Tech Celebration: Single-Period Video Production

How much can you do in a single hour?

Could you create a fully produced, edited, coherent, and engaging movie? Well, our students can.

Students can create fully finished cinematic jams in under an hour, recording, editing, and sharing with a single device. One of the amazing abilities that technology gives us is the power to harness the work of a fully staffed high-level movie production team, and to direct it to do your bidding. Students here at CFHS used iPads and iMovie to create these gems. This means that students spend less time messing about with technology, and more time generating and refining ideas, collaborating with one another, and learning content.

The key is to emphasize content, knowledge, and insight over production values. One way that teachers can do that implicitly is to spend much more time helping students to encounter and learn  new information, and develop ideas and plans, and drastically reduce the amount of time that students actually have their hands on the technology tools. Hence, the single-period video: give students an iPad, and iMovie, and a single hour to get the shooting and editing done. (Of course many of them spent hours of time discussing ideas and planning before they got to production.)

Below are some funny, insightful, and quickly produced videos that our bolts teachers have caused our students to produce:

Carissa Boyd, Megan Kirts, and Gary Thompson’s students created trailers to recap major units of study to help students remember them for the AP U.S. History test:

Click to see “The Age of Exploration,” by Mr. Thompson’s students:

Melissa Lewis’s students scripted and filmed “Crash Course” videos about their novels:

Click to see “Life Lessons from Literature Lecture,” brimming with good-humored lessons from Dickens’ Great Expectations:

However, we also have teachers with superpowers. Here, as a special treat, is the trailer Carson Wright made in 12 minutes during our workshop - a preview of a heart-warming (and hysterically funny) love story between man and machine-learning algorithm, “Hey, Siri:”

Click to play video

Let this idea simmer over the summer, and let me know if you’d like support to launch it in your own class!

Tech Celebration: Taylor Johnson's 1,700-mile Debate

Sometimes you have to travel pretty far to find worthy competition. 

CFHS debaters Sarah, Abraham, and Vincent (rear, acting as judge)
 introduce themselves to their dread enemies.​

To combat a worthy foe, Taylor Johnson took our ​debate ​students thousands of miles to Canada - they traveled 1700 miles to the banks of Vancouver, CA, after school one day - and then came back before dinner. Twice!

​The 1704-mile journey accomplished through cyberspace.​

​The barbaric wilds of Brentwood, the Canadian school our students visited virtually.

​Taylor arranged and conducted​ the entire collaboration using Google Hangouts 

and recorded and documented the interactions using Apple's ​QuickTime.

​ ​

First, our students battled the Canadians in a Public Forum Debate (or "PF" to acolytes)​ to prepare for an upcoming competition. The students engaged in an hour-long, research-based debate, and then were able to give and receive feedback from the other team, and Brentwood's sponsor, Ryan Skardal. The second time around, they tried the Canadian style debate, in a more expository format that forced ​all participants to think and respond on their feet.

​The Canadian debaters (and sponsor) listen and take notes as CFHS debater, 
Sarah, elaborates a point.​

What did the students think? They were as impressed by the technical aspects of the experience (“Whoa! We’re transcending time and space”) as they were by the interaction itself with real, live Canadians. It allowed them to prepare with quality competitors, and experience a mock debate that was more ‘real’ than it would have been just among members of the team, with whom students are all familiar.

Plus, it allowed us to strike another blow in the cultural war against Canada. Thank goodness for that.

Next year, Taylor looks forward to conducting more international debates like this: to help novice debaters get their feet under them ​with the novelty and discomfort of competing against strangers, and t​o continue to have "more interesting conversations about interesting topics with our international friends.”

Tech Celebration: Chris Lambert flips his AP European class

Well, we are losing Chris Lambert this year as he takes the next step in his career, but I did not want to let him go without sharing one of the

​ innovative and exciting​

 things he has done this year 

​(​

and last

​)​

.

You may have heard about a blended or 

​"flipped"

 classroom

​ -- ​

in the last year or so Chris has tried it for real in his AP European history classes. He has essentially moved the content delivery outside of class time, so he and his students can focus on problem-solving, processing, and group work during the time they are together in school.

​Here's Chris's website page with all uploaded videos:​

​He did not mean to transform his classroom...at first​

It did not begin as an attempt to transform the nature of the work they did together inside the classroom – it began, for Chris, as 

​a​

 means to save his voice. 

After lecturing all day about the Huguenots, or the 

​H​

undred 

​Y​

ears

​'​

 

​W​

ar, or the Archduke Ferdinand, he found his voice was ragged and tired – and he realize that if he recorded his lectures he would only have to perform them once. 

​And he could also 

put them on his website where students could re

​-​

watch them whenever they needed to.

​Students have more control over the pacing and delivery of content​

So he began posting his lectures online, and had his students watch them at home. Students had much more control over the lectures themselves – they could pause them, to catch up on their note

​ ​

taking, they could rewind them, to hear again a particularly complex or tricky passage

​ (76% of students surveyed said they did this most or all of the time)​

, and they couldn't even listen to them slow down or speed it up.

​What did the students say?

