Distinguished Colleagues December 9, 2008
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What happens when you cram a posh hotel conference room with sixty Apple Distinguished Educators for a week of geeking out on their MacBooks? Add to that Singapore's lovely sights and soothing sun rays and you can expect some exciting results.
I was fortunate to spend a majority of the time collaborating on a project with Amanda DeCardy and Jonathan Chambers, two of my colleagues from Shanghai American School. You would think that during the course of the school year we have several opportunities for professional development, but for technology PD we are often the ones providing the workshops, leaving little time for us to get together and pool our many talents, resources and ideas. We meet on a monthly basis and swap dozens of emails yet this is not the same as collaborating on a project that is meant for teachers to actually use with their students.
For several years, Apple has held week long institutes that provide invaluable opportunities for Mac-savvy educators to network, discuss educational technology challenges and often produce a project that showcases effective technology integration. I pitched the idea of having students collect stories from elders in their communities about how their city has changed. Amanda coined the project's title of "Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found" and that really provided the context for the project. With any digital storytelling project, providing a clear purpose for why you're creating stories always helps. We were off and running from there. In the solution section of my thesis on digital storytelling, I suggested that providing teachers and students with a digital story template will improve the story teaching part of the project. Teachers and students need more than a few video tutorials on the technical side of creating a digital story. It only took me three years to finally follow through on this idea. In our project, we provide director's cut style videos that help teachers and students prepare for the field interview. We created a scaffolded approach to the editing process, detailing three options (quick and simple, moderate editing, advanced editing) for creating the final digital story. Check out the project: Wisdom Lost, Wisdom Found. See also iTooth by David Gran and Mikey McKillip.
SAMS Poetry Podcast October 29, 2008
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Finally got around to using Garageband to create a podcast. Very easy.
Google - A Teacher’s Best Friend October 24, 2008
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In a school of nearly 500 students and 50 teachers using over 350 computers, there are always plenty of tech-related questions. I think every teacher would love to have their classroom next to the IT department, but that's rarely how schools are configured. While you can't clone your building's go-to-tech-person (I don't like being referred to as "the tech guy"), every teacher does have access to Google. And that sometimes is even better.
Today's situation. I was trying to import video footage into iMovie. Something I've done more than a hundred times. But today the computer would not recognize the camera. I remember something like this happening last year. Our school's video camera records in PAL format instead of the NTSC format that I'm used to in the US. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure it out. Thought of asking the video teacher down the hallway, but he was in the middle of teaching a class. Where else can I turn to? Google. I enter "creating a PAL iMovie project" and get a list of links to forum replies from people who have experienced the same problem. Whenever you think you've got a unique computer problem, chances are very high that someone else in the world has solved it. Google can connect you with that person. I read over replies from three people and found my answer. And then I got even more than what I was looking for. Lennart Thelander created an empty PAL iMovie project and made it available for anyone to download. Three minutes later I launched it in iMovie 06 HD and resumed importing the footage for the project.
When I needed to learn how to create a green screen effect in Final Cut Pro, I Googled it and found an excellent YouTube tutorial from a college student that taught me exactly what I needed in just 20 minutes.
We tell students that technology is supposed to help them think creatively and critically about how to solve problems. I think that we need to push this same message to teachers. It's not enough to put technology in teachers' hands. We need to teach them how to use it to be more effective educators. That's a thorny issue, but I see teaching them how they can learn from Google and the vast resources out there on the web as a large part of my job, much larger than being "the tech guy."
Google Docs - another reason why Google should be a teacher's best friend. Even though they're still working out some bugs, I'm excited about where this set of tools is headed. This week, I wanted to create a quiz for students to take. Sure I could have used Survey Monkey, but I was curious to see what Google had to offer. In the Documents section of your Google account, create a New document and select Form. Very easy quiz option. Easy to analyze results. And of course there's a great YouTube video tutorial that someone has created to help walk you thru the steps of creating one.
