May 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown us the value of having alternative ways to connect with students in the absence of a traditional face-to-face classroom setting. Additionally, with ongoing development in the area of innovative learning environments, recording yourself in video format is a practical way of reaching your students at any time and at any place.

As a LEARNZ field trip teacher, I have enjoyed producing videos that connect learners to a range of inspiring people, places, and projects. They play a key role in our LEARNZ field trips website, providing ākonga with an online learning experience that expands their classroom walls.

Learning through video has a number of benefits:

they offer both visual and auditory options
they are accessible on multiple devices
learners can pause and rewind them
they are today’s basic source of information which young people are already in the habit of using.

Here are five key tips that have helped me to better connect with learners via video. I hope you find these tips useful if you do decide to go down the make-your-own-video route.

1. Copy other people

I have been part of several field trips where ‘the bugman’ Ruud Kleinpaste was our field trip guide. Ruud is a great speaker and entertainer, his years of experience fronting and appearing in TV shows was obvious when making videos with him. His ‘performances’ in front of the camera were inspiring. I couldn’t help but try to copy his expressions and mannerisms a little bit. I knew I would never be Ruud Kleinpaste, but attempting to imitate aspects of his presentation style, along with other entertaining presenters over time, has assisted greatly in crafting my own video persona.

Here are a couple of field trip video examples where I interview Ruud:

Tracking tunnels

Habitat for kiwi in Tongariro Forest

2. Exaggerate

Once you have a bit of a handle on your own video presentation style, I then recommend exaggerating it. Not to the point of being melodramatic, more like being just a bit over the top. I liken it to acting, in that I want my audience to believe what I am saying and be enthused by the content. After all, if I want students to enjoy the video I have to at least look like I’m having fun!

This tip is especially valuable if you fear the students might not be immediately interested in the content. The following clip, taken from the recent Climate Change field trip, is a good example. Climate science may not be the most riveting of topics, but believing that it is and acting accordingly goes a long way to convincing the audience that it is a topic worthy of their attention.

Exaggerate your enthusiasm

3. Less is more

A three day LEARNZ virtual experience typically has around 12 videos in total. At 3 to 4 minutes per video that’s quite a lot of content. While there is often a sequence of videos, each one is made to stand alone. We feel that by focusing on only one topic or concept per video, the result is a more digestible watch. Too many ideas in one video can get confusing and if you rabbit on for too long your audience will simply lose interest. You need to cater for the length of attention span related to your target audience. Get to the point and make the learning intention clear.

This video from the 2017 Opera field trip is a good example where only one key idea is explored in a relatively short time frame:

Learn a stage combat secret

4. Talk to the students, not the camera

The whole idea of a LEARNZ virtual field trip is to “take” your students to inaccessible destinations. As a field trip teacher, I must engage with students in ways that connect them to the people we meet and the places we go so that they buy into the concept of “being there”. A helpful trick that I use is to imagine the students are right there with me. When I look at the camera, I imagine it is a class of students, not a camera. I say things like “right now you are in/at…” or “here you can see…” or “come with me”. Describing sounds and smells to paint a picture can also help with this engagement.

Talk to the audience

5. Find a consistent intro and outro

A consistent video beginning and ending builds familiarity and certainty. It acts like a cue for students that says “alright everyone, eyes this way – I’ve got something important to tell you so please listen carefully”. I use this technique for field trip introduction videos where it is just me in front of the camera and no field trip guide. You might notice some of your favourite YouTube or TV personalities using this technique. It is a good way to set up and frame what the learning intention of the video is, e.g. “Kia ora tātou, welcome to another exciting instalment of …in this video we are going to be looking at…” or something to that effect.

Consistent beginning and end

Making videos for your students might be something you and they find useful. They are a permanent record of instruction that are always available for future use. And given the increasingly flexible nature of teaching and learning, they might just become one of your key teaching tools.

We are in the transition period between “Learning at home” and returning to our education settings. It’s messy and we’re managing change across multiple contexts daily. One probable constant is that blended teaching approaches, combining distance and in-person learning will be the new normal for a while.

This post:

highlights some of the practices that can help us inclusively design distance learning options
draws attention to approaches that can create barriers to learning and ways to minimise them.

Learning from our own experiences

Let’s begin by considering our own distance learning experiences and reflect on what we value in an online environment.

Most of us have probably had a distance learning experience in our teaching career. We’ve taken a course, attended a webinar or participated in post graduate study where we’ve had to navigate Moodle’s multiple spaces, participate in discussion forums and submit work in unfamiliar formats.

Reviewing our experience of distance learning as adults, we’d probably give quite mixed feedback.

Some of us will have relished open-ended assignments, others will have ached for structure and exemplars. Some of us will have been comfortable posting into an online forum, others will have rewritten a reply to a post ten times before daring to press send.

As we participated in online learning, our home contexts will have impacted on our study. We may have juggled care of children, work pressure, a health crisis within our whānau and/or our own mental health. Most of the time we will have managed the juggle, but sometimes we may have had to step back from the study, negotiate extensions or have a heart-to-heart with a tutor.

Now consider your ongoing use of familiar online environments, such as TradeMe, Facebook, Netflix, or an online supermarket or newspaper website:

What do you value in an online environment you use regularly?
What kinds of things put you off using a website?

Also reflect on your experience of being part of a teaching team during lock down:

What kinds of communication approaches worked well for you?
What approaches or tools have you found useful?
What was frustrating or tiring?

Designing for humans

If you’re a designer of a distance learning experience, you know that the humans you are planning for will vary in:

how they are engaged (what captures their attention, keeps them interested and motivated and maintains their wairua)
how they process, make sense of and use information
the ways they communicate, collaborate, create and express their thinking.

