Multimedia Aspect of Research

Research is a big part of academic life, and this project was created to explore how the massive amount of information available through multimedia can be used to justify and bring a new perspective to a claim. All of these presentations started off with a yes or no question to be answered, and the question could be on whatever topic the author was interested in. They were created along with a formal, cited written paper.

The rubric for the project calls for interviews, connections to book club books, background music, connections to video clips, recorded audio tracks, and information from recognized, non-biased, and cite-able web-pages. They were also designed to relate to the unit theme of social justice. I also offer extra credit for anyone who got some usable outside filming related to their topic.

Of particular interest is how students use different ways to tackle the same claims. Motivation was a big question this year (2013), and while one student put together a series of audio recordings relating to psychological studies he read, another student recorded an interview on Skype with an authority with lots of life experience.

There is a great sample below from a student interested in the evolution of football, and you can see the variety that comes from offering students choice by looking through them all at the blog I put up here.

Booktalks Blog Up

I have had students recording book talks as a form of book review for the last two semesters. I envision it as a place for other students to turn to when they are looking for a new book to read. I am still managing the last round of recordings, but there are over a hundred up now. I'll include one of the best below, but you can peruse them all by book title or author at the site. The best ones from each round get a gif and a special listing.

Game

by Barry Lyga

Making Movies - Using Digital Texts to Document Personal Connections

This project was published on the Digital Is webpage.

In my junior level American Literature classes, we need to cover a play by Shakespeare each year to be able to meet our Common Core State Standards. Last year, however, I didn't get it done. I just couldn't figure out how to connect a Shakespeare play to one of the fulcrum texts we were already reading in class-at least not in a meaningful package that wouldn't distract for too much time.

Then, I found a great unit plan by Cindy O'Donnell-Allen and Jenny St. Romain, and I knew connecting Hamlet to Of Mice and Men with an overarching theme of resilience would work perfectly.

Next, I started to look for interesting ways to have students represent what they learned in a compact way. I was thinking of having students perform a scene from the play in groups. Yet, when I had done that in the past, students never created something worth capturing on film. The time for preparation and creative application just wasn't sufficient on my timeline. I needed something more focused.

In my reader program, I stumbled upon the Australian Theatre for Young People group, and saw their wonderfully stitched together version of the main soliloquy in Hamlet. I was intrigued. All I needed then was a way to connect it to the student's lives to make it work.

As I thought about what was really happening in Hamlet's monologue, I was simultaneously covering Joseph Campbell's ideas in other classes. Soon, I became convinced that each of my students would have had a similar moment in their lives which they could include in the film through location, setting, and reflection.

Students Published

I am very happy to announce that my spring 2012 American Literature class had their work published at Bookdrum.com. While reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the class gathered and formatted information about the book, the setting, unknown cultural references, unknown words, and the author, and also wrote a book review. I am so proud of the work they put into this project.

You can see their book profile on Bookdrum's Website. Included under the "contributor page" are links for student's Post Modern Multimedia Research Projects and their Letters About a Thing They Carry which were both published as missions on Youthvoices.net.

Media Studies Movies

For this project, students had to include product placement, greenscreen technology, some film shot outside of school, various types of shots, and a complete story. Most of the filming was done on phones, and the editing was done on iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker.

The project started with creating storyboards for various scenes in the movies.

Once the movies were finished, they entered them into the Youtube's Your Film Festival Competition.

On the last day of the unit, we viewed all of the movies in class. We also voted on which film was the best. Students asked if the winning team could remake their movie using everyone in the whole class to help make it better.

Post Modern Multimedia Research Projects

My American Literature class created Post Modern Multimedia Research Projects in coordination with the book The Things They Carried. They researched a question that was interesting for them, and then used Movie Maker Live to combine perspectives on that question from the book, from interviews, from music, from movies, and from any other source they could find. The results are very open and very connected. I am very impressed with the whole class. All of the results are posted on Youth Voices, and I will embed a couple of examples below.

While the movies worked well, and the students were very engaged with them, there are a few things I would change next time. First, I would schedule in some work with movie maker before hand. Perhaps have the class work in groups to make something. This would minimize the learning curve, and it would also allow for more experimentation with techniques like layering in audio tracks. Second, I would require the use of proper MLA citations in the reflection as well as a bibliography in order to meet the state standards for research papers.

Raisin in the Sun Graphic Novel Lit. Analysis

As a form of literature analysis, my American Literature class created graphic novels using Make Belief Comix and Issuu. In the project they included thoughts from the characters that were not represented in the play itself as well as a prediction of where the characters would end up ten years later--after the civil right movement and the reactionary rise in incarceration.

This worked, but was not perfect. I think the project was confusing as students were unclear about how to represent what the characters would be thinking about outside of the scenes that were happening in the play itself.

If I were to do it again, I would have students jump into the site early on to get used to how it works. Maybe I would have them simply represent what was happening in a scene they enjoyed and then send the slides they create to my evernote account just as a way to monitor comprehension while we are reading.

Then, the final project could be more focused on creating a well developed graphic novel scene to represent their character analysis. I would probably leave it more open as to where they place the scene. Could be a deleted scene from the book, or it could be a scene set in the future. Regardless, they would need to reflect on one character, and then show how the events in the book shaped their life in some way. This is where the real analysis could shine through.

Gender Studies Magazine Covers

For this project, my Freshmen English students created a magazine cover that incorporated their understanding and research of gender studies. We used Glogster to create and display them. You can see the full sized versions with the drop down menu from the Glogster Logo. The top one incorporated research on Disney's use of gender bias, and the bottom one reflects research on the issues surrounding women fighting on the front lines.

