Monthly Archives: November 2023

Conversational Video

Using Conversational Video

Leave a comment

Conversational Videos in the Classroom from Social Studies School Service on Vimeo. Access slides at bit.ly/CONVOvidSSSS.

Previously published by Social Studies School Services. https://www.socialstudies.com/blog/using-conversational-video-to-support-oral-history-project/

Before the pandemic, I thought I was a pretty good teacher. I worked hard at rotating reading, writing, speaking, and listening assignments throughout my social studies courses so that students would learn how to improve their skills and learn content simultaneously. I was very proud of the speaking assignments my students completed and pleased with the metacognition they showed when reflecting on their work. 

Then, the pandemic hit and students retreated to the anonymity of their screens. When we met back in person, I thought I could go back to business as usual and get them talking to each other about content and practicing some public speaking skills. I was wrong. They didn’t want to turn and talk. They didn’t want to socialize with each other. They didn’t want to complete any assignments that involved presenting or speaking in front of the class. To my horror, one class had eight students in a row decline to give a speech, even though most of them had written the speech and practiced it on Microsoft Flip. I was gutted. For the first time in my education career I found myself contemplating something new, perhaps in the rewarding and lucrative field of refrigeration repair.

Fortunately, I stayed in the education game, resolved that I could find new ways to effectively scaffold speaking projects to lower student apprehension and anxiety. This post will describe the importance of having secondary students engage in oral history projects and describe a new Artificial Intelligence technology StoryFile that can help students practice posing questions to pre-recorded conversational video without the heightened anxiety that comes with actually talking to a real person. 

Participating in oral histories improves engagement and increases the amount of historical empathy students develop. When conducting interviews, students generate original questions using higher-order cognitive skills that lead to deeper understanding. I helped my students to improve their interview questions by teaching them about the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Similarly, ChatGPT, an open AI interface can be used as a brainstorming partner to help students access information and creative avenues that improve their writing. 

The cool thing about this conversational video technology is that it allows students to “interact” with pre-recorded testimony. The AI matches responses to individual student questions. Practice with this technology offers students practice in listening, posing questions that show off their depth of knowledge about history content, and following up when they get an unexpected answer. In short, these activities may help students perform better during job interviews. Lastly, they provide educators with opportunities to evaluate student content knowledge, academic vocabulary, listening, and SEL skills. 

After reading the historical fiction novel Charlotte about German artist Charlotte Salomon by David Foenkinos, my students worked in small groups to collaborate on twenty-four questions to pose to Holocaust survivor, Rose Schindler. Then each student chose four questions to ask the AI and recorded whether or not the response was appropriate. The machine was able to off appropriate responses to 67% of my students’ questions. Here is an example of a student asking questions and then later reflecting about this assignment with her mother. 

Conversational video can improve the speaking, listening, and question development experience for students. Developing oral history questions requires listening and SEL skills. Many students don’t get sufficient practice. StoryFile can help them build background knowledge, anticipate multiple responses, and pose meaningful questions to Holocaust survivors, Civil Rights leaders, and 9/11 first responders using Conversational AI.

During the oral history process, students practice written and oral communication, conduct primary and secondary source research, use technology to record and analyze historical testimony. The act of creating questions enhances learners’ understanding of course materials and promotes deeper learning. Asking relevant questions reflect a student’s social awareness in addition to their pedagogical content knowledge and can be used as SEL skill builders as well as formative assessments. Students can practice asking questions to Japanese internees, Holocaust survivors, Civil Rights leaders, and 9/11 first responders using the Story File website.

Participating in the questioning and response process appears to increase the amount of historical empathy students develop. Conducting oral histories in the classroom can reveal student misconceptions and help educators address comprehension problems. Using Depth of Knowledge (DOK) and/or Bloom’s Taxonomy frameworks for evaluating questions, teachers can assess the historical content in student-generated questions. Students conducting oral history interviews practice empathic listening, build confidence in public speaking and oral communication skills, improve their creative collaboration skills, and demonstrate growth in one-on-one interviews. Students build media literacy skills when sharing projects via video production and digital storytelling.

