The tools that I played around with this week were EdPuzzle, an Add-On for Google Docs called Kaizena (Voice Comments) and VideoScribe. I just loved EdPuzzle because I already tend to choose a lot of videos and voice over with out recording. I usually just pause the video and ask questions which is exactly what the program does for you with perfect timing and grace. It also makes the student recall an answer that is needed to retain and be listening, which is GREAT! And it's FREE! A teacher's dream come true. I used the EdPuzzle for my Washington DC presentation for this coming Wednesday. I changed and modified what was already there, shortened it, deleted and made my own questions. It should be a fun add on to introduce the beginning of the trip in June.
Lately, in my Language Arts support group, I was asked to edit work that is being done in their core Language Arts class. The first day I started to use the suggestions editing mode, thinking that I was really looking cool and awesome and helping them a lot to learn new technology features in Google Doc. After sitting down with each student one-on-one and editing their work using suggestions and explaining why it needed work after they read it back to me, they would go back to their desktop and just click the green check marks and say, "I'm done!" They learned nothing and it wasn't their work. In comes the Add-on Kaizena (a voice comment). So I went back to the Google Doc's that were shared with me and recorded where the student could stand to use some improvement and where they were strong in conveying their points. Instead of it being a correction to change where I do all of the work, it is now a correction that they have to listen for, find and change on their own. I will be using this all of next week to get my 5th graders to look at their own work and make adjustments with my direction, but not one on one with the teacher. This will give me the freedom to facilitate and encourage peer editing and self-grading with a rubric. Again, this was a free Add-on that can change a teacher's life with direct student feedback that John Hattie so much adores in his Visual Learning book. And then there was the VideoScribe. VideoScribe was generous enough to give a 7 day trial with lots of pushes towards purchase. It is not cheap and I thought that it would be more user friendly. I am no techie, but if you are going to charge so much for something I would prefer it would be link friendly, slide friendly, insert into anything friendly; it was not, at least for me. I spent 6 hours trying to create, load, insert and then I went back and they two slides that I had created were gone. To say the least, I was frustrated and then some. I do not just pick up technology in one swoop and it did have some tutorial videos when I came across things that I repeatedly clicked on and a link to watch a video for more understanding would come up, but it wasn't enough to make me successful enough to get my creation the way I wanted it. I decided to just let it be in a simple form and put it as a link for the other part of my lesson and loaded it to YouTube and it disappeared, downloaded it to the screen on my laptop and it wouldn't upload, and then put it in a Power Point and didn't have a way to do anything with it but put it on my desktop screen. I honestly, did like the potential of what the program can do for me in my classroom when it comes to visual access, but with the high pressure sales, non-usability, I really struggled with its use. I would love to know if someone else tried it and got a better result because it would be worth it to share a membership with team teachers or grade levels at the school site for Anticipatory sets to introduce a lesson or tell a Social Studies story about something historical or even for teaching science concepts and just share the log in.
4 Comments
Scott Marsden
4/7/2019 07:45:33 pm
Monica,
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Jennifer Perkins
4/7/2019 11:49:04 pm
Hi Monica, I liked what you wrote about EdPuzzle! I do the same thing, where I pause a video to ask questions, and love that this program does that for us! This is a great tool to use for a flipped classroom because this tool makes sure the students are interacting with the video content. How awesome that you used it for your Washington D.C. presentation! Kaizena sounds fantastic. That sounds like such a great way to provide one-on-one feedback for each child. I also used VideoScribe this week and had many similar struggles. I found it to be fantastic visually, but not very easy to use.
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Tess
4/9/2019 01:00:12 pm
I'm not "techie" either, plus I have NO time to fool around with uncooperative apps. I want something extremely easy to use, and extremely fast. I found it in iMovie. I made my iMovie from jpegs of my Google Slides, then uploaded it to my Youtube channel. Once I figured out where my errors were, it was easy-cheesy, lemon-squeezy. Thank you, Apple!
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Monica Knecht
4/9/2019 06:36:08 pm
I will definitely look forward to trying iMovie.
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