Voices from the Classroom: Movenote and Student-Led Conferences

The Office of Instructional Technology has the pleasure of working daily with extraordinary teachers throughout the Cherry Creek School District.  "Voices from the Classroom" is one way we highlight innovative teaching and learning from the teachers themselves, in their own words.  

Our guest blogger today is Franzi Kuster from Antelope Ridge Elementary.  Franzi has been teaching 5th grade for 5 years and taught 4th grade for 1 year at Antelope Ridge.  

Movenote and Student-Led Conferences

In my classroom, Spring is the time for student-led conferences, but I wanted to give my students a voice during Fall conferences as well. So, I decided to use MoveNote to give my students that voice while parents are sitting with me discussing their child’s work.

After welcoming parents to their child’s conference, I would let them know that I had a quick video of their child to show them so that they could share some of their thoughts about the learning they had been doing so far this year. Parents were very impressed with the idea of using this type of technology tool and being able to see their child discuss their own learning. As a class, we had been working on growth mindset and progress monitoring, so students really were able to verbalize their understanding of their own learning.

To create these videos, we used MoveNote, a screencasting tool that lets you record, via your webcam, a video of yourself talking about a presentation that syncs to the slides. You can upload documents from Google Drive into a MoveNote presentation or you can use a screenshot or scanned documents. I had students pick one or two work samples to upload into the MoveNote slideshow. Since these work samples weren’t in Google Drive, they had to take a picture of their work sample using the Chromebook webcam. They saved the image and uploaded it into Google Drive as a .pdf or .jpg file. Once students had their images saved, I had them create a script to use as they added their voice/video recording to the slide show within MoveNote. I gave them bullet points that needed to be addressed in their script, and the MoveNote needed to be less than a minute long. In MoveNote, videos can be recorded until a "finished" product is created.

As students were creating their MoveNotes, I showed a few technologically strong students how to embed their MoveNote into their Schoology Portfolio. This way, I had some student helpers to work with the rest of the class along with me. After all MoveNotes were embedded into their Schoology Portfolios, I showed the whole class how make their Portfolios public and embed their MoveNotes into a Schoology assignment. This allowed me to have easy access to their Portfolios and MoveNotes during the actual conference.

Even for me, it was really interesting to see what items students selected to share in their MoveNote. This gave me some more insight into what was important to them and their metacognition.

A special thank you to Franzi for being willing to share the great things she is doing with her students in her classroom.  For more information about Movenote and the possibilities it creates please read the other posts on our blog which have featured Movenote here.