As a Digital Media teacher and a total fangirl of Adobe, I often get so excited to introduce my students to Adobe, but feel that this amazing introduction fizzles when students move out of my introduction class and no longer use the tools in other classes. Some move on to upper level classes, but many do not. What is the point of gaining skills and competencies that will soon be forgotten due to disuse? How do we get those creative skills to translate into other classes more seamlessly so students can continue to grow on their path toward digital citizenship? How do we allow for a more integrated approach to digital creative learning for students while still providing experience with high end "grown up" software that prepares students with 21st Century Skills? In a conversation with one of the Principal Product Managers at Adobe, Tom Nguyen, we talked a lot about what is currently happening in my Digital Media class at New Tech High. He asked all the great "empathy" questions to get a better understanding of his end-users' pains and likes. I answered from the teacher's perspective, but in reality, I know it's so much more powerful to get the students to give their input and thoughts about becoming new Adobe Creative Cloud users. Based on our conversation, my understanding of Tom's inquiry question is in alignment with my own questions as a Digital Media teacher. "How do we get Adobe tools into the hands of students so that they can continue to deepen their creative skills and their understanding of core concepts in all other curriculum? How do we eliminate the obstacles that currently exist in getting students access to Adobe software? What are essentials and what are the extra fun things needed in order to draw students in?
So, I propose that we bring in the students and open up the conversation. I've invited my students to comment on this blog post and answer a few of the questions I've got for them. And if you are not one of my Digital Media students but have something to say, you are welcome to join in on the conversation! Please leave your comments!
If we want to move ahead and truly prepare our students for the future, we need to provide access to the tools needed to succeed, and not just in an isolated computer lab. What do YOU think? How can we get there? What would you like to see in the education world? What would be ideal? Where can we integrate Adobe knowledge with other Common Core and STEM knowledge?
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I just got off a Skype call with a friend of mine and two teachers from Vietnam who are exploring ways that they can get their students to showcase their learning to employers. The request to speak with the teachers couldn't have come at a more perfect time as we are about to roll out a new portfolio process at New Tech High. We have revamped our portfolio requirements to better meet the needs of the students, so that they have a real, usable tool to showcase what they know and what they are interested in. When talking with the teachers in Vietnam, it became clear that for those students, a portfolio is a way to get students to reflect on their learning, so that they get more comfortable writing and speaking about their learning. I know that the biggest complaint at New Tech is that students believe the portfolio is just a hoop to jump through and does not produce a usable end product. They say that after their portfolio is created, no one every looks at it again. However, after talking with my friends in Vietnam, it is clear that the process of creating a portfolio does allow students to make their learning visible and that in turn helps them to go confidently into interviews . They have the words and ideas in their heads about what they have learned and are very forthcoming and clear when speaking about their experiences at New Tech. Some of that confidence comes from having to create a portfolio. We have decided to move on to a more Blog oriented portfolio that allows for students to reflect all the way through their learning process and is focused more on process and less on end product. The social aspect of blogging provides an incredible opportunity to be seen in professional circles, as an emerging expert in fields of student interest. It also provides a way to network with professionals and like-minded people. It can also be used as a way to share information and teach others what the student knows, thereby cementing that information in the students minds as they teach. Blogging is an exciting arena to move toward and as it unfolds, students are already seeing benefits to developing a blog. So, we are moving on to the next iteration of portfolio at our school, but as we move, I think it's important to realize that, even though students feel that portfolio used to be a waste of time, it was not. Speaking with the teachers in Vietnam, and seeing where they are headed, I am excited for them. I'm also more appreciative of where we've been and and what we've done so far at New Tech. We forget that we once were beginners as well. We forget to appreciate where we have come from. We are constantly dissatisfied with the status quo, and that is what moves us forward, but we also have done some tremendous work and need to acknowledge that. As a part of my Masters program in Innovative Learning I am being asked to create an Action Research Question. Here are the preliminary thoughts I have and where I think I'm headed with a question I would like to further explore through data collection and inquiry-based learning. I can't wait to investigate further and will share my process here on my blog as I go! Research Question: How can I foster reading stamina in my classroom? Subquestions: What obstacles do students face with reading? What cultural or socioeconomic factors come into play when students are presented with reading opportunities? What role does community expectation play in fostering reading stamina? Are we concentrating less on reading stamina at the high school level than we did before the internet? Does the 1:1 environment decrease reading stamina? Does moving to more screen work and to less book work decrease reading stamina? What I plan to do: I’m interested in reading about how others foster reading stamina and then I would like to try to apply those techniques in my own classroom. I would also like to investigate the phenomenon of lowered reading stamina to see if this is actually the case for 1:1 classrooms and how that might effect what I do in my classroom. Context/background for my question: I have a sneaking suspicion that as we move more and more toward screens, and more and more toward getting our information through video and audio, that reading levels and stamina are declining. I believe that this decline leads to students who can not access information on a deep level and that we are raising a whole generation of scanners, who only read for surface understanding. I believe that when we limit our reading to surface level reading, we lose all sorts of access to complex thinking, reasoning and discernment. With more and more information available to students through the internet, the ability to discern pertinent