For the second year now, I have had the students in my World War One/Two elective make "Common Craft"-style videos explaining different aspects of the First World War. Without further ado, here they are: The Weapons of World War One from John Fladd on Vimeo. The Aircraft of World War One from John Fladd on Vimeo. Lessons Learned:
All in all, I'm pleased with how this project went this year and I will definitely do more of these movies. Your comments are, as always, welcome.  My school got hit pretty hard by the H1N1 virus. Our 7th grade, which normally has 64 students or so was down to 17 kids one day last week. I had an 8th grade class with three students in it last Thursday. In one of my classes, all the boys were out sick. I asked the girls, "Seriously? No boys?" One of the girls responded, "Well, it is the SWINE flu..." But I digress... So the question is, with that many students out, what do you do about the content you are supposed to be teaching? All my blocks were finishing up the last couple of lessons of their Constitution unit and getting ready for a big unit test. On top of that, the end of the marking period was a couple of days away and I really wanted to give my guys one last chance to boost their overall grades. So, not covering the material wasn't really an option. On the other hand, how fair is it to cover important material when half the students aren't there to have it presented to them? Yes, they can get the notes from other students, but it really isn't the same. So I bit the bullet and did something I've thought about from time to time, but I've been really reluctant to do: My Math colleague and I have talked from time to time about filming our lectures and putting them on the web for students who are out or want to review key concepts. This makes a lot of sense for him especially, because Math lectures are generally only ten to fifteen minutes long. Mine tend to be substantially longer. Additionally, I really hate the way I sound. No. Really. You know how cringe-worthy your voice sounds on an answering machine? Mine sounds like that in real life. Plus, as another colleague put it, I don't exactly look like Brad Pitt. (Truthfully, I don't even look like Brad Pitt's Creepy Uncle Sid.) But, in times of crisis, sacrifices have to be made. Here's what I did:  I set up my Flip video camera on a tripod toward the front of my classroom. I started out by putting it on a mini, table-top tripod, but I found that every time a student bumped the table, the picture got shaky. I ended up using a full-sized tripod and got a better picture. Before my actual lecture, I pointed the camera at my whiteboard and had one of my students stand there for reference, while I framed the shot. I discovered later that because she is much shorter than I am, my face wasn't actually in the frame for a lot of the lecture (good), but my belly was (not so good). In order to head off potential privacy concerns from parents, I kept the camera aimed at the front of the classroom and didn't put any of the students in any of the shots. I also made up aliases for each of the students, which was probably overkill, but they enjoyed it. I filmed each of my lectures and used the one that covered the most material. For the PowerPoint review that I showed to my class, I thought about figuring out some way of downloading the slideshow directly into iMovie for a clearer picture, but I realized that I would lose any of the comments my students or I made, so I set the tripod up next to my projector and just shot the screen. It ended up looking a bit like a pirated dvd, but I think the lesson came across better. When I was all done filming, I tried editing what I had in iMovie, but the file ended up being much, much larger than the raw footage, so I gritted my teeth and just uploaded the raw footage to Vimeo, as-is. So, how did it go? Was it as bad as you thought? Sort of. From a watching-yourself-on-camera perspective, it was even worse than I had anticipated. I came across sort-of like John Candy playing a gay game show host. "Cringe-worthy" doesn't even begin to describe it. A couple of colleagues commented on how brave I was to put something like that out on the internet. I don't think they meant it in an entirely good way. On the other hand, from a pure teaching point of view, I was pretty happy. I covered the material I needed to, and it came across well. This was the first time I'd used video to observe myself and I was pleased with how I interacted with students. My pedagogy was solid and I looked like a real teacher. Go figure. I posted links to the two videos on my homework page and several students ended up using the lesson. Anyway, here are the two lessons: Bill of Rights Lecture from John Fladd on Vimeo. Bill of Rights Slideshow from John Fladd on Vimeo. I look forward to your comments. (Sort of.) Saving Pictures as Pictures 09/25/2009