Social Justice Unit Graphic Novel Research Project

For this unit on Social Justice, groups of students in my Freshmen English classes hand drew graphic novels in which they presented thier research by creating a story of a person who has suffered some form of prejudice or stereotyping in their lives. In each story they focused on how these characters could be rebranded as heroes.

We then scanned the drawings, inserted them in a powerpoint, published as a pdf, and uploaded to issuu.com for the final presentation.

Open publication - Free publishing - More graphic novel

Open publication - Free publishing - More graphic novel

Research News Article via Blog

I was invited to participate on Youth Voices, a student blogging site created by the National Writing Project in New York, and excitedly created a project for my Media Studies classes.

Students created a list of questions they were interested in, researched this topic from two sources from the internet, and created a News Article to present their information. Then, they uploaded their work as a blog discussion.

Paul Allison, the director for the site, liked the project, and allowed me to created a Mission from it for other teachers to use. All student's work from the project is featured and linked on the left side of the page.

Personal Narrative Podcasting/External Peer Review

This is a great way to do podcasting. The site is free for basic accounts, but with a project like this, I had to buy the basic membership. It is about $30 a year, but I can see using this for a cross-campus peer review, students recording speeches, booktalks, or many various projects. Well worth the small investment for a class that comes equipped with twenty ipods with microphones.

For this project, my students recorded a rough draft of their personal narrative project and we uploaded it, along with the text version, to the podbean site.

Students in Jen Mitchell's college composition course then listened to the podcasts, and filled out an anonymous peer review feedback form using google docs. Her students' responses showed a high level of engagement and the stewardship I have found in similar projects.

My students then made final versions based on the comments received. These final versions were then uploaded to the podbean site.

I love the last line in the final version of this student's narrative. It displays the level of engagement this type of technology project can create.

It is a little bit of work to record and upload the podcasts, but the results are worth it.

Storybird Character Analysis

We did a project with Storybird.com where students did a character analysis from the book Reservation Blues. To show their understanding of character motivations, students created an original scene involving the character. They needed to use literary devices similar to those in the book and reveal something new about the character.

A few students recorded their storybirds. Here are a few examples of students who met all of the requirements:







This was a really fun project, and students at all levels enjoyed it. Plus, the teacher accounts at Storybird make it really easy.

21st Century Education

Here is a student created film by one of my US Literature classes.

I got the idea for this from Greg Kulowiec at History 2.0, and I decided to use it to showcase students working in groups with new technology.

We spent one day talking about how education is changing, and what businesses are looking for when hiring today. Then, I asked them to work in groups to answer the question, "What do I want to be able to do when I graduate from high school?"

After they had some good ideas going onto paper, I asked if anyone knew how to use a camera, who wanted to direct, and who knew how to put things together in Windows Movie Maker.

They truly exceeded my expectations, and this great movie is what they came up with:

Speech Podcasting/External Peer Review

During the Fall semester in 2010, I got to teach 4 speech classes at Fossil Ridge, and we worked on a great project while I was there. We created podcasts of rough drafts of speeches and posted them on a web page with the written text. These were then anonymously peer reviewed by Greg Pierson's Forensics class and Kim Salz's AP Language classes using google docs. The speeches were then revised and the final versions were posted.

A significant portion of the class--over 10% of all students participating in the four classes, and I would guess maybe 80% of the students who actually submitted to the national project--were then published on the This I Believe webpage.

The rough drafts and the podcasts were all available on Fossil's Web Page before they created a new layout for their system. The links for This I Believe still work.

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90468/
http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/fish.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90586/
http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/feeling.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90800/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period6/flip.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90465/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period6/freedom.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90673/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/goal.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90462/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period6/shines.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90687/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period5/important.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90589/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/life.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90755/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period6/slowing_down.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90536/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/starting.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90645/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/average.html

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/90519/ http://schoolweb.psdschools.org/frhs/LangArts/SP/Buteau/period2/probability.html

Since the main focus of the project was to have students meet the requirements for getting published on this nationally recognized program, I think the anonymous external peer review process with podcasts is another successful way to use technology in education.

Creative Writing Cross Campus Peer Review

In the spring semester of 2010, I participated in a fun project with Jason Clarke, who is doing fantastic work in educational technology. We conducted a cross-campus peer review in which his AP students read and reviewed the work of students in my creative writing class. Mr. Clarke's students used the track changes and insert comment features of word to give peer feedback on short stories and personal narratives that my students had written. They then filled out a peer review feedback form to help my students produce their final drafts and to help all students think about writing, editing, and revision.

You can check out all of the student's web pages here. The peer review papers are under each student's personal web page under "peer review paper." Yet another example of how technology can be leveraged to create unique opportunities for students to learn!

Here is a video of my students talking with a Technology for Educators class at CSU:

Thank you Jason for everything you did, including writing this summary of the project.

Synchronous Blogging

Please choose your hour:

1st Hour

2nd Hour

5th Hour

Ted Talks Note Taking Project

This was my first technology project, and the reason this blog was created in the first place. I did this with students while I was doing observations as part of a professional development school program prior to my student teaching. Luckily, I got to do my student teaching with the same teacher, Mr. Wright, so I was able to continue after the success of this project.

Basically, I had a list of talks from Ted.com embedded on this site. Students could choose the speech they wanted to listen to, and then they would take notes on it. I also had them leave comments on what they thought of the speech on the blog.

It worked all right. students did the project as homework, so not everyone participated. Also, there was some confusion about how to make the comments. Some students left notes on the youtube pages linked on this site. If I were to do it again, I think I would embed the videos in the blog, and have students do it during class with headphones.