Capturing sound in student thinking and learning

One of the aspects of student learning and thinking that we are trying to capture at United World College is students' thoughts during their partner conversations. We know that a way that students learn best is by talking about their thinking with a partner or group.

As digital literacy coaches, we have been trying to find ways to capture this thinking. An easy way would be to use an iPad or a computer to record the partners talking.

However, when we tried this, we discovered that the sound was terrible. In many cases, we had to ask the students to speak very loudly and have everyone else in the class not make sound. This worked, but wasn't a very authentic and easy way to capture these conversations. Some teachers tried pulling students out of the classroom to a quiet place and recording the conversations there. Again, not something that is easy or that sustainable.

We wanted a solution that worked in the classroom, when all the students were talking and was easy to set up. We decided to try out a few different headphones with built in microphones. Why headphones? Headphones are commonplace in the classroom and we don't want to purchase any special equipment if we don't have to.

We tested microphones that have one plug for audio in and audio out and that worked with the iPads and with the MacBooks. Why these particular headphones? These headphones were given to us to try by our good friend Doug Taylor who is a teacher and app developer.

Headphones #1-3 are over ear headphones and headphone #4 is the in ear Apple headphones with a microphone.

The test was simple. I set up a computer and an iPad to record a conversation between two students. The other students in the class were also having conversations in the background. I started with the computer and quickly rotated the headphones through to try to get as fair a test as possible. Then I recorded on the iPad and, once again, rotated through the microphones as quickly as possible. For each of the test, I moved the headphones as close to the girls talking as possible.

Have a look at the results for yourself.




I noticed a few things. First and most importantly, it didn't matter which headphones I used, they were much better than the sound recorded from either the iPad or the computer without a headphone attached.

I also noticed that the sound recorded by the macbook seemes louder than that from the iPad.

If I have to pick the ones that I felt were the best, I feel that headphones number 3 and the Apple headphones (#4) gave the best sound. In terms of cost, we can get headphone #3 for less than $15 and the Apple ones are more than twice that cost.

So in conclusion, if you want to record the sound of partner conversations in a noisy room, get some headphones and you will hear a big difference.

Learning to Manage Distractions

One of parents' biggest concerns around student use of technology is that of distractions. The same tool we use to create and learn, can be used to entertain and derail productivity.

So what are our options, as teachers? As parents?

We could create elaborate structures of control (blocking certain websites, turning off wifi etc), but that is only a temporary solution.

At UWCSEA, we prefer to educate students about distractions, with a view to creating informed citizens, who learn to manage their tendencies to get distracted. This is of course what all adults need to learn to do themselves...

This skill of self-management takes time to develop, and students need lots of opportunities to practice. They may well need frequent reminders throughout their schooling of techniques and approaches to reducing distractions, and this is where responsive teaching comes to the fore.

One of the ways we have begun to educate students about distractions is through the Personal and Social Education curriculum. Recently, I co-taught with a Grade 3 teacher, who was concerned her students were getting side-tracked with Google Chat, and who wanted some strategies for helping students remain focused during class.

When I walked around the room, I asked if I could borrow a few students' computers to show the class. Here's what we found:

Personalisation
Like adults, students in our Grade 3 class loved personalising their computers. The majority had chosen a desktop background of something they were interested in (Minecraft, soccer players, horses etc) and many had changed their Gmail backgrounds to have snow falling or animated gifs moving in the background at all times.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Movement and colour can attract attention, often away from what we should be focusing on. Think about visiting a news website, for example. Advertisements often contain moving elements, as these attract the eye - a deliberate attempt by the advertiser to get you to notice what they are selling.

If we choose to have moving elements on our Gmail backgrounds, or our desktop wallpaper (one of the options on a Mac is to have a new desktop background picture every 5 seconds), then we are making it much harder for us to concentrate on our school work.