When doing online research with their students, many of my elementary school colleagues teach their kids to save all their pictures in a word-processing document. Why this might be a good and worthy thing to do: Looking at a pile of unclaimed print-outs from our Library color printer - most having a tiny picture tucked away in one corner - one imagines the tortured death-screams of trees. This could be traumatic. Why this practice might be somewhat ill-advised: Someday, when the students are in 8th grade, their Social Studies teacher will tell them to retrieve their pictures to insert into a blog or some other document. Most of the students will not be able to find their pictures. When the long-suffering Social Studies teacher asks them where they stored their pictures, they will say, "I dunno - in a Word file, somewhere..." At which point, the teacher will die of a stroke, leaking blood from his ears and grinning in a horrible rictus of death, which might be even more traumatic to some of the students than the killing-trees-thing. A less sarcastic explanation of why this practice might be somewhat ill-advised: 1. Unless you are planning to print out pictures and physically glue them onto a poster, placing them into a word-processing document doesn't do you a lot of good. If you need to insert them into a slide show, or into a blog, or email them to somebody, it is very difficult to access them in a document. 2. Not surprisingly, word-processing programs are designed to process... well.. um, words. They can hold onto images (sort of), but that's not what they are designed to do and they don't won't treat your images very gently. Pictures go in nice and sharp and come out somewhat scuzzier. A much better way to save images is as image files - usually .jpg or .gif files. "Okay, JargonBoy - what the heck is a 'jay-peg'?" Here's the way I explain it to my students: If you found a file called vocals.mp3, could you guess what kind of file it was? Music, right? How did you know? From the file extension - the three letters after the "dot". At this point, you know that ".mp3" means a sound file. You've probably also noticed that word processing files have ".doc" or something similar at the end of their file names. That's all we're talking about. Although there are many different file extensions for pictures, most of the time, a given picture file will be either a .jpg or a .gif file. "Yeah, yeah... Fine... Whatever... How do I save one of these JiffyPop things?" .jpeg. Or .gif. Okay - go find a picture online that you like and right-click it.  Like this. Choose "Save Image As..." Then you just choose where you want to save the file, then save it. Then, when some crazed-looking middle-school teacher wants to see your .jpg, you'll know it probably isn't as creepy as you think. Another Totally Ripped-Off Idea 08/30/2009
 The cool-but-intimidating blog, GeekDad had an intriguing post this morning. Eric Zimmermann, a geography enthusiast living in China, posted about his hobby of documenting "Confluence Points" - the exact point where a whole degree of Latitude and Longitude meet. He points out that a lot of the time, it isn't easy to get to these confluence points; they aren't necessarily near major roads (or even land, for that matter. For the purposes of demonstration, I just looked up Zero Degrees Latitude/Zero Degrees Longitude and found that lies it well off the coast of West Africa.) This makes getting to these points something of an adventure. This got me thinking...  Where is the nearest confluence point in relation to my school? I looked up the town of Deerfield, New Hampshire on GoogleMaps, but discovered to my surprise that it was placed in the White Mountains, several hours' drive from its actual location. Hmmmm... Well, that happens sometimes. So I fell back on my next-most-favorite mapping tool - Wikipedia. I looked up Deerfield, then looked for the link at the right of the page, labeled "Coordinates".  Clicking this took me to a page called "GeoHack", which told me way, WAY more about Deerfield's latitude and longitude than I had ever wanted to know. Among other useful tools, there were links to take me directly to those coordinates in MapQuest, GoogleEarth and about a dozen other mapping websites. I didn't use any of these links this time, but nodded with satisfaction at how, once again, Wikipedia is much cooler than anyone gives it credit for. I highlighted and copied the coordinates for Deerfield, then plugged them back into GoogleMaps. I removed all the fractions of degrees from the coordinates, which left me with 40 Degrees North Latitude, 71 Degrees West Longitude. I hit Return...  ...and got this. It turns out that our nearest confluence point is just up the road a little bit - though apparently in somebody's back yard. It wouldn't really be all that hard to zip up there and take a picture of it. [Admittedly, this could be done just as easily with a good map and a ruler, but I was very lazy this morning and didn't want to get off my couch.] All this leads me to think about what kind of classroom projects I could design out of this. Here's what I've come up with so far: 1. This is a good way to introduce or reinforce the concepts of Latitude and Longitude. A highly motivated classroom teacher could have his or her students map calculate and map all the confluence points in New Hampshire. (For teachers in bigger states, they could calculate the points around their county.) [Curriculum connections to Math] 2. If the class was studying Map Reading or Orienteering, this could make for a really good field trip - finding and photographing the closest confluence points. [Curriculum connections to Physical Education] 3. The class could design a webpage or blog with an interactive map, showing all the confluence points and providing links to photos the students had taken of them. [Curriculum connections to Literacy and Technology standards] 4. A very motivated class could do some research and find other elementary or middle schools near other, more out-of-reach confluence points and email teachers or students there to take pictures of them and email them back. [Curriculum connections to more Literacy and Technology standards] The only real question remaining is - am I that motivated? Time will tell. Angry Tiki Volcano Gods 08/17/2009
