​With summer fully upon us, educators are (yet again) deep in the discovery process, thinking about how to improve their classrooms and schools for the fall. I love this part of the school year! (And yes, I absolutely consider it part of the school year. We're just using our teacher brains in a different, still creative way). Anyway, over the last couple of weeks alone, I've been asked on at least five occasions how to decide between one educational tool or another for a school-wide adoption. Jen (@jenroberts1) and I have thought a lot about this process, and have gone back and forth on what makes an app or tool really essential to a classroom. Though my list of considerations is always evolving, here's what I find myself asking when test driving new classroom technology:​

• What's the educational purpose of the tool? Am I drawn to it because it serves a pedagogical purpose or because it's shiny and cool?
• Will it increase what students can do and create? Or how they meaningfully engage in the learning materials?
• Will it improve how students can collaborate with each other? With me?
• Will it streamline how we communicate with each other and how we exchange content (ie: the teacher feedback loop -- create, assign, do, collect, assess, return)?
• Will it improve the quality and speed of feedback to students?
• Will it help create a more authentic learning experience for students by giving them access to a wider audience, the tools of the trade, or real world problems to solve?
• Will it improve what we can do with the precious face-to-face time we have in class? 

​At the end of the day, it has to be about meaningful learning, not cool tools. I'm often reminded of Alan November's most excellent explanation: "Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement." Ain't that the truth. 

--
Meranda, Seth (2011). "Screen of Apps" via Flickr. Attribution, non-commercial.
Neebe, D. & Roberts, J. 2015. Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. Stenhouse.
November, A. 2013. "Why Schools Must Move Beyond 'One-to-One Computing." E-school News.

I have a confession to make. I’m obsessed with screencasting. Ob.sessed. In all honesty, I think this instructional strategy has been the single most transformative element in my teaching in the past five years. Seriously. How bout that for a high bar to set for one measly piece of software?  

Some describe screencasting mostly as something you'd use for giving a how-to of something on your screen. It’s true - this can be really useful to tighten up the workflow in a course, to get everyone on the same virtual page, or to answer a question once that you would otherwise answer individually a bunch of times. Take for example the video below. Last year, my school switched learning management systems, and my students started to freak out about how to turn their work in from the app we ask them to use. So I made a screencast showing them the process. I taught 40 students last year, so the fact that the video has over 120 views suggests a few things to me: either students went back to the video a few times to get clarity, or (more likely from what I’ve heard) they shared the video with other students at our school with the same problem. Not only did I save myself the wasted class time of repeating instructions, but I probably also saved some of my colleagues from the same headache. Sweet!

You’re probably wondering: how on earth was this transformative for your teaching? Honestly, it wasn’t. How-to screencasting is convenient, but at its core, it doesn’t help me to rethink the way I use class time. Where screencasting has been totally revolutionary for me is in the area of flipped instruction (flipped teaching, or blended learning, is an instructional practice in which guided practice is done in class and some portion of instruction is delivered as homework).
​ 
Back in 2011, when I was teaching with 1:1 iPads for the first time, I started experimenting with creating mini-videos to answer some of the repeat questions I was getting in class. Students were asking about how to structure an academic paragraph, and even though I had gone over it a number of times in class, I still seemed to get mediocre writing and perplexed faces each time we wrote another paragraph. I thought maybe a review video would help. I assigned the video as homework, and when class started the next day, a couple of my students asked me (half joking, half serious) why I hadn’t just explained it that way in the first place. Good question! Why hadn’t I? Well, I suppose I always thought that the teacher was supposed to, you know, teach during class. My students gave me license to rethink what constituted school work and what constituted homework. They liked being able to listen to my lessons multiple times when needed, and appreciated being able to pause me, rewind me, slow me down, or make me give my entire lesson all over again. My second year of teaching 1:1 with iPads was when I moved to a fully flipped model for my writing instruction. Below is one of my writing screencasts in case you are interested:

The best thing for me about screencasting is that -- once you get the hang of it -- it is relatively easy to do. Just this past weekend, I was reviewing my students’ essays in progress (because we flip our writing instruction, my students now write during class in shared Google Docs, and I use my preps to give them feedback during the writing process. Thanks, screencasting!). A number of my students posted questions in their docs about a particular practice in analytical essay writing. After seeing the same question a couple of times, I thought they weren’t paying attention. Then, I saw the question fourteen or fifteen times. That was one of those classic “it’s not you, it’s me” teacher moments. I needed to give my students a brief lesson on analysis, but I really needed to give the lesson before our next class. They were editing over the weekend, and they needed the feedback. So, I threw together a screencast. My go-to method is to create a google slide deck and record it. The one embedded below took me around a half hour from start to finish to create, record, and upload. Screencasting is just that flexible.

