Blog

It feels good to be running the final rendering of the video, and also to be wrapping up the final project of Course Five of COETAIL.

Without a doubt, it’s been a challenging project. I began wanting to look at the issue of Tech Literacy across the whole middle school, but Kim wisely steered me towards a more specific project: our Grade 8 Digital Citizenship course in Humanities. I had taught some lessons related to this in the past, I was familiar with the course material; how hard could it be?

I quickly realized the difference between knowing and preparing material to teach yourself, and helping coach a team of three teachers with their own unique strengths and styles. At some points, I felt like I almost needed to develop three different units for each of the teachers so that they could all play to their strengths.

We met, either one-on-one or in groups of three or four, as often as we could. I also used emails, Google Docs, comments, Google+. I tweeted out questions and asked for advice on COETAIL’s Google+ Community, and did a Hangout with a fellow COETAILer to discuss our projects.

I had some ideas for a final summative task, but the teachers were looking at some of the Digital Citizenship curriculum at Yokohama International School and decided that they wanted to borrow their idea: the G08 students would focus on a specific topic and then develop a lesson to teach that topic to G06 students.

My work really fell into three different parts:

• Helping the teachers identify and wrestle with some of the issues involved with Digital Citizenship
• Developing preliminary lessons that would cover the 4 areas of Digital Citizenship that they identified:
  • Online Presence and Persona
  • Online Safety and Privacy
  • Community Engagement
  • Ethics and Responsibility
• Take the Summative Task and push it a bit further so that it reaches the level of Redefinition

As the unit wound down, I did an interview with Adam and Lauren so that I could both get feedback from them and also bring some of their words into my final video project. I tried to find time to do an interview with Sandra as well, but we ran into scheduling issues and then suddenly we were out of time.

For the final video, I used iMovie more or less for the first time. I have done some little projects with it before, but nothing as complex as this. I found it very helpful to put my titles and photos into a Google Slide presentation and then download each slide as a JPEG to be imported into iMovie. That saved me the trouble of resizing and adjusting everything within iMovie itself.

So now, without further ado, the movie itself: