Teacher Toys

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:

I look forward to your comments.

(Sort of.)

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.

[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.

To make your own poster, go to: http://bighugelabs.com/poster.php

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.

• Color Photography? - Check
• Intantanious beaming of information from around the world? - Check
• Peas the size of softballs? - Not So Much
• Giant Navies of zeppelins armed with doomsday devices? - 50/50

It's the wrong predictions that are the most interesting to me - both because I get lost in thought imagining a world where those things are true, but also because it gives some real insight into what an educated world-view was in 1900. Someone once said that if you want to know what society was really like at a given time, read its etiquette books. If they are telling you not to do something, it probably means that a lot of people were actually doing that.

This is sort of like that. What they thought would happen was an extension of what they saw happening around them at the time.

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.

 

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:

• Check my spelling or
• Make sure it's the word I actually want to use.

Try it. How many things do you find online that actually make your life simpler and easier?

 

Then I pick a background color.

I do this by right-clicking the slide and choosing the "Format Background" option.

 

I generally pick a bland color for the background - something classy, but non-distracting. I like an dull olive-green: it feels kind-of calm and pool-table-y.

That's just a personal choice, of course.

 

 

Step #2 - Making Desks

From the Shapes menu, select a rectangle and draw the basic outline of a desk.

 

 

If the desks in your room aren't actually rectangular, other shapes are available.

My students actually sit at trapezoidenal tables, but for the purpose of this explanation, I'm going to use demonstrate a seating chart for a classic, 20 desk classroom.

 

Click on the desk you've just drawn and choose, "Format", "Shape Fill" and "Texture". This will provide you with several options, a couple of which will more-or-less approximate the general appearance of the desks in your room.

 

Now, to make your life easier, right-click your desk, select "Copy" from the menu and "Paste" in an exact duplicate.

 

 

Keep doing this until you've got a row of desks. If you don't trust your ability to do this by eye, insert a line to guide you, then remove it once you've got the desks placed.

 

Now, select your row of desks and do the same thing all over again:

Copy...

 

... and Paste, until you have all the desks placed into a reasonable representation of your classroom.

 

If the desks in your classroom are as mismatched as the ones in mine, you might want to change the textures in a few of them to reflect your actual state of affairs.

 

Step #3 - Inserting Students

Now, insert a picture of a student. You've probably left enough blank space in some part of the slide to fit a good-sized photo. (You wouldn't BELIEVE how long it took me to figure THAT out!)

 

Where To Get Student Pictures:

I generally use the students' ID pictures. I go on the school's server and find the pictures. (In a different place every year!)

It would be a pretty straight-forward process to take pictures of the kids yourself - or better yet, have them take pictures of each other. There are always students who don't like to have their pictures taken, but I've found that if I give a camera to a couple of competing "alpha-girls", they manage to get really good pictures of everyone. Almost any boy will let a cute girl take his picture and the weird, intensely complicated rules of girl politics will allow the photographer girls to shoot other girls, particularly if there are competing social cliques at play.

(Hey - I don't claim to understand it; I just try to harness it for Good instead of Evil...)

To protect my students' privacy, I'm using a picture of Marsha Brady here.

 Next, choose the "Insert" menu and select "Sound". This will allow you to have the picture of your student appear with an amusing sound effect that will make you look really cool. (Or in my case, slightly less lame...)

 
I've collected quite a few soundclips over time to use for this sort of thing. They are all saved as .wav files. I try to find some sound effect that is either very much in line with a student's personality or very much NOT in line.

Thus, all the hilarity.

At this point, PowerPoint will ask you if you want to start the sound effect automatically or when you click the little loudspeaker icon.

Choose "Automatically".

 

I generally drag the little loudspeaker icon off to the side of the slide. That way, I always know where it is and it won't clutter up the look of the slide.

Now, select the sound effect on your Custom Animation taskbar and use the "Reorder" command to move it to the top of the list.

Step #4 - Making New Slides

If you look on the left-hand side of your screen, you will see a menu with all the slides you've made so far in this presentation. Select the slide you've just created and copy it.

You can do this by clicking it and dragging it. PowerPoint will ask if you want to move it or copy it. Select "Copy".

Depending on what version of PowerPoint you have, there may also be a command under the "Insert" menu, called "Insert Duplicate Slide". That will work well, too.

 

Now, you have two identical slides.

(Which, I suppose, is sort of the point...)

Now, add your next student to the second slide and keep doing all the same steps, over and over again.

Because you will copy each new slide in order to make the next one, all your cumulative changes will come with you and the little pictures of the students will stay in exactly the right spots.