Will this be on the test? The best response EVER.

It's easy, during finals week, to get a little "test focused."

So I thought you might enjoy what may be the best response in history to the perennial student question, "Will this be on the test?"

It comes from Josh Green, author of several novels, including The Fault in Our Stars. This clip is from the Crash Course Video, "The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1."

It's a nice reminder of why we do what we do.

Crash Course is  a series of funny, fast, irreverent -- and surprisingly intellectual -- content videos that might help you in your teaching.  

Another great art + history resource: Smarthistory

Just discovered this delightful site and thought it would be of use to you and your students:  Smarthistory.

Dissatisfied with your textbook?  So were two university art history professors, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker.  They were unhappy with the large, expensive art history textbooks they had been assigning their students -- the physical textbooks were "difficult for many students, contain too many images, and just are not particularly engaging," and the publisher-created digital supplements were "woefully uncreative" (Harris and Zucker).
So, they created Smarthistory to replace their art textbooks -- it's a multi-media art history survey, focused primarily on Western civilization.

You can scroll through a variety of works emblematic of various time periods or artistic movements:

Conversations, not lectures
Audio files are included for every work, but one remarkable innovation is that Harris and Zucker chose conversations, rather than lectures.

Together, the two of them simply have a spontaneous conversation about each piece, and their conversations are fun -- they're full of little mysteries and hidden information about each piece, like in this conversation -- can you tell which angel Leonardo da Vinci painted, and which was painted by his elder and teacher, Verrochio?

(click on the painting to find out)

Why conversations?

In their opinion, lectures are too boring.  In contrast, in their spontaneous conversations, "we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to students, museum visitors and other informal learners than a monologue."


Open source: it's free, and you can contribute, too
Harris and Zucker recently teamed up with Khan Academy, because both of them share the same mission -- to get free, high quality resources out to teachers, and to encourage others to add to their content.

So you, and potentially your students, could contribute, too -- just pick a piece of art, and discuss it in regard to its historical or art history context.

Click below to see the "Create your own content" page:

Harris, Beth, and Steven Zucker. "About Smarthistory." Smarthistory. Khan Academy, Oct. 2011. Web. 03 Dec. 2012.

Do you know about the Google Art project?

I just recently learned about this awesome resource: The Google Art Project.





It contains insanely high-resolution images of artworks in hundreds of museums across the world, searchable by artist, collection, or artwork -- and you can filter by medium (including photography!)

I thought it would be a great resource for you as you present genres and models, and for your kids, as they research or look for inspiration.

Write like a professional: 10 tips for email etiquette

As promised, here are some resources to help you teach email etiquette to students -- so, never again will you need to wonder, "Who sent that one?"

This is all part of how students create a presence or an identity for themselves digitally.  The more conscious they become about how details convey information about them, the more prudent they'll be in all their online interactions.

Some ideas:

• Print out a real email from a real student (minus name/alias) and show it to the class; let them make suggestions.
• Point out context -- students will follow different conventions when emailing friends (or even on subsequent emails after a formal greeting or request -- most of us drop the salutations after 3 or 4 replies in the same conversation)
• Have students read the short article, "Email Etiquette," from the Daily Writing Tips website.
• Assign students to send you one email with appropriate etiquette (this has an added benefit for you: you'll be always able to search for the student by full name, and find their school Gmail address)

The documents:

• Email Etiquette.docx View Download
• Email Etiquette.pdf View Download

And model what you preach!  I know I don't always follow these guidelines, but I know my emails are more effective when I do. 

Is the Internet making us dumber? Or do we just like to think so?

Great thanks to Jean Bomeisl, for forwarding the article from SmartPlanet, "Using the Internet Affects Your Memory, Study Says," to start a discussion.

It's a fascinating read, but that's got to be the most misleading title for an article ever.

(Fludd)

It should read, "humans choose to remember written facts more if we know they will be erased later," or "we change which information we store in our brains if we have access to external storage."  But that's not very sexy, or scary.

The studies show nothing at all about the Internet.

A Challenge: Are You Encouraging Your Students To Fail Enough?

Part 1

Here's a puzzle for you:

In this puzzle, three numbers: 16, 14 and 38, need to be assigned to one of the rows of numbers below. To which row should each number be assigned?

Before I give you the answer, I have a question for you:  

How long would you work on this problem before you gave up?

Now, if you don't want the pleasure of grappling with puzzle this on your own, the answer is at the end of this post. Click 'Read More' at the bottom to get there.

Here's a related question:

How long do you want your students to work at a puzzling problem before they give up?