Using Google Forms to Create a online Quiz
Google Docs in Plain English
5 Step Blogging Staircase October 15, 2008
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If you are new to blogging, you may be feeling overwhelmed by creating your first post. Chances are you've seen a blog that allows you to listen to an audio clip or watch a YouTube video without ever leaving the space of the blog. You may have seen teachers posting Word documents, images or other files that are intended to be downloaded. STOP! You don't need to do all of these things to have a successful blog. And what exactly is a "successful blog?" It depends on your purpose. If you want to share information with parents then you can do that by easily posting short updates about what's going on in your classroom. As you become more comfortable with blogging, you can include other media elements, such as video clips, that help pull visitors to your blog. After all, a blog can be much more than the digital version of your classroom newsletter because it takes advantage of digital media that's easily posted online.
I shared a Powerpoint presentation with my staff last week. Here are five steps you can take to develop your blog from a space where you share just text to an online space where you're extending your classroom beyond your four walls:
Step #1: Add a short description of what's going on in your classroom.
Step #2: Add a link to a website supporting what's going on in your classroom.
Step #3: Share a picture of student work, a completed project, etc. Later, you can add more advanced media like audio clips or video.
Step #4: Invite a response by posting a question and requesting people to leave a comment.
Step #5: Add a post that reflects on a lesson, your use of technology, or just your thoughts about teaching.
A Year of Many Changes September 10, 2008
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It's been back to school here for over three weeks. And it feels like it's been three months. That's the international school life they say. One of our current challenges has been transitioning to Word 2007. Here is a quick cheat sheet I found helpful: word-quick-reference-2007.pdf
YouTube also has many excellent tutorials that walk you through the new "ribbon" navigation tool as well as many time-saving tips.
TeacherTube also has a great collection of video tutorials on many topics. You can download these as well.
A Look Back at 2007-08 August 20, 2008
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Scratching the Surface August 13, 2008
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My return to Boston this summer was primarily to see my family and friends. Second fiddle was the Scratch conference held at MIT. I love conferences during the summer. Teachers rarely turn their brains off completely from thinking of school, but during July and August you're removed far enough from your daily routines to think about school in a different way. Today was Day 1 of a gathering of people around the world who are using the free Scratch software developed by MIT. This year, I used this program with an after-school group of students interested in learning how to make video games. We didn't get very far into the program. I made the mistake of introducing it alongside other free game-making programs. The students were drawn more to the web-based Flash games. I had had plans to develop a whole course to teach video game creation through Scratch, but when the number of students dropped to 3 it lost its priority. This conference, though, has recharged my interest and I'm looking forward to pitching several ideas from this conference to my staff.
The key question for most teachers at the conference was how do I introduce Scratch to students and teachers? For me, the question had more to do with scaffolding the introduction of more complex coding concepts; moving students and teachers beyond the basics of what looks like something made with Powerpoint. The ready-to-use Scratch cards are perfect for getting the basics down. And the learnscratch.org site has some of the best sequenced lessons for teachers and students to work through. I think to get at more complex chunks of code, students could be presented with remixing challenges where they need to take someone else's Scratch project and manipulate the speed of a object on the screen. With this approach, you're asking students to deconstruct a Scratch project made by another student. This is where the scaffolding can work well. After students have solved one challenge, you introduce more challenges like adding speech bubbles, collision detection and loops.
Another strategy, I'll try is using themed Scratch projects to hook particular students and teachers. There's a huge number of anime projects on the Scratch website. The math and science concepts are growing but I haven't found many that do more than regurgitate information from a text book. Several presenters talked about using role-play to help students think through the code of their project. With a few students on stage, they would physically walk-through the code instructions behaving as if they were the objects on the screen. Audience members could also provide feed-back on solving particular challenges, such as how to create collision detection between two objects. This approach was a welcomed surprise to how I've seen programming taught in the past. Using creative movement to help students physically understand how if-then procedures work will appeal to many students.
I was really impressed with how much true constructivist and constructionist learning I heard discussed at this conference. For years, I've been on the fence about constructionist learning. My biggest qualm has been that it just doesn't fit with traditional test-driven classrooms. And that's exactly what Seymour Papert and Mitch Resnick responded to with their creation of tools like LOGO and Scratch to allow students to "imagine, create, play, share, experiment, and reflect." That might not be the exact cycle, but you get the idea. During the session on the ScratchEd site that's meant to serve the needs of educators using Scratch, I heard many teachers trying to map the entrenched school model onto Scratch, asking for resources to help use Scratch to teach their curriculum. I was one of them. I wish there were schools with a Media Lab type approach to learning. Places where students were truly encouraged to use their personal interest in a subject to guide their learning. I know this sounds like Montessori education, but constructionist learning theory is different. It's hard to document. I'll come back to it in a later post. Mitch's enthusiasm for creativity in education made me feel like I wasn't necessarily at an edu-tech conference. It was a gathering of people who believed in students and their ability to create, collaborate and demonstrate an amazing range of, sorry I can't avoid using it, 21st century skills.
A presenter used the term "safe failure" in his talk, the idea that Scratch provided opportunities for students to set out to build something and totally fall flat on their faces and not have any negative consequences attached to it. There may be some self-imposed ones, but those too are important. Schools have utterly failed at equipping students with basic problem-solving skills. I think this is largely due to the infrequency of these safe failure moments in academic settings.
Many sessions featured Scratch use for making video games, both with educational and entertainment goals. What I noticed in nearly all the presentations is the absence of any specific video-game teaching. This is a huge field and lots has been written about game design for teens. Maybe direct teaching is in conflict with constructionism. That's what I've never been able to resolve. The balance between assessing what skills the teacher needs to provide to the student and what you think is developmentally appropriate for them to discover on their own, that's the real challenge. There's a course that Bernie Dodge teaches where he has the teachers design board games and introduces the fundamentals of engaging games. I'll try a modified version of this with students this year. Creating a good game is hard. Why reinvent the wheel. Have students use games that already work, but just change the content to fit your needs. This I know is the complete opposite of constructionism, but I feel it's an important step before asking a student to create a game that's meant to teach or make a point. I found this book during a lunch break that really helps non-game designers understand the challenges behind making an engaging game.
This is similar to the main challenge I find in helping students create effective digital stories. You need to teach them how to do it. Why not give them stories and ask them to find the images that match the script, making changes along the way to add their unique voice to the story. I plan to use this scaffolding approach often this year for most projects that require students to create any kind of interactive multimedia project.
There was also a lot of talk at the conference about using Scratch to create and share stories among students in various countries around the world. The Scratch website makes the sharing part easy. I'll be watching to see how people interpret "story" and look for opportunities to incorporate digital storytelling practices. I'll be sure to include Scratch in my presentation on current approaches to digital storytelling at the Asian Digital Storytelling Festival in September.
Hound Dog Farewell June 6, 2008
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Converting Essay to Digital Story: Lessons Learned May 27, 2008
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Let me get my ranting out of the way first. I hate Windows. And I hate MovieMaker. I'm getting my Made on a Mac tattoo re-inked this weekend. When it comes to creating multimedia projects on a PC, there are many options, but which ones are any good? I've yet to complete a project with a group of students on the PC that wasn't plagued by freakish glitches with file path names, program freezes, or just general computers behaving badly. In my test run of the program, I had few problems recording my voice over in Audacity, importing my audio and images, syncing everything, adding a title, and exporting the finished movie. But I've done this before. The key difference is that I did this all in one 90 minute long sitting. MovieMaker does something that makes it nearly impossible for students to work on a project over a few class periods. When students opened their projects on their second day, they were met with big red X's in place of their images and audio that they had spend an hour syncing the day before. Most times you can just double-click on the images and reconnect the path. It's misleading when you tell students to import their images and audio because that's not what MovieMaker does. It saves the target source. Why? In iMovie, when you import files becomes part of the project file. You don't have to worry about the file after that. Not with MovieMaker. If you move your images or audio files, you might as well start over.
I had switched to MovieMaker from Photostory because it was easier to adjust the length of time an image stays on the screen. Photostory also has that odd path name glitch. Very frustrating because it makes no sense and it's nearly impossible to explain to students. The tech savvy ones figure it out and can work around it, but for the rest of the class they become intensely frustrated and squander valuable editing time dealing with these PC pitfalls.
I just wrapped up a digital storytelling project where students converted an essay they wrote about a country in Africa. Instead of the usual Powerpoint (the only reliable multimedia tool for the PC) to share their work, the teacher wanted to try something new. I created a template to help students see how they could convert their thesis statements to focus questions of a story. The focus question set up a story that would follow one of the following story models: Cause-Effect, Compare-Contrast, Analyze-Persuade, Describe-Conclude. Bernajean Porter puts these types of digital stories in the Beyond Words category. Different from the personal narrative, but still meant to move the audience in some way. That part, writing and creating multimedia projects that do more than just regurgitate facts is the real challenge for students.
I knew this would be challenging for most of the students, but it's an important skill for them to acquire. The sample story I created helped many see what we wanted. Overall, I'm very pleased the with the final projects. I get a sense that they learned much more than just facts about the countries they researched. This project brings my total of student-produced digital stories to around 500. With each project, I learn many new lessons. Aside from my profound dislike of MovieMaker, I'll take much away from this round of digital stories.
Lesson #1 Using a wiki to provide feedback to students during the script writing process is an easy, valuable tool to include. Although only a few students used the wiki, it was really helpful to
them in improving the quality of their scripts. The discussion forum on Wikispaces was simple and effective.
Lesson #2 Students have no idea how to find images for ideas, concepts, emotions, etc. It was fun to peak
over their shoulders as they were punching into Google Images phrases such as "political corruption in Nigeria" or "economic strife." Students need lots of practice in activities like assigning captions to
pictures or finding images for sections of a script. These are the types of short visual and media literacy activities that are essential to developing strong digital storytelling skills.
Lesson #3: No matter how many times you show students how to use the basic components of a program only your top 10% will remember it when it comes time for them to apply what you've shown them (and that 10% probably is tech savvy enough to figure things out on their own). Students still need written instructions on the step-by-step approach to the basic steps like editing and importing images and audio. I probably could have created a short movie that walks them thru the steps, but I'm lazy these days. Next time.
Lesson #4: When editing, students need a mouse and a set of headphones. Looking around the classroom, watching the students all listening to their stories with headphones was a great snap-shot of really engaging project-based learning.
Lesson 5: You always need more time than you planned for. We had 80 minute classes, but it was a tight schedule. They only had two days of work on the computer. Students who tried to download MovieMaker at home only found frustration when the red X's appeared because of the lack of portability of the program.
Lesson 6: Students need to be taught how to name files with descriptors that help identify it. Many students opened MovieMaker, started working then saved their project as "Movie" or "soc studies prj."
I'm fairly certain that for most students this was the first time they've been asked to "tell a story" that moved the audience. Many came close. A few really nailed it. Some still don't know the difference between a story and a report. This takes practice. I think teachers often are reluctant to take on a project like this because the end results can be less than stellar. But this is when teachers need to be reminded that we often ask students to apply many skills repeatedly. Despite being assigned dozens of Powerpoint presentations in their school career, only a third of most classes have students creating engaging and effective presentations. I still remain convinced that a digital storytelling project forces students to develop, practice, and apply the wide range of visual and media literacy skills that will produce truly digitally literate students.
You be the judge. Here are a few of the completed projects:
Flashback to Yangshou May 5, 2008
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