Play online or download the screensaver. Slide icons from beneath the grey box onto the characters' shirts to add sounds to the performance. Click on a character to get rid of the sound and try another combination. After you have a few 'voices' going, clicking 'Shuffle Mode" will fill in the group automatically. When you insert "an instrument," a yellow bonus icon appears. Clicking that brings up an 'angelic' chorus. I found that opening the Incredibox in several windows at the same time allows you to have more than one version of the same voice going. If you screen-recorded different combinations, you could experiment with bringing various voices or groups in at selected intervals as a way of composing music.
This seems to offer some creative educational opportunities for collaborative team building, but it may just be (to paraphrase the guys on CarTalk) a great way to waste a few perfectly good minutes.
I'm heading back inworld this weekend to the 4th Annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference. Nunarya Fairlady/I'll haven't spent much time in SL lately so we/she/I?'m going to explore some of the venues today and tomorrow. I need to practise getting around without bumping into people again. Here are some links that will help you find your way in: conference gateway and schedule, main website, Tree TV portal to live media coverage. There are a number of tours to other virtual venues, but you'll need to have the software installed ahead of time and avatar chosen if you want to participate.
[Drat -- my keyboard has gone glitchy and I inadvertently deleted the first part of this. I hope I can reconstruct it.]
I've been watching the Salaman Khan (of the Khan Academy) TED talk about better math learning through technology. Khan is a hedge fund manager turned math educator who has observed over his 5 years in the field that too many good students with good math teachers reach a point when for them prior achievement is no longer a predictor of future success. To a kid it can can feel like their quota of math success has been used up. From the outside it may seem that once their fund of math knowledge is longer a dependable platform for new learning, they turn into 'overnight unsuccesses'.
Khan has a great metaphor for what he (and I concur) believes is the underlying cause of this for most kids. He blames it on the holes in "the Swiss cheese" of kids' math learning that keep building throughout their foundation. Most of the kids I asked over the years said that this started happening for them in grade 5. I suspect that by then that the survival tactics (eg. finger counting) many kids develop to do arithmetic can't hold up under the demands of complex arithmetical questions. Over the next few years, a pattern of giving up on learning first one skill and then another evolves until a critical mass of failure is reached and they have a math melt down. From then on unless they get some effective intervention, they come to accept failure as the norm in math and begin to plan their lives around this deficit.
Khan wants to change math classes from being an environment characterised by an acceptable level of failure to one where the expectation is mastery. I think taken to it's logical conclusion this would mean the end of 'Remedial' or 'Essentials' or "A&W" (Apprenticeship and Workplace) courses which have, in a way, become a systematized acceptance of failure. We dress these courses up with nice names and convince ourselves and the public that they are in the best interests of the child, but they're still the system's way of saying: "You've now not learned enough math to prove that our past expectations of you were too high. Here's your ticket to the easier course. Just struggle for a couple more years and you can get out of math forever!!"
Khan's solution is to arm teachers with the data they need to know immediately when a student has become stuck and to increase what he calls the "student to valuable human time with the teacher" ratio so little sticking points don't turn into big holes in the cheese. I'm not sure if I buy his entire vision, but the fundamental shift to continuously collecting feedback to guide instructional decisions is critical. If I were the queen of teaching, I'd put an end to teachers demonstrating correct solutions on the board after quizzes and tests. Unless the students actively find out where their mis-learning has occurred and fix it, what carries forward is recall of the error or of an incompletely learned skill. I'd forgo 'scatter gun' homework assignments in favour of assigning fewer questions and looking at them more deeply to assure myself and the child that the work of learning a particular skill was done.
I think Khan's technological solutions can help, but first we need to make the fundamental shift (as he has) to believing that we are seriously underestimating people's ability to learn math. Then the work of preventive math dentistry -- of detecting and filling little learning cavities to be sure all kids leave school with a full set of math teeth -- can begin.
Attending a conference virtually can be disappointing to say the least. If the presenters cannot see their own session through the eyes of the virtual audience, at home participants can be left unable to see the media on the screen or watching endless footage of groups working together in a room. I had as many as 3 different Educon 2.3 sessions up at a time, and the best one -- What's Wrong with this Picture -- I saw was by Dean Shareski and Darren Kuropatwa.
Participants were invited to "create video and/or images that concretely demonstrate how understanding the content is informed and molded by how we consume that content and communicate visually". We were asked to tell a lie.
From Dean's blog: "Darren and I wanted to see if we could get our participants to play and explore with ideas around imagery. We were a little concerned it may not work due to time constraints, equipment and simply because it's not normally the format at the conference. We were both blown away with the quality, imagination and thinking that went into their work. ... Upon return the conversation about critical thinking, media literacy, quantity vs quality emerged. The strong takeaway for me was that a little play can lead to important conversations. " Participants were asked to create 'forced perspective' images.