 Okay. So,this post isn't REALLY about anything so fascinating as volcano gods. It's actually about inserting hypertext links into a Microsoft Word document, which, while a really useful trick, isn't -let's face it - all that riveting. So, as a public service, we'll break up this earnest-but-dry lesson with interesting pictures from My Favorites on Flickr.  For example, here's one. Okay, so what exactly IS a hypertext link? Basically, a hypertext link (or hyperlink) it is a way of linking a piece of text to something else somewhere, so that when you click it, your computer will go look at that other location. You've seen these all the time. This, for example is a hyperlink. (A really nerdy fact - in the http:// that you see at the beginning of every internet address, the "ht" stands for "hypertext". If you find that interesting, you're going to love this lesson!)  Here is a picture of a baby thinking really hard. How to Use Hypertext Yourself For Fun and Profit All right, that's all well and good, but unless you're one of those TwitteryBlogger-People, why would you want to insert hyperlinks into anything? Well, suppose that you are on a committee that's produced a long, multi-section report or you are handing out a longish document to your students. You and I both know that almost nobody will read everything you want them to if they have to keep scrolling or flipping through the entire report every time they want to reference something. What if you could email each of your students or fellow faculty members the document with a clickable table of contents that would allow them to jump to the specific section that concerned them? Would that make this a more effective tool? Hopefully.  Here is a man at an automat.  (For our purposes today, we'll talk about how to do this in Microsoft Word. The process is pretty much the same in whatever word processing program you use.) First, find the section of your document that you want to link to. Highlight a word or two of the text, then select, "Insert Bookmark". This is basically your way of telling the program, "Hey! I'm going to want to remember this place in the document later!"  Now, give the bookmark a name. You can't use any odd symbols or put spaces into the name, but you can use underscores.  Here is a very funny, nerdy t-shirt. Now, go to the table of contents you have written or whatever piece of text you want to link to the bookmark you just made and highlight it. (It's important to do the bookmark before the link, because you can't link to a bookmark that doesn't exist yet.)  Click on "Insert Hyperlink". It is located next to the "Insert Bookmark" command.  This is where you have several options. You can link to the bookmark you just made, but you could also link to a website or an email address. This time, we'll select, "Place In This Document" Select the bookmark you just made, hit Return and Bob's your uncle.  Here is a pretty girl in a library. And it's that easy. (Make sure you Save your document!) I hope this has been useful to you. I'll leave you with a picture of a mailman delivering a letter.   So I was fooling around on Flickr today, when I stumbled on the Flickr Blog. (Okay, so that's something right there I didn't know - I had no idea that Flickr has a blog. It would definitely be worthwhile to read this periodically to find out what cool things people are doing on Flickr.) Anyway, this blog entry was about how a woman named Kate and her boyfriend had figured out how to make cupcakes that look like cheeseburgers and furthermore, they had put together step-by-step instructions with photographs on how to do it in a slideshow on Flickr.  This strikes me as important for several reasons, not the least of which being, "Oh my God! You can make cupcakes that look like Cheeseburgers?! Is that the coolest thing ever? (No - this is - but the cheeseburger cupcakes are still pretty spectacular.) Next, the idea of using a Flicker slideshow to put together a set of instructions seems like a very powerful tool for the classroom. One immediate use that springs to mind is that a teacher could put together step-by-step instructions for his or her students, but even more intriguing is the idea of students putting together the instructions. One area of student Literacy that is very challenging to a lot of teachers is non-fiction. Children will buy into reading and writing narratives pretty readily, but getting them to invest themselves something less plot-driven can be quite a bit more difficult. "How-To" writing is often specified in school or state curricula. Having a class of younger students break down a complex task into individual steps would be valuable in and of itself, but then letting each student or team of students take and edit pictures, then post them with written instructions could be really engaging. This would also address the goal that many schools have of getting students to write for a larger audience. It might also be a good way to get reluctant writers more engaged - I'm imagining a not-very-academic boy putting together a step-by-step explanation of how he gaps the spark plugs on his snowmobile or eats a hot slice of pizza before his brothers can get their hands on it. This would also be a good way to document a Science, Health, Art or Phys-Ed project. I'm also thinking it would be a creative way of meeting the requirements in some students' IEPs.  