Hey everyone --these tools look like loads of fun! Last fall I attended a attend a webinar about using free online software (Go!Animate, Blabberize, and Xtranormal) that was offered by ISTE/SIGMS. These are free, and as you know most everything ISTE offers has a big $$$ sign attached to it, so these are a great deal.
The presenter is Gwyneth Anne Bronwynne Jones, a teacher librarian, but lest you get the impression from her name that she's a prim and proper wallflower type --
Enter as a guest and type your first and last name.
If it's too cold or too hot for your kids to play outside and they're keen on animation, here's a free downloadable program called SqirlzMorph.
This is a little like the high tech version of what I used to see when my dad riffled through the pages of a "Big Little" book really fast and made the individual drawings on the corners of the pages dance for my little girl's eyes.
Here are two very different video examples of work done with this free program.
There are loads of tutorial videos in YouTube, and I'm going to have to take this one into school on my laptop (we're not allowed to install at school) to let my students test drive it. I'm doing some experimenting with giving them visual ways to remember times tables. These a older kids who need to pass trade tests and we're working on creating dynamic visuals that will help them stop counting because they can see the images in their minds.
Link to this week's Elluminate room: http://tinyurl.com/yhffesd Password (for speaker series only): credenda-wilkes Time: 5:30 p.m. PacificDaylight time
It's with great pleasure that I invite you to a conversation with Ian Jukes -- one of Canada's most passionate 21st century educators and self-professed education evangelist.
I first heard Ian speak about integrating computers into classroom work back in the late 80's or early 90's when he was a principal in a school in Whitehorse, Yukon,who had traveled south to tell a group of Surrey teachers how to use data bases creatively to enhance critical thinking skills in our students. Now he's away from home many weeks of the year helping educators all over the world understand why it's so vital for us to provide instruction to students in a way that will better promote their learning.
This is the second in the Tuesday group's speaker series. We haven't yet come up with a catchy name, but we meet online in Elluminate on Tuesdays to discuss our work in the Instructional media program -- to lend each other support with technical issues, to compare courses, and to challenge each other to put our learning to practical uses. If you'd like to join in and haven't yet been in a course where the link was provided, just let me know and I'll send it to you.
The time and link for the speaker series, however, are different. We'll be starting at 30 minutes early to give people in the east a chance to get to bed at a reasonable hour or to get in some last minute lesson prep (or catch the last half hour of The Biggest Loser).
This promises to be a challenging discussion. I hope you'll join us.
The next speaker coming to the Wilkes Tuesday group on April 13th (5:30 Pacific time) is Canada' own Ian Jukes, so I started this morning looking at his Committed Sardine blog. One of the contributors had posted something about Infographics which are charts, graphs, and visuals that can communicate data by turning it into information. If you like astoundingly big numbers these will grab you:
This week in 508, we've been looking at Howard Gardner's Chapter about developing the what he calls the "creating mind." Gardner has quite a narrow notion of what constitutes creativity. He writes that creativity is not a spirit or a feeling, but often grows out of synthesis and “breaks new ground” (p. 82). It is not the act of one person alone. The creating mind exerts an influence through innovations that become recognized in a particular domain (pp. 80-1). He seems to think of creativity not as a quality but as an action -- not something you are or have, but something you do that has a lasting impact on others.
I find myself often looking back at sections of the Cognition and Technology course (501) as I've been adding my replies to others' discussions. Recent neuroscience (catapulted forward by observers ability to use fMRI's to watch electrical impulses fire along people's brain's neurons) is telling us a lot about what happens in the brain when we are learning and even when we're making decisions. But what is known about how ideas develop? where they come from? what chemical and electrical signals in the brain we experience as the germination of an idea?
That took me to this piece below in an article in ISO50 about overcoming creative block by Alex Cornell. I think he's on the right track. Feeding the brain with as much thought-provoking stuff as you can must create the electro-chemical soup from which the big bangs we experience as ideas and inspiration explode.
I wonder though whether the development of the Newton Virus (or any virus for that matter) meets Gardner's criteria for creativity.
All of which take me back to Ian and one of the videos that presents some of his ideas about 21st century learners. One of his astounding statistics is that elementary teachers and parents and grandparents of the young children among us is are raising the first generation to grow up with a mouse in its hand.
This is a very belated thanks to Dan Pink who sat in on Wilkes Tuesday group a few weeks ago. I started this post by transcribing a lot of what he had to say, but have decided instead to post the link to the recording and follow it with verbal snapshots of some of his ideas. Dan believes that anything enduring or great in life (eg. a love affair!) began with a conversation and he's hoping, that conversation by conversation, we can build a world that is 'just plain better'. I know Dan's ideas found fertile ground in our audience and I suspect there will be "Fed Ex days" devoted undiluted autonomy popping up in more than a few classrooms. Thanks Dan for allowing us to pick your brains..
Too often business and education start from the wrong assumption: i.e. that were it not for carrots and sticks, people would just sit there -- inert. Interestingly, we do not feel that way about ourselves.
With even a 'rudimentary cognitive skill'. a higher reward leads to poorer performance.
On Autonomy:
'Management' is a very good way to get compliance, but a very poor way to get, engagement which can only be reached through self-direction.
Teachers have less autonomy than workers in any other white collar profession.
On Mastery:
People are engagement-seeking missiles and will find it in other realms of their lives when they can't get it in a traditional job (or classroom?).
The biggest motivator by far is making progress.
On Purpose:
Humans want to be part of something larger than ourselves.
If we really want people to do great work and prepare students for their future we need to move away from the outdated motivational technology and capitalize on people's drive to do things because they're interesting and contribute to the world. The more we do that, the more we will do right by our kids and make schools a congenial, challenging place to learn.
Purpose doesn't have to be big or transcendent. If kids can see the context for what they're studying and how it all fits in, there will be less need for coercive tactics or bribery to get them to perform.
On Extrinsic Motivation (carrots & sticks):
The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to unleash their third drive (instrinic/its own reward).
One of Dan's favourite writers is Carol Dweck (Mindset ; Self-Theories -1999 ): She puts foward 2 theories of intelligence: entity (fixed supply; can be measured by tests) vs growth (each encounter you have is a chance to increase your supply; people take more risks and engage in greater challenges). If you believe talent, capability, and intelligence can be grown, that takes you towards mastery. The entity theory precludes mastery for all but a very few.
The disengaged, aimless, purposeless kid is probably not that way in every realm of his/her life (music, sports, after school job, church group, volunteer activities). Often outside of class, kids are profoundly and passionately engaged. It's important to look at those kinds of things for hints about how to engage them: sense of collaboration, more freedom, can more clearly see progress, animated by a sense of purpose.
Standardized tests are impoverished measures of what it takes to be an educated person. A different kind of motivation can pay off on standardised tests. They're trying this in 'Big Picture schools' where individual curricula start from and are built around kids' interests.
What skills do kids need to be successful? Industry and business are looking for "multis" (-cultural, - disciplinary, -lingual) -- people who are "T's" with both depth and breadth. So let's equip students with great left brain abilities and right brain abilities so they're creative/conceptual thinkers. Let's be sure they have amazing work habits, that they care about others, are great collaborators, can span boundaries, can learn how to learn, and that they're persistent and persevering. That's a tall order ....
Any time there's a problem in North America we ask schools to solve it, then don't give them enough money and blame them when it's not solved.
Education seems to be making a concerted push right now on the second drive (reward/punishment) -- our schools are 'fighting the last war'.
Self assessment is an important habit of the heart. Grades have become a goal in themselves when they should be feedback on the road to mastery. Our (wrong) notion of kids as endlessly manipulable and fundamentally passive has led us to the (wrong) carrot/stick form of motivation. More promising will be to see them as little human beings who respond better to the third drive.
I have reached the 'arghhh' week in the 511 Video Production course. I have decided that although I love the editing part of the work, I am not a camera person at heart. I struggle to assess what's in the viewfinder of the camcorder with an educated eye, but I haven't figured out what the various light presets do which makes that difficult.
How is 'beach' different from 'snow'? or 'waterfall' different from 'profile'? (How often do you shoot a waterfall after all?) I have a colleague who says to look these things up in the manual, but there isn't much there to help me distinguish between them well enough to know what setting is best for say -- inside a white-walled living room on a sunny afternoon? That is where I did the shooting for the final project for this course. This week we have to look at all the footage and create a story board that goes shot by shot through the entire final video.
