For this week's class, Barb and I decided to work together on using Voice Thread not to create a digital story but to use that same tool to bring an important assessment rubric to life for our HS ESL students at ISB. The High School ESL Oral Discussion Rubric was collaboratively created by the ISB HS ESL team two years ago and is used in all our High School ESL classes, grades 9-12 (albeit in modified form to address the developmental gains and curricular emphases at different grade levels), to assess student performance in group discussions in the ESL classes. Used regularly across grade-level units focused on development of students' oral language for both graded group discussions and Socratic seminars, both ESL and mainstream teachers have (since its inception) noted an overall improvement in oral participation by ESL students in the mainstream classes. For many students, the unit language and skills developed in the ESL classroom appeared to transfer to their mainstream classes. However, for some students the language and skills showed less initial development in the ESL classrooms as well as less transfer to the mainstream classroom. For these students the unit language and skills (as assessed by the rubric) seemed less salient, meaningful, and authentic for students. Given that the skills and language assessed on the rubric are skills and language that all students need to demonstrate in all their high school classes where oral participation is expected and assessed, it was hoped that creating a visual representation of these key skills and language—a video of images and text depicting the key elements (criteria) of the High School ESL Oral Discussion Rubric—would help more students recall and use the skills and language of effective oral participants in their ESL and mainstream classes at ISB.
In creating our Voice Thread video for the HS ESL Oral Discussion Rubric, Barb and I first divided up the task of finding photos to depict the criteria assessed on the rubric. After some discussion, we divided up the language of the rubric criteria into eighteen clearly defined and mostly distinct headers. We had initially thought to have both a 'literal' and 'figurative' image for each criteria, but deciding that simplicity would help make the video and its images more memorable we chose to find and use one photograph with a figurative connection to each criteria. Searching Creative Commons for images that would clearly connect to each criterion in a memorable and meaningful way for our High School ESL students and that were available to us to use as educators indeed proved to be the most challenging part of the whole project. Once we shared images and added them to Voice Thread (which was easy as promised), we then discussed the audio component of the video and decided on using audio to make explicit the connection between the image and the rubric criteria rather than explaining the literal meaning of the criteria as again we wanted to focus on making the images salient and memorable for the students and were confident the students understood the literal meaning of the criteria. We are now working on finishing the audio component of our Voice Thread project and look forward to sharing our finished 'visualized' rubric with both our students and the other HS ESL teachers. The final Voice Thread project will be published on this blog around the first week of November.
To reflect on this project seems premature as it is still in the draft stages; however, learning has no beginning and end points. So in reflecting on my learning to date in terms of the planning, design and delivery of our project using Voice Thread to visualize the HS ESL Discussion Rubric, I would say we would have benefitted from spending more time on the planning stage, specifically:
1. I would initially spend more time discussing and agreeing upon the purpose and vision of the end product held by both group members. Jumping into the task seems efficient in terms of time but actually ends up costing more time if there is no clear and commonly held vision for the project.
2. I would discuss all the images to be sought to depict each criterion as a group; both because they are such a major and integral part of the project, and also because they should show a thematic cohesiveness to be most effective.
3. I would also initially discuss the oral component to ensure the connection between the image and rubric criterion can be succinctly stated.
If we had spent more time on these planning components of the project, I feel our time would have been used more efficiently used and that the final product would have been better and more cohesive as our purpose and vision would have been clearer from the start. Our purpose and vision will still be realized but with some roundabouts and backtracks that could have been avoided with better initial planning and discussion.
Digital storytelling (using Voice thread, Photostory, or iMovie) has also been used in the ESL classrooms at ISB to help students tell their own personal stories in the form of personal recounts (grade 9 EAP class), and could easily be used with many other text types taught in the ESL classes at ISB to enhance student communication as they share and recite their own and others' poetry (Summer School English Language Institute), write and share news stories (grade 10 EAP), biographies (grade 10), and explanation reports (grade 10). Digital storytelling and digital storytelling tools are clearly a useful addition to the tool kit of any language teacher, whether used in a more traditional way to communicate a given text type in a multimedia format or in a more nontraditional way as described to communicate a common assessment tool (again in a multimedia format).
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