How long they will depends upon many things -- their incentives, the time of day, their feeling about the particular content of the challenge, peer pressure -- but it primarily depends upon a character quality we usually call "perseverance."  Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound, called it "tenacity of pursuit."

Perseverance is so important, we make up aphorisms to teach it ("If at first you don't succeed, try, try again") and create seemingly hundreds of posters to inspire it in employees and students:

Perseverance: Cliffhanger. Digital image. Art.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

But, in order to build the confidence to tackle problems despite failure, students need to encounter failure.

In fact, if we really want students to learn, we should probably increase the number of times they fail.  Tom Watson, arguably one of the greatest golfers of all time, and therefore an expert on perseverance, observed: "If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate."  In the business world, the best model seems to be to make many attempts, ignore your failures, focus on a success and try to replicate it.

Yet in schools, we do anything but encourage students to fail.  We demonize failure.  We record failure. We make failure permanent.

In doing so, we encourage our students to avoid failure -- and many of our kids do this by avoiding trying altogether.

If author Orson Scott Card is right, and "the essence of training is to allow error without consequence," then we need to change how we do things in schools.  The Marines thought Card was right.  They required that all of the cadets in their officer training program read his sci-fi novel, Ender's Game.  Marines fail again and again in their training programs, so that they don't fail in the field.

Believe it or not, in this respect we could actually take a lesson from video games, not because they are electronic or flashy, but because they ignore failure altogether (some simple ideas follow).

So, what about you?  Do you see enough of your students tackling difficult problems and persisting when they don't get it right away? How many times can a student completely fail at something major in your class before they can no longer earn an A?  How long does a student's failure follow him or her in your gradebook?

Below are some suggestions, from the trivial to the terrifying  -- from a single sentence that makes students more persistent, to a radical grading overhaul -- that might change your teaching practice, and allow your students to fail more now, and succeed more down the road.  (More to come in a subsequent post)

Provoke dialogue about your subject with a quick walk-in survey

Controversy causes engagement.

If you get your students arguing about the core matters of your discipline, they may understand its relevance even more, and even begin to think differently about how they approach the content.

At the heart of every discipline are controversies about how the discipline should be approached, what it means for the world, and what it takes to be good.  So, force your kids to take a stand on a question to provoke a debate.

Terry Fortunato designed and ran this simple SMART Board activity -- a single page, designed to solicit deep critical thinking and debate about science, and her students responded with a variety of thoughtful responses (below):

Deftly download digital videos

Wish you could just download those excellent videos you find on the Internet?  Well, you can.

No video downloading tool works in every instance, so it's good to have a variety of arrows in your digital downloading quiver.  Here are a few:

Websites that help you download video

To use these, just cut and paste the URL of your video and go to the site.  You can always bookmark the site in your toolbar to access them quickly.

• KeepVid only seems to work reliably on Firefox.  KeepVid gives you an easy way to drag a button bookmark to your browser's toolbar, too.

• Zamzar.com will also download a video for you -- it sends you a link via email, but Zamzar only converts videos up to 100 MB.   (Zamzar also converts all sorts of other files, too -- PDFs to Word, for example.)

Tools you can add to your browser to download video

There are also some Firefox + Chrome extensions / add-ons that you can add to your browser (you can do this on your own - they don't require administrator authentication):

• Firefox: In Firefox, go to Tools > Add-Ons and search for Video Download Helper. Install that -- and once you restart Firefox, whenever you're on a site with video, a little icon in your status bar with three colored globes will become animated. Flash Video Downloader is another Firefox add-on that works.

• Chrome: In Chrome, click on the Settings icon -- a wrench or three parallel horizontal lines on the far right of the status bar, then choose Tools > Extensions. You can add FVD Video Downloader.

3 Ways To Engage Students In The Election...Digitally

Want an easy way to get your students involved in the election?  Have them start their own Super PAC.  Or....just have them access one of these interactive resources online so your students can simulate election strategy, peruse polls for data, or listen to experts discuss the issues particular to this election.

Here are 3 resources that might intrigue your students, from most simple to most complex:

Numero Uno:  iCivics.org

This is Sandra Day O'Connor's project to help students understand the workings of government -- students can play a game in which they manage their own presidential campaign, and teachers can download a variety of lessons, games, and materials to teach about the election.

iCivics.org

Numero Dos: Play the Election (this is condensed from Richard Byrne, at Free Technology for Teachers)

From Rand McNally -- it has 3 main sections.

