Teach42

I got here a little late, but I’m thrilled that Prensky is doing a presentation. If you haven’t heard of him, stop reading and go visit his site.

i’m not sure how he started, but right now he’s giving an overview of the Native/Immigrant theory. Those of us that didn’t grow up with the internet (myself included) have an ‘accent’. People who distinguish between online and offline. “Real life” is just as real online as it is off.

Teaching is not the same as learning. Learning takes effort. We’re not exactly sure how it hapens, but it can either feel like work or it can feel like play. It feels like play when you have engagement. Kids know what engagement feels like. Engaged learning is active and passionate.

Just using technology does not mean that the kids are going to be engaged. Students say “Whenever I go to school I have to power down.” “I’m bored in class 99 percent of the time.”

From Mark, “For today’s kids ot learn, engagement is more important than content.” There’s a charged statement. I can really get behind it, I’m just not sure I would have had the balls to state it like that.

“Content won’t help students to learn throughout their lives, but engagement will.” Mark seems to be the master of the sound byte, and that’s what his Powerpoint is.

It’s effective. The difference between analogue and digtal technology, is that digital is programmable. You can tweak it to do what you want it to do. So the question is, how do we empower students to do that sort of thing?

“Programming is the literacy of the future.” I don’t agree with that one. It’s not programming. It’s critical thinking and logical process. I’m not a programmer, but people think I am because I can think things through critically, experiment, analyze the results and adjust accordingly. If he’s talking about programming abstractly, then that might work for me.

Today’s students are not ADD, they’re just not engaged. Does an engaged child look like an ADD child? That’s an interesting idea. ADD students are the ones that aren’t engaged by the traditional methods of teaching. They aren’t engaged, and they’re ticked. Which leads to disruption.

When we say, “Stop playing and get started on your school work. You’re wasting your time, money and braincells”, it enrages the students. It doesn’t take the work they’re doing that appears to be play seriously. And often the work they’re doing on their own is incredibly deep and meaningful. After school, they get their real education in 21st century learning. During the day they get yesterdays education, after school they get future learning.

If technology is the new literacy, then many teachers are illiterate.

Disrespect is at the root of many of our problems. Students don’t think they’re respected by their teachers, and consequently they don’t respect them in turn. So what can we do about that?

1. Foster the message, we are all teachers and we are all learners. 2. Teachers should teach using tools that they can’t ever master. Technology comes and goes, don’t try to stay ahead. Just use it, even if you haven’t mastered it. Use unfamiliar tools. Don’t waste your time learning the stuff because the kids can do it!

Wow, this is fantastic. How do teachers use tools that they don’t understand and haven’t mastered. Wikipedia: Assign them to create an entry. Evaluate it for contenet, journalism, use of multimedia, and creativity, and then teach them about search vs. research, fair use vs. plagarism. That’s the lesson. The lesson for IM is about formal language versus informal language. Do you need to be a master of IM? Of course not, the students will figure that part out.

3. Learn from games.

Kids want the games, not just because their games, but because they’re intellectual stimulation that they don’t get from us.

Why is there so much negativity about games? Nobody seems to want to stand behind them. Why? When digital immigrants were growing up, games were trivial. They were casual, simple. Card games, dice games, etc. Minigames. And most educational games that are available today are Minigames. They don’t do much. They last a few minutes to a couple hours. AMEN. That’s not what the kids play. Kids play complex games. Games that take 8-100 hours.

Are sports important to school? Of course. Well, games are intellectual sports.

People say, what about the graphics? How can we create something that compares? We don’t have to. We aren’t fighting a war of graphics, we’re fighting a war of ideas.

Kids are learning to collaborate, they’re learning teamwork, to take risks, ethical and moral decisions, lateral thinking, persistence, scientific deduction, management, to master and apply new skills quickly, etc…

People who played video games as kids who are now in busines often cite it as a reason for their success. Doctors who played video games (a specific type of surgeon) commit 37% fewer mistakes.

There are four ways we can use games in instruciton: Use commercial games, use custom games made for education, talk about games in class (bring the conversation to class), use complex game design principles to create engaged instruction.

