Successful Teacher Mentoring, Evaluation and Self-Reflection Through the Use of Video

Sarah Webster:

Hi everyone. Welcome to our webinar today. We’re thrilled that you’ve joined us and we hope you enjoy the presentation and leave with some great learnings about mentoring and evaluation. My name is Sarah Webster, I’m with GoReact and we are the host of today’s event. For those of you who aren’t familiar with GoReact, we’re a cloud-based video assessment and feedback tool that’s used primarily by higher ed institutions. In today’s presentation, you’ll get to see an application of GoReact for teacher education. And that brings me to say thank you to both of our presenters today, Dr. Cindy Ross and Dawn Thompson of the School of Teaching and Learning at Bowling Green State University. Thank you both for leading today’s discussion.

Before I hand it over to you, there’s just a couple quick housekeeping items that I’d like to take care of. First of all, I want to make sure everyone knows that we are recording this webinar, so you get done and you want to share it with colleagues or friends afterwards, we’ll email you a copy of that recording. Today’s event will be about 45 minutes and that’ll be about 30 minutes of presentation followed by about 15 minutes of Q&A depending on how curious everyone is today.

Throughout the presentation, feel free to ask your questions of the panelists using the Q&A function. Another great thing about using the Q&A to ask your questions is that other attendees have the option to up vote questions. So maybe someone’s posted a question and you are really wanting to see an answer, give that an up vote so we can prioritize those questions to ask towards the end of the presentation. We do also have the chat option. If you have technical issues, you can request help there. Abby from GoReact team is behind the scenes monitoring that chat and we’ll make sure everything runs smoothly for you all. But you can also use the chat as we asked, introduce yourself, where are you from? What are you excited to learn today? Talk amongst yourselves there. That’s a great way to use the chat function as well. So without further ado, let’s have our panelists introduce themselves and begin the presentation. Cindy and Dawn over to you.

Dawn Thompson:

Thank you. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen briefly here. Can we see that okay? Okay. So welcome. We weren’t sure how many to expect today, so we’re very glad to see quite a few participants and we’re really hoping that you’ll find some value in some of what we share today. We’ll introduce ourselves shortly, but if you haven’t already, I would like to invite you to be sure to introduce yourself in the chat, maybe let us know your role and where you’re coming from. We are in Bowling Green, Ohio, and it’s about 34 degrees today. So hopefully many of you are in warmer weather than what we’re experiencing. Let me move this out of my way. I don’t know what’s going on here. Apologize for that. Okay, and on we go.

So my name is Dawn Thompson and I am an assistant professor with Bowling Green State University in the School of Teaching and Learning. Specifically, I work with the Career Tech Workforce Education area. I’ve been a full-time instructor at BG for six years now and I was adjunct before that and previously, I was a high school career tech teacher in the area of business and IT. I now work with pre-service teachers and newly hired career tech teachers who have been hired out of industry and are working toward licensure. I’m going to turn it over to Cindy. She’s going to share a little bit more about the program and a little bit about herself.

Cindy Ross:

Well, hello and thank you so much for joining us. I am Cindy Ross and I am the program coordinator at Bowling Green State University in our Career Tech Workforce Education Program. Just to give you a little background about our program, we have two pieces to our program. We have an on-campus program in which we serve a traditional pathway to a teacher license for business and marketing education and family consumer science. And then the other piece of our program is actually an online program to obtain a Career Tech Workforce education teacher license for those people that come from industry. So somebody who is going to teach in a career tech program that might be a nurse or an engineer or an auto mechanic or a welder and they’re hired at a career tech center, but they don’t have the education background. So we offer a completely online pathway to those license in the state of Ohio.

So every state does that a little bit differently, but that’s how we do it. It’s not a degree program, it’s actually 24 credit hours that they earn and then they can actually earn that teaching license. At BGSU, we have a variety of teacher education programs. We are the largest provider of teachers in the state of Ohio. Our programs include, besides our Career Tech Workforce Education Program, we have inclusive early childhood, middle childhood, adolescent, young adult, the intervention specialist programs. In those programs, those traditional teacher ed programs, we do a variety of different types of observations and teacher reflections, just like many of you probably do that come from higher ed in teacher ed programs. We have pre-service teacher observations that we do. We have several opportunities that our pre-service teachers are reflecting throughout that program.