Ok, fine. I’ll admit it. I freaking love screencasting. And I’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about what makes for a successful screencast. My writing partner, Jen, and I included a chapter in our book about rethinking class time… and a section of how to effectively create your own online content. I’m excerpting a passage below because it outlines my approach to creating screencasts, and may be useful to you, too:

For any videos we create—the most frequent being a screencast recording of a slide deck—we go through the same process and follow similar design rules.

1. Create a concept map.What do you need your students to understand, and how can you explain that concept in a meaningful way? We like to start by determining a story arc, angle, or metaphor to connect students to content.
2. Storyboard.The slides in the slide deck are fabulous for this purpose. We label the slides with key points for starters, and then we go back and fill in with images, words, and details.
3. Write the script. We strongly suggest having a script. We know teachers who can record themselves talking off the cuff and have it sound totally polished. But most of us ramble without a script, and rambling leads to unnecessarily long videos. Generally, any video that tops seven minutes is likely too long for a teenager’s attention span. We use the slide notes section to write what we want to say about each slide in the presentation while we are recording.
4. Design your visuals. Our general rule for slides is that they need to be simple, clear, and contain an anchoring image to ground the story. We like to find images through photosforclass.com, and we use only images that are Creative Commons licensed, in the public domain, or photographs we took ourselves. Try to keep words to a minimum, unless you are analyzing a chunk of text. In that case, consider highlighting specific words and phrases with a contrasting color or font. If you are new to presentation design, we recommend picking up a copy of Presentation Zen (Reynolds 2012) or his follow-up book, Presentation Zen Design (Reynolds 2014). Slide:ology is also a great resource (Duarte 2008).
5. Do a run-through. Talk out your slides at least once before recording to make sure the images and script match, and that the words flow well.
6. Record! Launch your screencasting software, select the area of the slide on your screen, and click the red “record” button. When you are finished recording, check the video to make sure everything looks and sounds okay. Then post it where your students can find it, and link to it on your learning management system.

So, as it turns out, I have a bit of a thing for worked examples. I mean, what’s not to like? Worked examples help students build schema for unfamiliar challenges, give them an expert solution to emulate, and even relieve students of unnecessary extraneous load. Humor me as I geek out for a sec... I invite you to follow me down the rabbit hole into my dissertation nerd lair. Shove some articles aside, pull up a seat, and get comfy. We’re going in!

Cognitive Load, Worked Examples, and Multimedia (oh my!)
 Back before the Multimedia Handbook was born, John Sweller was writing up a storm to explain how worked examples work. At the time that they were writing, the most prevalent pedagogy for math and science was “drill and kill.” Okay, maybe there’s a more neutral term for it, but in essence, students received a mountain of math problems, and were believed to learn by slogging through. Sweller and some of his buddies suggested that studying the steps an expert takes to solve a couple of problems would be a more efficient and more effective way to learn whatever skills were to be learned. Sometimes, those worked examples were computerized, and other times they were printed on paper (as in the case of reverse-fading of handouts).

Fast forward about twenty years, and welcome multimedia learning to the arena. If you take a gander at Renkl’s chapter in the Gospel According to Mayer, you’ll quickly come to learn that effective multimedia worked examples are also targeted at novice learners in the initial phases of “skill acquisition.” Of course, they support learners in adopting a schema for solving usually linear problems with a concrete sequence of solution steps. Multimedia worked examples, when done right, follow each of the “classic multimedia design principles” as well as traditional best practices in teaching and learning. An excellent multimedia worked example will elicit self-explanation from the student, which is another strategy for freeing up the working memory to focus on the important stuff, like building schema.

Did you notice that whole part about solving linear, well defined problems? Not surprisingly, worked examples have most successfully been studied in math and science.

Wait! You’re an English Teacher!
 After reading a chapter chock full of images depicting vectors, probability charts, slope intercept problems, and geometric shapes, it may seem odd for me to conclude that worked examples just might work for reading comprehension instruction! But I actually think I’m onto something here.

 Let’s start with the problem. There’s a transition from elementary and middle school to high school when it comes to “what’s expected” of readers. We move from wanting students to identify key plot elements and identify basic fiction structures to wanting them to read for the subtext -- looking at how literary devices like imagery, motifs, symbols, and archetypes lead to some deeper thematic or political meaning in the text. For some students at the Sophomore level, this just makes sense. Of course there would be some deeper meaning in a novel! But, for other students, this practice is just so hard. Some of this, I think, has to do with cognitive development and moving from being a concrete to an abstract thinker. So modeling what the process looks like (ie: modeling self-explanation) could be really helpful.

 My focus: I’m looking at struggling readers, but more importantly, those readers within the context of a whole class that is of mixed ability. I want to know if a worked example of what an effective reader does would be an effective way to remediate instruction for struggling readers beyond what they would get from instruction in a traditional classroom, (where readers go home at night to figure out the reading on their own, then come back to class to repair meaning and get some clarity).

