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from Mr Feist @ DF Scotland Teach
QR codes are all around us, and part of our every day interaction- be it with COVID check-ins, to additional information on foods, to providing survey feedback.
Despite them being so prominent in ‘the real world’ for our learners, in schools they are so often forgotten. So how can we create QR codes and use them effectively in education? Hopefully, this training video will help you to consider this very question:
from Malcolm Wilson @ Digital Learning & Teaching in Falkirk
from Malcolm Wilson @ Digital Learning & Teaching in Falkirk
from Malcolm Wilson @ Digital Learning & Teaching in Falkirk
from Malcolm Wilson @ Digital Learning & Teaching in Falkirk
from Malcolm Wilson @ Digital Learning & Teaching in Falkirk
from Mr Feist @ DF Scotland Teach
Here are four video lessons on turning Reading into Writing, which I have created for the children in my school as part of my CLoL project as well as to give colleagues a lesson for which they do not have to plan/prepare and record. Feel free to use them with your learners or take ideas from them if you like. Each is designed to be a stand alone lesson that can be adapted across different stages, differentiating by outcome/expectation and all are linked to CfE E&O’s with SC being drawn from benchmarks.
Whilst the videos vary in length, I would expect each lesson to take between 60-90 minutes for children to complete as they are asked to pause whilst doing different tasks.
CfE Early Level: Writing Stories with a Story Map
This is an Early Level – pre/new writer – lesson – which uses a ‘Story Map’ or ‘Text Map’ to explore reading and learning texts (see Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing for more on this methodology). In this lesson we take a simple story; learn it and then continue it. Most suitable for advanced Early Years settings, P1 classes, and pre-writers in P2. I wouldn’t recommend for older children regardless of ability as the content will feel very childish for them.
CfE First Level: Stories to Scripts
This is a First Level lesson which uses the same model text as in the previous lesson, however this time learns to up-level it, extend it and then convert it into a script which allows for much greater application of skills. I would consider this mainly for on track/higher achieving P2 / lower ability P3. I wouldn’t recommend for many in P4 as the following lesson, whilst much more advance, should still be accessible as all text is read.
CfE First Level: Script Writing
This is also a First Level lesson, although all of the skills and SC are transferrable to the similarly worded Second Level Outcomes, so would be suitable also for children just starting Second Level that may struggle with some aspects of the following lesson. Aimed broadly at high achieving P3s, on-track/high achieving P4s and P5s who are not yet on track, with consideration for some just on track. The content is not however too childish for P6 & P7 who require additional support, as, whilst the text is a traditional fairy tale, it is in such a way that children turn it into their own story and choose their own ending.
CfE Second Level: Script Writing
This is a second level lesson which is really applicable to all children working across the level as it can be easily differentiated by outcome. It takes two texts and develops them as both stories and scripts with HOTS playing a key role.
from Mr Feist @ DF Scotland Teach
It’s snowing! Love it or hate it, snow is an amazing tool for developing STEM skills, unlocking imagination and practising creativity.
My 13 Snow Day STEM Challenge cards are available as a single PDF download at TPT, or for free as JPG image files below. Check out the very short video of these cards as well:
from Mr Feist @ DF Scotland Teach
I know I am not alone in finding lockdown challenging. We are teachers, and as such having quiet schools with only a handful of children just does not feel normal. We, along with our children, are learning to adapt every day and the stark difference in the quality of learning many children are experiencing in this lockdown is incredible – a true testament to how well colleagues have reflected and adapted to rise up to the challenge.
That being said, it is hard and online learning is still never going to be any substitute for face to face teaching.
Reflections on this, and how best to meet the needs of learners in my target groups; providing them with fun and engaging activities that they can engage in at home has led me back to an activity that I used in my second year of teaching, when I reached out to GDSS for advice on how to support one particular learner; I have linked to their website below as it is a superb resource. They showed me how to use the game ‘Snakes and Ladders’ to support literacy development. Now, there are many ways to do this, and after hunting for the resource that was shared with me I could not find it so I have put together a resource (below) which works really well for me with learners who require support with reading and spelling.
Link to PDF resource: Snakes and ladders game
For this game you need word cards, but children can easily make these at home by copying down their spelling words/common words. There are fantastic word card packs out there, which I will also link to below. Anything can be used as a counter, and this can easily be played as a family game.
I have used it with a variety of learners from P3-7, and have found that they really enjoy it, and, as children can use their own word cards it is automatically differentiated as children can play at their own pace. Indeed, when I have children who are using more advanced words, they will often use the rules for game one while children with cvc words would use the game 1 rules.
However you play it, do, as it is truly a fantastic game. Again, I take no credit for the idea but just put together a quick resource to save you making one!