We also do a lot of peer review of teaching and mentoring and we also use tools, besides GoReact, we use something called Mursion, which is a computerized animation tool that we have. It’s really very interesting their avatars. So we have pretend students that are pre-service teachers can interact with. And I actually am going to do something interesting in the spring where I’m going to combine Mursion and GoReact together to record a Mursion session and then let our pre-service teachers and our teachers that come from industry do some reflecting on that process. So we’ll see how that goes. That’ll be for another webinar.

So specifically about our alternative licensure, which is where Dawn and I use GoReact quite a bit, we have over 300 teachers that are enrolled in that program and they come from all areas of the state of Ohio. The state of Ohio requires us to do observations, but you can imagine that that’s very challenging. We are up in northwest Ohio, which is at the very top of Ohio. You’ll see that little red mark on that map is approximately where we’re located, Bowling Green State University. So for us to travel all the way down to the Cincinnati area on a regular basis to do teacher observations is very difficult and very time consuming and very expensive. So that is why we needed to look for something else to help us with our observations. So the travel costs were challenging.

We are an online program, so peer support in an online program is very difficult when you’re not coming together as a class on a weekly basis to discuss the challenges of education. So we needed to find something where our teachers could support each other and then the opportunity for teacher reflection and how that fits into classroom observations. And so again, those were our challenges to try to figure out how we could improve what we were doing.

Dawn Thompson:

So we actually found there’s quite a bit of research available pertaining to the use of video as a tool to improve the teaching practice. So a few of our findings that specifically relate to reflection, we found a study that says supervisors, they indicated that video was useful for conversing with teachers in regard to specific moments in the instruction that was observed, as well as allowing teachers to review their instruction and think about it before a post-observation conference. And then it also gave supervisors some insight into what teachers are noticing about their own teachers.

As far as pre-service teachers, a lot of them indicated that it’s more beneficial to actually do a video reflection than just depend on remarks from peers. And in a micro-teaching situation at BG, we actually, with our pre-service teachers, we still do the micro-teaching, but we also record it into GoReact so that those students have the benefits from both the video, being able to see their own video, as well as interacting with peers and getting feedback from peers.

And then the third area was teachers who are current teachers in service indicated that doing video reflection actually was a motivator in changing their teaching practices and seeing what they do currently and motivating them to maybe do some things differently. So what we’d like you to do is maybe just stop and take a minute to think about what your teachers do for reflection and maybe if you could add that in the chat so we could see what kinds of things your teachers are doing to reflect on teaching and learning. And I’ll give a minute for that.

So I’m not seeing much coming in yet, so I’ll go ahead and… Oh, there we go. Okay, so we’ve got somebody using GoReact, they watch it and then talk to their supervisor. Awesome. Teachers are reflecting in writing. Good. Video reflection via coaching companion. Awesome. Okay, so we’ll let those keep coming in. Thank you for sharing. We appreciate that. So we’ve got a lot of people that are actually using GoReact. We’d love to hear from you and hear what your experiences have been with that.

So some of the things that we found, and I’m guessing some of you would definitely agree with this, video enhances teacher reflection practices in several ways. So for example, it’s a concrete evidence of what really happened. So sometimes our memory only suits what we saw or what we observed, it doesn’t suit the entire environment. So it’s a concrete evidence of what really happened rather than trying to remember and then spending time discussing what we think happened as opposed to getting into the richer discussion of what did happen, why it happened, how it could be improved or how it was really great. We don’t want to use it just to say what was wrong, right?

Our teachers are able to view their instructional choices and how that affects students. So sometimes teachers get so excited and so engaged in what they’re doing as a teacher that they maybe aren’t always observing students and what students’ reactions are to what’s going on. So they might not notice everything happening in the room. And so by watching the video, they can pick up on what it’s like to be a student, what it’s like to be a learner and see what that lesson felt like for the learner. Why isn’t that working? A few other things. I already said that we think what happened.

One of the other things that we’ve noticed is that using video, we can deal with… I don’t know what’s wrong with me right now. We can deal with changing roles, responsibilities, we can see, maybe, how some personal biases might be reflected in our teaching and we can fix some of those kinds of things. I really appreciate all the comments. Cindy, I don’t know if you’ve been watching the comments. Is there anything-

Cindy Ross:

So quite a few people that use GoReact and similar in regards to having pre-service teachers or teachers view their video to write reflections, both oral feedback and written feedback that they would provide.

