Post #7

For this week's multimodal post, I decided to spend some time tracking down some interesting presentation programs online. One promising program I came across was the intuitive, easy-to-navigate Biteable. After some experimentation, I was able to create the simple presentation below!



Blog #7 on Biteable.


What I found most surprising about this program was just how easily I could make a presentation that looked incredibly professional. The animations are smooth, cute, and like nothing I've ever seen in a standard Powerpoint. The major downside, however, is that creators are limited to 80 characters per slide. For more informational presentations this is extremely limiting. However, for the simple stuff I find Biteable's presentations to be plain gorgeous!

A few other programs I found promising (some mentioned in our texts, some not):
- Animaker
- PowToon
- Glogster
- Prezi
- Focusky

I think that while multimedia presentations are already a staple in classrooms (mostly in the form of Powerpoints with text and photos being lectured over), many of us could find it useful to go much further than that. I've created many a presentation in my day, but I never really considered how engaging they are to different modalities. This unit has given me the opportunity to actually consider what a multimodal presentation can look like at its most polished. I plan on incorporating one or more of these presentation creation programs into my classroom, both in terms of lectures and assignments. I am also interested in incorporating multimodal assessment when I grade projects. This could be as little work as recording audio comments as well as typing text, which even in its simplicity can prove useful for students who work better with audio than with the written word.

My main worry about assigning the use of these programs to my students, however, is in terms of accessibility and technology. Biteable and other sites seem to use Adobe Flash and other advanced tools. Students with older or slower computers, then, will have a lot of trouble accessing these programs. I could recommend these students go to the library to work on these projects as a workaround, however. I am also hesitant to use any programs that are app-based since I can't assume that my students all have smartphones or tablets readily available.

Post #6

I was excited to test out apps related to the writing process this week, particularly due to the fact that the class I teach new college students is focused almost exclusively on learning to write an essay from start to finish. Because I teach older students, I focused my app tryouts on those that seemed appropriate for use by young adults in service of research writing. In addition, I avoided paid apps due to the limitations of both my budget and those I would feel safe assuming are shared by my adult students. The following is a brief overview of which I looked into and found best suited for my classroom.

Grammarly: I suggest this app often to my students, particularly those with skills poor enough to need help that my classroom is too limited to provide. Because I only meet with my students for an hour twice a week over fifteen weeks despite the laundry list of things I need to teach before winter break, the time I can allot for grammar lessons is essentially limited to one class period. Although Grammarly is no grammar teacher and therefore doesn't get to the root of a student's issues, it does help quickly fix up surface errors.

Citelighter: Citations are often the biggest stumbling block in writing an essay for students unfamiliar with the process. Although some teachers scorn citation helpers due to occasional errant commas and the necessity of teaching students the arduous process of citing things by hand, I'm not so picky. My students often feel most confident with their citations, in fact, when using apps like this.(Easybib and Citation Machine are also helpful)

Kaizena: This app for Google Docs seems like an ingenius way to streamline commenting on student work. This one is more a timesaver for me than anything!

Editminion: This is another quick and easy tool I'd recommend for my students. By checking for sentence length and frequently occurred words, this site could be extremely helpful for students who accidentally find themselves reusing phrases.

Wordrake: This tool helps to remove cloudy or overly long phrasing. I would definitely suggest this to students during revision.




Interestingly, the apps that are most useful in my classroom aren't actually the type I'd use inside of the literal classroom space because that's just not a good use of time in a college environment. The apps my students would find useful are more tools and shortcuts to better research than, say, activity starters. This means that these programs are more the type I can suggest my students use than the sort I can grade the usage of in an assignment. A citation machine, for instance, would save my students a lot of time... but that won't stop one or two from writing their citations by hand because it's more comfortable for them nonetheless.

I think it would be most useful in my classroom, then, to list these apps as potential student resources rather than necessary assignment components. Providing them as a document or spending half of a class period going over them one by one, for instance, could be extremely useful in streamlining the writing and editing process for my students.

