Screenside Chats feature online practitioners as they discuss their experiences, strategies, and tools building and interacting in pedagogically sound online learning environments.
In this Screenside Chat, IU High School English teacher, Courtney Gaylord, explains why students don’t always read lesson instructions and how to change that!
Please watch the video and then join the conversation below!
I fell into this trap so many times during the online “learning” last year. I tried so hard to not put a lot of directions online, especially since even a few directions face-to-face were too much for many students to read. But because we weren’t face-to-face, I felt like my students needed more information to get them started. I even made a few short, goofy, videos (using Snapchat filters) to “hype them up” so they might be more in the mood to do the assignment. I’m not sure how well those worked; nobody ever commented on them. I probably enjoyed them more than the students did. Oh well.
I used EdPuzzle for all videos, except for my little crazy ones, and I never gave “important” lesson instructions in those videos. Students were supposed to write notes from those EdPuzzle videos. I would put in comments about writing down particular pieces of information and I would have the questions scattered throughout. However, one particular student (one of my “good ones”) was seriously struggling with an assignment after watching an EdPuzzle video. It turned out she hadn’t written a single thing down from the videos. She had answered the questions and moved on. Well, no wonder the follow up assignment was so difficult; she had no notes to follow and hadn’t really taken anything in from the video. Even though she had done well on the questions, she hadn’t internalized anything. So, even though it was a very short instruction at a particular point in a video, “Write this in your notes.”, the directions still weren’t being read/internalized/followed.
I am really interested in your “one-page” idea. Would you mind expanding on that, or maybe sharing an example?
Thank you,
–Chris
Hi, Chris! It sounds to me like your use of EdPuzzle to present materials is spot-on. Even though your student didn’t totally follow your directions, the two of you together caught the fact that she wasn’t understanding something and were able to go back and correct it. I’d call that a victory! So often, in online classes, students just keep right on rolling, completing huge chunks of work without having any idea what they are really doing. My theory is that putting less text on every “page” so that students don’t need to scroll and then making sure that they need to DO something at the end of every bit of instruction can, together, reduce the risk that they will “sleep through class”.
Here’s an example of how I do this (not an exemplar, mind you, just an example!): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tiFoRdH8U-hA933dguKDxkGZ4qbQZoOPvTbu7x-zv5w/edit?usp=sharing
Let me know if you have questions or suggestions. It’s a work in progress!
Using modules on Canvas or organizing items for students into topics into a single Doc was so helpful for my students. Many of them as high schoolers just really need chunking of lessons – they need that structure so help with organization since their executive functioning skills are not what mine are as an adult. Since our students were learning synchronously (but also a bit asynchronously in that we had some online meetings but students were also working on their own on their own time), I tried to organize tasks into a calendar I would create on a Doc – step 1 do this, step 2 do this, step 3 do this and try to provide them feedback during the week so if they were struggling with step 1, we could meet on Zoom or they could ask on our feed for some peer help along with some extra resources beyond my Zoom links, Screencastify videos, and etext links. For world language, my students were integrating speaking, reading, writing and listening skills online, so I would post the calendar and all the “stuff” as one assignment on Google Classroom – like the FlipGrid for the week, our EdPuzzle for the week, etc all together in one place. I would assume with students doing the work asynchronously, you would do it more thematically in modules?