Because my students could practice their oral history interviewing techniques in small groups or as individual assignments much of their anxiety in completing this assignment was reduced. Allowing time for gallery viewing and helping students conduct peer reviews or self-assessments also lowered student anxiety levels. With increased practice, students will gain proficiency with interviewing skills and teachers will grow more confident in evaluating the quality of student questioning. 

Brainstorming skills were enhanced by repeated queries of ChatGPT to generate high-quality interview questions that reflected advanced background knowledge and cultural competency. Reflection on the learning process and practice generating specific AI disclosure statements may also allow students to avoid charges of plagiarism. Also, students who have significant practice in conducting interviews will experience less anxiety and display more confidence during actual employment interviews. Lastly, advances in Artificial Intelligence will impact all teaching and learning. This activity will help teachers and students work in harmony with AI, using it as a thought partner to bring out deeper, more iterative, and reflective learning. 

I ask my students to present one assignment from my class to their parents in a conversation using Microsoft Flip. This allows for increased equity for the students who can’t participate in back-to-school night and also gives students practice in demonstrating to an adult that they are responsible and should be given an increased allowance or even the car keys. I was surprised by how many students showed their parents the video of their conversation with Rose Schindler. 

Traditionally, higher SES schools offer more field trips and are able to bring in more guest speakers to offer eyewitness historical accounts to students. Lower SES schools struggle to offer students these enrichment opportunities. StoryFile technology could create an equitable, student-centered learning environment by allowing all students access to interactive conversational video experiences with historical figures. Integrating AI voice recognition with video testimony could level the playing field by offering unique, first-person interactions within the classroom.

In sum, even in elementary and middle school classes, there are numerous benefits to having students conduct oral histories, however, the cost and length of time involved in these processes often make them prohibitive practices in the classroom where 70-90% of learning experiences are textbook-based. Using Story File’s website is free and offers students a chance to practice interviewing skills with sixteen video-recorded subjects in one gallery and an additional eight subjects in their Black Voices collection. I hope you will consider experimenting with StoryFile and ask your students to conduct an oral history in your classroom.  

EDUprotocols, Mexican Revolution, Paraphrasing

Diving Deeper with ParaFLY

Leave a comment

The ParafLY EduProtocol (Chapter 6) helps students paraphrase complex text and simplify it to show a clear understanding of the subject. This post features examples of a 10th-grade World History class practicing interpreting literary criticism. This was a part of a large, interdisciplinary project that required the collaboration of an ELA teacher, a History teacher, and a Spanish teacher. The students used their knowledge from all three classes to write children’s books on historical figures from the Mexican Revolution. The books are archived here. 

As part of this project, I asked students to write their narratives at a sixth-grade reading level. They used the Hemingway App to check their text and revise it until they hit the target. For practice, I gave them some post-graduate literary criticism from Yisela Maria Padilla of the novel they were reading in class. Students had 15 minutes to paraphrase the original 360-word paragraph, which was written at the post-graduate or 16th grade level. I collected their work via Pear Deck and color-coded it as A=Green, B=Yellow, C=Red. Everyone who made an effort got the points. NOTE: This is not the way to smart start ParaFLY! Always use a low-cognitive lift when starting a new EP. Here are three student responses and the feedback I provided to the whole class.

On the left-hand side of the slide below is the original text and on the right-hand side is my paraphrased attempt. Numerous studies demonstrate that student self-assessment is a major factor in academic improvement. Asking students to identify strengths and weaknesses in their own work yields powerful insights. Increased metacognition and problem-solving with advanced social studies concepts and academic vocabulary leads to deeper learning.

The next day, I asked students to evaluate their work after reading my sample. They posted to a discussion board answering the following questions: Add up how many of the ideas you were able to put into your own words. On a scale of A, B, & C, what would you have given yourself on this assignment? What was the hardest part? What did you find easy? Two student responses are followed by their paraphrasing samples below.

