In getting ready for my final presentation for my Certification of Educational Technology and Information Literacy (CoETaIL@YIS) on December 1 at Yohohama International School in Yokohama, Japan, I made the following video to show how I integrated technology into my classes at a redefinition level. I teach yearbook journalism at Christian Academy in Japan, in a high school in Tokyo, Japan and this year I was faced with two challenges from the very beginning. Only ten students wanted to join my yearbook journalism class this year, and nine of those ten were new. My students came into the classroom with little or no knowledge of how to use Adobe InDesign or Photoshop, as well has no knowledge of how to put together a yearbook. The second issue arose that in order to even get 10 students, I would have two separate class periods of yearbook students due to conflicts in schedules. No one could change their class section to have all of them in the room at the same time. How were we going to collaborate and communicate with two different class sessions?
I decided on two different courses of action. One, I would encourage the students to watch video tutorials on how to use the software from home, one hour per night, for one month, 5 days a week using Lynda.com tutorials. Second, I would set up an Edmodo class and ask my students to join the class, so that the two class sections could share thoughts, links, and visual concepts online in a social media platform.
The following video demonstrates technology integration into a high school yearbook journalism class using a flipped classroom learning strategy and social media to promote collaboration and communication. Learning takes place both inside and outside of the classroom in a blended learning environment that promotes anytime at any place learning.
Well this is my final post for my course work for Coetail@YIS. It has been such a great time of learning for me. I have grown so much in my knowledge about technology in education. I was starting to get depressed thinking about how I could keep my head in the game on always learning when a colleague introduced me to Edudemic.com. After going to that site, I realized that I could easily keep learning by downloading their app on my iPad and then subscribe to the Edudemic Magazine for even more articles than what is on the web which downloads directly to the Newsstand on my ipad. A great wealth of information about technology in education. I highly recommend it to those of you who are finishing Coetail with me and what to keep abreast of new technologies.
When I was at Edudemic.com, I found an article on “100 Best Learning Tools of 2012” in which Edmodo was ranked 22 on the list. I wasn’t surprised that it was high on the list. I started using Edmodo in my two high school classes this year for the first time and I have had a lot of success with it in my yearbook journalism class.
At the beginning of the school year, only few students had signed up for the 5th period yearbook. So to make it possible to create a yearbook this year, the registar let me drop my video production’s class sixth period and added another class session for yearbook. The issue then became, how can two separate class periods work together collaboratively on one yearbook? The issue was also that I had only one experienced returning student and nine new students who needed to be trained in using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop. I usually have about half the class new and half the class with some experience, so the students so I usually pair up students together to help support the newbies with experienced staff members. But with nine out of 10 members being newbies, this really meant it was going to be a slow start in creating the yearbook after training occurred. Problems always come in threes right? Well, our tech guys decided we needed a bigger server and they wanted to move my yearbook files and my digital photography class files to a new volume. However, it has taken them two months to finally do it and I still don’t have digital photography online yet to put photos on. That means even though my staff can start designing layouts, they don’t have access to any of the digital photography students’ photos. I can’t help that problem but the other two problems I tried to solve by using Edmodo and Lynda.com.
I introduced my yearbook students to Edmodo.com so that they could share ideas and visual images with each other using an online social media learning system. It has become a resource bank of ideas for both of the classes to go to for getting them started designing. It has also been a place that I could post assignments, messages, links, and documents that I wanted to share into a digital library right into the Edmodo environment.
I decided to use an iMovie movie trailer to make a commercial about how my yearbook students used Edmodo in my classroom this fall as a part of my presentation of my final project that I will be giving on December 1 at Yokohama International School.
I also signed up my students for a one-month 5 course video tutorials using Lynda.com which allows educators to sign up students for a defined amount of time with limited access to up to 5 courses of the teacher’s choice for only $10 per student per month. This educational option of Lynda.com is called LyndaClassroom. This is what one of my student’s said about LyndaClassroom.
The LyndaClassroom tutorial has helped me a lot in understanding how to use Indesign and Photoshop, and as a beginner, it is really helpful because it summarizes the uses of each software, and how to use it. It is accessible at any time, and any place, so it is much nicer than actually going to school and spending only about 1 hour a day in class. ~Raina
Here is a link to the Google Drive document for my Unit 5 Course Planner based upon Backward by Design for Edmodo and LyndaClassroom.
At the beginning of this school year, I found myself to be in a very awkward position. I didn’t have enough students in video class to keep the class, and not enough students in the yearbook class to produce a yearbook. I convinced the two students who first wanted to be in the video class to join the yearbook class, however that meant there would be two different class periods for yearbook. This produced another dilemma. How could I keep the communication a collaboration going between two different class periods in creating a 176-page yearbook?
I had been reading online about a classroom management system called Edmodo. I decided to create an Edmodo online classroom to promote collaboration and the exchange of ideas between the two groups. Later as my class numbers grew to seven students in the 5th period class and three students in the 6th period class, this Edmodo class helped me to remember what had been discussed in the previous class, so that the students in the next period would be on the same page, so to speak with the other students. Students could then read the reflections from the other students to understand what had been discussed in the other class section.
This became very helpful at the beginning when we were trying to think of a theme for this year’s yearbook. Different students would think of an idea and post it online in Edmodo. Others then had the chance to comment and add their opinions or expand upon them. I also liked the ability to link information in Edmodo. I started to collect the resources that I usually use to teach from and added them to the library in Edmodo for easy access for my students. Then I could just assign some reading and they could get access to the documents that I had posted either as a post or from the library. I started conversations with notes, and soon other students were starting conversations themselves, and replying. I also tried the assignment method in Edmodo, but the only problem with that was I was the only one who could read the responses, and after reading the responses, it made me wish I had posted the question as a post so that everyone could read the responses. In assignments, only the teacher can read the responses. So it is only used for assessment purposes and not for sharing. I also tried the quiz and poll features in Edmodo and found it very easy to use.
I was the first teacher in my school to enroll a class in Edmodo. I told my technology coordinator about it, so when a teacher came to him thinking about using Moodle, he directed the teacher to talk to me about using Edmodo instead. As a home economics teacher, she started using Edmodo and liked how she was getting her students to reflect and share recipes and respond to her in a way that they never did in class. She then talked about it with the art teacher, and I heard that she started an Edmodo class too. Suddenly we had three teachers in our school using Edmodo during the first month of school.
Now that my students have started to work on their actual layouts in Adobe InDesign, we have used Edmodo less and less, but it really became important during the first planning stages of our book. I still have a few students post ideas whenever they find something. It has become a resource online site for my class to post ideas as they find them and to share with their peers. Because what you find on a Friday, will be forgotten on Monday, unless you post it.