Tried and True – Touchcast

Okay – so it has taken a bit of time, a little bit of procrastination, and a lot of determination, but I was able to finally wrap my head around this whole idea of interactive video. As an art educator I am used to the concept of interactivity, and video, and combining them to create artworks, but for some reason, this tool just seemed to baffle me. But once I finally sat down and thought through this application, everything started to make sense.

The first thing that I did when playing around with this app was to start “creating” and quickly realized that it is not a “pick up and go” production tool, as I had been lead to believe. In fact, creating an effective Touchcast really requires you to apply basic principles of video production – pre-production – production – post-production or in other words… plan, plan plan. When I did the original exploration, I was able to figure out the various vApps fairly quickly and thought it was a quite intuitive. Stringing vApps together effectively is what really makes a strong  Touchcast.

So here is what happened with this experiment, that although initially frustrating, I believe turned out to be a great experiment.  I have been searching for new and innovative ways in which students can effectively demonstrate their learning about an art career, while at the same time trying to teach them a useful skill that will help those students that do not take art beyond grade 10. Thus,  Touchcast became an area of interest as a means of layering multiple curricular expectations and engaging students with 21st century skills. The basic gist of the assignment is to brainstorm art related careers (which is always fun as students begin to realize that there are more careers than just the stereotypical graphic designer or starving artist!), select one, research it and then present the findings to the class (see my website for the lesson plan). The end product is to look something like this. (Please be aware that this is the first Touchcast that I have created… in fact I made my students and take an oath that they would not laugh at me when they saw it!).

//www.touchcast.com/e/40487

I admit, there are a few things that I wish I would have done differently, but it is also a process of figuring things out. And who says that students need level 3 and 4 exemplars all the time any way. They are still able to learn from this!

From creating this piece, here are a few of the things that I learned:

1. It is so very important to research. This is the first step.  Know the content of what you are wanting to present. Have more information than you intend to use so that you can make sure that there is a good flow to your dialogue.
2. Plan out your video ahead of time. Ideally I would include talking to students about different camera shots at the very least (a close up or nostril shot for 3 and half minutes is not very flattering).
3. On the Touchcast website under Education, their documentation suggests a variety of equipment (i.e. tripods with iPad mounts, lighting, etc.). At the very minim you need something to hold the iPad – I just used myself and held it at arms length. This resulted in the unflattering shot and the jittering of the camera shot. My students started to pull out the easels to work on – in fact this will be a good workaround for the tripods and mounts.
4. You need to know what the different vApps will look like and how they are arranged on the screen using the presets. Give students an opportunity to play and explore so that they can begin to see how the tool actually works.
5. Plan which vApps you want to use. Build them (i.e. ask your questions, create your polls, insert your websites, maps, etc.) and arrange them on the time line that appears down at the bottom of the screen. As you build them and insert your content. Ideally a short storyboard or list of how you envision the video to unfold would be useful.
6. Create your titles and set their duration before they disappear (or if they stay up continuously).
7. Then I had students write their script. I think that I should have had students do this before they even touched the App. This way they knew exactly what they were saying, and then could storyboard from there, and they would have a much better idea of how they were going to build.
8. The most important thing is to provide time for students to rehearse. It took me 5 attempts to get this video the way it is. The video length is capped at 5 minutes, so it is important that students are able to compete the video in this time. Not only do students need to rehearse what they are saying but also how to transition the vApps. This got a little tricky.
9. In the video that I have posted above, you will see my eyes twitching. This is because I am reading from the teleprompter tool. This is great so students don’t have to memorize their script, but you can see what you can look like. I think this is because I was so close to the iPad that it exaggerates the eye movement of reading.
10. I think this is best done working with a production team – one person is the on-screen talent and another managing the technology and tools. It would have helped a lot with the flow of my dialogue if I wasn’t having to worry about pushing the right buttons on the screen while talking at the same time!

Overall, I enjoyed working with this tool and can see many benefits of integrating into my classroom teaching in the future. As with anything though, the first time you use it with students, you can’t expect perfection. It is new to the students and it is new to you. As a teacher you may have  your content knowledge down, but as you begin integrating increasing amounts of different technologies into your teaching, learning how to teach with these technologies effectively takes time. It is important to remember that you need to learn how to teach with these technologies, and it is not going to be an instant success. I tell my students every day that I want them to make as many mistakes as possible in their creative process so that they can learn from them. As educators, we need to allow ourselves the room to do the same. Hopefully you can learn something from the small mistakes I learned along the way as I integrated Touchcast into my class.

April 30, 2014October 3, 2016 by Brian Leichnitz Categories: App ReviewTags: digital natives, pedagogy

Investigating Touchcast

So, have you noticed that your students are tuning out during your lessons? Are they constantly going to their devices in order to ‘stay’ engaged? Do you think that meeting students in their space would make the lessons more engaging? more authentic? or even more real for students?

Touchcast may be a new tool that may enable you to engage students with some of your own lessons, but also may provide a great tool for students to demonstrate their learning.

I have to admit, work primarily with Apple Products (I have a MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone) and was somewhat disappointed to see that there was no Desktop App for a Mac, as I find that I do most of my creation on my laptop. I am still trying to get used to creating on an iPad. Not only am I having to wrap my head around the complexities of Video Apps (Vapps), I am also having to learn how to create on the iPad. Nonetheless, I signed up for my free account today, just to try this tool out.

After spending a few minutes getting my account set up on the iPad, and then exploring my channel on the computer, I thought that I would be able to easily go about and just get started making something, just to experiment and explore. However, I quickly found that this tool is perhaps a little more complex than I originally thought. So, I stopped, thought about whether this would be worth my time to play around with for a while, and then found that Touchcast offers training manuals and suggestions for integrating touch casts into the classroom.

