The Henricus

I saw the idea for micro-lectures at History Tech where Glenn suggested 60 seconds in the title, but mine went a little longer at almost 5 minutes.  The purpose of a Micro-Lecture is to use multimedia and the Internet to briefly explain a skill or content to students so they can begin working on a project.

Here is my sample:

Demonstrating a Micro-Lecture from Mike Hasley on Vimeo.

I like this because once the teachers makes one or more of these, they’re modeling what students should also be doing.  Plus, once the teacher makes one they can help students with the technical aspect of multimedia.  I’ve also been talking a lot about Interactive Lectures with my teachers, another idea from Glenn, and felt this could be an activity or tool teachers can use to add to their repertoire of activities.

Some activities students can do after this micro-lecture are:

• oral history projects
• short movies/documentaries/digital stories
• comparative histories
• collaborative projects (with students from other parts of the world)
• debate
• investigative journalism
• wikipages (instead of a standard essay)
• create a Primary Resources collection
• an online fishbowl

And I’m sure more, which opens it up to a student’s interpretation on how they’d like to present the material.  Either way, during the class time, the work focuses on the student, not the teacher.  However, as a warning, it does take some time to make a micro-lecture, much longer than it takes to listen to it.  My 5 minute lesson probably took 3 hours to create with creating the script, finding the pictures, saving the pictures and URLs, trying to find copyright free material (most of it is, some I gave up on), and then editing the final product.  Furthermore, I have experience with Movie Maker, so those with less experience may take longer.

I wish I had waited to use my external microphone because the sound isn’t as good as I’d like. 

Below are all the links I used for images, video, and sound:

Read more…

Yesterday, I posted my thoughts on what technology teachers in HCPS, and others, should know.  Then, Tom suggested I make it more purposeful (imagine that… a purpose behind technology use).  Thus, the same list is below, but attached to 21st Century Skill themes and with more of a rationale.

Research and Information Fluency

• Aggregate information
  • Subscribe to information/blogs using an RSS reader like Google Reader for example
  • Comment on other’s blogs
• Organize information in ways that makes information more usable
  • Using Social Bookmarking like Delicious or Google Bookmarks for example
• Use tools that facilitate cooperative resource creation
  • Understand how Wikipedia works and why it can be powerful

Communication and Collaboration

• Expand classroom discussions
  • Create a blog or wiki, or use School Space to continue classroom discussions.  School Space has chat rooms and discussion boards so you don’t have to worry about sites that are blocked.
  • Find ways to collaborate outside your school
  • Learn how to Instant Message
  • Join social network sites that will build on your teaching, technology, and content skills.  Share with the networks you join. Suggestions: Twitter, Facebook groups, Ning, or Classroom 2.0.
• Use multimedia to enhance learning and engage students (also implies Creativity and Innovation)
  • Embed video into your blog or in School Space
  • Use online tools for multimedia projects like www.voicethread.com or you can even use a site like http://www.authorstream.com/ to post your classroom Power Points and then students can read them off their iPod or other handheld devices. 
  • Create podcasts using programs on your computer like Audacity and iTunes (all free if you don’t have laptops)

Tools
Below are tools available to all teachers and students and should be used to help facilitate student learning or your own organization and time saving measures.  These are also listed in an order of easiest to hardest use:

• Internet Explorer 8 (make sure you know how tabs work among other things)
• Instant Message (saves time versus e-mail)
• Converting documents to PDF (so non-Word folks can view your work)
• iTunes (find podcasts, upload podcasts)
• Voicethread (an easy way to present to the online world)
• Office 2007 (Word, Power Point, Excel: similar to previous version, but things have been moved)
• Outlook (so you can vote, use the calendar, possible IM… manage your time)
• Audacity (for creating sound files for podcasting or blogs)
• Google Docs (for collaborative online work with word processing and presentation software)
• Google Earth (using and creating KMZ files)
• Wikipedia (easy for just reading, but need some skills to edit and contribute)
• Wikispaces (create your own wiki with varying levels of security: uses multimedia)
• Premier Elements

For those new to integrating technology into your classroom, this is a lot to learn and can be overwhelming.  Especially if your school just has computer labs or limit access to the Internet.  Start with something you’re positive you can be successful with and learn how to use it yourself first, like voicethread or start subscribing to some podcasts in iTunes.

