Making My Job Redundant: Using Technology to Work Smart, Not Hard

Tweet

Since starting the COETAIL program, I've been converted to being a big supporter of Creative Commons (CC) as a licensing method (see: 'Why Wait!?' and 'Free to Take? Free to Give!'). As such, I've taken the time with my classes to talk about what it means, how to find images, how to properly credit images and assuring them that it is, in fact, Creative Commons and not Creative Comments. As with anything in teaching (or, perhaps more accurately, in learning), concepts are easier to understand when they're part of a tangible experience. For my Year 7s, they are doing some Presentation Zen styled presenting using CC images and my Year 8s are using image editing software as part of their unit which means that it is easy to teach about CC in context of their units.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384" caption="CC Logo from creativecommons.org"][/caption]

The challenge I've encountered is that explaining all of this takes a fair bit of time and I know that some of my lessons when teaching about this have been a bit directive and lacking in activities to keep the kids interested.  Granted, I'm lucky that most of the students I teach are pretty attentive and eager to learn so these lessons still go reasonably well but despite this, I still don't get that feeling of complete satisfaction that I've taught what is not only a useful lesson but also a fun lesson for the students. The other problem with using CC images is that even though it's fairly simple, the fact is that it is a new concept for most students and it takes practice to get used to it. Inevitably, I regularly end up having to repeat the steps of how to reference a CC image or remind the students what each of the different licenses mean.

So I decided that a bit of hard work up front would actually end up being less work in the long run and I did a screen recording about how to find CC images; what all the licenses mean; how to insert images into a Wordpress blog; how to insert images into Powerpoint; and finally how to credit them in either of those media. What I had was about an eight minute video which taught everything that used to take me four or five times as long to teach at the front of the class. At first, I thought, 'Great! I can post this to Screencast and I've just cut my lessons down by at least a quarter!' But then I started thinking beyond that initial instruction lesson and I thought about students that just wanted to be reminded of the licenses or who only wanted to know how to credit an image in their blog. Did I really want them to have to filter through an eight minute video to find the information they needed? More importantly, would their attention spans allow them to bother scanning through an eight minute video? I decided the video wasn't good enough to actually solve the problem of me having to repeat the same thing over and over again.

I took some digital scissors and cut the video into three smaller, more digestible episodes: one focused on how to find the right image and understand the licenses associated with them; another video about adding and crediting in a Wordpress blog; and another video about adding and crediting in PowerPoint (I'm sure most Keynote users could find some value in that too). To help to better explain the licenses, I whipped up a quick FLash animation to focus on the four licenses the students would likely encounter and added that to the first video.

As my video tutorial had now become a short series of interrelated videos, I decided that Screencast might not be the best avenue for distributing these and I decided instead to post to YouTube so that I could take advantage of their easy annotating feature to make sure all the videos were effectively linked to each other. I began by posting the video about finding images and understanding licenses (shown below) and adding links at the end to either the Wordpress video or the PowerPoint video so that it suited my students regardless of whether they were making a presentation or writing a blog.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOJYnbK2wbA[/youtube]

I used this first video in class a couple of days ago with my Year 7s. Not only did it take much less time but when I saw that class again today and reviewed the information from last lesson with them, they even seemed to retain the information better. It also came in handy when students were asking how to insert and credit the images in their presentations that I could just get them to follow the link to the video for adding and crediting images to PowerPoint from the class page on our school network. This freed up my time to sit and focus on helping the students who were struggling a little bit with understanding the assignment while those that understood but had simple, clarification questions could easily find their answers through the video. I haven't field tested the video for inserting and crediting in Wordpress but I'm guessing it will yield similar results.

There are definitely some things about the tutorials that, given more time, I would change or improve. Some of the timings are perhaps a little rushed but that's solved easily enough by just rewinding and watching it over. The voice over is far from being up to a Lee Lefever standard as I wish I had had more time to rehearse and record a more solid soundtrack but the ultimate goals - of cutting down teaching time and giving my students a resource that they could return to when needing clarification - have been met so I'm generally happy with the results so far.

Please feel free to use any of these videos with your students (or staff!) and if you notice any glaring errors, please let me know so that I can get them fixed! Happy sharing!

So You Think You Can Tweet?

