Ben's Edublog

From Slide #1 of my Wicked Problem Final Project: Here’s my problem: I teach ukulele and guitar to students from other countries, living in the United States for a period of time. Many of my students would like to continue their lessons when they return to their home countries or move to other parts of the US; how can we do that?

From Slide #2: My solution is to use the Edmodo Learning Management System to organize and deliver the materials needed. (I could have added: in a manner that best addresses the technological, pedagogical, and content challenges specific to the course and students.)

From Slide #10: How does Edmodo address TPACK? 

First, how does the Edmodo support my teaching strategy and methods, or Technological Pedagogy? With Edmodo I can easily: post .pdfs of sheet music and notes, sample mp3s, instructional videos, and homework assignments. I can also manage my class list, post assignments, communicate with students, accept finished assignments, and provide feedback on their work. The calendar function can be used to schedule assignments and due dates. 

How does Edmodo support Technological Content knowledge; how does this technology make the content in my solution more intellectually accessible?  One of the nice things about Edmodo is that it is easy to let the student learn on his or her own time. Many of my students will be in other time zones or have a non-traditional student schedule. With Edmodo, they can have access to the instructional materials and other course content at any time of the day or night. They can work on their assignments at the times that suit them best, within the constraints of the schedule I’ve set.

Also, Edmodo makes it easy for me to tailor the lesson and strategies to the particular student. For example, a student might be more of an auditory learner than one who does best with printed materials. For that student, I can focus more on mp3 and video lessons to get them to learn the song in a manner that works best for her.  If I find a particular lesson isn’t effective for whatever reason; I can easily delete the offending file and upload a new one. 

How does Edmodo support the Pedagogical Content for my instruction ? How specifically do my pedagogical choices make the content in my lessons more usable? In the library of my “Ukulele Online” Edmodo group I will have four main folders (plus a “Misc” folder with items such as an online ukulele tuner, uke reviews, etc):

 “Getting Started” (information about tuning, terminology, parts of the ukulele, etc., plus a one-chord song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”

 “Beginning” (songs with up to four chords: C, F, G7, Am, basic 3/4 and 4/4 time strums)

 “Intermediate” (songs with up to 8 chords, reggae, calypso, muted, and other strums)

 “Advanced” (8+ chords, more complicated strums, jazz chords, scales runs, and more)

 Unfortunately, Edmodo does not support the creation of sub-folders at this time. To organize the materials in each folder by song assignment, I will simply title the video or MP3 lesson, sheet music, and teacher notes starting with the name of the song. This will group them together in alphabetical order and will be an acceptable workaround until the sub-folder issue is resolved.

This will allow me to organize and sequence the lessons in a logical and progressive manner which should be intuitive to the student.  It will also make it easy to start each student at the level that suits them best, depending on their previous knowledge.

I’ll use the calendar to schedule assignments and due dates for each student, along with the live Skype sessions. The students can upload a video of themselves playing the song, or we can evaluate it during a live session.

The gradebook will be used to give them a: “Uke Master”, “Good Progress”, or “Needs Improvement” evaluation for each lesson and level. They will be able to upgrade their rating on any lesson at any time; even after they’ve moved on to another lesson; this way they can apply techniques they learn from later lessons to earlier ones.

The complete script is here and the video presentation is embedded below:

(Sorry this is a little out of sequence with the rest of my posts, somehow I missed this assignment.) Our group ended up having some issues with coordinating the construction of our storyboard, so Allison took the bull by the horns and mostly put it together herself; with slide contributions from Wouter, John, and me. To compensate, we decided to split the rest of the responsibilities between Wouter and myself; with me doing the majority of narration and Wouter doing a masterful job of editing, cropping, sound equalizing, and finally putting it all together in iMovie. (John didn’t play as prominent a part in it all, due to connectivity and scheduling issues; but that was ok. When you’re a team, individuals sometimes just have to go ahead and get things done for the good of the group.) I used Camtasia to record my slides (mostly concerning the website function of Twiddla), narrate the other slides, converted the files to mp4s, emailed/Dropboxed them to Wouther. Our storyboard can be found here; the final product has some slides added to the original sequence.

