Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash Well, this is the cap on the 703 blog posts for my class on transliteracy. As a teacher, it's easy for me to steep in the world of academia, communicating in one sole fashion. Through this class, I've learned that the production and consumption of important messages can take many more shapes than written word. Not only can they, but they must take different shapes. In the world of academics, traditionally, messages were communicated by a filled page of text, but through this course I have learned that messages are even, and especially conveyed in the empty spaces!
Accessibility has been a key word for me this trimester. Is what I'm creating and trying to communicate accessible? Am I sticking to a familiar or traditional format when other formats would make my message accessible to a wider audience? By taking away from this course baby-step skills in video editing and...I don't want to say graphic design but maybe...visual element assemblage, I have begun to think about other areas of my career and life in which I'd like to use these skills to communicate a message in a meaningful and memorable way. Learning about the importance of making our messages accessible to our audience has made me think about how I emphasize this in my own classroom. If the visual, verbal, and auditory are all just as powerful in terms of clearly communicating a message, we should be designing instruction in the same way for kids from day one and teaching them transliteracy skills as they learn to communicate their own stories and thinking with the world.
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The title of the 703 class is Extending Human Capacity via Transliteracy. Well, it has certainly done what the title sets out to do, in my life anyways. I have been stretched through the exercises in this class, in ways completely unlike the stretching in the previous classes. At the beginning of the course, it was completely daunting to hear the list of items we would create: logo, infographic, executive summary, academic research poster, mini-documentary. However, knowing what the goals were from the beginning helped me pace myself...I know what you're thinking...I haven't necessarily been ahead of the game but if I wouldn't have known there were other big projects, I could have easily spent all my homework time for the 8 class periods on any one of these projects alone, especially the mini-documentary. As much as just saying that word made me sweat bullets initially, I really did enjoy the video making process. I think I like details...and if left unhindered, I can spend a lot of time on them...(not good for trying to get classwork turned in). I loved filming shots, editing clips, and putting the finishing touches on my project. I really struggled when it came to diving in to academic writing again after a long break. My research paper is really long...I thought I wouldn't be able to gather the right tidbits of information to condense into one academic research poster. Not only that but my tables and graphs are detailed and complex. I knew I would have to recreate some simpler graphs which meant sifting through and re-compiling data. Thankfully, one day I had a miraculous burst of energy and got tons done in one evening. As stated by my instructor and classmates, once I wrote the short executive summary of my paper, the pieces of the academic poster easily fell into place. I did have to recreate some data graphs but it was also a good refresher of all that hard work and interesting findings from research in the fall. I have learned through the Extending Human Capacity via Transliteracy course that accessibility is key. I wouldn't label myself a storyteller or an artist but if I don't employ some artistic and storytelling techniques in what I have to share, there won't be many listening to my message. And what good is one's message if no one hears it? Today I made my first attempt at shooting A roll footage for my mini-documentary about my action research. I would love to make something funny or at least clever but usually my work is serious because that is what I know how to do. Learning to simply put pieces of footage together in a way that hopefully ends up making sense, is where my energies will have to go for now. I wrote out my serious storyline and serious questions and went over them a couple times. Then I proceded to record my serious interview. Despite the title of my last blog post for this class, I have actually been looking forward to the challenge of putting this project together. However, when it came time to actually record, my optimism started to wane. It was the perfect cloudy day for filming with natural light. Thank goodness I had begun cleaning my room prior to the weekend because even with the clean surfaces, I had to move plants and other items around multiple times before I finally got some kind of shot that seemed clean enough, though I'm still not sure. Next came positioning the cell phone and fixing it to the window frame with gobs of tape that ended up sticking more to itself than to anything else. It was a struggle. I filmed one interview with the reverse camera on so I got a long clip of the window frame. I got another interview in time-laps mode because somehow my finger switched the video settings on the touch screen before recording. That was a fun one to watch. I keep thinking I will do more takes and just use the best one. But at some point I need to realize, I've worked hard, this is new, and it's never going to be perfect. It reminds me of my students in the early stages of the year when I would have them record a simple response to a question on Seesaw with the microphone. Some of them, surprisingly even those that LOVED talking constantly in class, were completely paralyzed and would start the recording over multiple times (sounds familiar). I only realized this when I had to work one on one with one student in a Zoom breakout room. All I wanted was a simple quick voiced response but it was a big deal for students, something I hadn't anticipated. Oh the funny tricks our minds play on us when we encounter new challenges. I will try, I will be content, and I will grow. Photo by pawel szvmanski on Unsplash I am on the final leg of my masters journey. This final leg involves making a mini-documentary. That's right, this 2nd grade teacher will become a documentary film-maker. How, you might ask...I don't know. But I did learn some good tips today to help me identify the characteristics that differentiate a good documentary from an unclear one.