1. An interactive Electoral College map with current polling data, links to articles, and historical data back to 1960.

2. Play the Election Game Central has 11 games, including State by State, which has interactive mini-infographics about the concerns and preferences of each state -- students predict candidates win in each state  (currently only 4 are up, more on the way).

3. You can also find lessons in the Classroom Manager which are aligned to Common Core standards. Teachers can also use Classroom Manager to see the statistics for the games their students play (students have to register and log-in as class members)

Numero Tres: Take a course at Stanford, online:

Your students can audit an entire course at Stanford, but you could also assign individual videos/lectures as homework.

Rob Reich, professor of political science, and David Kennedy, pulitzer-prize winning historian and editor of The American Pageant, are curating one of Stanford's first online courses, open to the public.  They're bringing in different lecturers and experts, and have downloadable panels + videos.  

Here's what has happened so far:

The first class from this past Tuesday ... was a discussion of campaign strategy featuring:

• Chris Lehane (Democratic Political Consultant, former Press Secretary for Vice President Al Gore and for his 2000 Presidential campaign)
• Mark McKinnon (political consultant for President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain, and co-founder of No Labels)
• Gary Segura (Professor of Political Science, Stanford University and Principal Investigator of the 2012 American National Election Study)

Guests in coming weeks include:

• John Taylor and Kenneth J. Arrow on the economy
• Goodwin Liu and Pam Karlan on the courts
• Stanford's President Hennessy on the implications of the election for California and Silicon Valley
• Bruce Cain and Gavin Newsom on California politics and ballot initiatives

To enroll and gain access to the site:http://itunes.apple.com/us/course/id565286438

A master political strategist on the value of language (and Shakespeare)

Karl Rove

Karl Rove

Regardless of where you stand politically, it is hard to deny that Karl Rove is one of the most brilliant and effective political strategists in recent memory. He never graduated from college, but he does tout the incredible value of what he learned there...in English class:

"The best course I ever took in college was in my sophomore year, and it was a course in Shakespearean literature. I learned more about political communications in one semester from a Catholic nun than I learned in any political science course. It made me aware of the power of language. And how, telling a story -- a political campaign is about big issues, but you have to describe a narrative, you have to create a storyline, you know -- what is this all about?"

-- Karl Rove, in an interview with Stephen Dubner, in the Freakonomics Radio Podcast, "Freakonomics Goes to College, Part 1," 30 July 2012

So, for all the English teachers out there, happy continued teaching of such a relevant and powerful discipline.

Image: White House. Karl Rove. Digital image. Wikimedia Commons. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 16 Aug. 2012.

There is no single draft of greatness

In case you have students who believe that rewriting is something only done in school, show them this interactive display of Darwin's 6 revisions of On the Origin of Species -- you can play it like a movie (I recommend the Fast setting) to watch the work 'evolve,' and even hover over specific segments to read the actual text of the book itself.

And speaking of counterclaims -- there's a great surprise -- as an entire chapter (in red) appears suddenly in the 6th version -- it is Darwin directly addressing counter arguments that have been made against natural selection.

The title is a nice pun, too, on the full title of Darwin's work:  On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Click on the image below or go to http://benfry.com/traces/ (does not work well in Chrome - use Firefox or Safari)

Where do we come from? Where are we going? Two beautiful interactive data visualizations of migration

 

1.  Peoplemov.in

At Peoplemov.in, you get an instant, visceral sense of the nature and diversity of the groups of people who flow into and out of every country in the world.  It uses open source data from the World Bank and U.S. Census, among others.

It's one thing to read a list of numbers; it's another to see them.

Can our students change the world? Some already have.

This incredible video was created by Josh Pennock and Molly Madden, who created it to help promote the Dollars for Scholars project.  (The music was changed from the original version to avoid copyright infringement.) What better way to use our technology?

This year, our freshmen raised over $3,000 to provide a high school education for students in Liberia -- enough for 23 semester-long scholarships at the Bishop Juwle High School. So, now 6 students will have a full high school education, who would have otherwise been denied it.

It all started last year, when Angie Mason had her English 9 students correspond (via real, paper letters) with students at Bishop Juwle; they continued their engagement by raising money to support the school.  Last year, her students contributed enough funds to build a library.  But that was just the beginning.

Meaningful Task + Choice = Tech Wizardry

Alex created this website to showcase her fitness plan, goals, and resources.  

Without being asked.

Sometimes, the most authentic use of technology comes when you don't require students to use it -- but instead, when you leave it up to students to find the absolute best way to get something done.

Ann Smith decided to innovate in her health class, simply in an effort to make her content more real for students -- but her students responded, not only by creating relevant, meaningful work, but also by using technology in innovative ways.