To all: I would have been more creative in my presentation here, but right now, I’m just trying to focus on getting all my classwork in by the end of next week

I know my weaknesses: For one, I am very inconsistent in planning and can be quite the procrastinator. For certain projects, like the annual Mighty Uke Day festival I started, organize, and run; I am very good at looking at laying out timelines, anticipating potential problems and addressing them, marketing and publicity, lining up volunteers, etc. When it comes to things like lesson plans and teaching, I’m a last-minute guy, often getting up at 5:00 am to put the day’s lessons together. (Thank goodness it’s only a 1/2 day!) I ended up taking this class at the last minute because all of a sudden I found that my teaching certificate was expiring; I could have certainly been more on top of that and planned ahead. I’m fast on my feet and can go with the flow quite well; sometimes that’s a life-saver and sometimes it gets me into trouble.

My career path has taken some interesting turns and I’m sure it will take some more twists in the future. A few years ago I realized that since I have never had a job where I have much of a pension or retirement savings, I would be working most of my life. So, what kind of job would be similar to what I would be doing for fun if I was retired? My main joys in life are traveling the world and playing music. How can that translate into a career? Why not to develop a program to teach American Culture and English through music and travel one month per quarter to various countries?! Already, I have done some of this in China, S. Korea, and Vietnam and hope to use these experiences and contacts to build a reputation and curriculum to take it to the next level. My ex-students, both from the ESL school and MSU, are eager to host me and help me attain some of these goals, which is helpful and much appreciated.

What do I need to get to where I want to go?
Credentials: I have a degree in Elementary and Special Ed and a second renewal on my Provisional Teaching Certificate. At this point in my life, I don’t see myself getting a Master’s in ESL, Ed Tech, or anything else and I won’t meet requirements for a permanent teaching certificate in three years. So, my plans are to get some sort of online TESOL degree within the next six months and continue to develop my references based on a variety of experiences.

Marketing: I need (at least) two different marketing approaches: 1) To sell myself to the various universities and English schools and 2) To raise money to get this journey started.

For #1: I need to make a professional-looking video explaining my approach to teaching English and what the benefits are for the particular institution. I have plenty of video footage, photos, and testimonials; I need to budget time to put it all together in an under-three-minute presentation. I should also get it subtitled in the languages of the countries I am targeting: China, Vietnam, and South Korea.

For #2: I would approach this with a presentation/performance/fundraising approach. Schools are usually willing to pay travel expenses for a 6 – 12 month commitment, but I have too much going on here, personal and professional, to go away for that period of time, so I need to raise money for airfare (at least in the beginning). My thoughts are to create a nice slideshow with video and photos of my experiences, and then sing-along with the audience to songs that I use with my students. It would be part concert, part travelogue and could be very fun and effective. I could hit libraries, community centers, and groups specific to the countries I am targeting. I may also be able to tie this in with the Lansing Regional Sister Cities Commission; I have some contacts there.

I will also need tri-fold brochures, with translation for distribution overseas, and with a donation envelope for the fundraisers.

Technology: As much as I’d like to present myself in person to all the people and institutions I am targeting, that will be next to impossible given the time, money, and geographical restraints. I will need to rely on media such as video and slideshows, as well as Skype or Google Talk to substitute for face-to-face contact. One thing I need to work around is the “Great Firewall of China”. YouTube, Facebook, blog sites, and many other social media networks we take for granted here are blocked there. Some people there have VPNs (virtual private networks) to get around this, but I can’t rely on that. (When I was last in China, I was able to use a VPN and for some reason was able to access my WordPress website/blog; maybe because it’s hosted through my domain name.) I have established a QQ social media account and a Youku video account, both of which are China-based and open. I have had no such issues in Vietnam and South Korea.

Timeline: I need to get started on the marketing and certification points listed here as soon as possible; by the end of this year, for sure. (My plan was to work on the marketing presentations and TESOL class and this summer, but I ended up taking CEP-812 instead.) I am currently working on a trip to Can Tho, Vietnam to take place over the December 2012 holidays and hope to make a stop in China during that time to germinate and nurture relationships. I more than likely will be leaving my Okemos ESL job at the end of this school year, so I need to get this started (and finished) sooner rather than later to give me enough lead time. I do have a tentative invitation to teach in Siberia for a month next summer; an ex-student of mine from MSU wants to work with me on a proposal to teach Creative Thought, American Culture, and English. I need to get her some solid information within the next couple of months.