But whatever you learn, make sure it’s something that will translate into activities and content your students can produce on their own.  Don’t do it all for them.  Also, find ways to make your job easier.  For example, if you have to design curriculum with other teachers, use Google Docs instead of Word.  See how that works, experiment, make mistakes, and then figure out how to get your kids to use Google Docs.

The goal of all this technology is not to be trendy, but to get your students to become creative with their own learning and to put their learning in their hands.  Everyone is tired of teaching to a state mandated end-of-course test.  These tools can re-invigorate your content and turn student achievement into something more than just passing a state test.

(on a side note, why does Internet Explorer’s spell check not have: podcasts, iTunes, Facebook, Wikipedia, iPod, and Ning as real words?)

We’re in a new phase with using laptops in our county, and in many ways, an exciting phase.  Since 2001, we’ve had laptops in high schools, and beginning in 2002 in our middle schools.  At first, we all used Macs, then in 2005 high schools began using Dells.  Having two platforms had its benefits, e.g., students theoretically could become “fluent” in both platforms, but there were also problems, e.g., training was made more difficult since you often couldn’t train the same program in a mixed class.

Starting this fall, we’ll be back to a single platform, and have the opportunity to create a more seemless curriculum with the learning tools available to all students in grades 6 – 12.  While the middle school will certainly miss certain programs, I think the consistency will benefit students in the long run. 

This of course puts some responsibility on the teachers of course, since they’ll have to be prepared to use the same tools our students should be using.  So, after reading two blogs, here and here, I wanted to create a HCPS specific list of what HCPS (especially Social Studies teachers) should know. 

I’ll also go on a limb here, and say, not knowing these things is putting you behind as a teacher, and doesn’t give your students 100% of what they could have in your class.

• Read and comment on blogs
• Subscribe to blogs using an RSS reader like Google Reader for example
• Learn the tools we have on our laptop image such as Movie Maker, Premier Elements, Google Earth, Office 2007, Audacity, Internet Explorer 8, and iTunes
• Create a blog, wiki, or even use School Space to continue classroom discussions.  School Space has chat rooms and discussion boards so you don’t have to worry about sites that are blocked.
• Embed video into your blog or even in School Space
• Find ways to collaborate outside your school
• Learn useful Web 2.o tools like Voicethread and wikispaces (sites not blocked)
• Join social network sites that will build on your teaching, technology, and content skills.  Share with the networks you join. Suggestions: Twitter, Facebook groups, Ning, or Classroom 2.0.
• Learn how to Intant Message and use Outlook tools (groups, voting, calendar)
• Find 3 tools (or 3 more tools) that you’ll be proficient with if you have a white board
• Understand how Wikipedia is used and why it’s a GOOD THING
• Use social bookmarking tools like Delicious or Google Bookmarks
• Create PDF documents
• Use Google Docs
• Figure out how to maximize the use of these tools for your students

Luckily, there are a lot of teachers in the county that know how to do these things.  However, they’re often silent about their skills.  We have a rubric in our county that details what student centered classrooms look like, especially with the use of technology, so this list is an attempt to focus teachers on what they should be doing as everyday skills, to reach the higher end of this rubric.

This lesson comes from Teaching US History Beyong the Textbooks, Chapter 1, Haunted History.  In it, students solve mysteries about ghost appearances.  The idea is you pick people or events in your content area, especially those that are from the area you teach, and create clues for your students to solve.  Ideally then, you’d have your students create these also.

To see a larger version, click here.

How you can use this in class:

1. Once you demonstrate the a “HOST File,” students would create a list of historical people or events they can research.
2. Students create a rubric on what a trusty resource is, then, using that rubric, research information about their “ghost” to create clues about the person or event.
3. Students can use  a variety of methods to create their HOST file, from paper to Web 2.0 sources like Voicethread.  I chose Voicethread thinking that students can exchnage HOST files with students from other schools across the nation or globe.
4. All students need is a list of “ghosts,” research, and a presentation tool.

The author of this book also gives other tips on how you can use this type of lesson in your class.

Just playing with this, but this tool looks like a quick and easy way to create polls for your class:

From Richard Byrne

Each year, schools spend money and time on textbooks.  Often, these textbooks don’t get used, get lost, destroyed, or become out of date quickly.  Furthermore, the ancillary materials become a secondary cost which often promote 19th century learning (worksheets that only ask the minimum and cost schools $1000s in copying usage.)

But, they make parents feel good.

