Week 5: Collaboration & Educational Research

Week 5: Collaboration & Educational Research

My Focus:

As I started to read through different educational research sites, there are 2 things that jumped out at me throughout the different research sites and those were coding and the use of videos. I decided I would focus this blog on the use of video research that I found while looking though the Project Tomorrow's Speak Up. I noticed they were both discussing video trends and thus decided to take a deeper look into their findings with this blog.

Videos in Education Research:

First of all, I was reading through Project Tomorrow's Speak Up document called, "From Print to Pixel: The role of videos, games, animations and simulations within K-12 education" and I found a list of the key findings and 3 infographics that were pretty much displaying information about the top 10 things everyone should know about technology based on the 2015 findings, but each one had a different view with one focusing on the students, another on the teachers and lastly on the parents. I found interesting statistics that were related to using video in the key findings list and in each infographic that refers to using videos in education.

(To view the full article with list of key findings/infographics, please click on this link)

Here are the statistics (I took screenshots of the important ones from the infographics):

• The top subject areas in which the students in grades 6-12 watch videos to support homework, research projects or studying are science (66 percent), math (59 percent), social studies/history (53 percent) and English/language arts (45 percent).   (2015 Speak Up National Key Findings List) 

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  Ten Things Everyone Should Know about K-12 Student’s Digital Learning

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Ten Things Everyone Should Know about K-12 Student’s Digital Learning

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  Looking inside today’s digital classroom: Teachers Speak Up about technology use

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  Looking inside today’s digital classroom: Teachers Speak Up about technology use

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  Parents of School-Aged Children Speak UP about Technology Use

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  Parents of School-Aged Children Speak UP about Technology Use

Source for all of the above findings:

http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/from-print-to-pixel.html

 

 My Thoughts: 

First of all, the statistics on using videos in education relate to me because I just recently started to post YouTube videos that I find relevant to the topics we are learning in class on Google Classroom through a "unit document". Basically, I start a Google Doc that for each new unit and I put the section numbers and topics along with a video(s) that helps demonstrate what we learned, goes over examples or how to put things in to the calculator. Here is a link to my unit 6 videos that I posted for my students that went over examples and how to use the calculator to find the various characteristics of quadratics: Helpful Videos for Unit 6. Thus, I agree and would be part of the 68% of teachers who stated that they are using more videos in the classroom. I do want to try and create my own videos for students to references in the future and make my classroom more blended/flipped to help differentiate my class for student who need reteaching or are absent from class and would benefit from videos that help them learn the material. Thus, right now I would agree that I not part of the 27% of teachers who said they would likely create their own videos, but I hope to change that mentality going forward. I had a teacher in college who use to screen recorded the notes on his tablet and wore a mic to record his voice/our questions throughout the lesson. It was great to reference back to or just in case you are absent to watch the entire lesson another day. I would love to do something similar to this for my students but I need to get my hands on the technology (tablet, mic) to do it!

Secondly, I wanted to discuss what students were saying in the survey and how it relates to me. I was not surprised to here that middle school students/student in general are watching YouTube/teacher-created video to help them on coursework. I feel as though this was something I did when I was in college to help me learn the material as well. Once I started posting video in my classes, a few of my students told me it was very helpful and they use them, but majority did not refer to them and instead would look at notes or ask friends. I think next year I will start using videos (maybe even make videos) and I will continue to survey my students throughout the year about the video usefulness to get a more accurate answer on how many of my own students use it. I would be curious to see know how many of them look for video themselves, use the videos I post and also if they would rather watch a video verse come in an see me, ask their peers or refer to class notes/examples. I definitely want to put out some type of survey that would give me a better idea of what my students prefer and help me differentiate my class accordingly. I also thought it was interesting that the class students look up video/use videos the most for is science (then math, history and English is last). I am not really surprised by this since science involves a lot of demonstrations/labs that would be easy to watch on video and math has a lot of examples that can be worked out through videos. Also, it makes sense that English is last because usually they are reading books and writing papers so there is only so much a video can help you with. I would have thought that math would have been the highest but maybe I am biased!

Lastly, I want to discuss the parent statistics about videos in education. This is where I was the most surprised since most adults went through an education where you either didn't have or didn't use technology in the classroom. This means they are use to the traditional classroom and thus they would be comfortable with how that is done and think cell phones/lap tops are distractions that shouldn't be used, however, most parents, even thought they are concerned about it being a distraction/issue with privacy concerns of technology, still think it is a greater benefit in the classroom. In this report, the statistics for parents thoughts on videos in education was that 64% think videos help with different learning styles and 59% of parents think they are useful to allow students to re-watch content to help them learn.  As a teacher, I 100% agree with this and it make sense that their are parents who support the use of videos, but it's just interesting since they didn't have this same opportunities in school. The most interesting statistic was the last one that parent think that the ideal school involves internet, laptops, digital textbook, apps for learning and education videos/games. It seems that parents know what is interesting to their students and they probably look back at their education and say I think school would have been better if we had the technology of today. I am curious if these parent who said this is a perfect school know the data about 1:1 devices/technology in education or if they are just like yeah technology is important and should be used more. I am also curious on what the parent of my school demographics would say since they are low social-economical status and just technology/internet is not always easily accessable. Just some thoughts!