I know where I’m at and where I want to go and am capable of putting most of this together on my own. The hard part for me will be to buckle down and get it done; there are so many distractions in my life. Just writing all of this down has been a great help in setting my goals and visualizing what I need to do. I will use this Edublog site as well as www.benhassenger.com to document and spread the word about my progress and implementation – stay tuned!

In putting together our Group Leadership Project on “Twiddla in the Classroom” we learned quite a bit about new technologies and working together as a group. Here is the link to the finished product: http://vimeo.com/47439152 and my comments are below.

What tool did your group use to deliver the PD tutorial?  Why? We used iMovie to deliver the finished product, mostly because that part of the product was left up to Wouter and that’s what he decided. Each slide was narrated (I used Camtasia to do mine) emailed (or sent via Dropbox) as an mp4 file to him. He then cropped the slides to make them as consistent as possible and tried to match the volume levels as close as he could.

What did you learn during the development process of the final product? We learned that is can be quite challenging putting together a project with people in multiple locations, on different schedules, and with varying degrees of technology expertise and internet access.  We had some issues with communicating, technology, and scheduling, but we managed to work around complications and play to our individual strengths to end up with a satisfactory final product. It’s not exactly as we would have liked it to be, but an imperfect something is better than a perfect nothing and we gained a lot of knowledge in the process that will help all of us in future projects.

What would you do differently if you had to develop a similar product again?  First, we could have done a better job of delineating roles and responsibilities. We ended up in a time-crunch near the beginning and Allison made a valuable “command decision” and basically wrote the storyboard herself. John had some problems getting online with us during our group meetings (which we probably could have done a better job of scheduling and communicating about), so I ended up narrating a majority of the slides. Wouter took on the heavy responsibility of piecing together and editing the final video; he probably had the most expertise with such things and it was the most expedient way of getting it done. If we had more time, I would have liked to go over some of the slides to better equalize the volume levels. In a couple of them, I used the narration in the embedded movie instead of re-narrating it through Camtasia, and the results were uneven. We were learning as we went along; we may have decided to use other technologies and/or techniques if we knew then what we know now. Understanding comes through experience and we certainly gained a lot of insight during this project.

My “Online Ukulele” Edmodo group has been a fun project to work on and is something I should be able to actually use far into the future. As of this posting, I have one lesson posted in each of the “Getting Started”, “Beginning Lessons”, and “Intermediate Lesson” library folders, and I hope to add at least one lesson every couple of days for the next few months. My A+ International Ukulele Orchestra at the English school I teach at will be starting up in a few weeks and I am planning to use this with the orchestra members, some of whom are returning and many who will be new. I also have the potential of using this site with former members of the orchestra who have moved back to their home countries or to other locations in the U.S., ukulele students and groups who I meet across the state/country/world, as well as my private students here in the Lansing Area.

The concept and setup of the site are going pretty much as planned. I have discovered some of the pros of using Edmodo as a Learning Management System (user friendly interface, easy set up of site, integrated calendar, library, email/text alerts for students and teachers. grading, small group capabilities, posting of links, files, and homework assignments, “Facebook-like” social networking without having to reveal personal information when signing up) and the cons (inability to set up sub-folders in library, lack of direct messaging between students).

The sub-folder issue is a big one for me; I have addressed it with Edmodo Support and they have been very sympathetic. One work-around that was suggested was to use Google Drive to organize the sheet music, notes, and links in a folder for each song. The problem with this is that you cannot post links in a Google Drive folder easily. Also, I don’t like the idea of having to go to navigate away from Edmodo to access the folder. What I did was to organize the various aspects of the lesson by song title within the level folder, for example: in the Beginning Lesson folder, I have the materials for “You Are My Sunshine” listed as: “You Are My Sunshine Notes”, “You Are My Sunshine Sheet Music”, and “You Are My Sunshine Ukulele Mike Video Lesson”. This allows me to list all of the materials alphabetically in the folder and keeps the materials for each song together. Once I have more songs uploaded to each folder, I will add a number to the beginning of each file to organize them in order of difficulty. This is an OK solution, but it will make life much easier when they figure out a way to provide us with sub-folders.