information on any given topic is more important now, more than ever. It is not enough to let others curate our information. We must be willing to curate our own points of view on a given topic, read all supporting documentation on a topic and be able to analyze and synthesize all that written information. Personal Biases: I have altered my own reading habits over the last few years due to the kindle, Facebook, Twitter and websites. I used to be able to sit with a book for hours at a time, reading until my heart’s content, but now, I find myself gravitating toward shorter articles, getting my news from Facebook, reading more and more about public opinion, opinion that is not necessarily backed up by facts and evidence. I find myself having a harder time sitting down with a book for long periods of time and read a lot fewer novels and more FB posts, and I used to consider myself to be an avid reader. I AM reading more current events, which feels good, but maybe not much of substance regarding those current events. I also have a personal bias toward reading in general and have very high expectations for myself for reading. My own three children are not that into reading and that alarms me as a parent. Today was the day. It happens every year. We roll the dice in Classcraft and today, pulled the random event that sets certain odd behaviors and actions into motion in my class. What normally is a very talkative class became eerily silent this morning. For all of about 10 minutes. And then all havoc broke loose as students figure out how to "game the game." Then we got to listen to speech-to-text computer voices saying the lyrics to really bad songs. Then new students chimed it by talking to each other from across the room via speech to text. It wasn't long before teenage humor mayhem took over.
There was much giggling. And more interaction between students than ever, as they prepared to present their new game prototypes to another class this week. Those who often float under the radar, sitting off to the side texting their friends, where now texting their team mates about the project. Why? Because they could. There is an inherent playfulness that I relish, in any learning environment. How do we cultivate this in all of our classrooms? Find games to play....at EVERY opportunity. We sang Karaoke this morning in my Digital Media class, which led to students humming and singing through the rest of class, a nice way to wake up on a Monday morning! We tossed coins on a big answer poster on the floor, from across the room as a formative assessment. Students begged me for another quiz question! Scratch off tests. Game Boards. Bingo. Trivia questions. Name that Tune. Thumb wrestling. (Look up Massive Multi-player thumb wrestling for a great short whole class game.) It doesn't matter what it is. Gamification is where it's at when it comes to increasing student engagement. Thanks to Napalearns, just last year I attended a great training from Project Management International Education Foundation (PMIEF) to help teach students the fundamental skills of Project Management. This has been the year of experimenting with how to fit this curriculum into my existing Digital Media and Game Design classes. Heres what I've learned so far: Upsides: Breaking Down the Project makes it more manageable. Project Management can greatly help students to understand what is expected of them in order to make steps toward completing complicated and larger endgoals. Students often feel paralyzed in the face of answering a really big question or starting a really big project and often will choose to socialize with their friends instead of really puzzling through what needs to be done. They are simply in overwhelm and don't know where to start, so they just don't. Real world vocabulary prepares students for...well....the real world. A shared Project Management vocabulary helps students to interface with real-world industry experts and partners. I feel strongly that, in order to prepare students for jobs out in the real world, we ought to be using real-world words in the classroom. Instead of "benchmarks" and "assignments" we should be talking about "milestones" and "deliverables." Students need to be taught accountability techniques. It doesn't just come naturally. Project Management has some naturally built-in accountability tools and structures that support Project Based learning. It's one thing for a group to say "this week we are all going to come up with the ruleset for our new board game." It's another thing to say "Juan is in charge of the rough draft for the ruleset, Kate is in charge of proofreading, and the whole team is in charge of testing and feedback on the ruleset. Juan will be done my Wednesday. Kate will be done by Thursday, and after we all give feedback, the finished ruleset will be ready to go by the end of Friday." Then there are class check-ins built in to every class (Scrum meetings) to identify what has been done, what will be done and any impediments that might get in the way of achieving the goals. We need to continue to build these skills so that students remain accountable to each other and to the teacher in very concrete ways. Project Management can provide those accountability structures. Having a Project Manager means someone in the group is in charge. Oftentimes, running a project by committee can be cumbersome and not very effective. Teaching students how to lead and be led is an crucial part of learning about collaboration. Having one point person makes communication with the teacher and with the team more effective and easier to manage. Providing a chance for each student to take that role pushes the more assertive students to learn to step back and defer to their project manager. Inversely, providing a chance for a less assertive student to try on a leadership role that they might not normally choose for themselves, provides a chance for growth and risk-taking within a safe structure. Downsides: Jamming more into the curriculum can take away from other lesson time. We are already hugely strapped for time when trying to complete projects and it can be a stretch to create extra time for scaffolding PM skills. I think that the course work provided by PMIEF is really thorough and concrete, providing lessons plans and curriculum for a teacher who needs that kind of support. However, in the end, following those provided lessons would be a course in and of itself and requires more time than we have in any given day. We've got to pick and choose which tools work best in a learning environment. Some Project Management tools are too ungainly and complicated for the school environment. Planning a project from beginning to end does not support continuous development and the flexibility needed in a PBL environment. Many professional project managers say that they use a combination of Waterfall (planning from beginning to end) and Agile tools (planning in 2 week cycles) and it would be great for PMIEF to create lesson plans that reflect that blended approach. In PBL, we often solve problems from a Design Thinking perspective, which requires flexible planning and management tools. Project Management can be a buzzkill.
