Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

An Exemplary Scribe Blog Post, Pecha Kutcha Presentation, and Screencast

My undergraduate students in “Technology 4 Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma this semester have learned how to use a variety of web-based tools for communication and collaboration. Here are a few superb examples.

Copying the “scribe post blog” idea from Darren Kuroptawa, we’ve used a Blogger site this semester as a shared learning blog / scribe blog. Students were randomly assigned a partner at the start of term and a week to summarize, and worked together to post a thorough recap of their week’s topic and learning points. In week 13 we discussed Pecha Kutcha presentations as well as phonecasting, and the student summary for the week was excellent. This summary was good, in part, because it included multiple hyperlinks to relevant resources.

T4T Scribes (Shared Learning Blog): Week 13 Class Scribe

In addition to student-created scribe posts, this blog also included auto-posted lecturecast videos from our class blip.tv website. My main goals in utilizing the scribe blog post assignment were introducing students to the scribe post concept, and also giving them a chance to experience posting to a shared / team blog. I wish Blogger permitted posts to go into an approval queue, as WordPress does. Since it does not, I don’t think Blogger makes a good choice for classroom team blogs. Kidblog, EduBlogs (which uses WordPress) and Class Blogmeister are the best options for student team blogs at this point IMHO.

Pecha Kutcha presentations are short, Presentation Zen-style multimedia talks which use 20 slides in exactly six minutes, forty seconds. My T4T students have had a choice of either sharing their pecha kutcha presentation “live” in class, or asynchronously using either VoiceThread or SlideShare. Tiffany Edwards’ pecha kutcha about the artwork in her first art show was fantastic.

Several of my students reported that our screencast assignment was one of their favorites this semester. Using Screenr, many students were amazed how easy this process can be. Christy Hanna’s screencast about the German-English online dictionary, BEOLINGUS, was superb and an outstanding example.

Watching my students’ diverse screencasts, I thought about the 1970s song, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” It is marvelous to empower others to become online, digital teachers as well as learners. 🙂

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One response to “An Exemplary Scribe Blog Post, Pecha Kutcha Presentation, and Screencast”

  1. Matt Montagne Avatar

    Wes, I love the instructional design! You’ve given your students tons of choice and autonomy over form, medium and design. As a result, your students have created a diverse set of learning artifacts.

    I was recently at a talk given by Mitch Resnick of MITs Media lab…he mentioned that when the lab gives classes for follks on Scratch that one of the criteria that they use to evaluate themselves is the diversity of student projects. Choice, autonomy, etc is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately in terms of instructional design.