Page 176 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

Chapter 6 • Small Changes and the SAMR Model

here for my sketchnote of Adam Bellow’s keynote at the ICE conference in
February 2016.

3. Presenting Ideas
One of the last examples I’ll share really starts to shift thinking from just
enhancement to transformation. Although making presentations in Microsoft
PowerPoint to share your information has been around for decades, there
are now many more mediums to use to display your knowledge and under-
standing of a concept. In some ways, you could consider the idea of students
presenting information in a presentation tool to be substitutive. Couldn’t they
also display their information on one of those trifold poster boards made
famous by science fairs across the country?

Where presentations start to cross over into augmentation (and ultimately
to the transformative level) is when the technology allows for tasks that you
couldn’t do on a poster board, and even some tasks that were previously
impossible without technology. I’ll give you one of my favorite examples here:
explaining Latin with Minecraft.
A couple of years into our iPad initiative, we saw some immediate benefits for
students presenting their understanding. Using Keynote for the iPad, students
could create simple presentations explaining their thinking or knowledge of a
learning objective. In Natalie Cannon’s Latin class, one student wanted to try
something a little different.

The task was to create a presentation (presumably on PowerPoint or Keynote)
that outlined and explained the various parts of a Roman bath house in Latin.
This assignment could have been done by the student in a couple of hours,
but this student wanted to dive deeper and use a tool that he had become very
comfortable with: Minecraft.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last several years, Minecraft is
an interactive world where users can create and destroy materials one block at
a time. This particular student wanted to re-create the Roman bath house to
scale and then screen record his creation and do a voiceover in complete Latin.
While the original task (presenting parts of a Roman bath house in Latin)
could have been done without technology, the way in which this student used

68 Mobile Learning Mindset: The Teacher’s Guide to Implementation

Mobile Learning Mindset: The Teacher’s Guide to Implementation 176