Dawn Thompson:

Okay, wonderful. Yeah, and we do that too. We do ask for some written feedback from the student, as well as mentors and peers when we ask students to watch their videos and reflect. One of the other things we found is that video enhances our teacher mentoring process. So as Cindy shared with you, we’ve got teachers all over Ohio that we’re trying to mentor and trying to observe. And we’ve got mentors who are mostly retired previous Career Tech teachers and/or previous Career Tech administrators. So they’re really, really well versed in Career Tech education and they’re great mentors to have, but some of them travel, some of them are in RV parks.

And this has really allowed us a lot of flexibility and the ability to reach a lot more of our teachers. We still go and do the in-person observation, but we also do some video observations along with those throughout the semester. So it allows us to have team approach. Several people, we’ll show you this in a few slides, several people are able to watch a video and participate in the reflection and the feedback schedule flexibility, but then also, again, that concrete evidence of the learning environment that can be specifically reflected upon.

Cindy Ross:

So just some reasons why we chose GoReact. And I will say that before we used GoReact, we actually did use another video service. So we’ve been using video for quite a few years. We even tried to do video on our own where teachers would video and then send it to us. That was extremely cumbersome, no doubt. So we knew that we needed some other type of service to be able to use. And again, keep in mind that we have about 300 teachers just in our Career Tech Program all over the state of Ohio. So you can imagine the expense of trying to do some of these things and GoReact ended up being something that’s a less expensive tool for us to use than the travel costs.

One of the best things that we’ve discovered is the ease of use for students, our traditional students here on campus that use it, our teachers, our Career Tech teachers because many of them, this is a second career for them. The average age of those individuals is 47 years old. So they’re not 20 years old, 22 years old that have a comfort level of technology sometimes. And then our mentors, as Dawn stated, are retired Career Tech teachers and administrators. And so they are the ones that we actually talk to a lot about GoReact and they absolutely love GoReact so much and we just do not have any issues with the use of it. We also are very grateful that GoReact has very good support and training and in our Canvas shells, we even provide the videos that are available that GoReact has for how to use… We actually give our students a quiz on watching those videos. They have to watch those videos so that they learn about React and then there’s an assignment for them to complete a quiz on that.

It in integrates very easily with our LMS system, which we use Canvas. The other tools in the past that we’ve used, we’re not able to do that. It has been less expensive for us. And the beauty of it when it comes to feedback, it’s real time, the markers and some of you even mentioned that in the chat about the use of markers, the built-in rubrics and those rubrics seamlessly flow into Canvas for us. So there are just lots of different tools that are available that work very well for us and for our teachers and students.

So the feedback, as many of you already know, there’s lots of different possibilities for the feedback. There’s texts, there’s audio comments that you can provide. The rubrics are really, especially for giving it as an assignment, which we do that they’re required to video their teaching and we divide it up into various pieces. So for example, we might ask them to only videotape their hook or their entrance ticket activity or it might be to video just a formative assessment or to video a new learning strategy that they’re implementing. So we chunk it up. We don’t really have them ever submit an entire video except for when they do a face-to-face observation and we want them to video the whole thing, but it’s really for their benefit that they’re going to go in and do an evaluation or self-reflection.

So there’s lots of different possibilities of how you can use the video, obviously the use of markers, and you’ll see those are in the screen right now, you see the little colored boxes, that just allows for an easier way to note something that you’re seeing on the video and you can set up those markers any way that you want, as many as you want. You can set up markers for yourself as the instructor of the course. You could set up markers for peer review, you can set up markers for self-reflection, lots of different possibilities of how you utilize those markers. And then obviously, there’s the comments, so peer review commenting. You can set up a peer rubric if you’d like. I think that that’s one of the other really great benefits of this is putting teachers and pre-service teachers with partnering to help with watching each other’s videos and providing peer review comments and feedback.

Dawn Thompson:

There we go. Oh geez. Sorry, I’m on a delay here.

Cindy Ross:

Back one more, Dawn.

Dawn Thompson:

I’m sorry. Yeah, there we go.

Cindy Ross:

We’re good. So possible ways to utilize in education. We are talking about how we use it in teacher preparation and with our current teachers. And we’ve already talked about several of these things, best practices, observation, self-reflection, peer review. One thing I did not mention is that we do use it for edTPA. So those of you that are in higher education and you do use edTPA, we use it quite a bit, GoReact and video reflection, to prepare students to be able to complete their edTPA.

