Using VoiceThread in Queensborough Community College Hybrid Online Early American Literature Class”
Example of VoiceThread in Darcy’s American Literature Course:
(Student responses are eliminated due to restriction on web distribution. Student responses will be available for presenations.)
https://voicethread.com/#q.b6178064.i31751809
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The individuation required of reflection practices and the social skills required in collaborative work can be integrated in parallel recursive tasks that build critical thinking. The students in our literature classes come from around the world and bring into our classes a rich understanding of cultural artifacts and practices that can enhance our own understanding of the way early American texts were created. Using reflection on their own individual experiences and collaborative sharing with students from other cultures, students can begin to integrate their learning in ways that enhances their critical thinking skills. Since Hispanic students represent the largest ethnic group (30 percent) of our freshman student population, followed by an equal representation of Asian and Black students ( 21 percent each) and 19 percent White students, it is incumbent on teaching faculty to use the rich diversity within the classroom to present texts within their original cultural fields of influence. Our Hispanic students bring their heritage into the classroom and views on American involvement in their own history. By opening the class to contributions from varying Hispanic cultures students are able to participate socially in new and unique ways.
Technologies
Example of VoiceThread use at Penn State (2:20)
Voice Thread at Penn State: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2nb7FO7p8
VoiceThread technology allows students to post written comments, audio files, or webcam recordings of themselves in response to weekly tasks in relation to our study of texts. It is interesting that almost the entire class is posting webcams by the third week. Students have access to technology even if they do not have it at home and enjoy using it. Since the technology uses visual and audio representations, presentation of self and professional awareness are enhanced. Students can use their multiple intelligences and skills in these presentations.
Explain project results
Optimize retention of Hispanic students in online courses or programs, Promote the effective development and implementation of assessment efforts in Distance Learning, Assure student authentication in the online environment, Manage contact hours to assure equivalence of activities between distance education and regular courses
Why it should be considered best practice?
In my Early American Literature online class, we are developing a course that integrates multi intelligences as students prepare their VoiceThread final presentations. Studying texts from the early discovery narratives describing landfall in the Caribbean, texts representing the migration experience of Amerindians, texts of religious assimilation in Mexico, students begin to see the social and artistic fields within which texts develop. We ask how those fields influence attitudes toward discovery and the unknown. These ideas become central to the theme of the course, as they are encountered in “contact zones.” Using “VoiceThread” we are able to come to understand the technology through which our own cultures are creating communities that consist of “contact zones.” As students think about approaches to “discovery” and the way attitudes toward the stranger and the unknown, they also reflect on the way technology influences their own community building, shared knowledge and discovery within their class relations.
VoiceThread technology encourages the use of visuals, voice, music and group participation as well as reflection. Using artifacts in relation to literary documents, students begin to see the social field and cultural forces influencing creative productions at the same time that they are producing and distributing their own artifacts of knowledge. As knowledge producers themselves, students must go through a process of selection, analysis and synthesis as they research through the archive of artifacts and each part of the process is punctuated by both reflection and collaboration designed in a way that each complements the work of the other to build critical thinking skills. Teams are strengthened as individuals begin to recognize the talents of others who bring a different skillsets to the project. Students are asked to draft out their research questions and thesis statements which change as their projects become more mature and their awareness of their own inquiry is heightened, even as their awareness of alternative inquiry paths pursued by others is also made more apparent. Since the teacher is presenting the lectures and sequence of tasks in VoiceThread each week, the teacher’s model and their own participation in the model prepare them for their own productions.
In the hybrid online courses students do not get as much “face to face time” with teacher or time with other students. In the VoiceThread environment, the teacher and other students are present to one another. However, it is the group work done in class that really cements relations as students prepare for their online communication during the week.
The Flipped Classroom:
In our weekly two hour classes, we organize groups and come to understand the research question we are working on. Alternate inquiry paths are established and research routines are suggested. Students are extremely active during class time working out the group’s logistics. Leaders emerge in natural ways as those who feel comfortable doing different tasks volunteer and exchange emails to collaborate during the week. Students relate to one another differently in this flipped classroom. The teacher is not playing an active role, but providing the structure for their organization. This prepares the students for the VoiceThread work they will do on their own during the week when they access the lecture and tasks on VoiceThread. Students can collaborate during the week using their individual webcams/audio files or text boxes. Because real presence is enhanced, there is less imitation and associative thinking. Group leaders report their team’s response to the teachers’ questions about the lecture/video. At the same time, students are preparing their final projects by creating power points. By working with the teachers’ lectures each week, they understand how the technology works and use it themselves for the final projects.
Voice Thread is embedded in the Blackboard LMS to take the place of separated lecture files and Discussion Forum tasks. The lecture and the discussion are blended on one screen .Each week a folder contains the task schedule with guides to the text. A Voice Thread Video uses nine slides to take the student through my webcam directions. The way the slides are sequenced follows the pattern of recursively structured reflection/collaboration using rubrics to guide students through the distinctly different habits of mind used for each stage of thought. While reflection is related to bouncing ideas off significant memories and experiences in a way that reconstitutes a perspective, collaboration is associated with listening skills in detecting alternative patterns of thought that lead to choices. Each of these tasks is designed to help students construct their own inquiry path leading to an individuated project that relies on their own talents.
Scaffolding Tasks:
Slide one uses an artifact to introduce the idea of the week in the form of evidence that adds to the kind of evidence found in the literary text. The careful use of visuals and artifacts is vital to the course as students come to understand the kind of texts that influence literary expression. Each week the visuals that introduce the ideas are set up in a way that provides students with parallel cultural views as, for instance, the artifact central to Columbus is seen in relation to artifacts central to the Amerindian. Students see knowledge within a field of different ways of knowing that stimulates their own use of multiple intelligences. Slide two takes the students through an overview of the work for the week, while slide three gives specific step by step instructions. Slide four is a video lecture that again uses artifacts as visual guides through the lecture. Slides five, six, and seven are the slides used for Group comments using the research associated with building social pedagogy and authentic audience. Each member of the group has a different role in relation to providing interpretations that link the use of literary devices in the text to the cultural forces seen in the video. Slide eight is a reflection slide in which each student thinks about how his/her own thinking patterns relate to the patterns established by the author in the text and the members of their group. For instance, in the first week when we are reading Pratt’s essay on “Contact Zones” students consider how Voice Thread is a contact zone. In the second week when we are considering the kinds of thinking Columbus uses in relation to the “unknown,” students identify the unknown in their own thinking and how they either allow for “empty spaces” or fill such spaces. Slide nine is a “tips” slide reminding students of the way the technology works.
In their final project, students will submit a paper, but, in addition, do a Voice Thread presentation of the main ideas in the paper. Over the course of the semester they have learned to use artifacts, voice, music, and webcam combinations to present their ideas. They begin to see and hear their ideas in new ways. They become knowledge producers who can then reflect on the way the dissemination of their work is received by the audience. They become active members of a social group creating knowledge within a field of thought. The assessment design used in the class can be seen in the following link: http://www.slideshare.net/brocansky/vt-for-deeplearningflipped
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