Here's a collection with a similar premise from the Life Magazine Archives: Real or Fake?
It's set up like a game where the audience can vote, see how they measure up to other viewers, and find out the right answer. I guess this one gives new meaning to the phrase: 'elephant in the room'.
As I prepare for my own next conference, I find myself thinking back to this session and asking myself what made their mix 'just right'. They set the scene for learning from their own experiences, drew participants into a dialogue so the learning would be more personal, gave us enough time to create something new and interesting, kept the technology simple enough that it promoted learning rather than becoming a barrier to participation, and summarised the experience. I almost expected to be sent away with a homework assignment at the end (LOL). This session was proof of the fact that -- technology notwithstanding -- there are old school teaching skills that endure.
Have you ever wondered how to break up a long pdf file and save just a few pages? Today I"m beginning work on a project for the JUMP Math people.This video is long, but until someone edits a new one from several of John's training sessions, it will have to do. His main point is that the bell curve is a social construct that we have come to believe and rely on to justify failure of huge numbers of students to fulfill their potential to be good at math (video link). The information on JUMP Math starts about 15 minutes into the video.
I want to put some of the JUMP demonstrations into a format that will work on a SMART Board and attach the pertinent pages from the Teacher's Guide to the Notebook file. Some of their guides are over 100 pages. They are treasure troves, but because they're so long, a lot of teachers using JUMP without any training plunge in without reading the guides. The problem with that is the heart and soul of about how to follow the JUMP model is in those guides. Without that information, JUMP Math can come across as just another set of workbooks. Armed with the information in the guides you can transform math teaching and learning into an art that captures the imaginations of the kids and meets the goals of teachers.
JUMP is a charity dedicated to helping teachers and students bust down the barriers to math learning. The materials are free to download and share. It's possible to apply for funds to set up math camps for kids during the holidays and for action based research that will provide them with more data to help them understand what it is about JUMP that works.
Here's how I made a new pdf file with just 4 pages from the original (video link). [Please note: the last frame on the video just shows that I did my screen recording with an old version of Snagit.]
To highlight multiple pages, click and hold down your control key.
You'll need something like the free version of Cute PDF Writer or Printer installed on you computer so that when you save the selected pages in the document, the computer can create a new pdf file for them. There are a number of pdf programs out there but Cute is reliable and the price is right.
DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR USE 'pdf 995'. It just about killed my computer and was almost impossible to uninstall.
Modeling ethical behaviour and attitudes to our students is one of a teacher's greatest responsibilities. Teachers who aren't sure where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable public comment lies without having it written up as a school board guideline ought to do some serious soul-searching. On a personal level, all we need to do is ask ourselves who could be hurt if the information in our blogs became widely public. Professionally, we have a duty of confidentiality to the young people in our care -- no matter how challenging their behaviour or less-than-respectful their attirutes are. Any communication which breaches either of those trusts is unacceptable whether teachers feel their comments are justified or not.
Ms. Monroe still insists that she did nothing wrong. As my students often did when I caught them saying something hurtful, in her most recent blog post of Feb. 12 she tries to pass her comments off as a 'joke." She also paints herself as mystified by the tempest her "casual blog" has caused and as misunderstood because "the crazies" (students and parents probably aided by the press) who "tracked her down" tried to make her look bad by focusing public attention on the negative stuff she posted. She implies that if we knew the whole story and read all her posts, we'd see her as the proud and dedicated teacher she really is -- one who soldiers on in her teaching work like a salmon swimming upstream against the flow of "more and more, students [who are] are coming in less willing to work, to think, to cooperate." But if Ms. Monroe stands by her words, why has she deleted her blog's archives?
Despite her assertions to the contrary, she seems now to be in damage control mode. In her ABC interview (scroll to bottom), she said she started the blog at a friend's suggestion as a way for them to keep up better.
Good one, Ms. Monroe. When in trouble, blame a friend for getting you into it!!! Have you never heard of email? She is now claiming that the students alluded to in her blog were "caricatures of students she'd had over the years" (from the ABC interview) and that she "kept things as anonymous as possible" (from Feb. 12 blog). Read this blog passage from Jan. 29, 2010 (with bold/red emphasis added by me), and judge for yourself.
