Discussion Posts

Name: Autumn McDonnel

Home Town: Marshall, MN, but I've lived in Aberdeen, SD for 2 years!

Program of Study: English Education with minors in Special Education, Creative Writing, and E-Learning.

Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: My current favorite is mint chip! It changes, like, every month or so. It just depends on how I'm feeling at the moment, but there's not a single flavor that I dislike.

What Brought Me to This Class: It's a requirement for my E-Learning minor, but I'm still excited to take it nonetheless! I enjoy editing photos, film, audio clips, and just about anything digital!

• The podcast from this week recalled the experience of a teacher "wheeling" a television into the classroom and how students perceived that process. Do you have a similar situation? If so, what was it like, and what was your favorite show or film? Why? If not, why do you think you missed this process?

• With so many resources available online, we need to give them a critical eye. Provide links to two video resources you've found online.

  • You need to provide an example of an educational video that you think would be effective for classroom use. Please explain why.

  • You need to provide an example of an educational video that you think would not be effective for classroom use. Please explain why.

I miss those days when my kindergarten through fourth-grade teachers would literally wheel their televisions into the classroom. They only did this on rare occasions. From kindergarten through about second grade, my teachers only used their televisions to watch fun movies as a reward if we, as a class, had behaved for a prolonged period of time. The movie I remember best was "The Polar Express," where we had a Christmas party, watched the movie, drank hot cocoa, and made fun Christmas cards. But from third through fourth grade, television was only used for educational purposes, such as watching "Bill Nye the Science Guy." And honestly, even watching Bill Nye felt like a reward because we learned from a silly adult rather than a boring textbook. I remember these moments because they didn't happen very often. The pure joy and excitement we'd get from watching and listening to the televisions being wheeled into our classrooms felt like an adrenaline rush. We actually sat in our seats to watch because we knew we had to take advantage of having a television in our rooms.

One example of an educational video that I think would be effective for classroom use is Weird Al Yankovic's parody "Word Crimes" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc). Weird Al is like the Bill Nye of the music world; everybody knows his name, and his lessons are entertaining and catchy. This song goes to the tune of Robin Thicke's song "Blurred Lines," which was a hit song in 2014 and still very popular among younger generations. This video is silly, but it has a valuable lesson: spelling and grammar are important to learn at a young age because as you get older, the more mistakes you make, the more you'll get made fun of by the public.

One example of an educational video that I don't think would be effective for the classroom is TikTok user @jaykaykenny and his compilation of English class vocabulary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78MaAwzfS78). While this video may seem funny at the start, it gets annoying and repetitive real quick, and it doesn't really have anything valuable to learn from. It's just a man trying too hard to be funny and purposely mispronouncing words of the English language. There's no goal to achieve, and while teachers may try to use TikTok to gain their class's attention and relate to their age group, it's just stupid. There are plenty of other videos on TikTok to choose from that have actual meaning.

• Share the URL video.

• Explain the context of your instructional video.

  • What is the intended grade level of the audience?

  • What is the content being discussed?

  • How is this going to presented?

• Explain what you believe was the most difficult part of this process.

• Explain what you believe was the most useful part of this process.

My introduction video is an introduction to a course I took in high school called "60s Literature." It is a class all about how history and literature coincide. The 1960s was an interesting decade, as many celebrities were born and died, the birth control pill was introduced, Woodstock became a gathering place for hippies, drugs were on the rise, the US went to the moon, and so much more. History heavily influences literature, which was one of my favorite takeaways from the course when I took it. I really enjoyed this class when I was in high school, and I really hope that someday I can teach it! The intended grade level is anywhere from grades 7-12, though probably more for older grades when discussing heavier topics like the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc., as well as the influence of drugs and the lifestyle of hippies and yippies. This introduction video would be presented for supplemental information. My plan would be to send it out a couple of weeks before the actual course starts to the students can prepare. The course would also be an elective course, so I'm hoping many of my students that would be in the class would be willing to take it to see what it's about. Perhaps they just really love history and literature, or simply the 60s.

The most difficult part of this process was editing my audio. I used iMovie, and there isn't much of an option to edit audio very well (at least not that I've noticed). So, in some parts of my video, my audio tends to be too loud or too quiet. Dr. Pirlet mentioned this in my feedback, but I was aware of it as I was editing. However, the most useful part of this process was incorporating images in my video and some music so my students could get a sense of the events that happened in the 60s. Sometimes when we hear stories from our grandparents talking about their younger years, we can't really picture the world they were living in. It's super hard for me to imagine my grandparents growing up in the 50s wearing mini skirts, having frizzy hair, smiling in braces, driving Volkswagon buggies, etc. My goal with the images was to help my students get that clarity of what the 60s were like by giving them actual images of both the positives and negatives the US endured throughout the entire decade and to realize that real people lived through that decade, and they have many stories to tell, and we can see that through literature.