How can I teach my grade 6 and 7 students to teach themselves? Today's lesson is following a GIMP tutorial , but I am not so interested in whether or not they get good photo manipulation skills - I want to see if they can follow a step by step process on video. Grade 8's can.
In block 1 I explained that the task was to follow the youtube video we saw the day before 1 step at a time in order to learn how to teach ourselves skills from youtube.I demonstrated how to find the instructional video, and how to find the program. I then told them to follow the video one step at a time - only about 20% of the students were successful in following the video one step at a time.
In block 2 I explained the importance of being able to teach yourself skills from a YouTube video. I then showed them how to have both YouTube and GIMP open at the same time, and how to open the two photos they were going to photoshop, and how to hit play and pause on the YouTube video. I then let them go on their own, and about 33% were successful in following the steps of the video.
In block 3 and 4 I modelled several steps using a student's photo collection. After 4 steps I asked if the students were clear on how to follow one step at time using a YouTube video. I then asked how many would be able to get to this point. I then had to correct about 5 kids who didn't open their photos correctly in GIMP, but at the end about 80% of the kids were successful.
So, in the end the lesson for me was just how many steps to go through in a multi-step process (at least half) in order for most of the students to be able to follow a step-by-step set of instructions independently. Now to hammer home the information that students are not really learning how to manipulate images, but how to teach themselves.