He’s going through a ton of games that are available on the market right now that fit for education perfectly. Everything from the Sims, to Civilization, to the Tycoon series to Typing of the Dead.

SocialImpactGames.com Lists them all on the site.

Here are the issues though. there are no curricular games yet. Yet is the operative word, they’re coming. The second issue is that classrooms are not designed for electronic games. Not just physically, but organizationally. How do you teach when your students are all at different levels and doing different things? Gotta be creative and inventive. You could have students play outside class and synthesize it inside class. Also, use complex game principles. Game designers have figured out how to engage kids. So learn from them.

Key things to take from game design: Engagement, goals, decision making, gameplay, leveling up, adaptivity, iteration

I’m a little distracted right now, just had another one of those “Might be brilliant, might be stupid” thoughts and had to get it down. Sorry I don’t have many details from that previous list.

Teachers are used to content first, students want engagement first.

Focus on the goals, focus on the decisions, focus on the levels kids go through so they can make themselves better, and focus on the iteration.

“What can you learn from a cell phone, almost anything!” Article of his, I need to look up.

No more battery life!

Had to quit there but there wasn’t too much left. Fantastic speaker though. You can find his site at MarcPrensky.com, and it’s definitely worth a visit. He definitely gave me plenty to think about. Great way to close off the conference.

technorati tags:blc, blc06, games, education, prensky

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I’ve never seen Joyce Valenza present, but many people have pointed her out to me this trip and said that she was worth seeing.

She lays down some ground rules at the beginning and one of them is that if you’re going to blog about her session, please ‘blog kindly’. So I’ll try to be gentle here.

Heh, I’ve never seen a group of people in a workshop all sing together. She’s saying that Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing” should be our new anthem. She played a clip and astonishingly enough, people actually sang along. Then again, these ARE educators. We’re a bold bunch.

Users are changing, technology is changing, so we need to change accordingly. “Our kids lives are seemless”. She wants to be a window on their desktop and open all the time. She wants to blend the virtual with the face to face.

Gen X’ers spend 6.5 hours per day using technology. She quotes some research from Griffiths and Brophy, and PEW. I’ve never heard of the former, gotta look that up and see what they have to say.

We need to make our systems smarter. Instead of labeling things the way we think they should be, we need to start using ‘tags’ that make sense to the people using them. We know our users, we need to tailor our learning landscapes to meet their needs.

What can we do that can’t be outsourced to Bangalore? What can we do that Google can’t? Personalized service, with knowledge of the learner, tailored to their needs.

Put tools no more than two clicks away from a learner. Independance and intervention are critical.

She’s sharing mciu.org/~spjvweb, the ‘front door’ of her library on the web. It looks like her daughter drew the front page, which is very cool. Warm and friendly, which is a much better motif for a library then technological and sterile.

Ok, I know I said I’d be gentle, but I do have to throw out one small critique. There’s alot of unnecessary animation in the Powerpoint that’s cute, but detracts from her presentation. Flowers growing, and specific phrases slowly zooming in, they should probably be eliminated. After she’s made a point of verbally focusing our attention on a phrase, and then afterwards when she tries to go to the next slide, she first has to wait for the slow zoom to finish. It’s kind of distracting. And she’s doing a fantastic job of emphasizing the things that need to be brought out already. She’s a dynamic presenter, so her Powerpoint doesn’t need to be. Ok, back to the session.

She’s just gone through some examples of how some of the organizational processes of the library could go virtual and be more effective than doing them personally. It’s cheap to put information out there, and an easy way to get feedback and suggestions in a safe anonymous way.

Her site has got a ton of resources for students and for teachers, for content, curriculum and professional development. She also has an Online Research guide. And all the tools are available to pull off her site for teachers to use.

She collaborates with the media class at her school and ‘hires’ them to create content for the media center. When somebody asked how she orients students to the virtual library, she said that she has her students create the virtual library tour. Best way to learn is to teach it, right?

Students create pathfinders as they do research to keep track of it all and to show the path they used to find their resources. I dig that. The example that she’s showing emphasizes that they aren’t just using the internet, but also offline resources and a wide variety at that. Blog as bibliography. Very dynamic and much more robust. Dig that.