Post #5

Graphic Organizers

Hi again, everyone! To begin this week's post, I'd like to share the three graphic organizers I made this week and briefly go over my experiences with them. Finally, I'll consider how GOs can be used in my own classroom and what concerns I have.

Inspiration

My first GO was made using Inspiration. After considering what sort of topics would be appropriate in my classroom, I decided on creating a research paper outline that my students could edit or recreate. A major pro of Inspiration is its rich library of templates and examples. I edited a template to create this GO, which really streamlined the process. Outside of templates, however, the program is a little feature-rich and takes quite a bit of learning to navigate. Additionally, because I am limited to free programs in my classroom Inspiration would not be my first choice.

Google Draw

For my Google Draw GO, I decided to recreate the rhetorical triangle. This is a diagram that I draw often on the board during class time, so I'm actually quite happy with having an actual online version of it to share with my students. In fact, I think I'll be sharing this on my class Canvas page this fall. 

The Google Draw program, like Inspiration, has a bit of a learning curve. However, the tutorial we watched this week is brief and straightforward enough that I'd be comfortable letting my students loose on Google Draw after watching it. Of the three options we used in our assignments for the week, Google Draw is also the only 100% free option.

Popplet

In creating this small map of my fall course curriculum, I decided to use the Popplet mobile app rather than the web app. In doing so, I found Popplet to be the most user-friendly and intuitive GO program out of the three we used this week by far. Because of the built-in tutorial, a student could make a Popplet without any outside instruction on how the program works. However, Popplets are limited to a sort of circle-and-line sort of structure. Although this is particularly useful for organizing facts around a topic, it does severely limit what types of GOs can be created using the Popplet platform. Additionally, Popplet is not a free program. Although the free lite version does seem to be pretty easily usable in the classroom, it is still pretty low on features and therefore can be used in a limited number of assignments.

Conclusions

Creating digital GOs was a pretty fun experience. Although in some cases (particularly in the case of Inspiration), I felt that it took a lot steeper a learning curve and more effort than creating a GO with a pencil and paper, overall they end up looking professional and clean.

 I found Popplet to be the most relevant in my classroom because during the third project I assign, students are to make "worknets" that explore different aspects of potential source articles. Popplet is the perfect program for doing so since each worknet organizes thoughts around a single article and needs to be saved as an image file. My only concern with assigning a Popplet is that some students will accidentally end up getting the premium version rather than the lite one (AKA wasting at least $5), so I'd have to emphasize to my class that spending money is not required.  If I do end up utilizing any other GO program in my classroom, I worry about how long teaching the ins and outs of the program will take before my students can actually dig in to creating their own GO.

 

Post #4

In lieu of a traditional post this week, I decided to create an audio blog using Audacity and Soundcloud (which hosts uploaded audio publicly or privately). Click the widget below to have a listen!


I found Audacity to be surprisingly easy to use for such an intimidatingly complex platform. Editing and exporting the audio, in fact, took less than five minutes. By using normalization, silence truncation, and noise reduction tools that worked in one click I was able to create a surprisingly professional sounding product! Now that I'm familiar with the tools, I know it won't be difficult to create audio commentary to send to students.

Post #3

For this week's blog, I decided to have a little fun in making my digital image and go in-depth on one of my favorite subjects... my cat! I figured this would make my blog post both more silly and personal than an infographic (although a part of me was tempted to create an infographic on how to create infographics).

In order to fully experience the Thinglink below, make sure to scroll your mouse cursor over the image so that the interactive elements show up on your screen!



As I read this week's chapter in Bridging Technology and Literacy, I became interested in mentions of Thinglink and its possible uses in the classroom. I loved the idea of interactive photos that one can scroll over to find related information or even videos and links, especially since it's something I haven't seen before online. This led me to decide to teach a little something about my feline companion by creating a Thinglink. I was disappointed to see that there was no text editor on Thinglink itself to put my cat's name on the photo, but it did only take a few minutes to add a text box in Microsoft Paint. After adding text to my photo, I used Thinglink to insert Wikipedia articles, fun facts about my kitty, and even a Youtube video right into my image.

