Inspiring learning in the school library starts with giving students choices and the chance to be creative. At Dartmouth Middle School, our selfie-loving students enjoy creating videos that involve collaboration, creativity, and presentation skills. With green screen video production stations and Touchcast (a free iPad app for video and digital storytelling), we have moved through the “four stages of competence.” Keeping this progression in mind, we have increased the rigor of our assignments, our expectations, and student output. Here is a look at our process.

Setting It Up

I bought a green screen for our library in Fall 2014, not knowing that it would completely transform my library and our school. In their first experience with the app, I gave my sixth grade library skills classes very minimal instructions and the rest of the class period to play. After one week of classes with this simple lesson plan, the seeds were planted. Soon I had students showing up in their free time before and during school to use the green screen and iPads to make silly videos with their friends. It became evident that one green screen wouldn’t suffice so I ended up painting three walls green to accommodate multiple groups at once. Then came the most exciting part: students started campaigning to create videos for curricular projects for their teachers.

Let the Students Lead—“Unconscious Incompetent” Stage

School librarians know that one of the most difficult parts of the job can be convincing teachers to try new tech tools. At our school, we have decided to let our students be in charge of figuring out the technology. Students love how user friendly Touchcast is and how easy it is to edit, type on the screen, put together various scenes, and upload projects. We frequently use the teleprompter, which helps our students naturally make eye contact with the camera, and various in-app backgrounds such as the newsroom and the talk show backgrounds.

As school librarian, I am available as a guide, particularly for using more advanced features, but students take the lead on learning and teaching each other how to navigate apps. Taking the pressure off of classroom teachers to know how to use “every” app has resulted in a much higher rate of participation in projects that involve technology integration. Teachers are responsible for making sure the content is rigorous; I take responsibility for the information literacy instruction such as source evaluation, copyright issues, and citation.

Annie-Laurie Jacob, the sixth grade social studies and ELA teacher, was the first teacher students successfully convinced to try a video production project. The students were to create country projects for their study of Europe. Rather than create a brochure, a poster, or a Google Slides presentation, we decided to create a travel diary explaining why each country was unique and worth visiting. In groups of three, students created videos that described the geographical features of their country in terms of the five themes of geography. Further, they were asked to make an argument as to why a potential visitor should choose their country. Students also had to include at least three vApps, which are add-on elements in the Touchcast app such as pop-up images, maps, Twitter feeds, and news feeds. Finally, students had to use the PV-LEGS (Poise, Voice, Life, Eye contact, Gestures, Speed) rubric to address the various elements of good presentation skills (http://pvlegs.com/effectiverubrics/pvlegsrubric/). In this stage of learning the app and how to effectively integrate it into our curricular projects, we teachers were unaware of all the possibilities of the app or how to best use Touchcast to encourage rigorous projects. This was our stage of “unconscious incompetence.”

What We Learned—“Conscious Incompetent” Stage

As our trial project with the new technology, the travel diary project was very useful and also surprising. Once we watched the final products, we knew we could do better; at this point, we had reached the “conscious incompetent” stage. We learned that students defaulted to monotone, boring delivery unless we reminded them that their audience was their peers. Despite telling students while they were filming that they needed to spice it up and speak with enthusiasm, it took watching the projects as a class for students to realize just how boring they sounded. We had to remind students to have fun and be funny once the camera was rolling, just as they did when creating videos for their own personal purposes. At first, students seemed surprised that we wanted them to have more fun, but soon their products were improving dramatically. One video in particular on the Black Death has proven to be a great example for other classes (http://goo.gl/kSFMoc).

We also learned that it was best if students were telling a story, so in future projects we used more story building prewriting tools so videos weren’t just a recitation of facts. A good example of a follow-up project from that same class that made better use of storytelling is that of Bandits on the Silk Road (http://goo.gl/7bWZis).

Finally, we decided to focus on specific skills within the PV-LEGS rubric. For some projects we asked students to work on including “life” in their voices and making good eye contact throughout their video. For other projects we focused more on speed of delivery. We also had students practice more before filming.

Projects Taking Off—“Conscious Competent” Stage

Now that we understand the Touchcast app better and know its strengths, we have been able to plan some great projects. Some have been exclusively Touchcast projects, such as natural disaster newscasts and an American Revolution project that involved battle reenactments and interviews with historical figures. Many other Touchcast projects are done as opt-in projects where students choose to present what they’ve learned using Touchcast or other apps, such as Weebly, Prezi, Google Slides, Sway, and Padlet. At this stage of “conscious competence,” we have found that video production projects are an effective addition to projects that involve choice and collaboration, but video projects do require more focus and planning than most projects. Our students and teachers think that the payoff is worth the extra effort. Eighth grade science teacher Laurie Hellstrom said one of the best projects for the Newton’s Laws project conducted this past year was made with Touchcast.

At the end of the school year, my students were charged with creating social media PSAs using Touchcast. First we watched sample PSAs from the Ad Council (http://www.adcouncil.org/Our-Campaigns) to analyze the different elements of a PSA such as audience, purpose, ad techniques, and special effects. Students chose their topics from a list of options such as cyberbullying, manners, reputation destruction, and online versus reality. I gave students blank storyboards, time to write their scripts, and an iPad to start planning their Touchcast and vApps. Students were required to practice their scripts, critique each other, and revise before filming. The results were inspiring, creative, and informative; we all also learned a lot from the process. Moreover, the work was authentic; the top six videos will be shown as previews at a public screening of Screenagers, a documentary about teens and devices. You can see the top six videos here: http://goo.gl/YPFNqK.

What Comes Next?—“Unconscious Competent”

We continue to learn from our experience of having students demonstrate their learning through video. We have over 170 videos we use as examples and hope to build a sound studio for one of our green screens since audio quality is our biggest problem in a busy, noisy library. I also expect that more teachers will get their own green screens; in the last year alone three teachers purchased or won their own (see our Touchcast that won 2nd place in the national Touchcast competition: http://www.touchcast.com/dmslibrary/news_on_yugoslavia). And, whereas in the past our school’s green screen was exclusively available to students in video production classes, now all students can use it.

The eventual goal is for students to know the app so well—the “unconscious competent” stage—that our time can be spent almost exclusively on researching and crafting high quality content and improving student delivery. We can thus spend our energy increasing the rigor of our final products instead.

Further Reading

Braun, Linda. “SLJ Reviews Touchcast Video Creation App for iPad.” School Library Journal (November 2015).  http://www.slj.com/2013/11/technology/slj-reviews-touchcast-video-creation-app-for-ipad/

Johnson, Doug. “Power Up! The New School Library.” Educational Leadership 71, no. 2. (October 2013): 84 - 85. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct13/vol71/num02/The-New-School-Library.aspx

Segal, Ayelet. Engaging with the YouTube Generation: Touchcast Educator Guide. http://www.touchcast.com/education/TouchCast_Edu_best_practice/

Uden, Ryan. “New Teen Spaces Coast to Coast.” School Library Journal (November 2015). http://www.slj.com/2015/11/teens-ya/new-teen-spaces-from-coast-to-coast/