When I began the journey through the Innovative Learning program, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical - I had a preconceived notion that most people who bandied about the word “innovative” were jumping on a bandwagon of glittery newness simply for the sake of the novelty of the strategy or the cool factor of the technology. After being in the trenches for a couple decades, I’ve seen many fads come and go. What began as the latest greatest idea was, a few years later, proven to be poor practice. Then a few more years down the road, that same idea came full circle again, refurbished a bit, rebranded, and “voila!”, suddenly it was the thing to do again. I entered determined not to follow blindly a new trend unless I was thoroughly satisfied that the philosophy, concept, and practice would truly benefit my students. I can say with satisfaction, at the end of this journey, that the new skills, tools, and theories of innovative education that I’ve embraced will be necessary and effective practices for sound pedagogy. One of the powerful, thrilling opportunities for educators is the vast array of digital tools available to enrich our classrooms and our students’ learning. This semester we’ve learned the technical aspects of designing logos, videos, and posters. Along with learning these discrete tools we’ve explored the theories of aesthetic design and marketing. I find that I am walking away with a heightened appreciation for the visual effect on humans. Properly designed and well placed images have an emotional and cognitive effect on the viewer that can improve the receptive faculty of the audience. Images attached to information also improves memory and recall abilities. All of this ultimately increases the learning - an important and desirable result for teachers. As a learner in this program, and one who comes to the table not having grown up in the digital age, I appreciate the idea of focusing on the necessary, essential elements first and growing from there - especially when it comes to infusing digital tools into my repertoire. Acquiring new digital skills and becoming proficient can be daunting. At some point in the year of this program, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with the learning curve when I read something that made me feel what can only be described as relief. When a go-getter innovator like George Couros, author of The Innovator’s Mindset, says in his chapter on professional growth for teachers, “If we aren’t intentional, we may promote confusion and burnout, instead of inspiring innovation and deep learning”. His advice is to focus on a few new ideas and practices at a time. Achieve mastery and then add more digital tools to your arsenal. Growth is important as an end goal, but it does not have to happen all at once. A good lesson for us as learners... and as teachers!
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Over the past several weeks we’ve been asked to use our fellow cohort members as critical friends. I’ve found that my peers have been very helpful in my journey to create a 90 second video for the home page of the Learning Innovation Lab.
Input from people striving for the same goal and using similar technology is helpful and more enjoyable than doing it on my own. Feedback from cohort members helped me overcome obstacles. My initial video was far too long. I had become attached to certain ideas and to pieces of video footage. My classmates were able to give me objective, detached suggestions on what could be cut out without losing the central message. Thanks to their thoughts, I was able to edit my video down to the required length. Also, I had struggled with a functional aspect of the Adobe Spark editing platform. I wanted two different music tracks on my video and had not found a way to do it. Though I probably could have searched for a way to do it on an internet search, a couple cohort members had tips that saved me the time and ultimately ended up being successful. It occurred to me that it is also more social and enjoyable to troubleshoot an issue with friends than it is to do it as a solitary endeavor.
From my experience I glean lessons to bear in mind as I continue to help my students to use technology effectively and with positive results. Technology can become a force that isolates humans from one another, or it can be used to bring us together for collaboration and for recreation. Technology is often a huge learning curve, but once we invest a little time and wade through the frustrations, it is also a tool to save time. The product so far for my Capstone Project video has morphed from what I first envisioned. I think my initial storyboard was a bit too ambitious! When I began planning the video filming, I realized I would need a camera person, a mic, and more time than I had to commit to the filming. I also saw that my video would exceed 90 seconds. Back to the drawing board. I scrapped my original idea, kept the bare bones of my script, and decided I would use raw footage with my students and do a voice over so I wouldn’t have to mess with a microphone. I thought I did a good job of writing a script that stayed below 90 seconds. I timed it while speaking on the slow side of normal speech. What I’ve found is that when you add the pauses between slides and transitions, the seconds add up. I’m at 2:00 minutes now. I need to edit down the script and reduce the transitions. Feedback from my critical friends in my cohort will be very necessary here. The filming day was quite a bit of fun for me and my students. I thought they would be reluctant to be filmed, but they embraced it and enjoyed it. I was pleased to see that their involvement added some humor to the resulting clips. Hopefully the intended humor will translate to the viewer. I’m also finding that I’m fond of certain clips and therefore have a harder time editing these clips out of the final cut. (Now I understand why filmmakers do “bloopers”.) Again, I would appreciate a fresh perspective from my cohort team.
