Can an Evaluation Speak for Itself?

A small group of my Level 1 students have being having a go with Explain Everything on the iPads. They have completed their final poster designs on Adobe Illustrator and I wanted to see if we could do the final evaluation as a spoken rather than typed thing.
Blog post about setting up the template here.

Our first attempt last week was a complete disaster, as they could not read the questions and answer them straight away. It was an interesting leaning curve for me, as their teacher, as I realised that they needed the same help and scaffolding when they speak their analysis as I would give them when they type it.

The second attempt showed a really good session at writing the script with help sentences and key words, which was thwarted by wireless issues so we couldn't get the files onto the iPads.

The third attempt was today. We were ready. We had fabulous scripts!! We had wireless. We were good to go.

Here are the 3 that were completed today...

Student 1

Student 2




Student 3




Feedback from the students :-


Which did you prefer ?

• Writing

What was good about writing?

• You have more confidence when writing rather than saying it.
• It's faster because you can stop when you want and you don't have to rewind unlike the video recorder you have to stop and start again every time you make a mistake. 

What was good about speaking?

• You don't need to type.

What were the worst parts?

• Being nervous while speaking
• Having to except the fact that we HAD to record ourselves talking. 

Would you do a spoken analysis again?

• Yes. It is much more better to say than write
• Yes, only if it's to do with credits :D

Key things that were highlighted for me....

• Students were very nervous of doing this to start with. Will they get used to it and find it easier to do?
• Get the image on the right way to start with as once the recording was done, every time we tried to turn it, it went back to sideways on saving.
• Scaffold exactly the same as we would if they were writing the evaluation / analysis.
• It meant that the students actually did BOTH - writing and speaking as they wrote their script.
• Using the teacher dashboard to share the original template file was easy, even though we didn't use them in the end.
• The students saving their work into their drive then retrieving it on the app was easy ( once the wireless was playing ball ).
• We learned how to use the app as we went along, especially when things went wrong. One of the students did a mostly great recording, got flustered and ended that section on a HUGE swear word.  So, rather than him start the whole thing again, we learned how to edit just one section of the recording and delete it. 

I really appreciated these guys giving this a go. It has given me a lot to think about moving forward with this, especially with its use within a totally online course.

Can students record an audio analysis / evaluation with what ever app / equipment they have, outside of the classroom, without on-hand teacher help.