Sometimes you have to let students just get their hands dirty first, instead of going straight to more abstract planning. Emphasizing the organizational process can suck the fun out of a hands-on project. I've found it to be more helpful to use PM tools as small mini lessons to introduce in the middle of a project rather than a constant underlying conversation that starts at the onset of a project. The Bottom Line In PBL, where we often emphasize student-led and student-run projects, one has to be OK with a little bit of chaos and productive struggle. It's a part of what engages and excites students, as well as what frustrates them and leads toward lasting learning. Laying some of the PM models on top of a project at the very beginning can take away some of that juicy productive struggle. Ultimately, AFTER they struggle and look for solutions to solve some of their organizational problems, a teacher can be ready with some PM skills that would help address some those issues. Ultimately, the best way to teach PM skills is when there is an authentic and genuine need to know that originates from the students. Only then, is it effective to swoop in with a lesson on "The Waterfall" technique or how to run a "Stand-up meeting" in an "Agile" environment. All that said, I believe that Project management should be considered an essential tool in the tool belt of any PBL teacher. It's right up there with things like conflict resolution and personality/leadership styles awareness and encompasses important skills such as time management, resource allocation and accountability. With a little tweaking and experimenting, any teacher can make PM an important part of teaching and learning in the PBL classroom. We finished off the first semester in Intro. to Digital Media with a culminating project using Augmented Reality, Photoshop and After Effects. Students were asked to choose paintings from a list of art periods and then create parallax animations of their chosen paintings. They were then asked to create postcards with their paintings on them, so that any art student could point their smart phones at the postcards and see their animations. This was a 4-5 week project that included separating out foreground, middle ground and background in Photoshop, as well as using the "puppet" tool in After Effects. You can have some fun pointing your own smartphone at the images in this post to see some of the student work. The directions for downloading the Aurasma app are seen at the bottom of this post. More images will be posted on the blog soon! Directions for using the Aurasma app
1) Download the app for your phone: Aurasma 2) Open the app and press the small white aurasma icon at the bottom until you see the “Explore” page 3) Hit the small search icon in the bottom bar and type #nthsgottfried in the search bar. 4) You will see a list of auras and pictures with student names-ar next to them. Click on any one of the auras. 5) "Follow" one of the auras and you will now be following all the auras with #nthsgottfried. You are ready to see all the auras for Digital Media 1! 6) Point your phone at any of the aura photos or images. You will see bouncing dots in a circle. Hold the phone in front of the image until the bouncing dots turn into a target. Watch your aura! If you don’t see the aura after a few seconds, try holding the phone closer or farther away from the image. The truth is, I am not really an expert in anything. I just LOVE to learn. For me, teaching at the flagship New Technology school has been one amazing and incredible learning experience. I often choose projects for my students that are things I personally would like to learn. And, of course, I build into every project, the opportunity for students to write, practice math and learn Digital Media technical skills.
But at the heart of it all, it's about being as excited as the students to learn something fresh and new. It's refreshing to not have to always be the expert, refreshing to be the one who says "I don't know. Where would be find the answer to that question? Let's look together!" This is at the heart of why I teach Project Based Learning and why I LOVE my job at New Tech High, Napa. By Grayson Capener
So something you will quickly learn at New Tech and any school you go to where you work with people, is that there are some people who have the hardest time staying focused and getting their work done on time. This is an even bigger problem when they have access to something as distracting as the intern. Because of this, I have created this segment on how to handle off-task team mates. By Daisy Farella
In this blog, I will be showing you how to save a selection you’ve made in Photoshop. This is extremely helpful if you need to go back to your work later and need that selection again. I know how painful it is to get that perfect selection, only to have to start all over if you had to work more than one session on it. Before I knew about this, often wasted over half of my Digital Media class just trying to get back what I had perfected class, resulting in stress and frustration. I’m so glad I learned about this and I’m now able to teach others. I hope you get some good information from it! |
AuthorLisa Gottfried is a CTE teacher with 20 years experience as CEO of her own Video and Motion Graphics Production house. She currently teaches Digital Design at New Technology High School and at Touro University in the Masters of Innovative Learning program. She loves her job and her students! Archives
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