First Day In Class - One Computer

Today was the FIRST DAY that students have seen one of my lessons...

Lesson 1.1 - I played it in my classroom on the projector in my Honors Physics class (34 students) 5th period (after lunch)

<PURPOSE>
I wanted to run the lesson during class because: (1) I wanted to see if I could get it to work, (2) I wanted to SHOW the students the details of running it... how to log on to my web page, how to find the lecture and get it to run, how to type in the password, how to print up notes and how the video player worked.... How to answer the CFU questions, and how to get past some of the oddities of the program (3) I wanted to see how the students reacted to the new format.

<BEFORE CLASS>
During lunch I was setting up the online video and making sure it was ready to go, with sound... I also taped up some black plastic over part of the windows in the back of the room because I know that it is harder to see the projector video than it is to see the video on the actual computer. (In particular, in lesson 1.1 there is a moment when a "dot" pops up on the screen.... and it is hard for some students to see unless the classroom is darker.)

Well, there was about 20 minutes of terror.... Because.... For some, unexplained reason... the video just.... FROZE in the middle of its playing. IT HAS NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE. (In the past I have gotten a video to either PLAY or NOT PLAY... but it has never FROZEN in the middle.)  I ran Task Manager and watched the Network download rate... and found that the video was downloading VERY SLOWLY... It was basically TRICKLING in. It seemed like the video player paused the video whenever it got to the point where it had not downloaded that part of the video yet. This was more than annoying because I would then press "play" later.... and it STILL was frozen. I tried 6 times AND IT WOULD NOT WORK. Part of my thoughts were that, for SOME REASON, the school's network connection just could not handle my download. Maybe there were a bunch of students in the library on those computers and that was bogging down the school's internet connection????

I was about to throw in the towel..... Then a colleague came in and I was showing her what was wrong.... and.... suddenly the Task Manager showed that the splash video loaded NORMALLY (7 seconds, quick spike of download) and then it played normally. Then the first mini video (Lecture 1.11) loaded and played just fine.... Whatever was causing the slow download 20 minutes ago had gone away!

<DURING CLASS>
I then tried it in my classroom 20 minutes later. The technology worked fine and pretty much as predicted. (Technology is a funny thing. Who knows WHY it just didn't work for awhile? One reason may have been my 8-year-old classroom computer or it's buggy network connection..... I know that it sometimes take my computer a LONG time just to upload a file to the school's server.)

HOW DID THE LECTURE WORK, CONCEPTUALLY?

I gave the students a quick introduction and explained what I was about to do. (I told them that this was an ongoing project and that I was trying to get my lectures online. I told them that I expected the entire project to take two full school years and that they were going to be getting SOME of their lectures in this format and SOME of their lectures in my older, hand-written format.)

They were quite impressed with the opening sequence and first mini-video.

When CFU questions popped up on the screen I randomly called students around the room and THEY told me what to type in. (There are 7 mini-videos for this particular lesson... So it pauses 7 times for students to type in answers.) I often had the CLASS tell me if all of the answers on the screen were correct or not. It worked out alright. When a student said "I don't know" I pointed out something to the effect of...."See... It's ok to have that answer, but just be aware that, in the computer lab tomorrow if you 'don't know' then you will have to watch the mini-video over again. It's ok, because I EXPECT all of you to have to re-watch SOME of the videos SOMETIMES. It's the way it works. If you can FOCUS and get the information the FIRST time, that's great! If not, that's 'ok' too... Just watch again and try to find the answer the second time. But.... be careful of not getting into a video-watching death-spiral of boredom.... where you just tune out and end up watching a video 5 times.... Eventually you just HAVE to pay attention and get the answer." (This is a compilation of replies that I gave over a two day period to various students who did not have an answer.)

FINDINGS:
After about 3-or-4 videos into the lecture it seemed that SOME STUDENTS WERE STARTING TO FIGHT BOREDOME. MANY of the students were fully awake and enjoying the entire video. Some of the students just "went with it" and some were definitely tuned out after awhile. One student had his head down on the desk by the 6th mini-video.

Part of it has to do with THE LIGHTS BEING TURNED OFF for almost the entire period... and the WINDOWS being blacked-out. Also, because the students did not have to copy notes from the screen, they did not have to DO as much. There is something to be said for having students move a pencil around on their paper in order to copy letters off of the screen. It gives their brain/pencil something to do. (But, just because they are copying stuff off of the screen DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE LEARNING.)

This may NOT be the best format to give lectures. It was never intended to be shown, AS A CLASS. I would rate today's full day of lecture/notes as a "6" whereas my AVERAGE/NORMAL lecture is about a "7"

However, after all is said-and-done.... It may have been that I just was able to NOTICE the boredom of the students more easily because I myself was NOT HAVING TO FOCUS on "delivering the lecture." I was completely free to move around the classroom and watch the students. I could poke some of them awake, point at their notes, etc. THIS ALONE may be a reason to show lectures like this at times. It is less stress on the teacher AND the teacher can monitor students. (If you have 1 teacher and a classroom of students, and only one computer....DI instruction is definitely more effective than using my silly online lecture.... But this was not my intended format for these lectures.... and the online format has other strengths.)

<AFTER CLASS>
I had a couple of students come up to me and ask questions about the video production itself. Obviously it caught their attention. (I think it is always a bonus when a teacher does SOMETHING DIFFERENT than OTHER TEACHERS.) They wanted to know what software I used, how did I record animations, and how long did it take to produce.

My thoughts after the day was over: I was hoping that things would go better IN THE COMPUTER LAB when students were FORCED to answer every question on their own. They could not just sit idly by hoping that one of the other 33 students would save them....

Note: The very next day I did the SAME THING in my OTHER four classes in the morning.... Four College Prep Physics classes, 1st through 4th period, with 34 to 36 students per class. I wrote this blog entry and combined those findings. Those lectures had varying results, although, overall, the students seemed to be more "into" the lectures than my Honors students were the previous day. One period they were even CLAPPING after some of the mini-videos.