At K through 12 level, which I am excited to hear that there are possibilities of some K through 12 schools that are starting to implement the use of video and specific GoReact. We have a school in our area that just started to use it for the state teacher evaluation. And depending on your state, I’m sure that you have some type of evaluation system. Ours is called OTES. So an administrator has to go in and do a formal observation and we have a school district in our area that is using it, Go React, along with that face-to-face observation.

And interesting comment that I heard about that is that there are many times when an administrator will go in to observe a teacher and in the middle of the observation they’ll be called out because of something that’s happening in the school and they don’t actually finish the observation. But if you’re video recording it and then able to put it into GoReact for later on for self-reflection and observation, then it doesn’t feel like you’ve ruined that observation because you had to leave the classroom. So that was very interesting to me. You could also use it to help for administrators to learn how to do a formal observation, new administrators.

In the state of Ohio, we have a new teacher assessment. So first, second, and third year teachers go through quite an extensive program. We call it RESA and GoReact could be very easily used for that as a possibility to help with that process. Because again, it is an evaluation system where there’s observations and reflection and lots of details, similar to what we do with edTPA, actually.

And then any type of mentoring. So one of the things that I’ve also discovered with our teachers is that they’re assigned many times a mentor within their school district, but sometimes it’s not somebody in their same building, it’s somebody that’s across town that teaches in a different school. And for them to come over during their planning period to do an observation and to be a mentor is sometimes rather difficult to do, especially nowadays with the lack of subs. So using a tool like GoReact and video to be able to provide that mentoring really is very helpful and beneficial for a school district to be able to implement.

And then one last thing that, actually, something that I’ve done some research about is school districts that set up learning communities to improve teaching. In one specific article that I read is about a school that set up a teacher video club for a whole year, that there were seven teachers. They were all math teachers that would get together once a month and they would actually bring their videos with them and they would help each other out with observation of what was happening in the classroom. And the comment that was stated is that that teachers in the yearlong reflective video club reported learning the importance of listening to student thinking. And that was something that they never really had an opportunity to do because they didn’t have that video recording.

Dawn Thompson:

All right, so let’s see if I can do this. I think what we’re going to do is I’d like to share an example of an assignment and how we’re using GoReact and how those comments are all integrated within the assignment. So this is Canvas. If you don’t use Canvas, you probably use a similar LMS. We’ve just got the description of the assignment and then at the bottom, this link that loads GoReact. So we’ve linked it right into Canvas. In this particular assignment, teachers were supposed to try, we listed a bunch of teaching strategies, something that’s new to them, not necessarily new to teaching, but something new to the teacher that they’ve never tried before and would like to try. So we’ve asked them to plan a short learning activity using a new strategy and then video it and upload it into GoReact. So I’m going to-

Speaker 4:

Today, we’re going to talk about a relationship that a lot of you-

Dawn Thompson:

I’m not going to play the video for you, but this is one of the videos that was uploaded and over here what I want you to see is what the student then is able to see. You’ll notice, so this is a peer, so we have a peer that has given some feedback at specific time spots. And I think somebody mentioned this earlier in the chat. You just start typing down here in the comment, you watch the video and as you start typing, it stops the video. As soon as you hit enter, it restarts the video. So it’s really nice and simple to use. This is the alternative program, so it’s older, non-traditional students. They found this very easy to use and they really don’t… I’ve had almost no complaints about it at all, at least not the comment part.

Down along the bottom here in this particular, we’ve got three things that we wanted to look for, meeting the instructional objective, student engagement, and then communication with students. So you’ll see here this is one of our mentors. She made some comments and used the markers to show where specific things were happening within the video. And then you’ll notice here, this is the student himself responding back to the mentor, as well as to his peer in regards to what was happening in the video. For people in a distance program, that has been very useful and has allowed them to have some interaction with others and not just simply reflect on the video, watch your video and reflect on it. We ask them to look for certain things and to comment on certain things. And then we also ask the mentor to do so as well.