"After showing them how to set up their answer sheets, I said to the class, "And I would remind you of our honor day activities and the honor pledge. We didn't just do that for fun. Remember what we talked about. And if you were planning on doing anything untoward--[and I looked RIGHT at the girl in the pink and the kids around her]-- DON'T. [She averted her eyes immediately!] Because I WILL give you a zero, and I WILL call your parents, and I WILL talk to your other teachers about you. And I won't trust you anymore. And it's awfully early in the semester to lose my trust. So, even if you may have been tempted because you perhaps didn't prepare enough or are worried because it's the first quiz, DON'T cheat." While quizzing, I stood behind the pink-shirted gal and her area for a good 4 minutes ...".
Ms. Monroe is not the 'Julian Assange' (Wikileaks founder) of the educational blogging community. She is simply a jaded teacher who felt was pushed too far and blurted out a lot of stuff that she should have kept to herself or dealt with on a one-to-one basis with parents and administrators. I think her frustration turned into a sort of arrogance. In the blog posts I read, she seems to be looking down on her students and even her colleagues from her own little acre of moral high ground.
Although I'm guessing that her lawyer would have her deny this, I suspect Ms. Monroe hoped her writing would resonate with some readers somewhere. She said in the ABC interview that she was just blogging "for fun, anonymously, for her [7] friends," but it would only have taken a few clicks of the mouse for her to change the settings and permissions and ensure that her blog, which she claims was "not [meant] for mass consumption," remained truly private and restricted to only readers she chose. Whether Ms. Monroe wanted to reach other like-minded educators (which has now happened because she's up to over 400 followers from 7) or touch the heart of an uncaring public, clearly she needed something to change.
However, as the old adage goes, you have to be careful about what you wish for. Unfortunately this teacher's stinging words have not softened the attitudes of the people she most wanted to reach. Those students and parents will be very unlikely to show more respect to their teachers in future. The cause of hard-pressed educators has not been well served. Ms. Monroe herself may find it impossible to connect positively with any students (if she keeps her job at all or can get another after the furor and court cases have gone away). As tough as kids today seem, they still value trust relationships with their teachers and betrayal of this trust creates a wound which is almost impossible to heal.
When it comes right down to it, Ms.Monroe was supposed to be the adult, but she acted out -- just like the worst of her students -- and got caught. Her blogging was not honorable. Let me quote from her Jan. 29, 2010 , blog again -- here she's writing about taking the school's honor pledge seriously:
"So I designed an entire block's worth of activities .... I figured that if I spent 90 minutes on this topic up front on the second day of class, that they'd realize how important it is. We talk about honor and what it means. We talk about why we sign our names to documents and how on a contract, the signature is legally binding. We discuss reputations, how easy it is to go from a good to bad reputation (and how difficult to go from bad to good), and how much nobody wants a bad reputation. We talk about trust and the value of a good name. ... Honor isn't stuff to me. Honor is a driving force. Honesty, integrity, and one's good name aren't things that happen to you, but things that one earns and should value and aspire to and wish to keep."
Ms. Monroe -- I'm with your kids on this one. If you can "give myself a free pass of conscience" (Feb. 12) when you feel justified, how can you blame your kids when they do the same? After all, they learned it from their teacher. Before you set foot in a classroom again, I suggest you let your defenses down and reread some of those deleted blog entries and the students' comments. Use your English teacher skills to delve beneath the cuss words and ask yourself what they might have been feeling that would have caused them to lash back so harshly. As you wrote on Feb. 12:
"The truth hurts sometimes. Maybe instead of getting pissed off at the person pointing out the behavior, people need to examine their behavior and make a change. Better to know now before the Ghost of Christmas Future shows up."
I'm paging through the OZ/NZ educators' Diigo group today and they share some interesting links, but there are two I passed on to a Social Studies teaching friend of mine
The first is a link to a Google Template created by Derrick Wadell.
It's so students can create a faux Facebook page for a famous person. This template is not connected to any actual Facebook account so is safe and user friendly. It works inside a Google Doc, so offers students an interesting way to collaborate to develop the profile of a historical figure. They can insert an image (try a Wikimedia Commons search first), but will have to add text boxes of their own to add their research to the right slots. (See "Facebook for Dead People" post in Richard Byrne's blog.)
The other is a new service from Life Magazine. Students can now view or create pictorial timelines using Life's photos or their own.
"With LIFE.com’s Timelines, you can unlock LIFE’s legendary archive of more than 10 million images — or choose pictures from your own collection — and put together photo essays to share with family and friends."
There's even a way to do a futuristic timeline of events that haven't yet occurred. I like the idea of them doing their own artwork and creating an interesting storyline or starting with historical photos, going through the present with Life and then projecting into the future with artwork.
History never seemed to be about real people or events when I was in school in the -- just lists of characters I was supposed to care about but didn't. I think using these kinds of tools would have breathed some life into history for me.
Wilkes University
Posts