When I originally conceived this project, I thought I would make all the videos myself. Luckily, I remembered the Ukulele Mike lessons that were already available for free online and have incorporated them into my instruction. He is non-intimidating and gives good tips and instruction without sounding like a know-it-all; everyone I’ve talked to likes his approach. Some of the songs I would like to use as part of my program are not available from Ukulele Mike, or he has them in a different key than I would like, so I will have to make video and/or audio lessons for them. Also, many of the songs he has videos for do not come with sheet music, so I have to write them up with lyrics and chord diagrams. It’s not complicated, it just takes time.

I have not really been able to implement the use of my site yet, but when I do I foresee the following challenges: One, although I will not have formal grading, I do want to make sure the student has the ability to properly play the song from one lesson before proceeding to the next, much like I do with my “in-person” students. This evaluation can be done via Skype or by the uploading/linking to of a video or sound file, some technical difficulties may arise during this. Also, some students may not have the same access and familiarity with technology and the internet as others. and will be unable to use the site. Two, I will have to figure out whether I want to set up small groups according to level; this could be good for the students for sharing ideas and tips, but may be difficult to set up and monitor.

I know I’m going to have some bumps along the road, but I’m pretty happy with the way I have things started with my site. I’m hoping this experience with Edmodo will give me some good ideas to incorporate in other uses with the service, such as starting up a site for my ESL teaching.

The concept of learning “anytime, anywhere” with mobile technologies is very intriguing, but it may be hard to find ways to effectively integrate them in my English as a Second Language classroom. I have a wide range of students; ages 18 – 75 with a (usually) descending level of access to and familiarity with computers, smartphones, and other electronics. Some of my students had never used a computer before coming to our school and others don’t have much access to one at home. My older students have very simple cell phones, while my younger ones are more apt to have iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries and are very adept using them.

One of the technologies I explored that could be of use to students with any kind of cell phone is the Poll Everywhere instant polling site. You can set up a poll that students text their responses to (or they can enter them on a computer) and it instantly displays the results in graph and percentage representations. I love the idea of instant results displayed with an LCD projector; I can use it for exercises such as the yes/no and multiple choice questions we go over as a class after our story readings. It would also be a great tool for test preparation and allow me to see the comprehension level of my class as a whole in an instant and visual way. I tried it out with a poll that I posted on my Facebook page; it was easy to set up and the data visualization gave me a real-time, easy-to-understand snapshot of the results.

I also did some reading on using portable video recorders in the classroom. Most smartphones, and some “dumb” ones too, have video recording capabilities; we can use these, along with loaner Flip-type cameras, to make a collaborative video acting out verbs. I could split my class up into groups of four, give them each a camera (or they can use their own) along with a list of four verbs, and have them record their physical demonstrations of them. We could review the verbs before the assignment, or just give them to the students without explanation and they would have to use their phones, translators, or other mobile resources to discover the meanings. We could then combine them using iMovie or other software and have a fun video to share between ourselves and with other classes. Another good use for video recordings would be for mock job or citizenship interviews.

Portable audio recording could be used for collaborative story writing. We could come up with a concept for the story and I could start it with a sentence, spoken into the recorder. Then. we could pass around the recorder from student to student, each adding their own part until we reach the end. I have done this in a written manner, but the audio method would be a lot of fun; especially when we listen to it all at the end. I could then type up a transcript from it and we could do some additional cloze, vocabulary, and listening exercises based on our creation. Voice recorders could also be used as a “ticket out the door” where the students tell what they learned that day and what they still had questions about; it could be uploaded to a class blog or other shared site for everyone to listen, and possibly add to.

Ok, maybe I have found some ways to use mobile learning in my classroom! I’ll have to give these a try once school starts.

P.S. I explored (and registered for) the Classroom 2.0 site and browsed the cellphone, ESL, and music forums which I will have investigate further; it seems like there is a lot of good info there.

Here is the vodcast I made regarding the beginning implementation of my Edmodo website for teaching ukulele lessons online: http://www.screencast.com/t/wqXjGIVPgxh. I focused mostly on the introductory portion of the course while I await a response from Edmodo support about a workaround for the lack of sub-folder capability in the library. If you would like sign up to be a “student” on the site and explore, go to www.edmodo.com, click on “I’m a Student”, and use code zivy32 to become a class member.