Have you ever heard of book-trailers? I haven’t but I love the idea. People have created online trailors for books they’ve read and made them available for other students. How cool is that? I would love it if every book that I looked up on my library’s website or even Amazon.com had a trailer. I’m a big fan of that idea. Very practical, and it could easily be done for every book your students read.

How are you going to interact with your students? FAQ’s? IM? Email? Blog? Podcasts? Most of the time students need their answers when the library isn’t open. Being available really takes advantage of teachable moments and makes powerful impression upon the students. And she points out that most of the questions students ask take less than 30 seconds to respond to.

This is a great point. She doesn’t want to see every library site converted to blog format. While she’s thrilled to be posting library news and sharing new content regularly, most of the people who are visiting the website have a purpose and want to get to specific tools. She wants those to be the highlight, the center, the focus of the site. The most valuable pages on the site were documentation guides, search tools, and the online catalog / OPAC. So build the site around getting people to those quickly. Then weave the other stuff in around it.

From feedback she’s gotten, just having links to the offline sites and databases isn’t enough. The icons don’t give any information about what their purpose is. “I don’t care what the name of the database is, I want to know what it DOES.” That’s a really good point that often gets overlooked.

SHe’s showing some some sites that are reprinting books, high quality educational content, and sites to search and find them. Her point is that these sites are much more educational rich for students to be using than what they might happen to find on the front page of Google. GALE.

Ok, here’s an interesting idea for a browser feature that might have some potential. A student does a Google search. They find a site that doesn’t quite suit their needs, but they find a link that takes them to a site that takes them to a site that takes them to a page that actually has the information that they want. All they’re going to bookmark is that last page, and that’s what’s going to be sited. While that may cover them for their bibliography, it could be very userful for teachers to see the PATH that students took to get there. So imagine a button in a search engine that grabs a breadcrumb trail that a user took to get to the current page. NOT the history, because students often go in 20 directions at once, so a straight history won’t work. But some sort of a bookmarklet that will copy out the trail a user took to arrive at the current page. Something that shows the search words used, and then the path that they followed. I think that could be incredibly valuable information for teachers, for other students, and might be a strong addition to a bibliography. Not just what you used, but how you got there. Anybody think that could be userful?

Hehe, she just mentioned unitedstreaming and that every library must have a subscription to it. It feels damn good to work for a company that educators are passionate about and evanglize for voluntarily.

This is truly a whirlwind overview of everything a virtual library can be. There’s way too much information to summarize. However, thankfully everything that she’s showing is online. Heck, nearly every slide in the Powerpoint is basically link after link after link. So if this is resonating with you at all, you’ll have to visit her site and spend a few weeks exploring. The one thing you’ll miss out on is just how animated and passionate she is about what she’s sharing. There’s no question, she’s a true believer. I’m guessing it’s not too unusual to find her working late into the night helping other librarians get their start with this stuff just out of the goodness of her heart, because she loves doing it. Not only doing it, but sharing it. I can see why people reccomended that I see her present, her excitement is contagious.

Her del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/joycevalenza. I’m guessing that it’s going to be something worth subscribing to if she uses it.

She’s sharing a ton of open source stuff now, and mentioned one that I hadn’t heard of. In fact a few, PrimoPDF, and FreeMind (I hope the URL’s are correct, I’m offline right now) are going to have to be added to my Office 2.0 presentation. Free PDF creator and free version online Inspiration.

Her blog is joycevalenza.edublogs.org, website is mciu.org/~spjvweb and direct link to the Powerpoint mciu.org/~spjweb/landscape.ppt

technorati tags:blc, blc06, library

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When he creates projects with his students, they use a system comprised of four P’s: Planning, producing, producing and Pheedback. Each P has a series of steps, and he has podcasts that outline every step of the way, designed by and for TEACHERS.

He introduced the presentation by sharing a video that students made focusing on what they didn’t like about the school environment they’re learning in, and what they’d like to see done differently. The basic message in a nutshell was, students feel empowered and want to take more control of their learning using every tool at their disposal, and instead they’re immersed in a traditional lecture/lab environment. They feel stifled. These are former students of his who are now in universities. They created the movie across campuses, never even working face to face at all. They transfered files back and forth and made it happen.