Here were some comments from students:

• "I used them to take notes and understand the content. They were valuable because I was able to pause or rewind to get all of the content, whereas in class it was easy to miss something when listening to in class discussions."
• "I used the videos for many different things, including studying as well as taking notes. For me, being able to go back to study and listen to the videos, was the most valuable."
• "What I liked about the videos was that if you were sick (which I always am) then you would be able to watch the notes/discussions of the chapter. This was very helpful because I would be behind like in first semester. As well, when watching the podcasts I enabled the subtitles that way I could read what Mr. Lambert was saying."
• ​"​
  I loved the videos and they helped me so much for I'm a slow writer and if I didn't hear something i was able to go back and hear it again."

What improvements did Chris make?

Chris asked for feedback, and changed the videos because of what students said, in several ways.  In general, (surprise, surprise!) they enjoyed lectures with Chris there, in person, but there were changes they suggested that could bring the videos closer to the real thing:

• make segments short - students liked the videos, but recommended that "they are shorter but there are more of them," to make it easier to sustain attention
• include jokes and stories - much of what Chris's students missed in the initial podcasts were the anecdotes that he wove into each lecture, and the humor; it's difficult to weave that into a presentation with no live audience, but possible!

One clear drawback is that students can't ask their own questions and get answers in real time.  However, there may be ways for kids to at least ask their questions:

• embed the video in a Google Form which includes a quiz or text box for questions or comments

• use a tool like Zaption to embed questions within the video itself:

So, congratulations, Chris, and we will miss you!

And everyone else, let me know if you'd like to learn how to do what Chris did (or ask Chris, quick, before he leaves for the wilds of Marana!)

Happy flipping, 

Mark

Students wage war on Twitter - for organelles! Cast your vote soon...

Campaign poster by @CellWall01

Our biology students are engaged in a deadly, high-stakes battle right now, on Twitter.  They are raking muck, slinging mud, and making bold campaign promises, all in support of candidates whose jobs are vital to our national, global, and personal security -- the organelles within our cells.

In the end, only one will emerge triumphant -- the most valuable organelle, or MVO.

You can snoop on this heated contest -- and even contribute comments, or ask tough questions of the microscopic candidates.  The whole conversation is taking place on Twitter, at the hashtag #CatFootMVO.  (You can only see the thread if you have a Twitter account.)

Tech celebration: A syllabus that students actually WANT to read...

Much of life's important information is boring.

Think of it : mortgage documentation, employment contracts, bylaws, user agreements, instructions... and the humble syllabus.

We bury the small rules that govern our lives in small print, or even worse - in print that is legible, but unreadable. And this is no small matter, either - recently, several people signed away their rights to their firstborn child into eternity - so they could use free wifi.

But does it have to be this way?

Taylor Johnson, (who teaches AP English), tried something which suggests that there might be a better way.

First, she asked her kids for feedback about her official syllabus, and decided she wanted to make something more engaging. And then she began to tinker.

She had a simple goal: to make her syllabus "clear, concise, and visually appealing."

She rummaged around on her computer, eventually opened up Comic Life, and created something that looked like this:

Hello Kitty, Tony Soprano, and Authorial Intent

(image from Alyssa Rosenberg's, "From Tony Soprano to Hello Kitty.")

It's not everyday that trivial Internet scuffles can be used to demonstrate sophisticated literary concepts -- but Todd VanDerWerff, at Vox, has done a nice job of doing just that, in his article, "The Tony Soprano and Hello Kitty Stories Are About the Same Thing."

If you follow pop culture, you might be aware of the scuffle over the species of Hello Kitty (the L.A. Times reported that Sanrio, maker of Hello Kitty, claims she is a girl, not a cat), and the flap about whether or not Tony Soprano, fictional TV mobster, is fictionally dead or not.

But you might not have made the connection that VanDerWerff draws so neatly -- that in both cases, audiences are arguing about whether or not the author's intentions should be taken into account when interpreting a text.

This might be an accessible entry point for students to talk about how we create meaning from texts of all kinds.

I personally disagree with him on one point - that somehow, because we care less today about authorial intent, that we are less 'collective' and more 'individualistic' in our modes of interpretation.  I think we still tend to argue for, construct, and revise interpretations collectively.

But overall, he offers an engaging, clear, and light-hearted entry into the topic, even defining academic language like "authorial intent," and "New Criticism" without dumbing it down.

And there's something for everyone - he even includes Dumbledore, and Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner. What's not to like?

What could be better than for students to understand how literary analysis is already an invisible and ever-present part of their lives?  And to learn how to do it more deliberately, and therefore, with more skill and delight?

Why be the only explainer?

We teachers are good at explaining.

We have spent our days, weeks, and years honing the craft of content delivery, and we often do a better job than experts of explaining complex concepts in ways that our students can understand. We can produce clear and beautiful explanations.

But what do we lose if we limit our students to only our clear and beautiful explanations of the world?

What might it mean if we exposed our students to a variety of explanations, and asked them to choose?

Maybe we make things too easy for students, we shield them from the teeming complexity of human thought and perspective.  What if we exposed them to some of that complexity, carefully curated, and helped them construct their own explanations?

An Example: Gravitational Waves

As a single example (though there are examples for every subject area out there), let's take a look at the recent evidence for "inflation" in the very early history of the universe.

You could allow students to choose among a variety of short, captivating explanations of what the recent discovery at the South Pole means:

An article from the blog, Bad Astronomy, by Phil Plait	A video produced by the journal, Nature
A video on Veritasium, by Derek Muller	A very short TED talk by physicist Allan Adams