Plus - you'd have the possibility of cupcakes that look like cheeseburgers!  Photo Credit - Lauren F. It always bugged me that I had such a hard time getting good pictures of my students. If I came at them with a camera, about half of them would hide. Finally, one of my genius colleagues clued me in that, left on their own, students take much better pictures anyway. (I mentioned this a few weeks ago in my soon-to-be-classic Seating Chart post.) Anyway, toward the end of this last school year, I took my advisory group, the Food Magnet on a field trip to our nearest city, Manchester, NH. We visited a Vietnamese Supermarket, a bodega, a Korean market and a Lebanese/Indian market. We went to Lindt Chocolates for a chocolate tasting, went bowling and went out for Indian food. While we were at the Indian restaurant, the owner took us in back for a tour of the kitchen and baked a piece of Naan bread in the tandoori oven for us. All in all, a successful day. (For the students' reactions of the day, see their VoiceThread about it.)  Photo credit - Chelsea L. Throughout the day, I took pictures of the kids with my own camera and let them use my Flip, but I also asked them to bring their own cameras and shoot anything that looked interesting to them. As usual, their pictures were much better than mine. As soon as we got back to school, I was really anxious to download their pictures and had a moment of panic when I realized that my Awesome Bag of Cords didn't have the right adaptors to fit all their cameras. Then one of the boys asked, "Um... why don't you just take the memory card out of the camera and use that?" I was a little embarrassed and fell back on typical teacher bluster; I told him that was a good idea, but unfortunately, I didn't have a card reader. This put him in a bit of a dilemma because, although he really wanted to be polite and respectful, he was starting to realize that he was dealing with an idiot. "Um...what about that slot in the side of your computer, Mr. Fladd?" "What slot?! ..... ..."Oh... that slot...." At which point, we all made the tacit decision to pretend that using the slot had been my idea all along. How To Use the Slot 1. Take your memory card out of your camera. In most cameras, it is located in the same compartment as your batteries. I always forget how to get it out and overthink things - in most cameras, you just press down on the card and it will pop out.  2. Do you remember cassette tapes? Do you remember that little tab at the top of the cassette that you would break off to keep you from accidentally recording over the Wicked Important Mixed Tape you were putting together? These memory cards have something similar - a little grey tab on the side that you will probably need to slide up or down in order to read the data on the card. Do that now. (If you run into problems reading the card after it's in your computer, it probably means that you need to pop the card out and put the tab back where it was to begin with. Also, when you're all done with the card and put it back in your camera, make sure you return the tab to its original setting.)  3. I can't 100%, absolutely, put-everything-on-black-and-let-it-ride guarantee that your laptop has a memory card slot, but it probably does. In my case, it is one of those odd little slots and ports on the side of the computer that I've always wondered about - the "mouth" counterpart to the "eyes" made by my headphone and microphone jacks. When I pop the card into the slot on my laptop, a little menu pops up, just like when I insert a USB thumb drive, asking among other things, if I'd like to open this bad boy up and see what's on it. (Err.. or words to that effect...) After that, it's just a matter of clicking and dragging. When you're done with the memory card, you remove it in pretty much the same way you removed it from your camera - just push it into the slot firmly and it will pop out. I really like this trick. It makes me feel kind-of techy without actually having to know anything. And that's always good. Making Movie Posters 07/27/2009