As homework, we were provided with several sample mini-documentaries and capstone videos to analyze for clarity and effective story telling. Some of the older capstone videos I watched did not have a clear story line or purpose, other than stating multiple times the main idea in a phrase. The B-roll video didn't really support a story effectively. I really enjoyed the video, Teach Like a Youtuber, by Professor Mike, on how to create effective instructional videos without being on camera. The creator, talked about the need to include several reasons why your subject (X) is important. I've always been a fan of no text on screen while there is audio narration. My brain cannot take both in at once. One sample video had final take home points appear as gradually appearing text on a black background at the end of the video with only music in the background. I like this quiet moment to take away the main points. I saw several great examples of visuals that support the narration in the video samples provided and articles that supported this idea. Hopefully I can put some of it into practice. I've made very simple videos before with photos as B-roll. I really loved the experience. But now I'm nervous and excited to expand the B-roll to video clips. I think the biggest hurdle right now is writing the narrative. What is it that I want to say? I'll head back to my short video presentation for NapaLearns that I showed back in December and decide what I like and what I want to change from there. That first video felt more like a promotional video and this time around I'd love to tell a compelling story instead. It's easy to agree that my research topic, peer-teaching, is a nice idea. But with my final capstone video I would like viewers to feel the initial need and then resulting joy at implementing a strategy that brought students together and improved learning. What an interesting assignment. This week we were asked to sketch our action research journey. It was interesting to think over the successes and failures...although in a learning journey they should all be considered learning moments no matter the outcome. I have learned quite a bit so far and now I'm learning even more about transliteracy and the power of sketching as a tool for learning. I took a class on European politics in Spain a few years ago...while you might think it must have been the most dry and boring class ever, it ended up being one of my favorite classes. Ok, yes I find politics interesting, but that's not why I loved the class. I loved the class because of the professor and his teaching style. Each day, he told the story of politics with drawings. We were spell-bound as he drew out our own three branches of government and made comparisons between the U.S. balance of power system and how it is viewed in Europe. If he had only lectured, there is no way I could have followed all the way through his classes, but with the drawings he made right in front of us, I found myself on a journey right through the European Union political system.
I noticed in my own teaching, how engagement increases when I stop screen sharing and have kids get out their whiteboards and follow along with me in a little writing or drawing exercise. It's better for too because I can just change my video output to my document camera and tell them to pin my video while I keep watching all of them at once...which is virtually what another screen would help me do too. In the past, I've also watched the power of the GLAD pictorial work on students. The idea is to draw a large poster of your topic in front of them, not share a finished product. I've noticed that student engagement is very high at this time. I can see the importance of including more sketching in my lessons, especially now during virtual learning. There is so little time with students and their screen attention is limited. So why not get them involved in sketching what they are learning? I think this is especially helpful for the little guys who struggle with writing, especially quick note taking. I always thought definition writing defeated the purpose of learning new words for primary aged students. I'm excited to try more of this in my classroom. Take a look at my first sketch research story. |
Minna NummelinLife-long learner and dual language 2nd grade teacher. Archives
April 2021
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