Part 1: Close Reading
"No doubt, young people today have less fear of the computer and more technical ability with software for rich media; multimedia is indeed their everyday language. However, they have no more critical ability with this language than do their peers – perhaps less. They need to be taught to write for the screen and analyze multimedia just as much as, if not more than, they need to be taught to write and analyze any specific genre in text."
It's not safe to assume that just because adolescents grew up with technology, that they know how to be critical, analytical consumers of multimedia. I have found that to be true in my classroom. I created video tutorials of class lessons because many students were having trouble getting caught up after being absent. I made short video clips of me writing out the correct solutions to problems and explaining them as I go. I've found that some students don't know how to utilize the videos effectively, and I had to teach them how to use the videos. For example, some students would say they watched the video but when I asked to see their notes they didn't take any. I had to have a discussion about why we take notes in class and why it would be useful to also take notes while watching a video tutorial. Other students would tell me they "studied for four hours for the test last night," and I would find out that they just watched every single video tutorial back-to-back and never tried any practice problems for themselves. I honestly didn't anticipate this misuse of technology. I assumed students knew how to effectively use multimedia resources.
Part 2: Research, Reflection, and Discussion
I would like to use the app Explain Everything in my classroom. I have used it as a teacher to create content for students; however, I would like to investigate having students use Explain Everything to create published forms of their work. One mistake I made in my lesson plan was assuming that students would know how to use this app (or that it would come quickly and easily to them). Like the quote I outlined in Part I explains, it's not safe to assume that students are going to know how to critically use and analyze technology just because they grew up with computers. This week, I'm going to add explicit instructions to my lesson plan for how students can use this app. If I plan on making this an integral part of my curriculum it may be a good idea to have students first create a video tutorial with an "easier" topic before trying to create a lesson about volumes by revolution.
Explain Everything is a collaborative and interactive whiteboard. Click here for a link to the website. The website has great video tutorials (imagine that) for ideas and how-tos for the classroom. I want students to simply copy/paste an assigned problem into the interactive whiteboard interface. Then I want them to use the record feature and pen tool to write out the correct solution while explaining each step aloud. I would then have students post their completed video to the class website, so that all students would have access to multiple different review videos. My research this week is to see if I can find (or come up with) a good set of explicit instructions for how to do this. My initial instinct is that I may need to do some scaffolding and have some students write up a script for pre-approval the first couple of times they try to do this task. So far I've found a few teacher blogs on the topic: link1, link2
