#UWinDig

I am responding to the Hybrid pedagogy article; Digital ghosts in the modern classroom by Ashley Hinck. This article describes the tendency of students to use online templates for assignments and even for social media. She describes the templates as limiting, a drag and drop platform leaving no room for creativeness and invention. These templates are easier to use but students do not learn anything from them. The author challenges her students to use different platforms that allow for them to invent their own theme as well as look at different social media sites with a critical eye. Wonder why they limit words, why the profile picture is in that location and how they incorporate task bars in their websites. This will give the students a better understanding of the technological age in which they live. I found this article to be surprisingly interesting. After the author made these points I was able to see that students fall back on these templates out of comfort level, because the work is already done for them and because they are afraid to step outside of the box. A template simply gives them someone’s ideas so that they don’t have to use their brain to solve a problem. These students see a problem and run away instead of confronting it. Ashley mentions that they are afraid of trial and error they feel as though the answer should just be right there in front of them. This is a very narrow mindset that is often enforced on students; that there is only one right answer and it is the end of the world to get the wrong one. I have outlined many of the problems with templates and solutions that the author has suggested integrated with my own ideas as well as why I believe the students choose to use templates in a mind map below: hope you enjoy!

click link to for better view —> Templates are destroying creativity

My colleagues and I are very fortunate to be the first generation that had technology integrated into our classroom. However, there is a time and place for everything. Online courses have not been around for too long, and we can see that they are not as productive as we would hope for. However online courses might be able to become friendlier. On the podcast, they discussed several alternatives to engage students more in an online setting.

The Piktochart itself was so simple to make. I can see myself using this in my professional career in both math and physics. The first use that comes to mind is online posters for the students to look at before the subject is taught. For example, for Classical Mechanics (a chapter in Physics that studies motion), perhaps have animations of cars driving faster than other cars, or different weights falling. I could also incorporate some text in the form of bullet points, next to the images to stimulate their thinking. It would be great for my students to look at for 5 minutes the night before the lesson. Just to give them some basic ideas on what we’ll be talking about. I strongly recommend to all of my colleagues to try this application because it is super user-friendly. Just make sure to use Google Chrome since Internet Explorer is not compatible with the website.

In this multimedia reflection on the article Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom by Ashley Hinck, I chose to display my thoughts in the form of a sketchnote.  Through sketchnote, I was able to show the two different paths that we can teach and demonstrate to students. There is the shortcut route, which is the road that most students take by using templates, drag and drop methods, standardized steps and a guaranteed working final product. Although this route is not preferred due to limiting the creativity of the student, I placed a yellow light at the beginning of the road opposed to a red light to inform students to proceed with caution. This path is not necessarily the wrong path but it is a path that does not show the students full potential. To get the students to show their full potential without the digital ghost in the classroom we need educators to lead students to take risks and encourage them to be creators from a blank canvas.  By taking the longer path that may provide a challenge to the students will lead them to a one of a kind masterpiece that is not influenced by the digital ghost or an easy to fill in template. When doing my sketch note, Choose the Creative Path, I felt that I began with a blank canvas eliminating the digital ghost and templates from my reflection. Starting off with a blank canvas definitely had its challenges, mainly just the challenge of starting but it allowed me to use my full creative potential.

I really enjoyed reading Ashley Hinck’s article “Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom” and it taught me a lot about the affordances of adding a technological aspect to your teaching style. Hinck explains how shortcut and template platforms are easy for students to use, however they remove the need for creativity, openness and trial and error, turning students into robots who create products simply to impress their teacher. Even after you remove these platforms, their “ghost” remains, as students have now acquired a “one correct answer” type of thinking and have trouble creating a finished product without a template or exact instructions. I have used platforms like these as a student and now I understand that although they were user friendly, they did not allow me to be fully creative and to have control over my final product. I feel that their “ghost” did linger in the classroom because throughout grade school and high school I remember being intimidated when I was not provided with detailed instructions for an assignment. I especially realized this while working on my artifact, as at first I was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of creative control allowed for this assignment. Although Powtoon was a platform with many predetermined preferences, I feel I was still able to implement many of my own ideas, just in a more organized way. This article changed the way I view the use of technology in the classroom and will definitely have an influence on my pedagogical decisions during my practicum and once I become a teacher.

Although it was challenging at first, I really enjoyed using Powtoon and actually had a lot of fun working on this video. The only barrier I came across was that to use themes from the “pro version” for free, the video must be under 3 minutes. I had to cut back some information from my reflection, however I am still happy with the final product. I will definitely use Powtoon again in the future and would recommend giving it a try!

I hope you enjoy my video!

-Olivia Kireta

Guess What! Students are not taking full advantage of technology and are actually hindering themselves from evolving as learners and more specifically content creators. The more surprising part comes from the fact that teachers may be actually encouraging this to happen, without even realizing it! In order for students to be using technology to its full potential as an aid to help them reach their full potential, they need to shy away from pre-constructed templates and move into programs that allow them to be active content generators. As teachers, we need to be sure we are fostering our students creativity and encouraging them to play an active role in their own creative processes.

Below is a Powtoon I have created reflecting on Ashley Hinck’s article published in Hybrid Pedagogy entitled “Digital Ghosts In The Modern Classroom“. I had a really fun time using Powtoon as a form of multimedia technology, until it told me that my video couldn’t be longer than 3 minutes long. In Powtoon’s public documentation it says that animations created on their free platform can be up to 5 minutes, however this was not the case. That is why I have attached two videos, a part 1 and a part 2. Aside from this minor bump in the road while using this program I found Powtoon easy to navigate and use. There are many different formats, fonts, colours and characters available for creative expression and importing music/voice recording was simple (as long as your file was in an mp3 format that is). Overall, I would recommend using Powtoon to anyone that is willing to put in time to create an animation essentially from scratch.

I hope you enjoy my two-part animation summarizing Hinck’s article and my thoughts and reflections on the content.

Keep being content creators everyone!

– Faith Hudvagner