Thing 10: Digital Storytelling

This has been the most hellacious assignment so far.  It wasn't the technical aspects as much as the concept for the video.  I just couldn't think of anything I wanted or could do in the time allowed in my life.  I then ran into an article on the 7 Stages of Grief and it struck me that I was using some of the same behavior in dealing with this assignment.  The seven stages gave me a structure with which to figure out a short film.  It is not course or teaching related.  I didn't figure out what to do until Thursday and then didn't finish it until Saturday.  It is a short film with the components you required, but I have not shown it to anyone.  Outside of you, I don't think anyone will ever see it, though they are certainly welcome to.  I am sorry if it doesn't meet all the requirements of Assignment 10, but I just had to get it done and move on to the next assignments.  Sometimes you just do what you can do and get on with the rest of what is required.

Here is a link to the video 7 Stages of Grief About a Video

Thing 9: Digital Images

Below is a photo of me taken with the Photobooth application on my Mac. It was uploaded to Picasa.

This is a photo of me taken with the Photobooth app on my Mac with the internal camera.

This is the photo of me after being edited at Picnik.

The photo above was cropped, resized, had the contrast and exposure altered, a drop shadow added and the HDR effect applied.  The link to my catalog of photos (such as it is) is here. I could see myself using the tools to jazz up some photos of paintings or sculpture for my philosophy class to give them some pizzazz.  Of course I would only use images that I had permission to alter.  The coolest use of photo editing software I have seen this year is from one of our social studies teachers who knows something about Photoshop and taught her kids edit a photo of themselves into an historic WWI photo.  Some of the kids are in the trenches, some are in planes, etc.  I don't know if there is an online tool that cuts layers out of a photo. 

 

Thing 8: Copyright and Creative Commons

I gave my students the Copyright quiz I created last week Tuesday.  It was a paper and pen quiz because we didn't have access to computers.  This afternoon I uploaded the quiz questions to Google Docs so you can look at them if you wish. I have two small classes, but the number of kids didn't matter. Most followed the video fine, but did poorly on the quiz.  As a media specialist as well as a classroom teacher, I thought I had done some solid work on teaching kids something valuable about copyright.  Well, the quiz demonstrated that I hadn't done such a good job. After we saw the video and took the quiz, we had class discussions about what main points were made and the questions they asked were astonishing.  They do truly believe they have a right to copy pretty much anything they want and use as much of it as they want for as long as they want.  This summer I will have to use the sites for this lesson to build a much more useful set tools and lessons for me and our teachers to use in the classroom.

I have copyrighted my AP World website using the Creative Commons tools and below is a picture of the welcome page with the copyright notification. What I haven't quite figured out yet, is how to change the html snippet to change the font and size of the type for the text. 

Thing 7: Hands On Activity and Capstone Reflection

Here is the address to the website I created for my AP World History course.   http://web.me.com/infolit/whap/
I had started it last fall, but during the course of the recent weeks (and because of the needs of this assignment) I have added substantially to it.  It is by no means complete, but I have the essential components for the class at the site.  I have tried to create sites that were easy to update and add to and that weren't limited by the rudimentary tools of the district-endorsed host, School Center.  I have yet to find a design or collection of materials that make a site I have created a "must-go-to" place that my students will check regularly.  It has been very much a challenge to get my students to use whatever site I create.  The link above is my latest version of a AP world history site.  I am hoping this one is seen as more useful to the kids.
In the past, I have tried to create a blog for each course, but there were rarely used.  Partly because of technical issues within the district and partly because of lack of interest, my previous blogs went pretty much unused.  One of the biggest reasons I started a Facebook page was because it was a simple means to communicate with a significant portion of my students.  In terms of getting information out to most of my kids, Facebook has proven to be more useful than a dedicated course blog.
I take these courses with you, Ron, because they force me to think out of my normal word and text-based methods of instruction and learning.  I get encouraged to try new things and to discover the new things out there.  I also receive local encouragement from Kelly Kermode at Eastern.  She has been very good at helping me find and try new things. 
Presently, I am having my philosophy students use My Fake Wall to create a fake Facebook page of conversation posts between Rene Descartes and other "friends" and "adversaries" from the Enlightenment.  The posts will revolve around his philosophy and his life.  It will be a "tree free" assignment where they have to send me a link to their Descartes page.  The entire assignment is not "tree free", however.  The description of what I wanted and how it will be assessed was printed out on a single page.  I will look at each of their pages and send them a grade by email.  We use CIMS for our grade management software (hopefully for the last year) and will file their grades digitally from home. 
Most of the class are seniors in their last 3 weeks of high school and I am really enthusiastic with how they have taken to the assignment by using the fake Facebook site.  Previously it had been a challenge for me to get them to use any other source besides their text, but now they are not only using their book, but also actively seeking out additional information from a variety of websites for text and pictures. I am requiring them to cite their sources of information for both photos and text.  They are actively creating a coherent dialog using text and online sources that will explain the ideas of Descartes and his relationships with his actual peers and as well as his intellectual "peers" from the Enlightenment.

