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Student Engagement
Happy New Year! Welcome back. Hopefully you got some rest and rejuvenation over the Christmas break. I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions because they seem to set us up for failure, but they are a great reminder of goal setting. One of my goals for 2013 is to focus "tuesdays" on student engagement. No matter what school I visit, there is a common thread of our teachers working too hard. Let's make sure the students are doing most of the work! Isn't that just good Harry Wong advice? My favorite part of my job is encouraging, equipping and empowering teachers to turn the workload over to the students through centers, online mini-courses, hands-on projects and anything that gets their creative minds flowing while studying within the curriculum guidelines. This "tuesdays" I would like to feature a great Web 2.0 tool that has been around for a few years, but is under-utilized.
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PhotoPeach is a FREE online Web 2.0 tool that converts pictures into videos complete with copyright free music, captions and embedded links for sharing. It reminds me so much of PhotoStory that was such a hit last decade! PhotoStory was limited to Windows users, but gave teachers and students a simple way to convert images into video. It empowered us all to think outside of the box for presentations. PhotoPeach takes it a step further in that it is agnostic and doesn't care what platform you believe in because it's online. I experimented with a slide show today for some of my teachers in Ohio and it was amazingly simple and fun. I highly recommend trying it.
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I would really like to encourage you to try to measure what portion of your school day that you are doing the work and how much of the time the students are doing the work. It's an interesting experiment. For instance, from the time the day starts until the time the day ends, two simple questions can guide your observations: what is the teacher doing and what are the students doing? If the majority of the time, the teacher is explaining, instructing and talking, the students are probably very passive. If the majority of the time, the students are writing, reading, constructing, designing, planning, collaborating, the teacher is probably facilitating. The more we can get the students actively engaged, the more we can increase learning. There is ALWAYS a time for lecture and instruction. Hopefully, it's not the majority of the time. What do you think? Let us know in the comments on my "tuesdays" blog.
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 How do you begin with PhotoPeach? First, create a FREE online account. Next, upload photos from your computer or even FaceBook and/or Picassa. Once your images are uploaded, you have the ability to write captions on your images (or not!), duplicate images, change the order of the slideshow easily and even add copyright free music. There are five tabs of music selection. Don't settle for the first tab or everyone's PhotoPeach video will sound the same. (That happened a lot with PhotoStory.) Did you know that you can even create an instructional video quiz using PhotoPeach? It's very robust for a FREE tool. I would love to challenge you to ask your parents/ PTO/PTA or other support group to sponsor a premium subscription. This would give you a class account where you could put the students to work! They will figure the program out even if you don't know all the bells and whistles. It's an awesome alternative to the same old, same old PowerPoints. If however, you make very good looking PowerPoints with more visuals than words, you could convert those slides to images and import them into PhotoPeach for a totally new look. I've created a PDF "How To" for PhotoPeach. Feel free to share and get the word out about this awesome FREE tool for teachers and students.
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| What is "tuesdays with Karen"?
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"tuesdays with Karen" is a weekly newsletter/blog designed to encourage, equip and empower teachers to be creative with educational technology. Please add your technology comments to my "tuesdays with Karen" blog. |
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