UPDATE TO SUBFOLDER ISSUE: I just received the following response from Edmodo: Hi Ben, At this time there is no way to create subfolders.  It is one of our most popular requests that we are investigating for the future. Thanks for the feedback. Best, Kelsey - Edmodo Support Team. I responded that I felt this was a basic and necessary feature for a library; we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, my workaround will be to label the parts of each lesson similar to this:

• Lesson 10 “Yesterday” – video demonstration
• Lesson 10 “Yesterday” – sheet music

This will at least keep it organized in a numerical (and progressively challenging) order within the three main folders.

This was a whole lot of fun; I spent much longer than two hours on this lab, but truly enjoyed it and found some very useful technologies for my teaching!

What tools did you try?
I tried Pixlr: http://pixlr.com/, which is an online photo editor. Having switched over from a PC to a Mac, I don’t have access to the the Microsoft Digital Imaging software I’m familiar with and I haven’t really taken the time to learn iPhoto. I was looking for an intuitive and easy-to-use free program and stumbled upon Pixlr in a Google search. I found it could do most everything I need: cropping, canvas and image resizing, all the image manipulation (brightness, hue, saturation, etc.) adjustments I would normally use, filters, and cool effects. I have Photoshop, but it’s really more problem than it’s worth for most of my and my students’ needs.

I really enjoyed playing around with Exploratree: http://www.exploratree.org.uk/. There many visual “thinking guide” templates available (you can modify them or you can create your own) for problem-solving, analyzation, exploring, and looking at things from different perspectives that really give you a great visual representation of the relationships between various concepts, thoughts. ideas, and conclusions. It makes it easy for the student (or student group) to think about a problem or issue, map her thoughts out, then easily express it to another. I think most of them would be easily scalable for almost any level; they could be effectively used in my beginning ESL class for developing language while problem-solving or exploring issues. For example, their Compare/Contrast visual is a spiffy Venn Diagram that could be used to list adjectives comparing two objects and you could easily see, and convey, what is different and what is the same.

The Data Visualization technology I decided to work with was VoiceThread: http://voicethread.com. My group-mate John Frezza had talked about using it so his students could narrate personal stories and I thought that might be a great way to have my students introduce themselves to the rest of the class at the beginning of the school year. So, I decided to dig into it. It has it’s good points and bad: here is an Exploratree visualization of the pluses and minuses as I see them: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6jSMPvyjIbtTWpnbmxmTi0tc2c/edit.

My project was to make a narrated slide show of my participation in the Old Town Lansing Scrapfest metal sculpture competition. For Scrapfest, teams gather scrap metal from a junk yard and create a work of art in two weeks. I had a collection of photos showing the collection of materials, the construction, and the finished product and I used VoiceThread to show the various steps in creating our sculpture.

My experience using VoiceThread was that the photos were easy to uploaded and re-order (you’re limited to 50 slides in the free version), but the audio quality was an issue. I played around with my built-in mic adjustment and got a decent sound on the computer I was creating it with, but it was a bit distorted when I played it back on another computer; possibly due to a slow internet connection. A good external mic would help with the recording and a strong internet connection. with the playback It’s also a little less intuitive than I would like. For example: it was hard for me to figure out how to delete comments. I initially ended up with a couple of comments on each slide and had to look in the “help” guider (horrors!) to learn how to delete the extra comments. Other aspects seemed a bit clunky as well.

What are you representing in the visualization you created?
The creative process of gathering the materials and building a metal sculpture. In retrospect, I would have liked to have photos that would have represented the thought process of designing our creation; we had some stops and starts as we were figuring out what to build and it would have been nice to show some of that.

What questions or “ah-ha” moments arise when thinking about representation?
As I was thinking about ways to use Voice Thread in my class, I thought it would make a great before/after tool to evaluate language skill and pronunciation progress. The student could make a later VT to compare with their initial creation and see how they felt they had improved (or not) in sentence construction, vocabulary, pronunciation, and other skills.

