About 2 years ago today, one of my Gr. 5 teachers (the amazing Sean Smith) completely shifted my thinking around ed tech in the classroom. We were working together and supporting our students in a project that involved them researching and synthesizing their thinking in an iMovie video. Students were engaged in the project and were quite enjoying making their learning visible in the videos they were creating.
Enter those “inconvenient” tech steps.
Once their videos were created, it was time to have them showcase their videos by putting them on their own Weebly websites that they’d be working on throughout the school year.
This meant several clunky steps for students…
- Exporting the video to the iPad camera roll.
- Downloading the video from the iPad camera roll onto a student laptop.
- Changing the format of the video from an MOV file to an mp4 file.
- Logging onto their Weebly websites.
- Creating a new page.
- Putting in a video web part.
- Uploading the mp4 file to the web part.
- …and finally, publishing the web page for others to view.
Exhale!
I remember thinking, it would be so much better if the students could hit one button and magically the videos that they had created would be uploaded onto their Weebly websites. It was my good friend and teaching colleague, Sean, who completely re-framed my thinking on this.
He looked at me and said, “I actually like that it takes lots of steps. Just think about all the skills they are learning along the way!”
Wow, was he ever right! Those “inconvenient” steps, were actually incredible learning opportunities to help students build their digital literacy skills. It helped them learn to problem solve, and more importantly, develop an adaptive digital skill set that is needed in order to thrive in the world today.
So next time you think… “I wish it could just be one button and done”… remember to not overlook the learning in those “inconvenient” steps.