control builds the foundation to be able to code.

So, ostensibly, most of the activities our kids engage in at our 'coding' activities after school, and at lunch times, are actually focused on learning how to control, not code—however, inevitably, these kids aren't going to be fooled for long. They are eventually going to realise that sequencing jigsaw blocks to control a screen sprite, (that was a black and white triangle, but now is an angry bird, or a zombie, or Elsa from frozen, the list goes on, the icon changes, but the activity remains the same) is not the same as 'proper' coding.

Reality Check

The upshot of this is that it isn't long before the kids get a little irritated, even frustrated, as they realise that what they are doing isn't really 'coding', now you can delay them, and redirect them, to ever more sophisticated iterations on the block theme, but before long (and I'm talking a week or two) I can assure you that they want do REAL coding, not just sequencing blocks that represent code. But the fact is that REAL coding is HARD! Especially if you're working with primary school kids, so how do you give them an authentic experience of coding without obliterating their little egos?

Here's some suggestions:

Control then Code

Let them taste a little of how daunting real code actually is, not enough to put them off for life, but enough to realise that they really need to continue practising in the more familiar 'block' environment for longer to build the necessary thinking skills, the cognitive capacity, to be able to work directly with code later. In short, you need to convince them that they need to learn how to walk before they can run, and maybe taking them for a decent jog/run might help convince them of that.

How? Here's how, try...

HTML

Code academy have a great little exercise, which is technically scripting, rather than coding, but your kids won't complain:

Open TextEdit on a computer and type:

<html>

<h1> Write anything you want here </h1>

</html>

Then save the file as test.html, then open the file with a browser. You'll see your very own webpage, with whatever splendiferous statement you chose to use in a brief spate of verbal felicitude, right there on the screen. 

Javascript

For a great introduction to Javascript its hard to beat learn/code.org, where kids can click 'show me the code' and they can see what the Javascript code looks like that would control (see, that word again) the blocks they have been working with.  

When they're ready to actually code with Javascript, they can use Khan Academy's 'Intro to JS'. In these tutorials, they'll learn how to use the JavaScript language to create drawings and animations. 

Apps and Xcode

But what they really want (what they really, really want) is to make an App for an iOS device. Now there's just no really easy way to do this, yes there are tools like Stencyl, and App Inventor which allow you to build Apps using the same kinds of block conventions that they used in the control Apps, albeit even more complicated. But if they still want to code, really code, with code, then you can give them a taster they way 'real' App developers do, using the Swift language in the Xcode App.

To do this they'll need to download the Xcode App for the App Store (free), then there are some great tutorials online which will guide you and them through building a simple app called 'Hello World'. Two that I've used are included below, both use Swift. Inevitably App's evolve, so the instructions in the videos below are a little out of date, but nothing you can't figure out, and if you can't figure it out ... then coding probably isn't for you! Think of it as I kind of test.  ;o)

Appcoda & The Code Lady

This is the simplest I could find, click a button and it pops up with a message that says, you've guessed it, "Hello World" (or anything you feel inspired to write).

Creating Hello World App in Swift Using Xcode 6

'The Code Lady' has a slightly more sophisticated version of this tutorial, clearly explained in the video below:

Swift Xcode 6 Tutorial - Hello World App

Here's mine!

Doodlecast Settings

Made with Doodlecast Pro? Who cares?

As magnificent as the Doodlecast screencasting Apps are, the 'Made with Doodlecast' and 'Made with Doodlecast Pro' messages really get annoying.

Here's how to tweak the settings on your iPads to kill this off annoying 'feature' for once and for all.