Editing was time consuming. Most likely my lack of experience has added more than a few minutes to the process! It also seems like the cosmos conspired against a smooth evening of downloading and uploading. I lost internet connection multiple times and Adobe Spark would get glitchy and not save slides and videos. I’m letting Adobe rest for the evening and I’ll hit the editing again after I see what it decided to save. I like working with Adobe Spark so far. I would like to find out if it is possible to change the music track midway through the video. I want to go from one kind of music for the presentation of the problem, and then change to more uplifting music for the presentation of the solution. Overall, the process has been a realization of the growth I’ve experienced over the semesters. Not only have I gained new technological skills and tools, but my perspective on teaching reading has expanded to include more innovative ideas and tools to assist a wider range of students. For my storyboard script for the home page video I tried to follow the advice in the article by Nancy Duarte called “Structuring Your Presentation Like a Story”. I tried to follow the general pattern of her recommended path for a persuasive story that convinces the audience to adopt new ways of thinking or new behavior. “By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved.” I began with a common status quo, reading from a book. Most language arts teachers, especially teachers who have been in the trenches for many years and who might be the ones who might need to hear about my capstone project, will connect to reading from the good ole fashioned print book. Hopefully, this makes a connection to the viewer and sets up a rapport to hearing the conflict, or problem to be solved. Then I set up the conflict of reading and reading instruction being changed by modern technology tools and the digital age mindset. There is a bit of scare tactic at use here. What if reading actually became obsolete? What if in the future books became historical curiosities under glass cases in a museum? Most language arts teachers will not want this to happen. Now that the potential problem is presented, the “what could be” is given next. The final part of the storyline is to imagine a best case scenario where digital tools are used to enhance and bolster reading. This is an invitation to explore the resources of the latest technology and incorporate them into the teaching and learning of reading. It is a call to action, but as Duarte says, it isn’t too burdensome. It is the “hook” into making the audience curious enough to want to explore the notion of transliteracy with me by continuing to read the rest of my Learning Innovation Lab website. My challenge during the storyboard process was imagining video and images to match the script. I have glorious ideas about what could be, but I know I do not have the experience in shooting video to actually accomplish the fabulous ideas of my imagination. I know I have to be realistic about what I can produce. I have basically no experience shooting video. I’ll need a partner to shoot the video if I try to accomplish what I’m envisioning. I know I want to bookend my video with a close up shot of a book (pun intended). I also want the second and second-to-last shot to be of me in the shelves of a library. Following the recommendation that we, the teacher-researchers, be visibly present in some fashion in the video, I want to do the live portion of the video (the narration) from the library. Hmmmm - not sure the library staff will be cool with that! My idea is that the video will cut back and forth from live video of me speaking directly to the audience to still images, screen shots, or action shots of my students. I want the overall effect to be a montage of live & still, playful & serious. When I first approached designing a logo, I took to good ole paper and pencil. I needed to get the important symbols down to capture my idea. My desire was to capture the idea that reading is changing. The traditional notion of reading from a book is being modified by digital technology. Perhaps, someday, reading as I know it will be obsolete. Already, a vast amount of people already read, still rather traditionally, from a digital device. We already listen to audio books on a variety of media. The part of me that loves to curl up on the couch and lose myself in a good book for hours is scared and sad to see traditional reading change. The part of me that wants to embrace the benefits of innovative learning and teaching knows that I need to explore how these changes will revolutionalize literacy and, hopefully, bring literacy to more people. My first drawings for my logo included a book as the symbol of literacy as we know it now. The eye, ear, mouth, hand with a pencil, computer screen are meant to capture the ideas that we now “read” by watching media, listening to text, communicate it orally, by drawing and abbreviated versions such as texting and infographics. In one drawing I included people holding hands to show the communicative nature of reading and the collaborative nature that is being heightened and enhanced by transliterative media. For my first digital draft I used Logojoy.com. (Click here to get a $20 coupon https://logojoy.com?referral=SJOC65b6b if you want to give it a try.) Logojoy first asks you to enter your company name, which I luckily figured out should be the basic topic of my web pages and capstone project. Next you enter a slogan. Then it asks you to pick at least 5 sample logos that you like. Next you can search an image library for up to five symbols/images. I chose simple line drawings of a book, an eye, ear, person speaking, and a computer screen. Then Logjoy generates sample logos for you. You scroll through and pick a favorite as a springboard. You then get to play with fonts, color, backgrounds, arrangements, and symbols. I knew from our discussions on graphic design that I wanted a sans serif font. I chose a blue color because it represents loyalty, dependability, trustworthiness. I toyed with the idea of using a purple color for creativity and innovation, but decided after seeing my logo drafts that seeing “reading” portrayed as people at a computer would be “new” enough. This is not a traditional idea for teachers to accept, so I needed the safety of the blue color! The hardest part was letting go of the multiple symbols I had created in my initial brainstorm. My first few drafts on Logojoy had only a book or a computer screen, but I wasn’t satisfied with that. I needed one image that captured the multiple learning modalities that transliteracy invokes: listening, watching media, speaking, communicating. I also kept remembering how our 792 Capstone professor kept reminding us that above all we should keep in mind that this is an educational logo. I needed a student in my logo. I found a single cartoon character person at a computer with headphones. Something was still missing. I just kept scrolling through more images until I found this one, which captures the idea that transliteracy involves more than one person. I am still not 100% satisfied. I am still wanting the image of book pages on here somehow. Perhaps framing the entire logo in book pages? Perhaps a small line drawing of a book right before the words “Reading For All”? Perhaps a book image between Trans & Literacy? In the end I know that a logo should be clean and can’t capture the entirety of an idea, so I would let go of this monkey on my back.
