EducationWorld is pleased to present this article by Pat LeMay Burr, Ph.D., digital media professor and Distinguished Chair at University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. In this piece, Dr. Burr describes an online lesson-creation tool that helps meet many of the classroom expectations of today's tech-savvy students.
Global thought leaders marked the 10th anniversary of the NMC (New Media Consortium) Horizon Project by identifying 28 metatrends that will likely define the role of technology in teaching and learning during the next decade.
The Top Metatrends and Young Learners
Six of the top metatrends young learners might embrace to integrate technology into the learning process suggest that:
Expectations and Solutions
The metatrends chart below identifies a few tried-and-true solutions to address young learners' expectations.
|Young Learners' Expectation||Classroom Solution|
LiveMinutes - Online discussion
Audacity - Interviews
|2. Anywhere/anytime access||
CamStudio - Screen capture for asynchronous replay on demand
|3. Cloud access||
UStream - Video capture
DropBox - File sharing
|4. Easy access to everything||
Twitter - Hashtags for immediate access to source material
Email, logs, iAnnotate
|6. Re-imagination of entire teaching/learning dynamic||
ShowMe - Re-imagines and enriches metatrends 1-5
One new solution—ShowMe—that responds to “re-imagining the learning process” is different, however. This tool reaches across the first five metatrends in a dramatic way.
ShowMe is an open, online learning community that allows teachers to create lessons, explanations and tutorials at any time and on almost any topic. Examples of teachers’ existing creations posted for public use suggest the endless possibilities for re-imagining the teaching and learning process. See the directory of video categories for tutorials already produced (almost always by teachers), and use the “create” directory for creating your own.
Learning with Showme.com
For example, explore the section dedicated to simple arithmetic with subtopics covering addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, percent, common factors, common multiples, decimals, common divisors, fractions, base 10 numbers, integers and place value. In the multiplication section, you can see thumbnail sketches of the possible video of varying length, quality, and complexity.
Or, check out an illustration of a short “multiplication array” tutorial by Kenny D. (a chosen pen name). Click on the video to watch his evolving numerical drawing and to hear the synched audio portion that explains his drawings. Click on his name, and you see the option to subscribe to his library of demonstrations. You will also see a URL to embed so students can click on a link from your own blog in order to reach Kenny D.’s explanation, if you decide to refer your students to his video.
This site belongs to Anthony DiLaura, a recent “featured” author at ShowMe. His “midpoint of a segment” video demonstrates the use of colors offered by ShowMe. Note how he uses the colors to make different points on different parts of the screen for young learners.
Useful videos may be used in class as a part of the re-imagination process, and they may be emailed to parents and children for repeated viewing after classroom discussion.
Creating and Teaching with the iPad Showme App
While you can create ShowMe videos with a laptop and mouse, a better combination is to learn with the laptop and create with the iPad. A good stylus, combined with the ShowMe iPad app, leads to a winning production combination.
And as good as some of the existing ShowMe videos might be, the exciting opportunity for teachers is to re-imagine the teaching/learning process by creating new and original videos that very specifically address the individual classroom. Turn your iPad into a personal interactive whiteboard by downloading the free ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard app (from the iTunes store). Read the app description at the ShowMe download site to better understand its valuable features and operating protocol.
When the app opens on your iPad, touch the large + (plus sign) inside the dashed rectangle to create a new ShowMe video. See a color tray at the top where a stylus can capture various colors, an eraser icon, and a large sponge icon on the far right for completely clearing the white board.
One of ShowMe’s most advanced features is the icon located between the erasure and the sponge—a cloud icon. Touch that cloud and you will see options to either take a photo with your iPad2, import a photo from your existing photo files, or search for images to import from the Internet. A search for a “normal curve” to explain a statistical concept saves you drawing one, and the imported image will likely be much more professional than your own drawing.
The search results will present options, and you touch the one you want to import. The import is immediate. The red button on the upper right of the iPad screen is the “record” button, and after one tap, it starts right up. Talk while you draw to make important points, and the completed video syncs audio and video into a seamless production that you name, save, make available to the public, keep private, or email to students.
Steps to Professionalize the Re-Imaging Tutorial
As you watch several of the existing video tutorials available to the public, it will become clear that key aspects of the production process are critical to creating a video from which young learners can benefit at the highest level.
Re-Imagination Applications of ShowMe
Various ways in which you can use the ShowMe tutorial include:
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