So over here we’ve also got a rubric set up and you’ll notice when I click on it, it wants me to score the video because I’m also a teacher in the course. But I can go back and look at the mentor’s scoring of this particular assignment and once she scores it and posts it, it puts it here, but it also feeds it directly back into Canvas. And if I were to do a second rubric and score it and if my score were different from the mentor, it would average those two rubric scores and feed the average back into Canvas as the score for that assignment. So I really think that that’s a nice feature of this. Let me see if I can…

Cindy Ross:

So Dawn, there’s a question in the chat here that’s when doing peer feedback assignments, how do the students access their peers video? Do you set this up in Canvas in advance? Do you want to maybe go back to Canvas and show.

Dawn Thompson:

Yeah, great question, so we do. In Canvas, each mentor has, I don’t know, five or six students. And so I set up an assignment for each mentor and assign only those students to that mentor. So when they log in, they’re not seeing 50 videos, they’re seeing the five people that they’re grouped with. And then in the assignment, also, the reflection assignment and I can probably show you that, we usually just tell them who it is that they’re going to be… Oh, this might be a little bit difficult to find.

We usually tell who it is that they’re going to be peer reviewing. So in Cheryl and Denise’s group, Nathan is going to review Tyler. Mark is going to review Nathan. Tyler is going to review Mark, so that they know who it is that they’re peer reviewing. And then the other nice thing about it is that we can set it so they can see the video, but they can’t see the remarks that the peer or the mentor have made to that person. So everybody else doesn’t get to see the feedback for that specific person, only the student gets to see their feedback. Does that answer all the parts of that question?

Cindy Ross:

I think so. So what a student does is has to go back to the assignment and then just click on to get back into their group and then they can access the videos. It took us a while to figure out the best way to do that in Canvas. And I’m sure that if you use a different LMS system, you probably can work it that same way. If GoReact doesn’t work with your LMS, then it’s probably a question you’ll have to ask GoReact to help. They did help us a lot with trying to figure out how to do this the best way possible, so they’re really good about that.

Dawn Thompson:

Veronica asks a question if the individual being observed does not agree with the rating score, does another supervisor watch the video and provide agreement? Yeah, we can do that. To be honest, we have not run into that issue because it’s video and because typically the student might ask a question, but we’ve had some really good conversations then about why we scored this way or why we scored that way. And usually being able to see the video, the student has said, “Oh okay, I understand.” For the record this is a pass/fail class as well. So we really want it to be set up to mentor and not necessarily as concerned about the grade. We want to be able to mentor and help teachers be able to reflect and be able to improve their teaching and work on their teaching without being quite as concerned about the grade, which is probably why we don’t have as many questions about the ratings, as much as taking that feedback and rectifying it for the next time. Cindy, you want to show your comment example, you want to go through that? Okay.

Cindy Ross:

Yes. So I think that even somebody mentioned it in the chat also that they print out the comments. And so that’s another thing that you can do in GoReact is even though the comments are showing up with the video, you can actually pull them down and save them as PDF files and then you could do a face-to-face one-on-one session just with the comments, a variety of things that you can do with just printing them out. So here is an example of some comments that I pulled from one of our teachers and I have a few highlighted here that I thought were interesting. So as she was watching her video, she found things like, I should have reread the complaint sentence here. I chopped it up, which I’m sure was confusing to the students. The next one, when the student described the next step of adding the character code, I should have done a better job of recognizing he was correct.

And it was interesting to me that she notes this several times that she realized that she was not addressing students by their name or not acknowledging that that was a good answer or a good question, so it’s that rapport that she felt like she was maybe missing. And keep in mind this is a brand-new teacher, so she comes from industry, first year teaching, these are all new things for her. Sometimes they tend to be a little hard on themselves so we try to encourage them to find the positives of things that are happening too. So you’ll see in one of the comments here, I think I did a good job showing students what each box means rather than assuming that they can see what I see. The way I indicated the representation of each box I felt was clear. I think she works in IT. I think that’s the class that she teaches.

This is another interesting comment. I touched my face, hair three times in the last three minutes. Not cool. And those are things that you don’t realize that you’re doing. I know that probably in this presentation I’ve said umm a hundred times because that’s my downfall and when I go back to watch it, I will probably count it, right? Further down, another overall comment, so she made some overall comments, pertains to the days that follow that might be better to have shortened lessons each day rather than one longer lesson on one day. I think that’s an incredible observation to make that she realized I am really trying to do too much and she probably, by watching her students’ reactions or seeing what her students were doing, realized that that really was happening.