Wikipedia on the other hand costs nothinig (again, we’re 1:1), gets used daily, cannot get lost, and updates daily.  Furthermore, you don’t have to inventory and move Wikipedia.  Students can read Wikipedia on their cell phones, iPods, or e-readers. 

You may noticed I left off the answer for gets “destroyed.”  Obviously, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, but that’s my other point for using Wikipedia. 

Textbooks contain errors that are never fixed, only perpetuated.  While using Wikipedia, students would be forced to learn about validating information, reading for bias, fact-checking, and researching the history of the article.  None of that can be done with a textbook.  Students can even fix Wikipedia or add content to any article that they researched.

This would obviously force teachers into a new way of teaching (which is my point), so teachers would have to see the benefits of this.

But Wikipedia isn’t where it ends.  The Internet offers 1000s of primary resource documents (such as this one, and this one)  that students can investigate on their own or with teacher direction.

Once students are used to reading, analyzing, and editing Wikipedia, they can move onto their own Wiki to create a class textbook that each new class can read and edit.  A tool like Wikispaces could easily handle this while also acting as a repository for audio, video, and documents.

But as I mentioned before, would parents be ready to handle that?  I don’t think this would be as successful in a school district that doesn’t offer laptops for their students, but for my county, it seems like the most responsible thing to do.

I probably should have written this a while ago, but I just thought about it. Summer is a great time for teachers to relax and refuel. However, if you’re not doing summer school, summer can also be a long time to be stagnant. So, what should teachers do over the summer, especially Social Studies teachers?

1. Rest
2. Visit a historic site or museum.  First, look locally.  You’ll probably find a lot of places you can easily visit within a few miles of your home that you’ve never been to before.  In Richmond, that could be the Virginia Historical Society, Library of Virginia, the Richmond History Center (formally the Valentine Museum), the Museum of the Confederacy, Historica Pole Green Church, or St. John’s Church just to name a few.  See what resources they have for your classes or if they come to your classes.
3. Read some historical work, for example, right now, Time Magazine has an interesting article on Thomas Edison that came out for its July 5, 2010 issue.
4. Take a workshop.  HCPS offers workshops for teachers all summer long.  Or better yet, teach a workshop.  Share what you know.
5. Reflect on what went well and not so well in your class last year.
6. Watch for news items that would be relevant to your class, e.g. the oil spill, the World Cup, Persons Unknown.
7. Volunteer your time.
8. Learn a new piece of technology.
9. Exercise
10. Remake 2 lessons.  Ask, “how can I make this more student centered?”

Before I get the ghost of Clemenceau upset, do you have any other ideas?

This would be a great project for kids to do if they still had their laptops at the end of the year:

The Last 18 Years In Rap from Week in Rap on Vimeo.

Vietnam BP

There’s a contest online to redesign the BP logo.  Some are pretty creative, others a little objectionable.  Nonetheless, right now, I think the BP oil spill is a great current event for student to follow.  It hits all the disciplines:

• Social Studies: the history of oil and oil spills, timelines, information fluency, government action, public policy
• English: reporting, literature about the environment, information fluency, research
• Math: projecting paths, calculating barrels of oil, money
• Science: environment, what oil is, the products oil makes
• Health: what contamination does to the human food chain
• World languages: reading other papers and how they report the spill
• Art: see the content

For students, especially this time of year, keeping up with the spill is something they’re probably interested in and you can spin some creativity in this as well, like the contest. 

This is not the time of year to let students just watch movies or play games.  Have them think critically and problem solve.  As it was once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Again, thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for pointing this site out.  In my quest to have more teachers use Digital Storytelling in their classroom, I realize that for some teachers and students, baby steps are needed.

Fotobabble accomplishes the goal of getting teachers and students new to technology (scary thought) a way to create a simple Digital Story.  It can also be done in a more complex level also:

Easiest:

• Have students find a picture of a  historical person (to make it more difficult, have them find a copyright free image or an uncommon image).
• Have students then create a mini-saga on this person
• Upload the picture, narrate

This could be done in 20  minutes and it would be a great way to introduce a topic. 

To make it harder:

• Have an entire class focus on one topic (the American Revolution for example)
• Students should narrate conflicting points of view (again, the American Revolution: patriots, Loyalists, Englishmen, slaves, Indians, etc…)
• Embed each Fotobabble into a blog for students to see and respond to others

Here’s a sample of one I did: