Lessons Learned:

• Have students help brainstorm video topics - I put a few possible topics on the board - "The Treaty of Versailles in Plain English", "Life in the Trenches in Plain English", "Spanish Influenza in Plain English" - and had students take it from there. My guys came up with some really good topics. Each team got to pick their own topic. All three videos this year turned out to be topics that the students had come up with themselves.

• Pick teams (semi) carefully - Eric Langhorst, the teacher from Missouri who I stole this idea from (indeed, who I steal most of my good ideas from) suggests using teams of five students. Teams of three-four seems to work best for me. Last year, I decided who would be on each team and made a mild-mannered or slacker-y student the team leader. That worked pretty well. This year, I still picked the team leaders and let them pick the members of their team, one at a time, like for a pick-up kickball game. The idea was to give them a little more control and choice in their project (something I always try to do) and it seemed to work well, but as someone who was ALWAYS picked last for everything as a kid, it left a bad taste in my mouth. While I've learned over the years to try and ignore my notoriously unreliable gut-feelings, I think I'll go back to choosing the teams myself next time, perhaps with student input.

• Use a tripod - I mounted my Flip video camera on a standard tripod. I put the tripod on top of a large table and tilted the head forward to not-quite ninety degrees. I taped down a large sheet of poster paper at the end of the table and used the zoom function on the camera to narrow the shot to the center of the paper. This let the students on each team spread themselves around three sides of the workspace.

• Have students do a dry run first - Even teams who have been responsible and practiced their presentation tend to mess up in front of the camera (well, under the camera in this case). I let each team do a dry run before we actually filmed their project. That seems to have worked out well. At the request of the students, I sent other teams out into the hallway to ease the nerves of the team who was shooting.

• Editing is Okay - My policy last year was to film each project in one take and put it online with no editing. The idea was to make students more attentive to details. This year, one of my students has a speech impediment and I ended up adding sub-titles. Under the philosophy of "In for a penny, in for a pound", I added a few more sub-titles in all three videos and trimmed a few seconds of "dead air" from the beginning and end of the movies. Also, an announcement came over the intercom as one team was just finishing, so I edited that out, as well. I tried to use a light hand with the editing, though.

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:

I look forward to your comments.

(Sort of.)

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?