Tweet

Today with my Year 9s, we took a look at Twitter and what makes you want to follow a Twitter link or not. As an example, we looked at the @mashable account as the content was relevant to our Social Media unit and Pete Cashmore and his team are generally quite effective at promoting their articles through Twitter. Typically, ignoring the endless parade of retweets, any given Mashable article is likely to be tweeted at least twice through the official Mashable Twitter account. This is where I started with my students.

[caption id="attachment_61" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Mashable Tweet 1"][/caption]

We looked at two tweets from November 18th. The first tweet was a pretty straightforward, factual approach to reporting the 25 most commonly used passwords whereas the second tweet took a more emotive approach to promoting the same article. When I polled one class of Year 9s about which link they think would be more enticing to follow, they were split almost 50/50 as to which one they would follow. Interestingly enough, the second class (of the two Year 9 classes I teach) was almost unanimously more intrigued by the second approach which listed some of the top 25 most common passwords right in the body of the tweet.

[caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mashable Tweet 2"][/caption]

After some discussion about why Mashable might tweet the same article in different ways, the main conclusion that the classes reached had to do with different people having different interests and therefore Mashable was trying to appeal to many different kinds of people. With a little prompting, about where Mashable's 2.5 million followers are located, some clever students realized that Mashable also has a global reach and therefore would send tweets to increase the chances of people in different time zones being exposed to the tweet/article.

The students' next challenge was something that, going into the activity, a lot of them didn't think was actually challenging. Split into four groups of four, each group was assigned a recent Mashable article to read. Once they had read it, each student needed to condense the content of the article into 120 highly interesting characters (140 character Twitter limit minus room for a link to the article) that would encourage a reader to follow the link which would be part of the tweet. Once each person had created their tweet, we posted them anonymously on the front screen and, using Kwik Surveys (worth a look if you're looking for free, online surveys with more features than Survey Monkey), we had the class rank the tweets in order of how likely they would be to follow a link associated with the given tweet.

As you might expect, there were some discrepancies in the quality of the tweets. Some students struggled to understand the character limit (one student submitted a lengthy 265 character tweet). Some students perhaps didn't fully read the article or understand the full meaning of the article and therefore were a little off the mark with their tweet's description of the article. Overall, though, the tweets were reasonably well done.

In one Mashable article, Sarah Kessler writes about Facebook's recently revealed user-tracking secrets. The article describes such Facebook practices as how they install cookies on users' computers; how they keep tracking data for 90 days; and what browsing behaviours it logs. Here, unedited, were the four proposed tweets from this group of students:

1. Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity


2. Facebook revels their secrets on user- tracking.


3. How Facebook tracks its 800 million users!!


4. Facebook tracks users by installing cookies on computer.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="350" caption="Cookies: Too Technical for the Average Person (Photo from Flickr by Sifu Renka)"][/caption]

When polled, 75% of students in this class selected option three as the tweet that would most interest them to follow the link to the article. When we discussed what made that tweet more intriguing, some of the key points that came from the students were that it used a fact; it quoted a large number that added to the amazingness of the information; and the exclamation marks added a sense of urgency as if you needed to see how Facebook is tracking you by following the link to this article. Tweet four was the least successful and when asked why students thought that was, most of them didn't understand the concept of a cookie (mental note: fix that) so the technical terminology got in the way of the communication.

As we looked at the other articles (Demi/Ashton's divorce; Annoying Orange TV show; smartphone dating etiquette), the students started to realize that there is, in fact, a skill to composing a concise, interesting and informative tweet. Some key advice that the students decided upon was as follows:

1. Know your audience

• If you want followers that are not just your friends, you should try to keep your tweets 'professional'


• Carefully consider how grammar, spelling and slang will affect how people perceive the message being tweeted


• Use language that is suitable for your followers

2. Know the content

• Sometimes the most interesting part of the article is in the middle or at the end; make sure to read the whole article to make sure you understand it


• Make sure your tweet effectively reflects the article; you don't want to disappoint someone when they follow the link expecting something else because you will lose their trust to follow future links


• Make it clear what the article’s about but don’t give away the whole story in the tweet (‘leave them wanting more’)

As the class wound down and we debriefed and reviewed what had been learned during the lesson, I gave an informal exit poll about writing tweets. Despite their attitude at the start of the class, most of the students agreed that writing a tweet is easy but writing an interesting, informative tweet that attracts a reader’s attention is quite a challenging skill. Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge for anyone and Twitter is a great proving ground for cutting to the core of the information.