...and all through the our dance house,
not an iPad was sleeping and no need for a mouse.
The projects got going, we were grinding our gears,
in hopes that winder break soon would be here.
The apps were all loaded and kids asked with mocking dread
"Mrs. Searles, what goes on in your head?!"
Well, hello again! It has been awhile. I apologize for such late December posts as I have been posting weekly the whole 1st semester, however, these 2 weeks in December have gone by with such intensity that even the weekend would pass by before I had any chance to share! So I am going to break these posts up into 3 separate ones. This 1st post will recap continued daily integration as well as a few new new things and highlight Dance & Media projects. My other 2 posts will recap the 2 projects that my students did for the end of the year.
We continued to have the iPads as daily integration in our courses as we prepare for my 1st ever dance spelling test! Awwapp.com continued to be our favorite for the daily practice activity. I was also able to have 100% "compliance" on all journals with our use of Google Classroom. Never have I ever had 100% of my students get a 100% on their journals without all sorts of hunting down, pinning down, and additional work on my part to get students caught up. That continues to be the case in my large Dance 1 that does NOT have iPad journals. All of my iPad classes have 100% on their own. That little red "!" pops up for them, the teacher account shows how many "Done" and how many "Not Done." They know if the they are missing something, I know if they are missing something. If they are absent, they can catch up without even having to ask. Right before grading time, I simply have to say, check your journals for anything you are missing and they can be self sufficient to fix anything missing on their own. Some of them even work ahead which gives them additional time for stretching (or socializing...they are real teenagers after all).
When it was time for the spelling test, I was so very curious how it was going to turn out. I used Classkick and had pre-recorded myself preparing each question with a recording of my voice saying the ballet term. Students were able to listen, write or type their answer, and work completely at their own pace. They could listen (and laugh at my amazing French accent) as many times as they'd like. They could move on when ready. On my teacher screen, I can watch the results come in in real time. I also have the ability to write on their screens from my iPad, but since this was a test we did not use that feature except to test it quickly. I could create my own scoring system that allowed me to write the corrections and totaled the points for me. If students wanted to re-take the test, they could log-in and view the corrections and then retake again. As a program it worked SO well. How was the spelling? As to be expected, some students studied and aced it, some forgot they had a test that day and well...tried their hardest. What it did teach me (and hopefully them) is that spelling is a skill that is lacking and would be a perfect goal setting task for them all.
Any student needing to make up exams or self evaluations could make those up by Edmodo and Google Forms respectively. You can easily see that although the iPads add a different amount of extra work for a teacher outside of the class, they help make work inside the class more efficient.
For final exams, all of my classes EXCEPT Dance & Media took their exams on Edmodo. Dance & Media were my guinea pigs for Classflow. This is a web-based interactive classroom response system that can also give assessments. No log-in/passwords to work with and neat answer response options. It worked well. I need a little more time to check it out but the students enjoyed that interface.
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Dance and Media was busy as ever as they planned their Module 2 project. Students were paired in groups and then chose one of the topics from lessons 1-3: dancing about an important event, dancing about a role model, dancing about a social issue. They then coordinated costumes, locations, dance choreography, and camera "choreography" to create a Dance Film, a dance performance that because of the movement of the camera and the ability to edit, can not be duplicated live.
All 3 groups chose to shoot their videos on our still cameras from the Arts & Digital Literacy grant. For some shots they also used the new tripods for getting all group members in the same shot since they were both the performers as well as the camera crew. I would have more pictures to share if they hadn't been dancing their way around the school each day!
At the end of the day, I would take the camera SD cards to copy all of their pictures for access on their Google Drive for review and download.
When they finished, they had their choice of editing tools. We ended up with students using iMovie app on the iPad, iMovie on a MacBook (student owned), and WeVideo (cloud editing that can be worked on at home) from a school computer. We snuggled up in the library for our editing days to accommodate all groups.
The one group that did have trouble was the iMovie iPad group. We did not anticipate the trouble downloading the video from the Drive app onto the device. Whether it was the file size, school wifi, or combo situation of multiple things, they would not download to the camera roll, even when adding the "make available offline" option. We tried lots of work arounds, from emailing (file too big and would send by drive anyways), Airdrop (would only send the link to the drive), using student phones with their own data. Finally by the end of the period, I decided to load all the videos to an album on Google Photo, accessed the album once loaded and volia! I was able to download from the Google Photo app. Needless to say the girls missed a day of editing, and maybe I missed some some step that would have helped,but was relieved to have fixed it...and all on my own too!
The girls had a rubric to work from for filming and editing that helped with what was needed in the project. I am so happy to share their hard work!!
So how did my other classes finish their semesters?
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