On Using Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning

We all want to use excellent content and to get students interested in what we are teaching. Video clips can be effective ways to make this happen. However, we face two main challenges to using online videos in class: (1) they are often blocked, (2) there is a risk that they will not load, load too slowly, or that the internet may be down when you want to play them.  

Although it can be frustrating, there are many ways to get around these very real problems and be able to show content from YouTube and other sites as part of class lessons. One way to avoid the blockage problem is to find the same content on a non-blocked site: TeacherTube, SchoolTube, or Test Toob, (for science) are go-to choices, and the Streaming Video wiki lists many more “alternative video portals.” This may give you the access you need, but it does not avoid the pitfalls of depending on streaming internet for your lesson.

A second option, which addresses both problems, is to download the videos onto your computer and then play them from your hard drive. This requires neither a working internet connection nor a password during the lesson itself. There are many free downloads that allow you to do this, as well as some methods that don’t even require a download.

Here are a few: Joyce Valenza of the School Library Journal blog explains how to use “Kick YouTube” which does not require a download (see option #4 on her list), Instructify introduces KeepVid and Open Thinking shares the merits of and instructional uses of Miro, which also allows you to download many TV shows (including HD).

This doesn’t work on the fly. Downloading and converting files does require a few extra steps, and in some cases you still need to put in the password to bypass the firewall in order to download the file if you are working at school. If you work from home you can avoid these issues, then bring in the file on a flash drive or laptop, email it to yourself in FirstClass (avoiding the file size limits of most web-based email; download the FirstClass Client onto your home computer for easiest use). Another option, especially good for those who work on different computers at home and at school is to get an account for free online file storage as places such as Box.net (the lite version, offering 1G storage with 25MB limit per file, is free) or Drop.io (100MB of storage is free, has many advanced features). 

As a reminder, BHS also has a subscription to Discovery Education Streaming (formerly unitedstreaming), a library of thousands of informational and otherwise educationally useful videos. Once you set up an account with Discovery Education Streaming, you can download any of the videos for classroom use. If you need the school passcode to set up an account, email me or Jane Hundley. 

Hope this is helpful information. Please add your own ideas or other obstacles to using online content with students in the comments.

Free Technology for Teachers is a blog that reviews free technology resources and how teachers can use them. In addition to the blog there is a linked wiki of resources that is a great place to browse and explore. These resources are organized by subject area as well as function (i.e. “content creation.”) It is up-to-date and favors resources that can help get students engaged, thinking deeply, and actively working with material that you want them to learn.

I’m filing this in the category of an “ostrich yank,”–one of those things that all signs point to, and pointed to more than once, but that I was somehow able to ignore until someone/something abruptly removed my head from the sand, leaving me looking some previously unexamined reality in the face. In teaching, I really believe that the ostrich move is a brilliant adaptation that allows us to do as much as we can handle and keep going. Every so often, then, a whole new level of what can and should be done becomes apparent, and voila–a new challenge.

In this case, I now recall seeing some distinctly red flags waving in the background when looking at student work that involved online research. Many students seemed to lack awareness of the context from which they drew quotations, citing sources without seeming to realize what the source actually was (a freshman citing a fifth grader’s posted history project in a research paper comes to mind). Immersed in trying to teach argument and the writing piece of research projects, my head-in-the-sand response was to give increasingly narrow boundaries within which to search (“just use the library databases”,
“look for .gov”). I didn’t face the significance of the problem, and until yesterday, I didn’t think of it as a reading issue. 

Light dawned when I attended a presentation by a team of researchers on adolescent reading and technology and came home with awareness of a whole new area of student learning to think about. The team, led by Don Leu and Julie Coiro, studied what reading skills and practices students use when using the internet, specifically websites and search engine results. They gave students information to find or read online, recorded a video of the screen, and had the students think aloud while they worked. They also compared students’ proficiency in this “online reading” to their proficiency in reading print. The results were fascinating and disturbing: fascinating, because they found no relationship between student’s comprehension of print and their ability to accurately make sense of information found online, and disturbing, because overall, students were very weak in online reading skills. They fell for hoax sites, judged whether content was “true” or not based on the presence or absence of advertisements or pictures on the site, and failed to find information that required additional clicks into the site. It really surprised me to learn that about 40% of students in the research project (in this case seventh graders) used a “.com” approach to searching rather than a search engine when given no direction: they typed in the words they were asked to find plus “.com,” then added or dropped words until something came up or they gave up. 

The good news is that students responded well to simple, focused lessons designed to teach online reading skills. The bad news is that we (as Education in America) don’t teach them. Online reading (or writing) is not embedded in any state’s curriculum standards, nor of course is it assessed by any state. With all the testing that does occur, it is a rare school that effectively teaches online reading. The researchers message made sense to me: to graduate proficient online readers, we need to improve higher order thinking skills such as questioning, inferring, synthesizing, and evaluating, and do so in the context of online reading specifically. Since 2005, students spend more time daily reading online sources than print sources.

Successful teaching strategies included problem-based lessons where students could only solve the problem by thinking critically about what they were seeing on the screen, and more traditional lessons where students worked with printed screenshots to learn to read and evaluate search engine results, short-circuiting their usual “click and look for three seconds” method. The thinking skills involved are exactly what we want kids to be using in all of our classes, and as we tap into the wealth of online sources to deepen student’s understanding of our content, it looks like we are going to have to spend some time making sure they are ready to take it in.  

Image: “Ostrich Farm” by Stig Nygaard via Flickr

Will Richardson, a giant in the field on educational technology, has made the point that the single most important tool for educators to use is RSS (Real Simple Syndication). I think of it as a “gateway” tool. But it can be hard to get excited about RSS until you start using it. An article in yesterday’s Globe provides a great parallel: it aruges that ordering groceries online can actually save you money (not to mention time), even though there is a cost to ordering the groceries, because online shoppers avoid impulse buys and consolation purchases (for yourself or others that you have coerced into coming with you). Grocery stores that offer online ordering and delivery allow you to save a grocery list, once created, saving you time every week. This all adds up to more time to spend doing things that you value. RSS works in almost exactly the same way for online content (blogs, websites, news). You set up a free account with a service called an “aggregator,” such as Google Reader or Bloglines. Then you tell the aggregator which webpages, blogs, or searches you would like to read (this is the equivalent of making your online grocery shopping list). Once set up, the aggregator will do your “shopping” for you.  It keeps and eye on the websites or blogs you put on your list and fetches any new content that is added, such as blog posts, news articles, or updates to web sites. It delivers this content to your aggregator, where you can read or delete these items whenever you choose to do some reading. Instead of running all over the web, the content is collected and delivered to you. Here is a screenshot of Google Reader:

Read more, watch a video, and download a step-by-step guide at the RSS page on the BHS instructional technology.

Welcome to BHS’s instructional technology blog. Technology use is exploding this year at BHS, so there is a lot to talk about and share. This blog is intended to facilitate communication and to support use of technology with students by bringing pieces of the knowledge base to you in one convenient place. Consider yourself asked to write a post sharing your own use of technology!