As it played on my PC, there was no sound, so I tried the usual stuff of turning up the volume etc, etc until I spotted I’d got a set of headphone leads plugged into the audio out socket. Doh! and problem solved. But I realised that as my colleague was watching the muted video with me and I was trying to troubleshoot the sound problem, he was asking ‘What’s he doing?’ and ‘Why’s that happening?’ Which set me thinking.
How about playing the same video in a Science class, with the sound purposely muted and asking them to note carefully what was happening so they could explain the final outcome. Having watched the video once, the class could be split into groups to discuss the story behind their observations. Without the narration, the tasks of watching the video, offering and considering different possible explanations and arriving at a plausible conclusion, set much higher cognitive demands. I guess it’s similar to listening to an audio book compared with watching a film of the same story; removing one of the sensory inputs demands that you fill in some of the blanks yourself and the outcome is a much richer appreciation and understanding of your experience … I might suggest.
We’re due to have an Enterprise Wireless Network commissioned in school shortly which will offer several new opportunities, not least of which is BYOD. Bring Your Own Device (or BYOL, BYOT in some quarters) has been occupying my thoughts for some while now … for lots of reasons, including:
Offers the potential of 1:1 access for students.
Tech can support learning wherever the learning takes place.
Students choose the device they feel meets their needs.
Students are empowered to choose the most appropriate application for the task.
Though they have their own school-provided laptop, staff have the option to use their own tech.
As a consequence I’ve been consuming as much information on BYOD as possible so I’m better informed of the affordances, the advantages and the challenges which will need to be met. A #ukedchat a few weeks ago began to focus my thoughts more tightly and resulted in an attempt to weigh up some of the Pros and Cons.
But as I searched and followed many a link, I began to accumulate a bag of resources in need of curation. What tool to use? Well the links are all stored on my Delicious account of course, but there are perhaps better ways of serving those up to others who might also be interested in BYOD. Always on the lookout for a way to test-drive new tools, I started with Site Hoover.
It gathered the links together quite agreeably, creating a thumbnail of each of the sites I entered and allows you some degree of flexibility in choosing the look and feel of the page on which they are displayed. As the majority of these links were to posts on blogs, it was interesting to note that, quite unbidden, Site Hoover adds an RSS icon to each of the site thumbnails and when you hover over, you get an outline of the other posts on that blog – nice feature! (Not so nice perhaps was the option to ‘Add erotic content’ to the master page! Hmm, not one for use in school then?)
As these were mainly blog posts, I also wanted a way of adding other resources: videos, podcasts, journal articles, research etc. I guess I could have done that in ‘Hoover (perhaps the ‘Folders’ feature might have solved that one?), but I also wanted to try out another tool – Trailmeme.
This tool offers something a little different in that it allows you to bring together a variety of links on a particular theme, but also provides features which encourage you to make sense of the bundle. The idea is that you create a ‘trail’ through the links, using a mind map or flowcharting tool, and can add notes to describe of explain the sites you’ve chosen.
It can be a straight-line sequence, or you can make the trail more complex and web-like depending on what you feel might be the best way for the trail walker to get the most from your resource bundle. The walker can move through each resource forwards or backwards, or choose from different options if there are some, or they can visit the Trail Map to get the overview and jump to resources they think they might suit them.
I see plenty of potential for use in education; clearly for teachers bringing together appropriate resources on a particular theme or topic and adding notes or questions to help guide their students’ research. More significantly perhaps, there’s also the possibility of students ‘blazing’ their own trails or better yet, working in a group to draw together research findings on a topic. Any user on TrailMeme can add other users and set their access rights to be able to manage/edit the trail with them. Maybe Trailmeme could even be the output format with students deciding on the pages and the order their trail should form, adding their comments to explain/argue/interrogate/discuss the information the pages provide? Real sense-making instead of copy and pasting?
An adjunct to "In the pICTure," these posts have a more practical flavour
Practically In the pICTure 