Showing posts with label screencast-o-matic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screencast-o-matic. Show all posts

Friday, September 25, 2015

Addressing Weaknesses and Clarifying Concepts

This school year I am working on addressing common mistakes students have made during previous years at the beginning of a lesson so they can be more successful this year. I am doing this through a short weekly video announcement.


Each video presents 3 tips for the current project. I am getting a good amount of student views on these videos. Aside from increasing the quality of student artwork, these videos also serve as a weekly greeting from me that my students see when they enter the classroom. 

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Video Feedback

After a bit of a rough semester due to lack of attendance in my live sessions, this semester I have decided to re-focus my efforts on rapport and community building in my classroom. I have several new techniques I am trying in order to do this, but I wanted to share one of these today.

This school year, I have been using a screencasting tool called Screencast-o-matic to provide snippet lessons to my students (more about that here). This semester, I have also been using this tool to provide personalized feedback to my students about their artwork. Below is a sample:


 Video feedback allows students to hear what I have to say in my own voice. It also allows me to draw on the screen in a more animated way than I have been able to before-see here. See below.

I have found that about 80-90% of students watch these videos (something I was not able to track before) and students seem to be more willing to make a revision and resubmit than they are with written feedback alone. I am enjoying giving students feedback in this way and hope to see even more improvements in their work throughout this semester as well as improved rapport!

Monday, October 27, 2014

Using Video Snippets in the (Online) Classroom

I have always been a proponent of video in my classroom. They offer great demonstrations of both vocabulary and techniques in a way that visual learners benefit from. Here is a link to some samples the videos I have created that fit into the demonstration category. 


Recently, I have started using videos in a few new ways due to the ability to pull in videos from sources like YouTube and embed them into my classroom pages. I use short, fun videos that I find to spark discussion via reflective questions. I have had a weekly discussion board in the past where I use articles from Scholastic Art to generate discussion, but I have found it is fun to mix up the sources that students are viewing, and it can lead to some great creative thinking! 


This is the first video I used in my discussion board. I looked for videos that were less than 5 minutes long and that could be used to prompt students to think about the big question, "What is art?" I asked them to reflect on the following:
1. Which definition of art from the video do you most agree with?
2. Do you think “bad” art still art? Why or why not?
3. At this moment, what do you think is the most important function of art?
At this point in the course, students have had a little bit of exposure to different styles of art but have mostly focused on drawing techniques. I really enjoyed reading their responses, especially from the third question as it prompted a great range of ideas from personal expression to visual communication and everything in between. 


The other more recent use of videos in the classroom is a variation on recorded live lessons I have used in the past. I have always recorded my synchronous lessons for students to watch at a time which is convenient for them (check out this post for more information on how that works). However, due to a shift in focus this year in my live instruction schedule, I haven't had a high attendance rate for my lessons each week. With this change and the availability of a new tool called Screencast-O-Matic I have begun to make lesson snippets: an overview of lesson content for the week summed up in 5-10 minutes. This week I am out of my office for much of the day due to state testing, so it is especially important that I was able to post a short lesson video into my weekly announcements for students to access this week while they are working.