Student A

The Underdogs written by Mariano Azuela is an incredibly famous novel of the Mexican Revolution as it highlights several traditions in a narrative format. Mexican Literature became reinvented by The Underdogs since its appearance in 1915. Literature that was once filled with European tradition now contains Mexican events, culture, tradition, and history. The Underdogs has a hyper national status and was published by Los de abajo’s. This publication left the novel open to not just becoming popular in areas surrounding where the Mexican Revolution occurred (such as Mexico) but to also become popular and reach all around the world. Mariano Azuela documents when he joined Pancho Villa’s men in 1914 in an effort to write a novel that is from the peasants perspective of the revolution.  As Azuela writes about several defeats and then he flees to El Paso, Texas where he finishes his novel and publishes it in a small newspaper (El Paso Spanish-lanugage newspaper). During this time Mariano is starving and poor and ironically published his book on the US-Mexico borderlands. According to Juan Pablo Dabove, the Underdogs is a “nation-state identity paradigm.” This simply means that the story has hidden meanings. It involves several pertinent events and people of the revolution with different protagonists and antagonists.

Student B

Mexican literature had been characterized as derived of European traditions before the writing of The Underdogs. When Azuela released his novel, Mexican literature was changed as we know it. He documented his time as member of a band of Pancho Villa’s men, writing a novel about war and everyone behind it. Villa used the names of important historical figures included in the revolution, but added characters in addition to present ones in attempt to add dimension to his novel. When the Villistas began suffering defeats, Azuela fled across the border to El Paso, Texas, where he finished his novel. The initial release of his novel was not brought much attention to, leaving Azuela penniless. As more publishers were drawn into the attention of the novel, it was celebrated. The success was celebrated for many reasons including the modernization and newfound interpretations of Mexican literature. This modernization was seen through the centralization of the Mexican government and post revolutionary antics, which ultimately allowed political and literary advancements. Despite the self-actualization displayed throughout The Underdogs, the ideas Azuela engaged were sometimes characterized as backward and violent.

Gallery walks are a great way to debrief student self-assessments. Repeated exposure to high-quality reflections helps students improve their metacognitive skills. Pair-share peer reviews can also be helpful.

After receiving whole-class feedback and self-assessing with an exemplar, it is important for students to do another rep immediately. This time, I asked them to select a passage from their research, record the grade level, and then document that they could bring it down to the sixth-grade level. Some were more successful than others.

The ParaFLY can be a challenging EduProtocol to provide feedback on especially if you use the jigsaw method and give every student or group different chunks of text. When using this EP, it is important to do a low-cog smart start and make your students feel proud of their first few reps. Otherwise, they will conclude that they aren’t good at paraphrasing and give up on this essential academic writing skill. These students had used ParaFLY more than a dozen times prior to this and were unafraid to tackle challenging text. I was very pleased with their efforts. They confirmed what Jon Corippo says in his EduProtocol seminars, “More reps mean more confidence!” 

If you are interested in diving deeper with EduProtocols, please pick up our book The EduProtocol Field Guide: Social Studies Edition. You can also catch The Social Studies Show live or on-demand every month on EduProtocols Plus.

EDUprotocols, Historical Writing

ParaFLY with Dave Burgess

Leave a comment

Coming up on November 16, 2023, Adam and Scott welcome Dave Burgess, the best-selling author of Teach Like A Pirate to The Social Studies Show on EduProtocols Plus. They will discuss Dave’s journey from Social Studies teacher to a major force in educational publishing and learn what led Dave to publish the EduProtocols series.

This month’s episode will feature the ParaFLY EduProtocol. Paraphrasing is an advanced literacy skill where students express the meaning of a text in their own words, in order to gain greater clarity. Come meet our big daddy pirate and learn how to simplify paraphrasing with EduProtocols.

Paraphrasing is closely related to summarizing, which has a .79 effect size, or two grade levels of achievement according to John Hattie. We will provide some tips and tricks for smart starting the ParaFLY, as well as provide some examples of student work from both of our classrooms. If you already have a copy of our book The EduProtocol Field Guide: Social Studies Edition, you can read Chapter 6 for a sneak preview. We look forward to seeing you on EduProtocols Plus.