The idea of transliteracy has made me challenge my philosophy on literacy, the direction of my capstone project and my future instruction as a language arts teacher. The question, “Will reading as we know it become obsolete?” keeps echoing in my mind.
After reading and listening to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on the development of literacy over the centuries and in different cultures I began to wonder if my notion of literacy was limited. Literacy has not always been reading a text from left to right to understand and transmit ideas. Before written language, people communicated ideas, culture, and their shared history through oral stories memorized and taught. The “academics” of these societies were poets such as the Greek, Homer. Communicating and forming a “village” was done orally and symbolically. When language developed to the written form, only a small population was educated in its use and only the wealthy could afford to use the materials for written communication. Reading and writing became a function of an elite portion of the society. It was arguably a social class divider. It was not until the advent of the printing press that written transmission of ideas became accessible to the general population. A shift in the “village” appeared. Now communicating could be done by an individual alone in a room sending an idea and received by another individual alone in a room at a different time and place. The notion of a community became simultaneously more global but also more individualized and isolated. Literacy morphed from a group collaboration to an individual activity. This history represents those cultures where language is phonetic, typically western civilization. Historically and currently for many languages , literacy is not even a left to right scanning of phonemes to make meaning. In some languages reading and communicating is a visual representation of symbols that carry their own meaning, for example, in languages such as Chinese or Japanese. The distinction is important when considering the brain’s process of making meaning. This is, afterall, the foundation of literacy. In linear text with a phonetic alphabet, the brain translates meaningless bits of sound/text into meaning. In text that is symbolic, the eye and the brain processing can hop from place to place and makes meaning from symbols that carry meaning in and of themselves. The digital age is marrying the ideas of literacy being oral, visual, and textual. Digital communication gives us the ability to be both individualistic and collaborative. It also expands our village to the global community. Has the pendulum swung from far left to far right and is it now coming back to the center? Is transliteracy an ideal place to land? I am pushing my thinking to question my bias toward traditional reading and accept the positive aspects of transliteracy. I value reading as we know it. I think it is also safe to say that as a whole, we are still a world that values literacy. “Reading” conjures the image of a person alone with a book or screen reading text. In 300 years, will “reading” be something entirely different? Will it be obsolete? If you hand a 12 year old a copy of The Hunger Games, will she know how to decode it? With my current love of curling up with a book and losing myself in another world, I know my answer is “I hope not”. And I think not. At least in my lifetime, I don’t believe traditional reading will disappear. Yet it is undeniable that transliteracy - communicating ideas through varying formats - is here to stay. The value of transliteracy to support literacy is the new direction of my driving question and my capstone project. At the outset of my new driving question and without the benefit of having done the literature review research or my own action research, I can already see how the idea of transliteracy is changing my teaching practices. I am embracing not only the textual aspect of reading, but also the oral, visual, video, digital, and collaborative aspects. Most teachers are already practiced at drawing out students’ prior knowledge at the beginning of a learning unit. We know that background knowledge is a key component of building student understanding. So take for example, my 8th grade ELA unit on “Suspense”. Before digging into rigorous texts, the new curriculum introduces the Big Idea by introducing the students to Alfred Hitchcock. What kid today has even heard of him, let alone seen one of his movies? Where there is a lack of prior experience, audio-visual presentations are a helpful and engaging way to shore up students’ foundation. The new curriculum, StudySync, provides videos of Hitchcock to expose the students to the background knowledge. Collaborating with other students to hear their stories and experiences is valuable. Previously, this would all have been accomplished by yet more reading, which was problematic because it required the labor of reading to get to the pre-reading idea. StudySync seems to be designed with transliteracy in mind - it provides video presentations done by students with mini-lessons on skills and content. Each text is also available orally - the program will read the text (in this case with a British accent). Students can slow it down, pause, repeat,and highlight the text to follow along. These transliterate strategies are more engaging for students. I also find that the content is more accessible for reluctant and struggling readers, students with special needs, and second language learners. |
Nancy JaminetArchives
December 2017
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