Thing 6: Digital Citizenship

Site 1: POP!: The First Male Pregnancy
Address: http://www.malepregnancy.com/

What a great bogus site! Some people put some serious time into creating it. Using Valenza's four criteria, it would superficially seem to meet the standards for a real, valuable website.
Content: many of the subsidiary links works, but when you click on them they really don't tell you much about the science; there is much more about the dynamics of the website itself.
Authority and Credibility: Click on the links to the doctors and you get very strange information. Click on information about the patient and it gets weirder still. Lastly, if you look at the sponsoring organization, it is the John Jay School of Law, a real law school, but not noted for it obstetrics program.
Bias and Purpose: I think this was intended to be a parody site with not real desire to intentionally deceive visitors.
Usability and Design: A very "busy" website with many links to be taken places one or two level deep before the joke is revealed or the link stops working. Attractive design, looks professional, and seems to want to provide you with as much information as it can about this man's pregnancy. It could easily be mistaken for a real site by an unsuspecting user.


Site 2: True But Little Known Facts About Women and Aids
Address: http://147.129.226.1/library/research/AIDSFACTS.htm

Ok, this one is really a fake and seems pretty obvious to me and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page it is all revealed to have been created by a librarian at Ithaca College.
Content: The "facts" are outrageous even for our knowledge of AIDS 15 years ago when the site was first produced.
Authority and Credibility: The sources are bizarre plays on words or strange, but seemingly real journals. Another give-away is the one person cited as a source whose name can be phonetically said as: what a lying fool. Lastly, there is no University of Santa Anita in the United States.
Bias and Purpose: The superficial purpose was to state some "facts" about AIDS, but the real purpose as stated by John Henderson, the librarian, was to create a fake site for his students to learn about critical thinking about the web. I clicked on the link to the Ithaca College library and Mr. Henderson is still working as a reference librarian.
Usability and Design: This was a pretty basic site even by 1996 standards.  It is your typical one-page screed that today would have shifted over to a blog or a tweet page.

For a lesson on the appropriate use of the Internet, I would have the kids read Eight Surprising Web Sites That Schools Can't Access http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/04/eight-surprising-webites-schools-cant-access/ I would have them brain storm reason why these sites are blocked at most schools.  I would also have them read an a synopsis of CIPA http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html and try to understand why the federal government passed this law.  I would then have them try to figure out how Internet filters could be reconfigured to be more selective in what was blocked and what was allowed.  The class would also have a debate about what was "allowable" content and why deciding what that is is not as easy as it sounds.

For a lesson about personal information on the web, I would have kids read the article Fired for Facebook: Don't Let It Happen To You http://moremoney.blogs.money.cnn.com/2009/04/21/fired-for-facebook-dont-let-it-happen-to-you/  and I would have them read Employers, Get Outta My Facebook http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/03/employers_get_outta_my_facebook.html.  We would then have a discussion about how much privacy to do have vs. how much should you expect.  Lastly, I would give the kids the assignment to examine their Facebook account and see if they believe they have posted anything that could embarrass them or keep them from getting a job in the future. 

Thing 5: Differentiated Instruction and Diverse Learning

I have tried over my years of teaching to be very conscious of trying to reach different types of learners. I have a weakness in that I am very word oriented. Reading had never been difficult for me. When thinking about concepts, I tend to see them as words and not as images. I KNOW that there are kids who "see" ideas as images much more clearly than me. I work hard at thinking about visual tools like photos, symbols, charts, graphic organizers, etc. that add a visual context to the information I want them to learn. I also try to explain things clearly and provide pronunciation guides and definitions for key words; not just concepts, but difficult vocabulary words from the text they may not have encountered before.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my philosophy students have just completed a PhotoStory project that required them to answer a series of questions comparing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, reformulate those answers into a script, find appropriate photographs, paintings, graphic organizers to represent the ideas they are discussing and then add a music track that also appropriately represents the theme and mood of their presentation.
When we get back from Spring Break, we will start a unit on Descartes and they will have to create a Manga book about his life and ideas using Comic Life software. Each student will take a piece of the chapter and translate it the information, concepts, and ideas into two comic pages. While they will be able to use images found at Google and Flickr, they will also have to use a still camera to take pictures of themselves and put them in the documents.
The use of Curricular Supports is an area where I am weak. While I had out pretty thorough project and lesson descriptions, I don't always produce the best assessment rubrics. I really need to work on that and I know my kids would appreciate it more. Generally, I know what I am looking for in the product of an assignment, but I need to be much more specific and clear in communicating all expectations to my students. The Curricular Supports section was very valuable to me. Made me think.
WOW!!! Just got done looking at the history resources at the UDL site and was blown away but the three things there. The Google Maps with Street View and Virtual Museums sites were cool, but the YouTube video on Thinking Like An Historian produced by Stanford University really got me where it hurts. Teaching kids how to use and question primary sources is another weakness and the video made commit to teaching those skills more consciously.

