Thanks!
Srta. Bush
My lesson plan for the actual use of the technology, which was Jing, included the students signing into Jing, testing their microphones, and learning how to use Jing. Once I gave the tutorial of how to use Jing, the students created a short video about anything for 30 seconds to try it out and see how it works. After that they were free to use Jing to record their story when they were ready. To prepare them for reading their stories I created a PowerPoint in Kiosk mode where I recorded my voice in Audacity and hyperlinked each recording to a button of the vocabulary word. Once they practiced the correct pronunciation they would record themselves using Jing and listen to the result. If any of their pronunciation was off then they would return to the PowerPoint for additional support and rerecord in Jing until they were satisfied with the result. The only change from the original draft is that I did have all of the students create a story rather than using a video online.
Unfortunately, the implementation did not go as well as I had hoped. I did this lesson with my 6th grade Spanish class and every aspect of completing this project took way longer than anticipated. There was a lot of preparation that needed to happen for the actual technology lesson to happen. All week long the students created stories in Spanish with 9 different scenes, then made a storyboard, then created a PowerPoint presentation of their story where each slide represented a different scene. The intention was that the students would complete this part of it within 3 days, but it pushed into 4 and left little time to complete the technology piece before this assignment was due.
I ran into many problems where the technology was concerned. A few students didn’t have emails so I had to sign into Jing for them. My pronunciation PowerPoint worked beautifully, but the technology at school wouldn’t allow me to place it in a shared folder so that all of them had access to it. Therefore not a single student was actually able to practice their pronunciation, which really was the point of the entire lesson. By the end of the hour on Friday only about a fourth of the students had successfully created a Jing video of their story and had been able to upload it to screencast.com, and we started this entire project on Monday.
The learning goals included having the students see how they sound when they speak Spanish and analyzing their pronunciation. However, what I think was actually learned focused more on the preparation lessons of writing the story than on the actual pronunciation since they had nothing to practice from and the actual lesson was so rushed at the end. Next time I would spread out the preparation over a longer period and do it in small pieces so that there was more of a focus on the pronunciation and recording than the story. This would also make it more obvious that the purpose was to supplement the existing curriculum rather than seem like a huge weeklong ordeal.
In order for this lesson to be successful the teacher and the learners need to know how Jing works. Jing needs to be downloaded on the computers that the class will use. The teacher needs to be able to explain how to use Jing and to teach the students how to use it. The learners need to know enough words in Spanish to tell a story and they need access to a microphone. I was lucky enough to have already had Jing installed on the computers because of my Technology class, but otherwise this might be more of a hassle than it’s worth. The advantage is that students are able to wear headphones and record their own voice without other students listening. This dialed down the shyness of speaking Spanish for most students. Also each student worked at their own pace. This was the key to taking into account the important differences among learners, along with each student being able to work at their own level of Spanish since they wrote their own scripts.
I saw elements of behaviorism as the students recorded their videos multiple times. I heard comments like “I sound like a robot” and “I sound so funny.” Many of the students were surprised by the technology and how the recording made them sound so they continued to record until they liked what they heard, which was their ultimate reward. Since my pronunciation PowerPoint didn’t work, I didn’t see the constructivism that I hoped to see with the students mimicking my pronunciation. From these responses you can kind of see the reaction that the students had to the technology. They had fun with it but were still self-conscious about hearing themselves. I definitely think the headphones made a huge difference, since no one else could hear what they sounded like.
This project ended up being more trouble than it was worth, especially with all of the problems that arose. The students didn’t truly complete the essential part of the project, which was working on pronunciation. I think that with more planning and spreading out the pieces this could be a beneficial project, though I think I would focus more on the pronunciation PowerPoint and them practicing with Audacity than using Jing. I think that the concept behind this is still very good, it just needs some tweaking to really hit the main learning target.