The program is super intuitive and easy to use, so I'm confident it'll be easy to teach in the classroom. My only issue is that in order to place your Thinglink anywhere on the web other than a Thinglink group, like the portfolio blogs I ask my students to create, one must use an HTML code. Although the process of inserting HTML into a blog or a Canvas post isn't a difficult one, I know that almost none of my students will have experience working with code so teaching how to embed the Thinglink may be a stumbling block. Otherwise, I had a great time working with the program. Inserting links and text was much easier than anticipated. In fact, you can even search for a link to insert without leaving the Thinglink page.

Post #2

For this week's e-book and app exploration activity, I spent my first few minutes searching freebie websites for picture books to download but found myself slightly disappointed. A lot of the books I found in my cursory search were YA or older books in the public domain. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since both of those types of e-books are popular in their own right, but just weren't what I was looking for. I also believe that if I were to search a little bit deeper and on a variety of sites, I'd be able to find a lot more picture books for free. After ten minutes or so of browsing, I realized that because I have Amazon Prime I have access to a large library of popular e-books. Once I made my way to the Amazon Prime library, I downloaded and read the following picture books on my iPad's Kindle app:

- Today I'll be a Princess by Paula Croyle
- Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld (Side-note: This one's hilarious - highly recommended)
- Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts
- Cool Dog, School Dog by Deborah Heiligman
- Too Many Fairies by Margaret Read Macdonald

I had a lot of fun with these texts, and was particularly surprised by how simple it was to get them all on my iPad and read. All it took to obtain the five books was opening up my Kindle app, browsing the book library, and tapping on any and all books that interested me. I'd say the process of finding and downloading all five books took less than five minutes. The ease of the download process on a Kindle (particularly if you have Prime) is a real blessing for teachers who want to build their digital library quickly and painlessly.

I also enjoyed the Kindle features I ran into throughout my readings. With picture books containing small text like Ada Twist, Scientist, I could double-tap the words and the chunk of text would pop up on a larger window atop the page. A few of the picture books also allowed for pinch-to-zoom on illustrations, which is helpful for hunting down small details in the background (although I can imagine some students could use this feature to the point of distraction). One other Kindle-exclusive feature worth noting was the side panel that popped up upon opening a few of the picture books. Although the information provided there (expanded author bios, a "follow" button for the author, synopsis, etc.) could prove useful for an adult book buyer, I found it to be a little bit of an annoyance to have to close out of and imagine student readers may either read it without needing to or need to be shown how to exit out of it.

Surprisingly, my more negative thoughts are not regarding what features the Kindle e-books have but what they lack. Although highlighting and the dictionary aren't necessarily features that a young reader of picture books may need often, I was surprised that they weren't available for these texts. This is because, I realized, the Kindle app treats picture books like a series of images rather than strings of text, meaning that the actual words in the picture book are to the app just another part of the picture. In other words, text can't be highlighted, read aloud, used in text-to-speech, or looked up because the app doesn't recognize them as words. A lot of opportunities for students to engage further with the text, it seems, are missed because of this. I was also frustrated that I could only zoom in some of the books I downloaded, particularly when I wanted to look more closely at illustration details.

In terms of apps for reading education, I am happy to see the sheer variety of apps and programs available to assist struggling and new readers. Apps like Dyslexic Like Me, Blio, and Dragon Dictation that help readers with disabilities are genius, particularly considering how the sort of accessibility they provide is unavailable with traditional ink-on-paper books. I'm also a fan of "gamifying" literacy for reluctant readers, so I find apps like Word Wizard and Jumbline to be useful as potential instructional tools.

Finally, I find that integrating e-reading into my class will be simple as many students purchase our textbook as e-books already and I assign online texts often. However, I would like to go a step further than this and integrate available tools into the classroom. I think I'll do a brief introduction to using all of an e-reader or e-reader app's tools to my students before assigning a text annotation project similar to that laid out in chapter 3 of Bridging Technology and Literacy. Assigning students to summarize and comment on different textbook pages to create a class annotation of a chapter would be helpful in cementing information.