5 Reasons Why I Love The Subtext App
Using TED Talks to Teach Digital Literacy Skills
“Friends don’t let friends use Word Art.”
“If you want them to read, Verdana is the font you need.”
As a technology leader I don’t get to spend much time in classrooms anymore, but I watch from afar as teachers new to technology integration allow students to make presentations with text-heavy slides, colors combinations that are painful to read and watch, and that show obvious signs of student plagiarism. These teachers were never taught digital literacy skills, so how could they teach their students the most effective ways to research and present? Something had to be done! Since teachers struggle for time, I decided to start the process with the students. To achieve my goal, I took over a small block of library and computer time – about 30 minutes a week – and I designed a project based unit to teach digital literacy – using TED Talks.
Effective Presentations - To teach about TED I used the examples of three TED talks given by kids
Adora Svitak: What Adults Can Learn from Kids
Thomas Suarez: A 12-year-old App Developer
TEDxNextGenerationAsheville – Birke Baehr – “What’s Wrong With Our Food System”
I explained to the kids we needed to prepare an “Idea Worth Spreading.” Due to lack of time, I had to give students a focus – though in a perfect world I would allow them to come up with their own question and idea worth spreading.
To teach presentation skills: I focused on teaching kids about simplicity and consistency in presentation design. Getting away from text heavy presentations and using visual representations instead. I taught about font selection, color selection and rethinking everything they knew about animations and transitions. I talked to them about what I like to call the “microsoft effect” – which states that just because a company puts it there, does not mean you need to use it.
Our mottos:
“Friends don’t let friends use Word Art.”
“If you want them to read, Verdana is the font you need.”
Research – We learned about the power of keyword searches, which could be made more effective by using modifiers like quotes, plus and minus signs. We learned about the power of reading a domain name.
Website Validity – We used the standard in hoax websites: The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and followed it up with a lesson about Alan November’s idea of trying to figure out if the website information is REAL – from his book Web Literacy for Educators
Read the URL
Examine the Content
Ask about the Author
Look at the Links
Curating Research – using Evernote, students learned how to effectively curate their research using tags and notebooks in the app. They also learned how to index items to be more easily found again at a later date.
Note-taking: Everything was put into our own words using Notability. No cut and pasting was allowed – EVER. I gave them a research guide, in the form of a pdf that they filled in using Notability.
Collaboration: Students worked collaboratively on their final speeches using Google Docs – and to help them the Speech as divided into three parts they worked on simultaneously in the document.
Image selection – students learned how to pick images based on copyright, size and and the reasons why thumbnails placed into a presentation are blurry. I also talked to them about selecting the best picture to SHOW what they are saying and that “busy” pictures are not the best to choose.
Social Media – Various age-appropriate sites were used to publicize their presentations. They sent out tweets on twitter and with my authorization first, used Google plus to entice other to view their presentation. We talked about the power of 140 characters, and building your PLN.
Finally, we talked about building your personal web presence and sharing our knowledge with the world – and the ways to do that effectively.
All these steps will culminate in a three minute TED talk delivered by 10 year olds in front of a parent populated audience.
