Final Project Information

My final project can be found here: http://digitalwritinginasl.pbworks.com/

This wiki is a balance of definitions, classroom application ideas, and program descriptions/links. What makes it different than other wikis is accessibility. The terms and descriptions are accessible in American Sign Language. The audience is primarily teachers of the deaf/hard of hearing, but there are some sections which could be beneficial for students. The criteria for sites and programs to make the wiki were how user friendly they are, cost (free), and visual accessibility via video or other conceptually visual layout.

The purpose of the wiki is collaboration around some of these basic web 2.0 concepts. If teachers become comfortable with these 7 areas in their classroom (regardless of programs they select), their students will be exposed to digital writing options that help keep them even with their peers. The web is generally a wonderfully accessible tool--with some interpreted materials, digital literacy is attainable regardless of disability.

Portfolios and Course Reflection

Looking over my blog I see a few changes. Generally, I became more comfortable with the tasks each week and started to see them as stand alone pieces. I've mentioned this before, but one of my mind-shifts this semester has been to look at digital writing pieces as their own creations rather than a "digitalization" of previous writing. It was fun to see some of the early tasks and thinking about how much mental energy went into those. Now I'm cruising those sites making the most of them.

The platform I would likely select for a portfolio would be a wiki. I like blogs, but they do feel a bit permanent and one sided. The flexible nature of a wiki (and it's collaborative feel) has the vibe I would want for a portfolio. I want students to value the flexibility in the writing process. By collecting feedback on their wikis, I would like to see them create a 'polished works' page and link to the texts they feel are the best. With that format, classmates could also link to the ones they like best.

Material selection for a portfolio is difficult because I've never had anyone ever look at a portfolio I've designed. I worked really hard on lots of pieces in my portfolio, and it feels devalued because it hasn't been looked at. My students would be asked to put in the piece they like the best, the one they improved the most, and an example of something they would like to revisit. It would be very important to provide a final piece of writing (less than polished) that talked about the process for each of those selections and their reasons for choosing them.

Implementation idea 1: I will use my final project wiki as a collaborative community with the larger teacher of the Deaf/HH (TDHH) community. There are lots of pieces I didn't have a chance to get to the level I want, and I will work with my peers and colleagues to make the wiki an active center for tech tool/digital writing collaboration.

Implementation idea 2: I will learn to walk my talk :) I've tried to learn to love Google Reader, RSS, and Diigo, but I lack community. I need to continue to work on those three technologies because I see the logic behind their powers. I want to use them to 'glue' all these other pieces together and to help the web work for me. Working to 'read the web' the way my students do will take some time, but with these tools, I can get there.

I have learned a great deal about tools working together to create individual works of digital writing, and I look forward to having my own classroom to apply all of this! For the time being, I will have to live through my wiki members.

Feedback for Digital Writing

My final project is focusing on a wiki for deaf education teachers and deaf/hard of hearing students to learn about these different applications and systems. It is difficult to predict how the site will be used, so I decided to discuss my changed concept of assessing digital writing.

I like to include a variety of assessments. I am not a fan of static rubrics--I strongly believe they need to be flexible and well developed. I cannnot change what people think about rubics, so I want to improve my rubics to act as models. Adding hyper text elements into the assignment structure and the rubric is a new challenge. I usually just had the tech tool as an add on rather than something that contributed to the way the work was done. A major change I would make in this area is considering the purpose of selecting THAT tech tool and how the studnet utilized it to the best of its functionality.

Rubrics for digital writing are something that should be their own structure. I don't think it is wise to retro fit an old rubric to a digital writing rubric. Until teachers (including myself) view digital writing as so much more than a digital version of 'regular' writing, we are doomed to static rubrics that do not offer meaningful feedback.

Throughout this course I have been made aware of more 'tech tools' that can help my students collaborate with each other, and there is no reason those collaborative tools can't be made into feedback tools as well. I would work with them to develop feedback skills through explicit instruction and modeling. This time away from what I 'should be teaching' is an investment in all that I will be teaching!