I did start with a shot list and a list of questions, but I've been reluctant to actually look at the footage because there isn't time to reshoot if I didn't light it correctly (there never was -- that would have tried my subject's patience too much) and I don't have the time to comb through it all this week before I get on the plane for Australia.
The conversation that I recorded was with my teaching partner and friend, Debra. We talk a lot about how we want to spend our last years in teaching and our early years out of it. She said she wanted to work at a local plant nursery because it isn't a people job. I used to say I wanted to tune pianos whenever the job got to be too much for me, but now I think I'd like to edit videos. The power that rests in your hands to pull the threads of a story together is amazing. You can literally put words in people's mouths by deftly rearranging what they've actually said to suit your own theme or purpose.
This week's slide show assignment has been fun from that point of view and I didn't have to take any of the pictures -- just find them and thread them together to create a story. Here is is for your comments and suggestions. I hope you enjoy it.
Back in November, when I was taking the Cognition course, one of the assigned texts was Daniel Pink's book: A Whole New Mind. As I wrote back then, this is a popular text in Wilkes courses. It's an interesting read. Even if you don't agree with everything Pink says, it will get you thinking about the importance of creating activities and strategies that will engage both sides of your students' brains to enhance learning, remembering, and responding. On Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 6 pm Pacific time (9 pm Eastern), Dan will be joining the Tuesday EDIM student group online to talk about his new book, Drive.
The Tuesday group (as I've come to think of us) was started by an EDIM student who is in his last course -- Vince Hill of Credenda Virtual School in Saskatchewan, Canada. He wanted to provide a way for EDIM students to meet and talk in real time once a week. For me the conversations have been a highlight of the program. As an "old school" person, I find I sometimes miss the interchange between students that takes place face to face in a local coffee shop after class. The discussion threads in the course Moodles are a great way to share ideas about a specific topic or question, and you do meet some of the same people in different courses, but the informal online meet-ups using Vince's Elluminate room give us a chance to share our successes, air our frustrations, ask questions about assignments to clarify expectations, and catch up with how everyone is doing. As was made so clear in the Cognition course (and in Dan's book), the social dimension of learning is an important one.
I know Vince is totally sold on the message in Dan's newest book. Vince is a thinking educator who generally doesn't use a lot of words to frame his ideas, but his latest blog post (Can we motivate students?Or do they have to be self-motivated?), an exploration of how Pink's ideas play out in education, is a long one. (When Vince writes upwards of 10 long paragraphs, you know he's excited about his topic. LOL!)
The issue of motivation has been troubling Vince for some time especially in his work with those of his students who don't attach much value to formal education. The underlying premise in Drive -- i.e. that extrinsic motivators don't work, have never worked and will never work -- makes huge sense to him. Vince sees extrinsic rewards (promising a screaming child an ice cream for good behaviour; paying students for perfect attendance; dangling a corporate carrot in front of a worker) as a form of negative reinforcement. In its true sense, "negative reinforcement" means increasing "the future probability of behavour" with a reward rather than diminishing it. The child comes to know that if he's bad, he'll get a treat; the student learns to comply when there's money on the line; the worker becomes dependent on bonuses as the reason to strive for superior performance. Vince's own experiences as an educator have been confirmed by the research and conclusions in Drive.
For Pink the true motive underlying the corporate world's use of extrinsic rewards is not to increase performance but to exert a form of control over the workforce. (Otherwise why would they persist in a practice that has such poor results?) He believes that the 21st century will be the era when finally companies' need for a passionate, creative, and dedicated employees will outweigh their desire to control. It will be economic suicide to continue to ignore the importance of self- (or intrinsic) motivation.
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation cannot co-exist. Jobs that make filling one's pocket the highest priority seldom also fill our souls. After all -- do we teach because it pays us top dollar for our skills and time or because we love our work? On the other hand, when we know our livelihood is on the line, do we comply with policies we feel are not in the best interests of our students and bury our passions so we can meet external expectations?
