677 Reflection
Over the course of this class, I became so much more aware of the various ways to incorporate audio into the classroom. Prior to taking this class, I didn't realize how audio itself could be a useful teaching tool. There were two ways that I incorporated audio into my own classroom over the course of this class. I recorded myself giving a detailed description of the Constitutional Convention in order to get students to travel back in time and envision themselves as one of the delegates. It was fun hearing the students discuss what they visualized and the feelings they had after listening to the recording. I also had the students do their own recordings to practice poems for our weekly poetry jams. They had a rubric in which they assessed themselves on their volume, articulation, expressiveness, and pace. The following week, they took their poetry recordings and created Chatter Pix videos to go along with their audio recordings. Check out the student sample below!
Screencast for Commenting on Google Slides
After completing my FIRST EVER screencast, I can definitely say that I'll be using screencasts more often! Because our team uses Google Classroom so much, I can see myself incorporating screencasts when teaching them about digital tools they'll be using. I can create these screencasts so that students can refer to them whenever they'd like. I can't tell you how many times I've had students come up to me with questions about how to use digital tools after I've showed them how to use them. I already have an "Online Resources"Google Classroom set up, so I'd love to add more tutorials on how to use digital tools and apps for my 5th graders to refer to. I even like the idea of having student experts create screencasts!
Book Trailer for Refugee
This is a trailer I created for the Global Read Aloud book named Refugee. We read this book to our 5th graders this year, and I loved it so much that I thought I'd create a trailer for next year's students. I like that iMovie provides templates in which you can change the text and drop images in, but I do not like that it's not possible to edit the storyboards. I found myself trying to find a lot more images than I needed, and I did not like the timing in some parts of the storyboard. Overall, I still think iMovie is a great way for kids to create trailers.
677 Discussion
Students tend to grasp concepts better when they have visuals to reinforce those concepts. Giving the students the opportunity to use graphic design, not only helps them understand concepts, but also allows students to be creative. Different modalities of learning are incorporated when students produce graphic designs.
When presenting information to students, I think it’s important to make sure the information is presented in a way that is quick, concise, and visually appealing. This is where graphic design comes in. Whenever I present new information to students, it is often accompanied by some sort of visual. Even when the students are asked to present information to each other, we discuss the features of their presentations such as color, font, layout, sound, etc. I tell them that the way the information is presented can be just as important as the information itself!
We have an upcoming unit on Earth’s systems and cycles, so I think it will be helpful for students to create graphic designs when learning the concepts. For example, they could create a graphic for each of the spheres (biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere). They could also create a graphic of the layers of the Earth and the various cycles (water, carbon and nitrogen). There are so many diagrams within the students’ texts, I think they would learn the concepts better if they are tasked with creating their own diagrams.