What is the TP knowledge for the solution?  (i.e., how does the technology you have chosen support the teaching strategies and methods you have chosen?)I have decided to use Edmodo to be my virtual classroom and lesson management system for my project. With Edmodo I can easily:

• Post .pdfs of songs, sample mp3s, instructional videos, and homework assignments.
• Manage my class list, post assignments, communicate with students, accept finished assignments, and provide feedback on their work. The calendar function can be used to schedule assignments and due dates. 

What is the TC knowledge for the solution? (i.e., how specifically does this technology make the content in your problem more intellectually accessible?  Be sure to think about representation.) One of the nice things about Edmodo is that it is easy to let the student learn on his own time. Many of my students will be in other time zones or have a non-traditional student schedule. With Edmodo, they can have access to the instructional materials and other course content at any time of the day or night. They can work on their assignments at the times that suit them best, within the constraints of the schedule I’ve set.

Also, Edmodo makes it easy for me to tailor the lesson and strategies to the particular student. For example, a student might be more of an auditory learner than one who does best with printed materials. For that student, I can focus more on mp3 and video lessons to get them to learn the song in a manner that works best for her.  If I find a particular lesson isn’t effective for whatever reason; I can easily delete the offending file and upload a new one.  

What is the PC knowledge for the solution? (i.e., how specifically do your pedagogical choices make the content in your problem more intellectually accessible?) I have created the Edmodo group “Ukulele Online”

In the library I will have four main folders (plus a “Misc” folder with items such as an online ukulele tuner, uke reviews, etc):

1. “Getting Started” (information about tuning, terminology, parts of the ukulele, etc., plus a one-chord song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”
2. “Beginning” (songs with up to four chords: C, F, G7, Am, basic 3/4 and 4/4 time strums)
3. “Intermediate” (songs with up to 8 chords, reggae, calypso, muted, and other strums)
4. “Advanced” (8+ chords, more complicated strums, jazz chords, scales runs, and more)

Each main folder (except Misc) will have sub-folders for each lesson (song and/or technique) that will be taught. Each lesson folder will have these sub folders:

• Printed material and sheet music
• Audio lessons
• Video lessons

This will allow me to organize and sequence the lessons in a logical and progressive manner which should be intuitive to the student.  It will also make it easy to start students at various levels, depending on their previous knowledge. 

I’ll use the calendar to schedule assignments and due dates for each student, along with the live Skype sessions. The students can upload a video of themselves playing the song, or we can evaluate it during a Skype session. 

The gradebook will be used to give them a: “Uke Master”, “Good Progress”, or “Needs Improvement” evaluation for each lesson and level. (I may change these grade labels after some more thought.) They will be able to upgrade their rating on any lesson at any time; even after they’ve moved on to another lesson; this way they can apply techniques from later lessons to earlier ones. 

I’m sure once I put all of this into action, I may discover organizational strategies that make more sense that what I’ve initially laid out. Edmodo makes it easy to re-organize folders and files, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

I’ve had a lot of fun using video in my various classrooms. In the summer of 2010, I taught a month-long class with a group of adult English as a Second Language students from a variety of different countries. We were learning about prepositions and took photos of the students acting out various prepositions (“Abdul is behind the tree”, etc.). I originally was going to make a slide show with captions, but then a little song came into my head. I wrote a catchy (obnoxious?) chorus and recorded the backing tracks in my home studio with a self-contained multi-track recorder. I then rehearsed the song with the class and we recorded it while listening to the playback of the backing tracks. Then, I had each student write a caption for their photo and captured them speaking their sentences with a handheld recorder. We worked on the sequence of the photos/captions as a class and then I put it all together using Windows MovieMaker; which was a real challenge because it crashed often. (I have a Mac now and will be using iMovie, which I hope will make future projects easier and more sophisticated.) The final result is here: http://blip.tv/ben-hassenger/the-preposition-song-a-english-language-school-summer-2010-4486644.

I found that this project helped cement the concept of prepositions in their heads and I have used the finished video in subsequent classes. I conducted a workshop on this at the MAETC 2011 conference; you are welcome to download my presentation at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/13tf4e7vf8oeceq/Taming%20Technology%203-11%20handout.pdf. Also, please feel free to use the video in your classrooms as you wish.