It’s simply not enough to mention ideas, either in a textbook or in a lecture. No matter what learning theory you subscribe to (constructivism, information processing, behaviourism, cognitivism) all agree on one thing: to remember ideas, learners must act upon them. Period. You can have students move their noses above any number of pages, left to right, top to bottom, but that is neither teaching nor learning. (Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman in Subjects Matter, 2004, p.146) So how do I do this? his past week I fielded a few questions about sharing videos and audio clips in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. In particular, how to stream videos from your computer through Blackboard (or any other conferencing app) to each of your students. It can be done, but I really don’t recommend it. If you have a short clip or audio file that you want to share, you need to share your screen and make sure that you share your audio (see illustration). Otherwise, your students will only hear the audio through your microphone and it will be faint, competing will all the other noises in your house. But I still don’t recommend it. In my experience, the best way to share a video or audio clip is to post the link to the clip in the chat box and provide enough time for the students to access it, watch it (or listen to it), and then rejoin the lesson. When you try to “simulcast” something through a conferencing software it can get garbled by internet connections and bandwidth and the experience for the student can be extremely frustrating. Many of our students are quite a distance away (Asia!). Just imagine how many routers these videos will get processed through! If the video clip is one you made yourself, you are best to post it on your Moodle course and then ask students to access and watch it when it seems appropriate. So how should I do this? Personally, I really like the idea of asking students to watch short videos, listen to audio files or do short readings during a synchronous class. We always did this kind of work when we had students face-to- face, why not online? Such work gives instructors a break from talking and gives the whole class a “muse” to examine and discuss. However, there are some things to think of when we assign such work in a synchronous class.
I find it helps if you:
However, just asking students to quickly watch something and then report back is not enough. We need to think of three different stages when it comes to such an activity:
Anticipation (sometimes called front-loading) Before you share a clip or reading with your students, you need to be clear of the instructional purpose for such an activity. What are the students going to encounter? Why is this important? If your learners feel that you are just “filling up class time” or that this is something that is “nice to know”, but not “need to know”, they might not come back to class when you want them to. As such, it helps to prepare your learners for the clip or reading. To whet their appetite. To build some anticipation. It also helps to give them a Central Purpose Question. “As you watch this clip, I would like you to notice…” “What assumptions is the speaker making?” “How might you…” Giving students a purpose for reading, listening or viewing and providing a lens or focal point will help students feel more engaged and give them something to share when they return to the lesson. Instructors who are aware of this anticipation stage take time to find out about their students, draw on some of their interests, and incite curiosity and wonder before they tackle very significant and meaningful content. This kind of front-loading helps to ensure that the learners will be interested and inquiring and not dispassionate or overwhelmed. Consolidation Consolidation is the part of the process where learners consider and weigh new concepts, personalize them and store them for retrieval and further consideration. When our students read, listen or watch something new, they activate a number of important thinking processes. Skillful learners will make:
Consolidation involves work and for some people this kind of work comes very naturally. Unfortunately, many of us need a bit of help (guilty as charged!) and rely on strategies that serve to aid us in comprehending, personalizing and holding meaning. Highlighting, annotating, note-taking, using graphic organizers, collaborating and sharing our questions and discoveries with others are all ways in which we have made new information more real and lasting to us. It is no different for our students, many of them need to discover and employ strategies that can assist them in consolidating their learning. It is our job to help these learners to become more “metacognitively aware”. We can do this by asking the students to record their connections, inferences, predictions and judgments on a shared document, an online forum, a Padlet, a Mentimeter or a Flipgrid video. Extension Extension is the part of the learning process in which we make our new discoveries come alive through written and spoken expression, demonstration, representation and further inquiry. This gives the students an opportunity to make choices about what they think is most significant and how they want to use the new understandings they have gained. As the quote from Daniels and Zemelman related, students need to act upon what they have heard and seen in order to truly understand, integrate and appreciate. In order to accomplish this, instructors need to give meaningful assignments that challenge students to think rather than regurgitate. And this is what we mean by extension. Extension is not the end of the learning process but, rather, it is a springboard to further learning.
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AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
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