 A recruiting poster for my advisory group - The Food Magnet. I don't have a cute story behind this REALLY fun new toy; it's just cool.  The movie poster tool at BigHugeLabs.com lets you create extremely realistic, very cool movie posters. You can upload your own photo or use one from your favorite photo-sharing site. You can add any credits you want, select a rating and even add a release date. When you think you're done, you can look at the finished poster, then go back and edit it to tweak it until it looks just the way you want it to. When you really are done, you can save your image to your hard drive or purchase a large, professionally printed copy for yourself. I've been playing with this for the past couple of days and I'm having WAY too much fun with it. Here are some other movie posters I've made over the past day or two:  This is a recruiting poster for the Technology Magnet.  This is a recruiting poster for the Yearbook Magnet.  One of my Kindergarten colleagues asked for a poster to welcome her students to her classroom. Back To the Future of the Past 07/14/2009
 A couple of years ago, somebody directed me to one of the oddest documents I'd seen in a long time - a list of predictions from the turn of the last century about what life in America would be like in the year 2000. This sort of thing always makes my brain hurt. If you've ever read any "alternative history" science fiction, like some of the stuff by Robert Heinlein or Harry Turtledove, you know what I mean. We generally walk around with a pretty good idea of how history has played out and without really thinking about it too much, we adopt a sort of historical chauvinism - "Well, of COURSE it worked out like that! What sort of stupid world do you think we live in that wouldn't turn out like that?" Then you read something that points out that our world could have turned out very, VERY different, with just a few twists and turns, and it really messes with your head.  Do you remember those old newsreels classroom movies we watched as kids that showed the Kitchen of the Future, or Life on the Moon, where housewives would cook dinner with a push of a button, then lounge around on Swedish-looking furniture, while their husbands zipped off to work with their jet-packs and briefcases? What the Lady's Home Journal did in December of 1900 was something like that, but about thirty or forty years before anyone else thought to do it. They asked leading experts and scientists to give their best guesses as to what the situation would be like in their fields of study in a hundred years' time. The predictions were pretty amazing, both because of what they got right and what they got spectacularly wrong.
This is sort of like that. What they thought would happen was an extension of what they saw happening around them at the time. What I did About all This:I'm a big believer in passionate teaching. My feeling is that if I bring a huge amount of interest and excitement to any subject, I can sweep my students along on the wave of my enthusiam. So, as days went by and I continued to obsess about this 100+ year-old list of predictions, I started wondering what I could do with it in the classroom. Here's what I came up with: 
I designed a project around the predictions. I broke down the 29 big, multi-part predictions into 77 smaller, individual predictions. I rewrote the language to make it a little easier for 21st Century 8th Graders to understand. I printed them up on slips of paper and put them in the Awesome Jar of Destiny. (Da, da, DAAAAAHHH!!!) After setting up the concept and reading some of the predictions to my students, I had each of them draw a prediction from the AJofD. Each of them was responsible for making a poster telling what their prediction was and whether it had come true or not. If it had, they were supposed to give evidence of how it had happened. If (and more interestingly), it had not, they were supposed to show that it hadn't and to tell what we can learn about how people in 1900 saw the world that made them make that kind of guess. This was their first big project of the year. Did it Work? Was it all Rainbows and Unicorns?Well, not all rainbows and unicorns - maybe cheap glitter and rented ponies. It turns out that this "alternate history" concept is pretty hard for 13 year-olds to wrap their heads around. I used a short homework assignment to help them with the idea of making predictions and wondering about the future, but some of my students were solidly concrete-operational at that point in the year and still had a hard time understanding what I was looking for. I'd probably have a little more luck assigning this project at the end of the year, when they've gone through their Amazing 8th Grade Cognitive Development Growth Spurt, but the end of the year is pretty packed already. On the other hand, one of my goals is to challenge my advanced and gifted students more and this really grabbed some of their interests. I think we'll do this project again this fall, with a little more scaffolding and maybe as a podcast; students could interview each other about their predictions and findings. Or maybe as a VoiceThread... Hmmmm... Looking Smarter, One Click at a Time 07/13/2009
 This is another one of those semi-boring, not-very-sexy, incredibly useful tools that make my life better. 1-Click Answers from Answers.com is a small, free application that lets you find out more about any word you run into online. Simply place your cursor on the word in question, press "Alt" and click at the same time, and a dictionary entry for that word pops up, with links to a thesaurus entry, a translation option and much, much more. To be honest however, although I use this tool about a dozen times a day, I mostly use it to:
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