A Monkey Wrench! 
​ It all sounds so good, right?: see if we can apply worked example research to a technology-rich English Language Arts classroom, and hope that multimedia worked examples of analytical reading will somehow trigger self-explanation and increased comprehension. But what about that pesky “expertise reversal effect”? The monkey wrench comes from an article by Sweller and Renkle’s contemporaries, Plass, Kalyuga, & Leutner (2007). They write that:

I've thought a lot about the effect of prior knowledge on learning, and the importance of level of expertise in determining appropriate scaffolds. At this point, it’s super unclear to me whether this effect will kick in (because some readers are just more adept than others), or if we’re safe from the reversal because reading is super ill defined. I guess I’ll just have experiment and write that little essay to find out.

I’ve always been really interested in the psychological side of multimedia instruction, studying how multimedia lessons can “reduce the learner’s cognitive load, thus freeing the learner to engage in active cognitive processing” (346). The multimedia principles based on social cues stands out to me because it takes on the motivational side of multimedia instruction. What’s fascinating about the principles based on social cues is that they tap a different theoretical framework. Instead of focusing on cognitive load and cognitive processing, they offer a framework for “designing a multimedia message in ways that increase the learner’s motivational commitment.”

Personalization
 If I’m making a video for my students, they’ll respond better to narration that is conversational instead of formal. Voice: If I’m making a video for my students, they’ll respond better to narration that is in a human voice rather than in a weird automated robot voice. By extension, does this mean that they will also respond better to a video with my voice instead of a random stranger’s voice?

Image 
 If I’m making a video for my students, they don’t need to see my sweet little face in the bottom corner of the screen … or anywhere on the screen for that matter.

Embodiment
 If I’m making a video (likely an animation in this case) for my students, my little animated dudes need to be as humanlike as possible.
Principles in PracticeAnecdotally, I see the first three of these principles in practice with my own students. They seem to tune out overly complicated jargon, and often tune out bad narrators. We go rounds on selecting an audiobook narrator at the start of each unit. They have also told me that they prefer videos with me narrating instead of a stranger. I wonder how that fits in with the principles above?
Each of these elements that I see with my students is interesting, and useful for me as I design their learning experiences… but ultimately these elements aren’t about the content of what my students learn, or how I break down what they are learning. These elements are about motivating students to learn and figuring out the cognition stuff later. 

Rich Mayer is clearly missing a chapter in his book, the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. It should be titled “All the Ways that Common Sense Will Lead You Astray,” and would be a practitioner-oriented version of Chapter six on “Ten Common but Questionable Principles.” What follows is a brief outline for the missing chapter, which should give Dr. Mayer plenty of time to write before the third edition comes out.
 
Common Sense Says: Repetition is Useful!
 As most teachers of fifteen-year-olds can attest, if you don’t say it at least five times, consider it forgotten. Given the number of times I have to go over the same things with students in live presentations (directions, expectations, etc), it seems fitting for a multimedia presentation that in order to help make the content really “sink in” I would repeat it a handful of times in slightly different ways. I could give verbal directions with scrolling text, then elaborate on the expectations just to reinforce the ideas. Based on my classroom teaching experience, common sense would seem to suggest that repetition of content is useful. False. According to the Redundancy Principle in Multimedia Learning, “redundant information interferes with... learning” because when the “same information is presented concurrently in multiple forms” or with excessive elaboration, the redundancy of the message may interfere with learning. The safer bet is to “eliminate redundant material” from a presentation.
 
Common Sense Says: More Ways is Better! 
 The second way in which common sense will lead you astray is by making you think that “more ways” is better. I’ve always thought that in order to teach the diverse population of learners in my class, I should reach out to all of them by crafting lessons that are inclusive of all of the different learning needs in my class. If everybody has an entry point to the lesson, it’s a good day! Although effective differentiation is still often seen as the high-water mark among educators for a productive lesson, some ways of scaffolding are apparently much more effective than others. Pulling learners in simultaneously through audio, images, media will likely just trigger the redundancy principle. Let’s focus instead on principles for reducing extraneous processing. The brain learns best when all the extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are ruthlessly pruned away. Instead of offering the same (redundant) message in many different forms, a clever curriculum designer would focus instead on principles like cueing, signaling, and spatial / temporal contiguity to help reinforce the assignment. The need to focus a message also made me think about this week's emphasis on voice editing and maximizing the one really great tool we have (the human voice!) by cutting out all the clutter of images, video, and other visuals. When we narrow in on just listening actively, the message becomes so much more clear.
 
Common Sense Says: Pretty and Interesting is Better Than Plain and Boring! 
​ Let’s not even talk about the presentations I made in my first few years of teaching. I made some really pretty PowerPoints, complete with cool transitions, words that flew in from outer space, images that spun in circles, and of course, me reading all the words on the slide. I poured my attention into making sure my presentations were pretty and aesthetically pleasing. But, according to the coherence principle, I should instead have “eliminate[d] words, pictures, and sounds that are not relevant to the instructional goal.” Less really is more.
 
​For more on my understanding of this week’s principles, check out the video I created for teachers new to creating effective multimedia presentations.