Another great comment, I do not believe I use enough academic language or higher level words to help students obtain such a vocabulary. That’s another great observation because you just don’t remember. When you sit down and write a reflection, what was the academic language that you were using? And we spent a lot of time talking about academic language in our program and then she gave her herself an overall rating, which I think she was rather hard on herself. She also mentioned the comment above that, a comment having to do with actually speaking with her university mentor and things that her university mentor pointed out to her in the video and she’s reacting to that. So just very valuable comments from her self-reflection. And if you have any questions, you can put them into the question and answer or the chat. I think they wanted you to put them in the question and answer.

Dawn Thompson:

Yeah, yeah. So quickly here, just to conclude our portion of this, the pros and the cons. First of all, ease of use for students. Again, we’ve got non-digital natives and hundreds of them per year that are using this with really relatively little issue at all. Usually, the issue is something that happens on their cell phone and they’re not able to get the video uploaded. It works very well with our LMS, which is Canvas, but I know it works with other LMS systems. Security for us was important. Obviously, we can’t use something like YouTube to watch video. We need something that’s secure. We’ve got K-12 students involved in these videos. And then just all the options for assignments. I’m sure we don’t even use all of them, but anything we’ve wanted to do, we’ve figured out a way that we’ve been able to use rubrics and do instructor and peer observations and rubrics for instructors and for peers.

The markers, we use the Danielson Framework and it’s just wonderful to have those markers so that you don’t have to constantly retype. You can just click on the marker when you see it being utilized in the lesson. And then privacy, the ability to control what peers can and can’t see if peers can see the video at all. In GoReact when you set up the assignment, you can set it up for peers to be able to see it or not, as well as what peers can or can’t see for the feedback that’s given. And then a lot of really good support on the website. We use all kinds of files and links and documents from the GoReact website in our course when we introduce the tool to our students.

Some of the cons, really, you can only see what video captures. So sometimes there’s things out of frame of the video that maybe you’re not seeing. It’s the reason why we still do some face-to-face in class observations and even when we do those, however, we do live feed to GoReact so that we have the concrete evidence of what happened during that observation. It’s not free, but it’s a lower cost than some of the others that we’ve used. And the licensing options, there are a lot of different licensing options, which has been wonderful for us.

We’ve actually started to use GoReact in the traditional program not just in the methods years, but even pre methods we’ve started using GoReact for things. And then every once in a while, and I’m going to say I think this is probably on the Canvas side, so we’ll find an issue with interaction between Canvas and GoReact. One of them that I find is that I’ve set up students in groups, but when I set up my assignment, when I set it up as a GoReact assignment, then I can’t assign it to just a group of people. I have to do each person in that group individually when I set up the assignment. Small issue. Truthfully, there’s a way around it. So those are some of the things that we found, pros and cons. We’d love to hear some of your feedback and some of the things you’re doing with GoReact.

Cindy Ross:

Just a couple things in the chat here, a learning management system, LMS is the learning management system. So Canvas, Blackboard, Schoology, Google Classroom for K through 12, those are the learning management systems. And then somebody said here, “I really like the idea of recording specific aspects like the hook or the vocabulary part of the lesson that helps with time, reflection and improvement.” Totally agree with you on that. Early on when we started using video, we were recording full lessons and it’s just overwhelming. And so we really discovered that the teachers or the pre-service teachers get so much more out of it if we just focus on one piece of a lesson and that’s what they’re reflecting on and that they are getting feedback on and approving pieces of the lesson one step at a time instead of being overwhelmed by an entire lesson.

Dawn Thompson:

I also find we get better peer feedback when it’s a shorter video. If you’re trying to watch an entire lesson, you get feedback in the first 10 minutes and then that’s about it. The rest of the video probably isn’t being watched because there isn’t much peer feedback then.

Cindy Ross:

Michael asks, “Seems most of your information today has to do with general education. Can you speak to special education, especially severe and profound?” Michael, I wish I could. I just don’t have that background. I know that our special ed program does use for their pre-service teachers. I just don’t know how much or how they use it, but I could probably find that out and get back. Dawn, do you have any?

Dawn Thompson:

Yeah, I mean that’s what I would do too. I would go to our special ed gurus.

Sarah Webster:

Well thanks Cindy and Dawn. We had a couple other questions come into the Q&A. I think you’ve been seeing those and addressing them in some way throughout your comments, but I wanted to go ahead and go through those really quickly just to make sure if there was any other discussion or clarification that people wanted we could get to that. Does that sound good?

