Document, Reflect...and Assess?
I have always been an advocate of video coaching and reflection for teachers. For several years, I have used this approach with teachers I have worked with-record a lesson; share with the teacher; teacher views lesson; we meet, discuss, reflect and plan. This task usually required quite a bit of time and effort. That is, until I discovered the Swivl. Swivl took the recording out of my hands. No longer did I have to walk around the class, holding a device in an attempt to document what was going on in a classroom. My new friend now holds the iPad and follows the teacher wherever he/she goes all the while receiving better sound quality. Swivl has also simplified the process of sharing the video file. With the Swivl app, video is immediately uploaded to the cloud. I can then share a link to the video with the teacher. Mostly, I have teachers create their own Swivl account so that they have their own library of videos.
Swivl has been a great coaching tool for me but the capabilities do not stop there. With Swivl+, a new wave of student assessment has begun. Swivl+ makes use of the Swivl device as well as up to four other devices. One example of how I have taken advantage of this feature is with Mrs. Lilian Corbitt's STEM Spanish I class. In this class, Mrs. Corbitt wanted to integrate our new Little Bits Kits. Before introducing the challenge, we needed to be sure students received a proper introduction to these "electronic building blocks". We also wanted students to show that they had an understanding of these devices by building their own circuits.
So, how did we accomplish this?
We separated the class into 4 small groups. Each group had their own iPad running the Swivl+ app. Students viewed a presentation on the iPad (yes, Swivl allows embedded presentations as well!) and performed the task on each slide. To make this even more awesome, Swivl+ was recording each group simultaneously. Once the presentation and recording were completed, the videos were uploaded to the Swivl Cloud and compiled into one video. In this video we had the ability to select the group we wanted to view and even isolate the audio for the particular group. This allowed the teacher to assess whether the group correctly demonstrated the task. We also had the ability to "jump" to a specific slide/task to view student work at that particular time in the video. (View the video here)
Swivl and Swivl+ have opened up so many possibilities for teacher documentation, teacher reflection and, now, even student assessment.
I can hardly wait to see how far we can go!
