Doing it Differently

I am a visual learner.  Once a friend jokingly asked me, "Do you see numbers in your head?" when I explained I could mentally visualize math computation.  He clearly wasn't a visual thinker!  I do see numbers, faces, images, whole book pages, locations, maps, directions, places, and words. I am a visual learner and, yes, visual learners see things in their heads. Visual learners can be supported with a variety of technology tools.

When I consider differentiating by learning style, I consider two things . . .

1. My teaching
2. Student learning

• Youtube . . .  Video sharing sites provide teachers with educational video clips that can help visual learners grasp complex concepts. For example, I recently had a group reading a Scholastic Storyworks article on the Hindenburg.  The article is written from the point of view of a survivor.  Prior to reading this article, I shared a short clip of the disaster. This helped them gain a deeper understanding of this historical event.  Educational video content is widely available on the internet. You only want to show part of a video?  No problem!  Try TubeChop . . . this easy site allows you to trim a Youtube clip to include just the segments you want.

•  Glogster  . . . Glogs are interactive, multimedia posters.  Glogster is a great place for a visual learner to share their new learning or the results of research. With a little practice and some peer coaching, all students quickly get the hang of how it works.  An added benefit I've noticed is with kids that have fine motor issues.  They often struggle with neatness when creating posters with markers and crayons.  This is not an issue with a glog.  Glogs print well in color and are easily displayed on bulletin boards or can be embedded on blog or wiki pages.  

• Google Earth . . . Visual learners benefit from mapping out important locations and seeing (street view, images) historical settings, locations in a book, and places they are learning about.  Google Earth can help students visual landforms (i.e. river deltas), view changes on Earth and even visit the moon!  Consider trying a Google Lit Trip with your next read aloud or literature group.  

• Spezify . . . This visual search engine uses images to share search results.  Visual learners may find visual search engines easier when researching information online.  Search Cube is another option for visual search engines.

• GoAnimate  . . . Creating animated videos is a great way for visual learners to create projects.  The video below shows how easy it is to use GoAnimate to create a book review.

Edublogs Challenge #5:  Create a story in 5-10 images.  Easy . . . or is it?  The option I chose was to create a story with 5-10 images and no words.

"Easy" is what I said when I started this challenge.  I quickly located some pictures that would work for this challenge and eagerly uploaded them into Animoto.  I LOVE Animoto and soon I was on automatic pilot busily creating my first video.  It had great captions/title slides that helped me tell my story.



I watched it and remembered that part of the challenge was to try not to use any words.  Okay, no problem. Animoto has an easy remix button, so I removed all the text slides except for the first (introduction) and the last (conclusion).  Surely they were necessary to tell my "visual" story.   Or were they?



I re-read the challenge again and realized that my story had more than 15 slides.  I would need to whittle my 18 slide story down to 10 (5 would be impossible) and AVOID words!  Was this possible?  Yes . . .I had to remove any slide that didn't contribute something important to my story.  However, I wasn't able to give up the first and last text slide as I decided they were important to my story.  My video went from 2:21 to 1:04  . . . I cut it in half! Here's my final draft.



What's the point?  Economy.  Economy is an important aspect of digitial storytelling.  Too often students (and adults) want to include every little detail into their stories.  More is better!  Right?!  Not exactly, I realized there's something to be said for simplifying story telling to just a few elements (5-10 images).  I've never had my students create a "story" with no words.  What a wonderful way to develop visual literacy and reinforce the learning styles of visual learners.  I think that using wordless books like Tuesday by David Wiesner and The Red Book by Barbara Lehman would be great models for stories like this.  Students could use Animoto, Photostory 3 or Movie Maker to create their stories.  

The lesson I learned from this challenge is I don't always need to have so many words in my blog entries.  I often include imagery in my blogs, but I don't use the principle of economy with my words.The longer a blog entry the better!  I realize that more WORDS isn't always better, sometimes more PICTURES can tell the story better.

Edublog's Teacher Blogging Challenge was all about avatars in Challenge #4.  My avatar has always been a photograph of myself.  I explored shrinkpictures first and was impressed with how quickly and easily I could shrink any photograph to avatar size. 

faceyourmanga.com

I joined Edublog's Teacher Blogging Challenge to improve my blogging skills and kick start a new blog ... THIS BLOG! For the first challenge, I decided to write about my life as a blogger.  Me, a blogger . . .

It's hard to believe that two or three years ago I didn't even know what a blog was.  I have Katri O'Neill to thank for my transformation.  She taught a graduate course at St. Michael's College on integrating technology.  Until that summer, I used email to communicate with friends and colleagues, I surfed the net for lesson plans or information, and I shopped and paid my bills online.  That was it. After this class my mind was spinning . . . web 2.0, podcasts, blogging, Photostory!  So many new things to try.

About half way through the school year, I took the plunge and started blogging.  I didn't know a lot about blogging, but I knew it had the potential to be a powerful tool for learning.  We used 21 classes because it was a protected blogging community.  My students loved having their own blog they could customize to show their personality.  That first year we blogged, we tried, we failed, we succeeded and we learned!

A few months after my students started blogging, I revisited the blog I had created over the summer: Looking Glass.  I blogged for a few months without telling anyone.  Kid blogging was one thing, but teacher blogging was risky.  What if I was a terrible writer?  What if no one read my blog?  What if, what if, what if   . . . The truth is that once I started, I couldn't stop!  That year, I became a blogger, not just a teacher offering blogging to her students. 

Soon after, I began following blogs and checking out other classroom blogs.  This gave me more insight and understanding of what it meant to be a blogger.  Now when I introduce blogging to my students, the first thing I tell them is that bloggers blog about things they care about.  It is for this reason that I start this blog.  I am passionate about differentiating with technology.  I care about meeting the needs of my students in the 21st Century.