Powerpoint and Web Readability

I spent a little time walking through the sites I go to most often, and I started to notice some elements that make a site easier to read than others. The elements I found most useful included: *Color schemes that weren't distracting (too loud or busy) *Sites that had SOME color--not just black and white *Tabs and menus that remain the same throughout browsing *Information set up with headings, bullets, etc (not just chunks of text) *Tone of voice appropriate to the site and its audience After reflecting on these sites and their design elements, I returned to the two sites that I manage and changed some of the layouts! I think both of my sites are much better having thought through these issues.


Powerpoint thoughts: I have used Powerpoint or some kind of presentation software for a very long time. I used it in my teaching as well, but I tried to avoid the death-by-powerpoint approach. To be honest, I still had plenty of slides that were very dry, too big, too many bullet points, and too much one sided information. Over time, I worked on including more stopping points and handouts that had gaps for students to complete. When our school got Activ boards (interactive whiteboards), I used their presentation software everyday. Built in their software is an interactive quizzing program. You are able to embed questions into the presentation and have students respond with remote 'clickers.' You are able to ask them to respond with T/F, ABCD, Rank, type a response, and Use numbers. Our interactive presentations improved a GREAT DEAL after we had that program. Now that I no longer teach there, I will need to continually focus on what PP has to offer and how to keep things interesting. Along this journey, I found the "Prezi" program listed on our class Ning. I LOVE this program! For me, it makes a lot of sense for teaching that concepts are connected and interrelated. It was a lot of fun to make the presentation that I made. I focused on the word "therm"--teaching a word part is the idea of the presentation. I will use this program when I get my own classroom again one day and will include it on my final project website. I wanted to really get a feel for it, so I signed up for a 1 year membership.

Comics

What fun! I had a really good time playing around with the different platforms for comics this week. I struggled with a couple of the platforms and trying to decide what I would focus on, but if someone had an idea, any of the 3 would be good.

I have some students who have limited English skills, and encouraging them to tell a story however they can is a great way to start working toward printed English. I will play with these programs and share them with my students in the future as well!

I ended up making a one page comic about my sister and I. If I were creating a comic story, I would try to take more 'action shots.' Since I just wanted to use pictures I already had, I decided to stick with something where posed pictures are okay. I would ask my students to use pictures that help forward their story.

Fun activity and lots of possibilities!

Christmas Podcast

For my podcast, I've decided to create a narrative of a Christmas list. In my family, we always send Christmas lists by the first week of November. It never fails that people wish they could have been more descriptive (to reduce how many exchanges they have to negotiate). So...since I was working on our family lists, I decided to narrate them and send the audio file instead of a typed description. It was fun to work with Audacity. I will play around with it more to do some layering and other fun things.

My experiences with Skype have been all positive. My husband and I used Skype while he was deployed overseas. It was pretty reliable, and he is tech-challenged, so the plug-and-play aspect was very helpful.

For my students, I would likely use podcasts as a brainstorming mechninism as well as the ability for me to give feedback to individual students. Since my students cannot receive audio files (deaf), I would need to keep my responses in video format for podcasts, but the practice working with audio files got me thinking about other ways to use these programs. This Christmas list practice session might lead me into snipits of information for my other websites and sending my voice for particularly special e-mails (rather than lifeless words on a screen).

I couldn't get the autoplay to stop happening (even when changing the code), so here's the link: http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/embedqt/50093

My Cruise Video

I was trying to come up with something really creative, but I ended up just using still shots focusing on my 2009 cruise. Since I don't have access to iMovie, I went with Movie Maker. I was pretty impressed by my classmate's ideas and use of imovie, so hopefully that's a program I will get to spend some time with in the future.

I have done lots of video and photo editing with my former students. I even taught a TV broadcasting class. We didn't have enough computers when we were working on projects, but it was always wonderful to see how creative and unique their productions turned out to be.

I would like to learn more about hypertexts embedded in videos--that isn't something I know anything about. Digital storytelling is an accessible way for low language students to tell a story and then expand to writing or another kind of literacy skill.

Here is a short video of photos taken on my cruise last August. I couldn't get the embed code from Media Mill, so I went to YouTube to get the embed code.