Colours that help promote calm and thinking are greens and blues, so they were recommended to the students as colours they might like to choose for their desktop and Gmail backgrounds. We encourage personalisation, but we want to make students aware that their choices have an impact on their learning. Students went back to their computers and made changes they were comfortable with.

Chat
The ability to send and receive instant messages is a relatively new phenomenon for our Grade 3 students. Understandably, it's an exciting feature to explore. Many students have older brothers or sisters who like seeing their younger sibling online, and take the opportunity to check in. This puts the younger student in a bit of a conundrum - do I reply to my sibling, or stay focused on my school work?

In one of those serendipitous twists of fate, this exact scenario occurred while I was in the room, providing us with a perfect teachable moment.

We plugged in the computer of a student whose sibling had sent a G-Chat message, and asked the students what they could do in this sort of situation. There were lots of animated discussions in groups about this scenario, and we collected some of the responses and evaluated them as a class.

"We could turn our G-Chat to invisible, so noone knows we are online."
"So can people still send you messages when you're invisible?" we asked.
"Yes, they could."
"Have a think about how that might that affect your learning," we suggested.

"We could turn our G-Chat to busy, so people know we're working."
"So can people still send you messages when you're busy?" we asked.
"Yes, they could."
"Have a think about how that might that affect your learning," we suggested.

"We could sign out of G-Chat when we're at school."
"So can people still send you messages when you're signed out?" we asked.
"No, they couldn't."
"Have a think about how that might that affect your learning," we suggested.

We then sent students back to their desks to make a decision that would help them remain focused on their learning following the discussion with the class.

Documenting Thinking
The final piece of the puzzle was to document their thinking about distractions, and the changes they decided on for their laptops using a Quicktime Screen Recording, which we embedded in their Google Site (see below for details)

Using Quicktime Screen Recording to Reflect

Students are always asked to reflect on their work. But how do we do this? Most of the time we get them to write a reflection. In my experience, these written reflections take a lot of time and students may not express their thoughts completely for a number of reasons. Students can be oversaturated by the sheer number of written reflections they are asked to complete and therefore don't always say everything they want to in their writing.

A great way around this is to have students use Quicktime screen recording on a Mac to show their thinking and reflect on their learning in a quick and simple way.

When most people think of Quicktime, they think of an application that is used to watch movies. However, there are three very useful functions available: movie recording using the isight camera, audio recording and screen recording. Although we have students use the movie recording function to capture videos of themselves and the audio recording to capture them speaking, I want to focus on the screen recording aspect.

When you select screen recording, the computer will record what is happening on your screen. You can either choose to have the whole screen or part of the screen to record. There are also options for the audio to be on (I always have it on so we can hear the students talk) and for the mouse clicks to be captured. I often use screen recordings to create tutorials for teachers, but they are perfect for students to reflect on their work and to capture their thinking.

In the example below, a student has used Quicktime to create a screen recording to explain the choices that they made when creating a poster. The student originally used Pages to create the poster and made 5 duplicate versions of the poster to gradually improve with each version. It didn't take long for the student to reflect on the process and what they did. This type of screen recording can prove very valuable to teachers.


Screen recording can take many forms for student reflections. Students can have a document written in Pages or Google Docs open and explain what they felt they did well and what they need to work on. They can highlight passages that show what they learned or what they were particularly proud of. If they are working on a specific skill, they could highlight where they have demonstrated that in their work.

When teachers start to see the value and ease at which these reflections can be made with Quicktime, they will realize that there are so many possibilities for using Quicktime screen recording in their classrooms.

Bling up your Google Forms with Images and Fonts

Google have updated forms with some great custom options for Google Forms. You can read about the update on their blog.

This is really exciting news for those of us who use forms a lot as the standard themes had become a little tired looking. The now you can select from a wide variety of fresh new themes.


But, there's a lot more available than just the new themes. For any theme you select, you can customize the theme by adding your own header image, changing the font, color, size and style for all the different text classes.