Well, I believe that some kind of text to speech converter software would be useful for some of my students, I don't think Vozme it the tool. It's mechanical voice with lack of emotion would be a problem for some kids who need the auditory context. The good ones with better and more diverse voices are charging, but if the need is there, probably worth the money.

Thing 4: Thinkfinity

I had really hoped that Thinkfinity would have been more useful for lesson plans than it was.  I teach an interesting troika of classes of AP world history, philosophy and Model UN.  Admittedly, I could find some world history lesson plans, but I was really hoping for a substantial number of plans for philosophy and international relations.
Anyway, I did choose a couple of lessons that I could use; one concerning economic forecasting and an interactive lesson from National Geographic on industrialization's impact on the culture and environment of modern-day Japan.

economic forecasting: an internet webquest

http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/index.php?lid=49&type=educator

The Garden: the impact of industrialization on modern Japan’s environment

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/hall/index.html?node=43

I would probably use the economic forecasting and the The Garden lessons in my Model UN course.  Both would be a useful extension of my curriculum and both would require my students to interact with information online.  

Thing 3: Using Skype

My wife and I have been using Skype frequently for the last 3 years; just after our kids and grandkids moved to Gig Harbor, Washington.  I also used it a couple of Sundays ago during my fantasy baseball league's draft.  One of our owners moved to Florida and he participated in the 10 hour draft using Skype between my computer and his.
In my school district, virtually all streaming video feeds are blocked.  If they weren't, I would use it most frequently in my Model UN course.  It would be a blast to try and contact diplomats or kids at other schools in the countries we are representing.  To get some first hand knowledge and just experience the human interaction would be quite an education for my suburban students.

Thing 2: Using Buzzword, the cloud app

I use, and have my kids use, the Google Docs word application frequently.  It has proven invaluable when kids are working in groups and need to share or add information to a document at odd times of the day.  In fact, it was the text tool my philosophy students used to create their script for the PhotoStory presentation comparing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle just before Spring Break.
Using Buzzword instead of Google Presentation took a bit of an adjustment.  The Google Docs interface is very similar to that of MS Office so things are comfortably common and generally easy to find.  Buzzword, as with all Adobe products, take a little time to get used to.  Once I got the feel of the page, I was able to easily start a simple presentation.
Because there are 4 other media specialists in the class, I invited all of them to help edit the presentation.

Thing 1.5: Delicious Bookmarks

There are so many things that one could try to keep track of when using Delicious.  I decided that I would limit my early bookmark focus to Web 2.0, tools, and library 2.0.  There are other tags you can see I used, but I will really focus on these three for awhile.
I also started my own network by going to the Delicious bookmark page for the person who I believe is the future leader for Forest Hills in 21st century educational technology.  That person is Kelly Kermode.  I would strongly recommend that you visit her page.

The link is http://www.delicious.com/coachk

Thing 1: Keyboard Short Cuts

Well, I'm a bit late getting started on the class, but here is the first part of lesson 1.  I had a heck of a time getting the keyboard shortcuts for MS Word to work on my Mac.  What I realized was that I had to overcome the built-in keyboard commands of the Apple operating system to let the keyboard commands of my Office 10 version of Word work. Once I changed the settings, almost all of the commands were identical.  I also had a problem creating the kind of instructional video I wanted using my existing Mac software.  I have had Snapz Pro X screen capture software for a few years, but had never really put it to the test.  When it didn't allow me full use of Word while recording,  I was not a happy camper.  I remembered that Ron had built his instructional video with Camtasia and I downloaded the trial version and it worked like gangbusters.  I made a 4 minute instructional video and uploaded it to Screencast.

Here is the link to the video:  http://www.screencast.com/t/Y9idBJSsv