Planning for this level of variability is an art and also the bread and butter of teaching. As we plan for young humans in distance learning contexts, many of the approaches we use face-to face translate easily (if taking a universal design approach is already part of our practice). There are, however, some additional thoughts worth considering to ensure what we are offering will work for all our learners.

So, to support you in your review of your distance learning options so far, here are:

two guiding thoughts
a table of practical considerations
a learning conversation (a video of Chrissie Butler interviewing Linda Ojala about using a UDL lens to review a lesson or activity).

Guiding thoughts

Learning support is for everyone

In the context of designing online learning environments, I’d recommend we think of learning support like air or water or food, it’s a necessity and a human right.

If we turn the words around and call it “support for learning”, we can see that it’s something for everyone.

As experienced kaiako, we know every young human learns differently and learning from home looks and feels different for everyone. We also know that emotion and learning are interconnected (Boekaerts, 2010) and our COVID 19 context and its consequences are having an impact on our individual and collective wellbeing and mental health. We appreciate being able to reach for the support or tools we need, when we need them, be they a pair of scissors, a how-to-video or someone to talk to.

So let’s:

build supports, including useful tools, into the way we design our online offerings and make them available to everyone
have ongoing conversations with our support staff, teacher aides, deans, whānau leads, guidance counsellors, SENCOs, RTLB, Learning Support Coordinators, specialist colleagues and allow their insights to influence what we design
create spaces and opportunities where those who work closely with tamariki can maintain connection
seek regular and ongoing feedback from tamariki and whānau regarding what helps and what gets in the way of learning.

Walk in the shoes of your learners

Before you press send, take a walk in the shoes of your learners. Imagine being on the other end of your activities or assignments. What will be your learners’ first impressions?

Will each learner think:

Cool, I can connect to these activities, see why they are important and they are doable.
Yay, the instructions are presented clearly in video, text and image. With no waffle!!!!!
Great, I have options and the teacher has included everything I need to be able to get started.

Inclusive design considerations

Here are some considerations aligned to the three principles of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. You can find out more about each principle by following the link in the left hand column.

Focus area	Things to think about	Benefits for learners
ENGAGEMENT Supporting engagement	Communicate in ways that engage culture, are mana enhancing and build community.	See themselves in the context/feel valued. Fosters ongoing social connections and friendships.
	Agree with students the different ways and times they can connect with you.	Clear shared expectations promote feelings of safety. Choosing options gives agency and autonomy. Can match the medium to preferences, needs and the constraints of their home context.
	Make explicit the purpose of each activity or selection of activities.	Know what they are learning and why. Motivating. Can quickly decide if the activity has relevance to achieving own learning goals.
	Offer learning activities where students can connect interests and experiences.	Relevant and personal. Increases student motivation. Can use props, equipment and items of personal value from their own environments.
	Avoid “must do’s” and offer a range of can do’s.	Agency to decide what activities they can do within their own context. Reduces unnecessary angst.
REPRESENTATION Support access and understanding of information and instructions	Keep the organisation of your online space laid out in a logical predictable way.	Makes navigation easier. Can predict where they will find things. Reduces frustration.
	Support short video instructions with separate written instructions.	Provides an overview of the content. Key content can be easily rewound. Increases accessibility.
	Avoid burying instructions in your daily hello video.	Instruction for activities can be found with the activity. Can just focus on connection with you, rather than having to split attention.
ACTION and EXPRESSION Supporting communication, action and expression	Position supports next to each activity so they can be easily accessed.	Supports attention and concentration. Supports independence.
	Offer multiple ways to fulfil a goal, including an option to choose their own approach.	Can successfully show what they know in a way that works for them. Have agency over materials and learning tools.
	Make activities with increasing levels of complexity available to everyone.	Can move between levels of complexity to match how they are feeling and who they have access to as collaborators. Not limited by teacher expectations.

A learning conversation

The video below introduces how we can review a lesson or activity with a UDL lens using the UDL thinking cycle. It is an informal interview between myself and colleague Linda Ojala. It is 14 minutes long.

Downloads

Transcript for Learning from home: Reviewing a learning activity using a UDL lens
Reviewing a lesson with a UDL lens (reflection questions)

Summary

Over the last couple of months, the learning curve has been immense as we have adjusted to teaching and learning over distance.

Hopefully this learning curve will continue to expand as together with whānau and tamariki we seek feedback, discuss and reflect on:

practices and ways of working we want to keep from our learning at home experience
old ways of working we don’t want to repeat or revisit
how to innovate a blended approach to teaching and learning that allows and supports every child and their whanau to access, influence and participate in learning experiences and environments that work for them.

I can imagine some of the richest discussions will be around maintaining and supporting learner agency and continuing to support close collaboration with whānau.

I also hope that we can take into the new normal some of our new learning about planning for variability, utlising digital tools and employing creative solutions, to ensure every child has access to learning in a way that works for them.

Finally, all the thoughts shared above translate directly to blended practice. They reflect a people-centred, systematic approach to design and are informed by the framework Universal Design for Learning.

Get in touch if we can help in any way or you would like to learn more about Universal Design for Learning, web accessibility and inclusive design principles and practices.

Acknowledgements

Vonnie Jones for uttering the phrase “before you press send”.
Linda Ojala for the interview and constant collaboration and innovation.
The UDL and inclusive design team at CORE.
The Aroha Harris quote can be found in the introduction to Anderson, A. (2016). The First Migration Māori Origins 3000BC – AD1450. Bridget Williams Books Ltd.
Boekaerts, M. (2010). Chapter 4: The crucial role of motivation and emotion in classroom learning. In H. Dumont, D. Istance & F. Benavides, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice. OECD Publishing. Retrieved 12 May 2020, from https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/the-nature-of-learning_9789264086487-en.

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