Dawn Thompson:

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Webster:

So that first one that came in says, “Have you run into school districts that don’t allow video recording and if so, how does this work? Can you block out student faces? Asking because we work with a couple districts now that don’t allow video recording.”

Cindy Ross:

Yeah, so a couple things. We’ve never really run into a school district that says that we can’t use video, but we work with the prison system also because we have Career Tech programs in the prison system and so they’re not allowed to videotape. So we’ve had to do some creative things in regards to that. We just can’t have them video. We’ve actually had teachers that will recreate their lesson and video record it at home to just show what they’re doing, not ideal situation, but there’s not much that we can do that won’t allow, especially in the prison system. But specific school districts, we haven’t really run into that. We require our teachers to have their students take home a waiver that has to be signed. If the student doesn’t bring it back, then we encourage them to try to put that student out when they’re recording that they’re not in the video so that we don’t run into those issues.

But I also have had with edTPA, our students will do recording for a practice edTPA and they’ll record it not directly in GoReact. They’ll record it on their phone and then they’ll bring that video into a… We have a video editing program that will allow you to blur faces out and then they can put that into GoReact. So they do a little bit of editing in regards to doing that, for them to put it in the LMS system in GoReact. There’s some workarounds that we’ve tried to do in order to help with that, but I totally understand that that can be a problem.

Dawn Thompson:

One other thing I can add to that, I had a student this semester, actually, who teaches at a juvenile correctional facility. So he was allowed to video, but the students couldn’t be in the video. So what he did was he turned the camera just specifically on him and he mapped out an area on his floor that students couldn’t go past so that they wouldn’t ever be in the camera view. Again, not ideal, but we were able to get some of that interaction with students. You just couldn’t see their faces, but you could hear their responses to questions and the interaction that he was having with students. Not ideal, but it was a way for him to see. And actually, he had some good reflection like, “Oh my gosh, I threw way too much stuff at them at once. No wonder they weren’t responding to this question.” So he did have some good reflective information from that video even though we couldn’t see the students in it.

Sarah Webster:

And with regard to compliance, I will say that GoReact is COPPA and FERPA compliant for anyone that’s in healthcare, HIPAA compliant as well. If you have any other questions about that, reach out and we’d be happy to ask those and get you an answer. A quick question, can the rubrics be adapted?

Dawn Thompson:

Yeah, the rubrics are completely adaptable. We create them and we change them from one semester to the next. So the rubric that we showed was a pretty simple one, but you can be as complex or simple as you want. It can be as simple as a check sheet. It can be as complex as open-ended feedback in the rubric.

Sarah Webster:

Awesome. And then one final question, if we can go over just a couple minutes, but we have our students record directly and GoReact itself, only issue is sometimes a site is blocked by the district firewall, so they have to use a hotspot instead of the district network. How did you get the district to allow GoReact through their internet browser firewall?

Cindy Ross:

That’s a great question. So we always have our students check with the school prior before they’re going to do any video recording if that is going to be a problem. And if it is, we usually really strongly encourage them not to record directly in GoReact and instead just record using their cell phone or a video recorder tool and then upload it later on when they get home or they get onto campus and that works just fine, so you don’t have to record directly into GoReact. We haven’t had any issues with that and it seems to work just fine to prevent that problem from happening.

Sarah Webster:

Awesome.

Dawn Thompson:

I do see one other question I don’t think we’ve mentioned yet. Reviewing videos takes time. How many videos would you assign in a term and how many students would you respond to? So that varies by class and by the number of credit hours.

Cindy Ross:

So this past class that I had this fall, there were three videos that they had do and I had a total of 30 students per class. But the mentors help with providing feedback on those videos, so I’m not necessarily doing all of it. So it’s several of us. They have a peer review, they have a mentor, they have myself that are giving them feedback and sometimes we do for all the assignments and sometimes only some of us watch the videos and provide feedback.

Sarah Webster:

Great. Well thanks, Dawn, for catching that question and bringing it. We didn’t have any other questions come in and we are at time. So I just wanted to close out by saying thank you so much to the two of you for putting together this great presentation and sharing with us today. For everyone that’s here, we will share the recording of the webinar shortly after. So again, if you’d like to share that with any colleagues after the fact, we’d love for you to do so. Thank you everybody and have a great day.

Cindy Ross:

Thank you.