Co-Teaching with Technology

In November 2017, Tracey Salinas invited me into her class to assist students with a video presentation that they had prepared for Dia de los Muertos. Students had prepared for this presentation by creating an esqueleto, or skeleton, representing a loved one. To accompany their esqueleto, students also wrote down some interesting information to share about their loved one in English.

Señora Salinas invited me to co-teach her class to support students in using Loom, a free Chrome extension that allows users to record their screen, themselves (via a webcam), and/or some audio. For this project, students were to record themselves using the built-in microphone and camera on their Chromebook. While their notes were written in English, students were to speak in Spanish throughout the video.

Technology as a “Station”

While we often see station work at the lower grade levels, Tracey saw an excellent opportunity with this project to break apart students into groups, with one group recording their videos (with me) and another group covering alternative topics (with her). Students spent half of their class period recording their presentation in Loom, then swapped locations with the other half of the class to work with Señora Salinas.

This approach was incredibly effective, cutting down on background noise for those students making their recordings, and leaving me with smaller sub-groups to support at any given time. At the end of a single period, every student was able to record a short video sharing information about their loved one in Spanish to celebrate Dia de los Muertos. After checking over their video, students downloaded a copy of their videos from Loom and uploaded those files into a Media Album within Schoology so that everyone in the class could view one another’s work!