Michie commented and asked several great questions that I thought I'd address in a post rather than hide in a comment. :-)
I'm very curious how you plan to use this activity to make it year long - sounds like a project we could do too, if you don't mind!
I'm still working on ideas for this. Right now I'm saving our daily graphs and I think we'll go back periodically and compare data between videos from different days or between winning videos. My kids are really liking this and it's a great way, like Kate suggested, to expose them to different kinds of music and other concepts (since I'm not limiting them strictly to music videos, although that will be a heavy emphasis).
Today I had my class (which is currently down to one) watch one of the videos from Kate's blog, then the Thanksgiving and Native American one from your blog. My classroom (mostly staff) voted that we liked the Thanksgiving one best.
I remember the days of only one or two students. Wow! Not sure how I kept from going crazy. I'll take my big gang anytime. Glad you all liked the Thanksgiving video as much as we did.
How are your kids voting? I'm not sure my students understand "favorite." I showed each video and asked the one student today, "did you like this?" and tried to get a yes/no answer. The only one I got a definite yes from was the Thanksgiving one, so I counted that one as her "vote." This voting thing is a new concept for us, but I think it could be fun.
We've done voting a couple of different ways. Since this is kind of new for us we are currently using the simpler method of answering yes or no after each video. All of my kids, with the exception of one, are pros at yes/no questions. My one who I'm not so sure about his understanding of yes/no concepts still votes and we also evaluate his responses to the video (orients to it, seems engaged, moves to be right next to the projection, totally ignores it, etc.). I quickly make communication pix for the the videos as part of my Morning Meeting Prep and print off enough copies for all 8 of us (kids and adults), which I cut out while we watch Kate's video/s. Then we show the kids the picture of the video while it plays. If they say they like it then we put it on our graph (picto graph made with the symbols, taped to a blank piece of paper in vertical columns). We count the number of "yes" votes after each one (rote counting, 1:1 correspondence). Then at the end we look at the graph and figure out which video got the most votes, which got the least, and if any tied. If we end up with a tie for first place, the kids choose between those two symbols and the top vote getter wins.
The other method we tried, which did not work as well for my kids for various reasons, was watching all three videos first then having them select their favorite from the three symbols/choices. This was too hard for us right now as the kids' memories couldn't retain all three videos long enough and they didn't really understand what I was asking. As they get the hang of this voting thing and figure out that the concept of "favorite" or "like better" means you can't like them ALL, we will start having them vote between the current video and the previous video (two choices).
I do think we will end up doing some sort of Video of the Week and Video of the Month, maybe on Fridays? That would give us three videos to vote for "top spot of the week" since we don't do VOD on Thursdays. And if/when we get comments about other's votes about our top videos, we'll start doing more counting and simple addition by adding those votes to ours and comparing that information.
Sorry for such a lengthy post - now I'm thinking I need one of these video of the day sites too! :)
It would be so cool to have an idea like this spread between several classrooms. I've wanted to do a pen pal type project for years but could never make it work. This woud be such a neat substitute for that and sooo easy to do. I do our entries right there with the kids. It takes me approx. 10 min. the day before to choose videos and save to my favorites (I often go video hunting for a whole unit, season, topic, or music genre at one time and save everything I like to folders in my favorites in which case I spend a couple minutes in the morning selecting three videos from that collection). It takes me about 5 minutes to make the symbols in the morning when I'm prepping my Morning Meeting boards with the daily changes (do that while the kids eat breakfast) and we spend approx. 15 minutes or so watching videos and voting (since we're sneaking in some math--GASP! Don't tell the kids!--I think it's a great use of our time) and maybe 5 minutes to post our blog entry. I need to adapt the actual writing process to give the kids more control of that part of the project too (oooh! more academics!). I run the videos out of YouTube in tabs on my browser for voting which makes it easy to quickly copy and paste the embed code into the blog. It would take a bit longer if I had to convert the videos at home ahead of time but fortunately so far YouTube is open to us, at least on "teacher" computers.
Best of all, the kids LOVE it. I've not ever exposed them to the world of online social networking and really didn't think they'd understand (they don't do it at home either). But being teenagers, they must have innate knowledge of this stuff because they've taken right to it. I'm thinking next up will be video Skyping another class somewhere. That would be WAAAY COOL to do. Cross-country classroom cooperative video day anyone?
Counting Crows - Omaha
14 years ago
Thank you for all of your answers. Your blog(s) and posts have really been helping me out this year. I've had some hard times moving my program from elementary school to middle school, and I really appreciate having someone (even someone far away!) to collaborate with.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for explaining how you are doing your voting - I think the yes/no after each video will need to be the way to go. Three videos and then, "favorite" was too much for my student. I don't think she knew what I was asking her.
I normally have four students - but for various reasons I'm down to one for the moment. However, this is one student who loves watching videos, and that is a preferred activity when she's in the stander, so I'm thinking it might be good use of stander time.
I actually was thinking it'd be great to have "penpals" too. If you ever think you'd like to try that - even if it is class to class emails, let me know. We have to do writing this year too, and that might be a fun project.