Have a good week,
Donald
Word cards website that I love to use: ESLFlashcards.com
GDSS website: gdss.glasgow.sch.uk
from @cullaloe | Tech, tales and imagery @ @cullaloe | Tech, tales and imagery
Further to this recent post on capturing, processing and captioning video, my colleague, Dr. Audrey Cameron, advised me to try YouTube for capturing the .srt captions file more quickly. I am thankful to her for this, because although I was aware of YouTube’s rapidly improving automatic captioning (I use it myself when I watch with sound off, for example), I didn’t know that the .srt file can be downloaded. Here’s a revised approach I am using today.
For capturing an old-fashioned lecture-style talk using KeyNote, I use the facility to record a presentation (from the Play menu). The presentation can be exported as a .m4v video file with sound. At the same time as recording the presentation in KeyNote, I also record myself on my Fuji X-T2 camera and capture a high quality audio track separately on a Zoom H-1 recorder. A “pro” tip to is to clap just before you start presenting – it leaves a nice spike in the audio waveforms, making it easy to line up the separate tracks. You can also pretend to be Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock, according to your genre, by saying, “Action!” at the same time.
Import the video and audio tracks into iMovie, align them using the spike from your clap, and check that the audio is the same length as in the video track of the speaker. I found that for longer videos, over 15 minutes, they can be different. This difference produces an echo effect, eventually separating the video from the soundtrack, like a Swedish movie. Adjusting the audio to align properly can easily be done in iMovie using the speed adjustment. Once the clips are aligned, you can turn the audio level of the video clips down to zero, so only the high quality track remains.
The next thing I do is to change the video track of the presenter to “Picture in picture”, so viewers can see me presenting within the slides: I think this is a bit of a substitute for one of the features I miss from live presenting, which is managing the attention of the viewer. I normally do this by blanking the display, which has the effect of moving the eyes in the room from the screen to my face – a powerful way to add contrast to your talk. This “mini me” within the slides can be faded in or out, according to what you want the students to focus on at any point. Other effects are possible, like switching to embedding the presentation within the presenter video.
The finished project can be exported via the Share menu to a .mp4 file.
The video can be uploaded to YouTube now: you’ll need a verified account to upload clips longer than 15 minutes, which means giving Google your phone number. I baulked at this at first, but expedient is the slayer of principle, and in this case, privacy. Make sure you click “Private” when saving the clip. These lectures are not for public consumption.
After a while – maybe 30 minutes, depending on the length of your video – the automatically-generated captions file can be edited using a really nice editing interface in YouTube Studio designed for the purpose. You will need to add punctuation and if you wish, add comments to your own commentary. Once that has been done, the .srt file is ready to download.
Your video can now be used within your local VLE, in my case, Blackboard Learn, by uploading via the media manager, Media Hopper. Once uploaded, you can then add closed captions by uploading the .srt file alongside it. Students then have a choice whether to access captions within the video sequences or not.
I was about to post this, all smug, like, as I uploaded the latest video made with this method, when I hit a “file too large” error when uploading to Media Hopper. The video I had made was just short of 18 minutes and had a file size of 1.2GB. Now, mp4 is an efficient container format so I maybe made too many “best quality” choices in making the video: high definition 1080p for the presenter, same for the KeyNote. Rather than go back and do it all again, I resorted to ffmpeg to make me a reduced bitrate version. I thought halving the bitrate might produce a file half the size.
$ ffmpeg -i mybigvideo.mp4 # find out what the current bitrate is..
...
Duration: 00:17:28.55, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 9978 kb/s
...
$ ffmpeg -i mybigvideo.mp4 -b 4489k mysmallervideo.mp4
This made (after thrashing my 5-year old MacBook Air for about 25 minutes) a file – as hoped for – half the size (673 MB).
To use the video and captions file together within a webpage is straightfroward, except that the captions need to be in a different format. This format is Web Video Text Tracks (VTT), and is easily obtained using ffmpeg:
$ ffmpeg -i srtfile.srt subtitlefile.vtt
The web page needs the following code (adapted to your own file paths, obviously):
<p>
<video width="640" height="360" controls="controls">
<source src="https://www.learn.ed.ac.uk/path-to-video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
<track src="https://www.learn.ed.ac.uk/path-to-vtt-file.vtt" kind="captions" srclang="en" label="English" default>
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>
</p>
Video production for ‘digital first’ teaching strategies needed in response to COVID-19 measures or similar, is a non-trivial task. Including closed captions is an additional time multiplier. Personally, I don’t like asynchronous teaching at all: it misses so many important aspects of good pedagogy, aspects which are easily ignored by administrators of education in the pursuit of apparent economies or easy fixes. I am at ease, however, with an established workflow.
I am thankful to my colleague, Audrey, for her patience and support in helping me get to this solution. We both have a lot of videos to make, and now it will not take me as long as it might have done.