Final posting: Teens are not digital media experts by default

During week two of my practice at Grimstad Upper Secondary both of my English groups  started working on a group-based digital presentation project on South Africa. The competence aims I chose to focus on were «communicating through digital media» and  «present and converse on relevant and interdiciplinary topics».

The teaching plan involved choosing between making a film, or making a photostory of roughly three minutes. These presentations would then be uploaded to itslearning and later shown in class. Initially they had two full school sessions to work on the project, but one of my groups missed out on a session. Further, they had to choose between four different assignments to base their film or photostory on. The assignments were:

1. Present the Boer War.
2. Contrast the South Africa of today and the South Africa during the period of apartheid (1948-1989).
3. Present the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
4. Make a timeline of South African history.

The main challenges I faced during this project were:
–  In the English group that missed out on an entire school session, only two out of six presentations were handed in by the end.
-Challenges in working on the project outside of school as students live in different places and have a full schedule with activities after school.
– Apart from assignment two, none of the assignments give room for reflection, and thus effectively stops students from getting a top grade.

Time is always an issue, and for one of my two classes more so than the other as the Friday of week three was a teacher’s planning day and they missed out on their second English session of the week. This turned out to be far more troublesome for my pupils than I had feared. I would have thought that they were extremely competent on social media and group-based work over the internet simply from being young and living in what one could call the internet era. This is not the case, and making such assumptions is grave misjudgement and very naive on my behalf. They have no more experience in working with digital media than anyone else. Their digital competence lies in other areas, especially communication.

My initial plan was for the pupils to handle the distance between them by working through facebook, twitter, skype and e-mails. This worked for the groups that had already done most of the work while under supervision at school, but for the groups that missed out on an entire session, it simply did not. It is hard to measure wether it is from a lack of time, effort or ability, but considering this was the group with the highest average English grade of the two I would have thought they could cope with the task they were given.

Initially I wanted to upload the projects to youtube, but I later dropped the idea. This had many reasons, but the most important one was that my pupils themselves opposed the idea for varying reasons and that I did not feel that forcing my will through on the matter would be doing anyone any good.

The reason I consider my own assignments bar the second poor, is that they are too broad and not spesific enough. Especially the last of the four really only offer a chance to repeat what you have learnt in a timeline. And this showed in the presentations that were handed in; most of the pupils made presentations on Nelson Mandela, and they answered when, where, what, but not why, not what consequences the when, where and what had for South Africa. But the single group that did assignment number two presented a contrasted view of old and new, black and white, apartheid and true democracy, racial hate and reconciliation. And they did this in a very visually moving manner.

Stian

Week two… on communication using digital media.

This week both of my English classes have started working on a group-based digital presentation project on South Africa. The competence aims I have chosen to focus on for this are «communicating through digital media» and  «present and converse on relevant and interdiciplinary topics».

The teaching plan involves choosing to either make a film or a photostory of roughly three minutes length. These films would then be uploaded to itslearning and from there put on youtube from an account administred by the teacher.They have two full school sessions to work on this project in addition to working at home. Further, they had to choose between four different assignments to base their film or photostory on. The assignments are:

1. Present the Boer War.
2. Contrast the South Africa of today and the South Africa during the period of apartheid (1948-1989).
3. Present the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
4. Make a timeline of South African history.

Working in groups of three or four and having access to mobile phones, laptops, library resources and software for movie editing and photostory (windows software) they got going pretty quickly.

The challenges so far include, but are not restricted to:
-Legal/privacy issues with uploading film and pictures by/with pupils on a public website.
-Challenges in working on the project outside of school as students live in different places and have a full schedule with activities after school.
-Groups organized by pupils sometimes cause unwanted work-ethic developing in some of the groups.
– Apart from assignment two, none of the assignments give room for reflection, and thus effectively stops students from getting a top grade.

The legal/privacy issue I have planned to handle by setting up the youtube-account to restrict viewing access and comments entirely for anyone but the pupils themselves. But there is also a chance I will drop youtube from this project entirely after reviewing the films. If that is the case then I will make a point out of explaining to them how their movies could have been a great educational resource for other students, and how youtube is not just a website to watch silly cats or music videos. Another alternative would be censoring videos that gave away pupil identities.

Time is always an issue, and for one of my two classes more so than the other as this Friday is a teacher’s planning day and they miss out on their second English session of the week. As for handling the distance between pupils when working from home I have suggested facebook, twitter, skype and e-mails to communicate and send media files back and forth for editing. This seems largely to have helped, and one girl even told me she had finally got permission to make a facebook account from her parents if she used it for school-work.

I should have picked groups myself. While I can see clearly now that they have started working that many groups are doing very well, there are a few that fall a bit behind. To circumvent this problem I have spent a bit more time with these groups in order to guide them onto the right track and to speed up their work.

Because I realized the assignments should have been better and allowing more from the students, I will not be grading them, but giving comments and feedback to each group through itslearning.

Next week we’ll see what we end up with and I hope I get to add a great success to this blog.

Stian