I hope you'll join us on Tuesday for what promises to be an engaging conversation with Dan Pink. Vince and Karena (our Wilkes academic advisor) will be hosting the event. I (SueH) will be monitoring the chat panel, so if you type in your questions I'll do my best to feed them to Dan. The session will be recorded and archived and I'll post that link here.
Please note: in the event that many more people come than we had originally expected, there may be a redirect from the first Elluminate room (when you arrive) to a second one on a larger server. Please bear with us as we iron out any wrinkles in the technology.
You'll need the latest version of Java installed on your computer. Vince has recommended that we all clear our Java caches (especially important if you attend a lot of Elluminate meetings), and have a USB mike if you think you may want to ask questions directly. Your normal computer mike will cause echoing and may be disabled by the tech crew. If you haven't used Elluminate before, you may want to login (any user name will do) a little early and be sure your mike and headset are configured to work correctly. The room will be open 30 minutes early.
I knew when I started the 511 course in Portable Video Production that I was in for trouble. My dad loved photography and wanted to teach his children how to use a camera and share his passion. I recall his giving me instruction about f-stops, apertures, and shutter speeds, and I also recall being quite baffled by it all. I'd try to remember what he said, but it seemed that as I got older any piece of equipment that had anything to do with image production became my nemesis. I accepted that photography would never be my thing.
When I was first teaching there were no photocopy machines. We had to write or type a worksheet by hand and then burn a stencil from that using a machine called a Thermofax (not a fax machine but an infrared heat device that is still used in tatoo parlours!)
The Thermofax would make a transfer, or 'spirit master', of the worksheet which was in turn laid onto the drum of the ditto machine. The copies were cranked out like this.
They were a distinctive shade of purple, and if you had to use them right away would still be damp and smelling of the alcohol used in the process.
Anyway, I could never remember the settings on the thermofax -- too hot? the stencil would burn; too cool? the worksheet would be so faint the kids could not read it. Now I can't remember the settings on the photocopy machine and when I try put a book in the wrong place or try to use an alternate tray, the machine reacts in a totally unpredictable way. So I knew that in a course using a moving camera I was going to be up against it, but having decided that I was too old to let past frustrations determine future pathways, in I plunged -- teeth clenched in determination to make this work.
Now I have to say that Frank Guttler, the instructor, is a man with endless patience. He obviously wants us to succeed more than he wants everything to be exactly right. He's the kind of teacher who can live with a few typos or errors in API style if he has students who are showing true improvement. He knows that for some of us (or at least for me) tackling this course is like going to live in an alien world and he's giving me plenty of credit for trying and the marks I need not to give up. He treats us more gently than we treat ourselves.
So yesterday while all my colleagues at school were out having fun in a pro-d workshop, I sat at my desk with my laptop and camcorder. After 2 hours I figured out that if I chose a camcorder setting that would give me footage suitable for the internet or emails and an aspect ratio exactly double that which is required by this course (seemed to make the most sense when I chose it), then the anti-shake function would be disabled. Do people who want to display their videos online or send them to their relatives in Australia have have steadier hands?
The next task was, as Frank had kindly suggested after he tried to view last week's assignment, to "play around with compression." The file was far too large for the course drop box, but the only solution I could find in Adobe Premier Elements 4 was to reduce the frames per second by half and the quality to 30%. This created a dog's breakfast.
Hour after hour ticked by, but finally at the end of the day, I decided to take a look at the mobile settings under the Share tab. I mean -- mobiles have small screens right? And there it was. Under the Mobile menu of Locations & Settings is something called of all things (oh! the irony) "Creative Zen." Creative Zen picks up the settings I have entered from the Export function under the File menu and packages the video into what seems to be a tiny, beautiful .wmv file.
I've sent a test to Frank via email (30+mb now down to a little more that 3), and i have my fingers crossed. It's calling itself a "Windows Media Audio/Visual" file. When I do a search for *.wmv, up pops my test sample. I think I can finally meet the criteria of file size and format without sacrificing quality.
Interestingly when I was coaxing a student through the toughest unit in her math course on Tueseday, I told her it was as if she was on the last 750m of the Grouse Grind (a local attraction). She just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and not give up on herself.
And that's why I took this course -- to feel the fear and do it anyway. It's my Grouse Grind.
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