Tips & Takeaways

Things that ROCKED!

  • It was awesome to see student apply the ideas of context and social construction. The lesson after these three was about understanding bias. Part of the lesson was understanding when language does and does not show signs of bias (ex: not every adjective is a red flag for bias). Students clearly considered context in their evaluation of whether language is a sign of bias or a description and even whether or not the bias displayed is acceptable in context. Amazing!
  • Many students took more seriously than expected the self reflection assignment. It was great to hear their honest feedback and to see them interacting with each other in Flipgrid. In one class, almost every student created a self reflection and commented on three or more classmates.
  • In the post evaluation, I could see some students applying what they learned from library workshops to the evaluation of the academic article, which I did not expect. HKU is an R1 school and students are required to learn information literacy concepts that Michael teaches to students to help them identify quality markers of research articles (peer review, citations, impact factors, etc.). I did not cover those quality markers, so it was interesting to see them pull from those lessons for this journalism-focused assignment. A clear connection between the literacies, but one that actually contradicts how we teach news consumers to evaluate research (by considering sample sizes and methodology for reliability rather than trusting at face-value the aforementioned quality markers).

. . . and not so much.

  • Some of the students either had trouble with their screencast (missing the volume, took too long to set it up, etc.) or just didn't follow directions.
  • Many students conducted their investigations off-screen and then prepared a script to read on-screen rather than show their process live. One student even prepared a PowerPoint lecture, which she displayed alongside the article, and then read from it word-for-word. While I like the creativity in their approach to solving whatever problem this technique addressed, it hindered my ability to understand thought process in a way that could provide further instruction or measure their progress fully.
  • Given the class sizes (64 students total) and full set of lessons being conducted in two class periods, it was extremely difficult to thoroughly evaluate all assignments in a way that allowed me to modify my teaching to where learners were in the process. I actually couldn't even follow my own lesson plans to a T, which is a big disappointment for me.
  • These lessons are constructed to include more assignments than some others in the course. They were also delivered during the last month of the course, when students have a lot of competing priorities. Some students, particularly the students taking the course for general education credit, did not complete some of the assignments, making it difficult to assess their progress for this project and for their own learning.

Next time around . . .

  • I will definitely assign students to set up and test Screencastify before coming to class where they will use it for the first time. This will save a lot of time and allow students to ask for help right away rather than spending 15 minutes in class troubleshooting.
  • I will give examples of what I expect from students for the assignments so that they understand that I want to see their process as much as their result. Also, a couple of students did not record their entire browser, rather the active tab only, when recording their lateral reading activity. This really prevented me from seeing their investigation, so next time I will include this in my instructions.
  • Students were under the impression that they should present polished, mistake-free videos, which is definitely not the point of using digital report-back in these assignments. It would be beneficial to explain that well.
  • If possible, I will stretch these lessons out more. I only had two class periods and the full set of lessons really warrants three 90-minute classes.
  • When accessing the Screencast videos, I highly recommend downloading the videos and then re-upload to Drive. If you save directly to drive, the student is still the owner of the video and can erase it! Also, note that it takes a while to download then upload, then for Drive to process the videos for viewing. But saving each video directly to drive (while faster) is more cumbersome, as you have to navigate to the folder each time. Just a trade-off decision.