I guess sometimes you just need to go slow, in order to go fast!

Over the next couple of weeks I am going to try and learn this app, and will write about what I learn, as well as what I think about this tool. It is definitely not as intuitive as Nearpod, but at the same time, I think it is going to me so much more powerful! It’s just going to take time to figure it all out!

April 11, 2014October 3, 2016 by Brian Leichnitz Categories: UncategorizedTags: pedagogy, teaching practice, technology

Nearpod – Creating Interactive Presentations

We have all sat through a bad Powerpoint Presentation – you know the ones…. you sit there as the lights dim and the title slide is visually hideous. All you can think about is How long is this going to take? When will it be over? Am I actually going to learn something? Having students present their learning to the class can be a very important part of the learning process as it requires students to have an in-depth knowledge of the content that they are presenting – it needs to be deep enough and thorough enough in order for them to effectively communicate their learning. And often I find that students will know their stuff, but they don’t know how to communicate it. It is a difficult skill. Thinking back to my early days as a teacher, I think I can easily admit to the same short coming – I knew what to teach, but I didn’t necessarily know how to teach it well.

The challenge with presentation aids such as Microsoft Power Point, Keynote, Prezi or even the presentation tool embedded in Google Drive is that there is little learning that goes into actually how to use them effectively. A few basic guidelines that I give my students for creating presentation tools include:

1. Use a simple, clean effective theme.
2. Where possible, use a good photograph or illustration that helps to reinforce your point. In art class, the image should be first and foremost on the screen.
3. Use the presenters notes as much as possible! I know students get nervous presenting in front of their peers. It is naturally. This is where you need to write down what you want to say.
4. If you need to have text on screen, write in short concise jot notes. Really there should be as few points on the screen as possible. What you write should be a key idea and you should be expanding on those ideas from what you are saying.
5. Use the templates that are provided – they mostly apply the principles of design – Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity!

These tools are to be visual aids for the presentation. They should help direct the presentation or seminar, and not ‘be’ the presentation. I try to reinforce in my students that what they have to say should be more important than what is on the screen. The visual is a touch point, a way to help the audience organize their notes and their understanding of the topic that they are presenting.

Last year I was introduced to a new presentation tool called Nearpod. It is a presentation tool that is unlike any of the others that I previously listed because it is fundamentally different. All of the other presentation tools assume that the audience is primarily passive – they sit, the listen, they write their own notes (hopefully). Nearpod turns the traditional presentation into an interactive experience by taking your presentation that is created in one of the traditional tools, uploaded to the Internet and then enhanced using their on-line interface (i.e. students can respond to questions as multiple choice, free writing, drawing, etc.). The best part is, when students are using a Nearpod Presentation you can complete checks for understanding in real time. As the instructor, the student responses are fed back to you and you can see their answers – who has completed it, what percentage of the class got the answer correct, who answered the question correctly, who had an exemplary answer or an answer that could spark conversation and debate. Student answers can also be pushed back to the class so that everyone can see an anonymous response.

The best part about the way that Nearpod has set up the platform is that it takes very little work to convert your old presentations into interactive presentations. The hardest step in the process is figuring out where you want to check for understanding, and how you want to check it.

April 2, 2014October 5, 2016 by Brian Leichnitz Categories: App ReviewTags: interactive, pedagogy, technology

Fatty Legs

My wife has been using the story Fatty Legs by  Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton (illustrated by Liz Amini-Holmes) for several years now to help her grade 4 and 5 students come to some understanding of the hardships that First Nations and Inuit children faced when they were enrolled in Indian Residential School.

It is a story of a young Inuit girl who sees school and learning as a huge benefit, as she sees it as the key to opening the treasure chest known as reading. After pestering her father for months to attend school he reluctantly agrees to let her go to the Indian Residential School in Aklivik, on the Mackenzie River in the North West Territories. The story recounts her experiences of having her name anglicized, her hair cut her clothing taken away and then being forced to complete menial chores as part of her ‘education’. The story however is not all about the hardships of the Indian Residential System; there is a glimmer of hope as you read about the main character showing the tenacity and cleverness as she stands up to the tormenting Sister known as Raven, and begins to assert her independence and resilliance.

So, for the first time since I taught middle school, I started to Fatty Legs this book to my class the other day. My grade 10s  are my test class for the First Nations Metis and Inuit Collaborative Inquiry professional development series that I have been participating in since February this year. I had chatted with the head of the Global Studies department at my school and discovered that they are covering the Indian Residential Schools as part of their curriculum also. So in class we have been investigating this idea of transition, after studying Daphne Odjig’s painting Indian in Transition (1982) and images from the Canadian Naitonal Archive of Thomas Moore, before and after photographs of what this young man looked like in relationship to his experience in the Indian Residential School System. I was a little nervous to start reading this book, especially since it is target for more of a middle school audience, to my grade 10s. I was not sure that it would command the attention of my class, especially the boys in the class who seem to have a hard time focussing on anything.

I can’t tell you how wrong I was – the entire class was silent as I read aloud. They were captivated – it is perhaps the only time that I have been able to hear a pin drop in the class. My wife told me that they would love just being read to. I had no idea how right she would have been. I guess that sometimes I forget the power of simply being read to out loud. There is something intimate and personal about it; something that draws people together. We have only read one chapter, but over the coming week, I hope that we will be able to finish the book, and they will be just as engaged with this story as they were  through the first few pages.

April 1, 2014October 5, 2016 by Brian Leichnitz Categories: UncategorizedTags: Indian Residential Schools, Inuit