A quick way to demand high-level, systemic thinking: Behavior-Over-Time Graphs

Chris Lambert found an excellent way to demand high-level thinking from his students on a recent assignment for his AP European History students.  He had them make a Behavior-Over-Time Graph (or BOTG, as the systems thinking adepts call them) of Napoleon's rise to power and his brutal fall.

In a minute or two, you can create a task that would demand that your students synthesize, evaluate, and articulate information from any discipline -- I'm including some resources that you can download to use immediately.

How Many Slaves Work For You?

"How Many Slaves Work For You?" Slavery Footprint: Made In A Free World. Slavery Footprint, 9 Feb. 2012. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.

Apparently, there are 94 who work for me.

What about you?  What about your students?

Slavery Footprint has created a quick, interactive web survey that walks you through a range of questions (you can give broad, basic answers, or really itemize it -- how many cell phones and skis do you own) and in the end, produces a map for you of where it is likely that someone has performed slave labor in order to manufacture the things that you own.

As we help our students become more globally aware, it's always an interesting start to the conversation to have them think about the impact that their economic choices make on people and communities around the world.

Granted, this site will open up controversy. To what extent do you - and your students - agree with Slavery Footprint's definition of slavery? According to the site's creators, a slave is "anyone who is forced to work without pay, being economically exploited, and is unable to walk away" ("About"). Do you agree with their methodology?

The site links to its blog (Hershey's kiss, anyone?  Or buying gold for a Valentine?) and to ways to take action or become more informed about the problem.

Below are the results for me and my family:

What are they for yours?

What do you think about this kind of an interactive, visual display?

Arm your allies + protect your time: update your website

(click the image above to see Bernadette's website)

Why is Bernadette Moreno's website so great?  I've had a support teacher and a student, in two completely unconnected incidents, spontaneously single out her website for praise.

It is a really nice looking website -- the layout is professional, the font is playful and fun, and there's a great image on the home page.  But that's not what seems to matter most.

"It's got everything," said this student, when I asked him why he liked it.  "All of the assignments are there, and she's got a calendar with all of the due dates.  If I lose a handout, I just have to go there and print it out."  For students like this one, who are bright and capable, but not so well organized, this is a boon.

What matters to students is the information that the site can provide, and Bernadette's (and many others; she's not the only one who diligently updates her site) provides the information a student needs most.  -- posting as many assignments and handouts as you can, and having a clear and organized assignment page helps your students directly -- but it also helps your allies: the other teachers and staff who work with the student, and the students' parents.

When you update your website, you give parents a tool they can use to support their children and hold them accountable.

For many parents, they can only find out about assignments through the website, and parents can't hold their son or daughter accountable without good information.  Since time immemorial, students, when asked what their homework for the night is, will say:  "Nothing."  Or "I've done it already."  And maybe they think they have.  But if parents who need to can check a website, there's a much greater chance they can help make sure their student has done his or her work.  You also help all of the other adults here who are working to help your students -- in the Nest, in the labs, in Support.

You also protect your own time, when you keep your website updated.

Every handout you post electronically is a handout you never have to print out, or copy, again -- and it's another conversation you never need to have, either -- you never have to give up your time during lunch or planning, when the conscientious but disorganized students comes to ask for papers they've lost.  You can spend your time with students working on academics, not organization.

It does take time to update your website.

But here's a possibility:  update it in class while students are watching, during the minutes when students are writing down the upcoming events and assignments in their planner.  Instead of writing down the upcoming assignments in chalk, project your website for them.  Once it's in their planners, and online, they don't need to see it in class.

Your students will benefit directly, their parents will be better informed and able to help you, and you will have to spend less time helping students resolve problems caused by their lack of organization.

Don't worry too much about fonts, colors, and all of the bells and whistles -- unless it's fun for you.  Just get that vital information up there.

For those of you who update their website (and there are many of you, I know), bravo!

If you want help to make your website easier for you to update, or easier for students to navigate,  -- or, as always, if there's anything else I can do to help you make your teaching easier, more fun, or more effective -- let me know.

Julie Bell's Awesome Public Service Announcement Project

This video, "Donación de Órganos" was made by students Dara Lehrer and Ana Gutierrez, 

using only two 48 minute class periods.

Julie Bell recently had a great idea for a project that shows that students can do remarkable things with technology with very little technical instruction, and very little time.

She had to assess her AP Spanish students' presentational speaking ability, but didn't want to watch a monotonous series of PowerPoint presentations in which students just stood up in front of the class and read bullet points.