I saw my first Swivl a year ago during a professional development session, and was thoroughly creeped out by it. The device itself looked unassuming, an iPad nestled in a small bowl-shaped device mounted atop a tripod, so bland-looking that I barely noticed it when I entered the room. Then the session began. As the instructor began moving about the room, I heard beside me a faint robotic whirring. The iPad wasn’t just statically recording her presentation — it was tracking her movements around the room as she presented her lecture, keeping her centered in the frame of the recording at all times, attentive as a dog on a treat, guided by the usb-sized device worn on a lanyard by the instructor. I don’t remember much about the content of this particular professional development session, but I do remember distinctly how much the Swivl made me unnerved (or should I say unnervd?).  

This past Wednesday, it was my sixth block AP Language and Composition students who got to experience that same sensation. 

I had set up a Swivl the back of the classroom. Watching my students gather around the device at the beginning of class, I identified with their nervous energy. I was reminded of a news story from a few years ago. In 2015 Canadian scientists developed HitchBOT, a friendly robot meant as a social experiment in human kindness. As you may or may not remember, HitchBOT met its grisly end in Philadelphia, where it was decapitated. While I didn’t think my students would be quite so brutal toward the Swivl, they certainly weren’t at ease by the way it was constantly tracking me as I moved around the room preparing for the start of class.      

“Teachers own the recording process and get the support they need,” the Swivl website claims, adding that “coaches are much more efficient with their time, and Administrators get the access and oversight they need.”

I was doing this less for oversight and support and more for the sake of experimenting with new technology made available to the staff at Champe, which had been brought to my attention in a recent technology committee meeting. I wanted to see how much I might learn about myself and my teaching from the experience. I had a full class prepared that I felt was representative of my teaching style, with several different activities emphasizing core concepts and learning objectives (we were focusing on the value of evidence and commentary in an argument).  

Here’s the whole video of the class:

https://cloud.swivl.com/v/e8a562356d836433f81d9ac44d47d134

After watching the video, I identified several areas of improvement: 

1. I don’t emphasize wait time after asking a question. I also don’t consistently give students time to collaborate on an answer. I try to do this once a class, moving around and singling out a student I know has the correct answer, making them look good in front of their peers. I did not do this enough during this lesson. In fact, I did much of the opposite, critiquing students in the heat of their argument, offering tweaks to shaky claims without giving students a chance to revise it privately. This class of students is well behaved and gracefully endures this sort of feedback, but how much more impactful would the lessons be if I more consistently gave students a chance to succeed instead of correcting them in public?  
2. I should have made better use of the supplementary microphones that are provided to record student comments. I balked at using them because 1) it seemed creepy to mic the students 2) it didn’t seem possible that students would be comfortable enough to act normally during small group activities if they knew that everything they said was being recorded. I’d like to see how other teachers get around this, because the video feels incomplete without being able to better hear the student discussions during the large and small group portions of my lesson. 
3. I speak too fast during lectures and instructions. Maybe it’s nervousness, maybe it’s because I know what I want to say and am more concerned with expressing it than making sure I present it in a way that it is easily accessible to my students. But I found myself sympathizing with sixth block as they valiantly endeavored to decipher my hastily expressed directions and edicts on evidence and commentary. 

“We believe teachers in K12 schools deserve the support they need to make big impacts in the classroom,” proclaims the Swivl website. “That’s why we designed Swivl Teams to make it easy for teachers and coaches to record and share video with others to get essential support and feedback. By collaborating over teacher recorded video, coaches can spend more time focused on coaching and less time traveling between classrooms.” 

I mentioned my experience with Swivl to a colleague, who observed the parallels to the Dave Egger’s dystopian novel The Circle, in which society devolves into a state in which everyone is recording every moment of their lives. With its ease of installation, I can easily see a world where Swivl exists in every classroom. Is that a good thing? Does every class merit documentation? Should I should treat Swivl the same way Philadelphians treated HitchBOT?   

For now, I’m fortunate to be in a place where I get to use this technology for my own improvement, not as a means to satisfy my superiors. From my experience, Swivl is an easy-to-use tool that makes a teacher explicitly aware of his/her strengths and weaknesses. It efficiently catalogs a class’s events in a way that is more efficient than a standard video recording, more objective of your performance during those ninety minutes than an observer’s notes. I plan to use Swivl again, in hopes that it will help me become a better teacher (or should I say teachr?).