The credits from the movie were incredibly creative. It was essentially an iChat between one of the students and Marco, with Marco asking questions like “Who edited the film?” and the student responding “Oh, we each took turns. Jim, John, Juan, Chung and Chaim each did a piece.” A great example of making something mundane, innovative.

The target audience for the video wasn’t teachers actually, it was other students to get them thinking along these lines and to encourage them to start having these conversations on their own campuses.

Interesting, he says that all of the movies he showed during the keynote, had production times of a single day. Longer was spent planning them and storyboarding, but the actual production took a very small amount of time.

Typically teachers gather a tremendous amount of footage. At his school, they actually log and archive all of their raw footage so that they can use it again without having to go get it again. He encourages people to train your eye, to change the way you see symbols in the world.

Heh, he just showed a two minute trailor for a movie and asked us to count the ‘cuts’. Two minutes. 211 cuts. Wow. He reccomends that you think about what type of movie this is going to be and write down what sort of tone will be appropriate for it. For example, this was an action movie, so a frantic pace is appropriate. 211 cuts. A dramatic movie that that is more heartfelt might have a more leisurely pace.

He just showed a commercial for Powerbar. 30 seconds, 29 cuts. One cut per second. Typically people when they go to shoot their video they shoot incredibly lengthy clips. 10-20 minutes nonstop. It’s more effective to use large numbers of brief clips and get cut together to convey a message.

He keeps saying that he’s got a podcast about this that takes you step by step. I wonder if they’re actually podcasts or if they’re video podcasts. Hmmm….

He’s pointing out that it helps to draw out the scene, where each person is, and then having your students draw out where the cameras are going to be to get the shots they want.

There are three main shots. Long, medium and close ups. Wide shots communicate the stage, setting and background. They establish the scene. They provide context and show where it’s happening. If your students use wide shot to depict something emotional, the student is making a ‘grammatical mistake’. For the most part, they should be using a close up. That’s not to say that a long shot can’t be used to convey emotion, but if it is it should be done very deliberately and they better be able to justify why they used it.

Mid shots convey what is happening. It’s the verb. The action shot. Dialogue, but not emotional dialogue.

The close up shot is called the headless shot. You usually cut off the top of people’s heads because you’re most concerned about the eyes. You’re trying to capture what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling.

Moving on, if you’re going to shoot a movie, you have to have good light. If you don’t have light, you don’t have your images. Composition is also critical. You have to know what you’re trying to communicate. Sound makes a huge difference. It must be very clear.

Light: The color white can be friend or foe. You have three colors in digital imagery. White is in the middle and sets the tone. Most cameras will take an average from the room and will base colors based on what it assumes the white to be. White balancing can change the image dramatically. Often students try to get fantastic backgrounds and don’t pay attention to the light. The actual subjects wind up completely blacked out because of it.

If you hold up your hand and try to spin around until you see the place where your hand is brightest, that’s where you want your subject to be.

The best time to shoot is during the morning and late in the afternoon. The light is at an angle, so it’s possible to get nice soft light. If you’re shooting in the middle of the day, shoot in the shadows because your light is even. The best time to shoot is actually when it’s cloudy, because it’s ‘even’ light. The camera amplifies all the little stuff. So if it looks a little dark, it’s going to be super dark on camera and even worse when projected.

Another tip: Buy a tripod. Keep the camera movement to a minimum. Pan, tilt or zoom only for a purpose.

Sound. Sound or music makes or breaks your movie. The microphone is usually on the camera. You need a quiet place to record your voice overs, like a closet, car, something small and enclosed if possible. The mic needs to be close to the sound source. Make use of handhelds, booms and lavalieres. Get headphones so you can always hear eactly what you’re recording so you know if you’re getting it or not.

Other tips: Get permission forms, let the authorities know that you’ll be filming in that area. Or call the local film commission. At first they’ll be confused, but then they’ll be impressed and thankful that you did. Shoot multiple takes and note them on the storyboard. Seperate the shots using a slate/clapboard.

“No amount of technology can make a bad movie good.” — plaque at Pixar.

Websites with resources are at sfett.com, torres21.com and flickschool.com

technorati tags:blc, blc06, Digital Storytelling

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