Toy #1
A Remote Control For Your Computer
Okay - the question is a natural one: Why?
"Isn't all this technology distancing me enough from the rest of my life already? Why would I want to get even MORE remote?"
I can answer that with two words: "Teenaged Boys".
If you've been in the classroom for any length of time, you know that it is a very bad idea to turn your back on certain students. If you have any "difficult" boys in your class (and really, isn't "difficult" the most flattering way of describing some of your boys?), you know that the idea of sitting at a computer in a dark room with your back to the students is basically courting catastrophy.
Yes, of course there are ways to contain the damage. You can pause the slideshow or movie that you are showing periodically to ask pointed questions of particular students to make sure that they are paying attention. You can spin around and give the Evil Glare of Doom to somebody each time you hear a suspicious noise. You could make one of the worst offenders your special AudioVisual Assistant.
Ultimately though, you still end up in a darkened room chained to a computer with your back turned to most of your students.
Now, imagine a remote control that allows you to walk around BEHIND your students as they watch your brilliantly dorky PowerPoint presentation. You've heard a distressing amount of whispering and giggling from one corner of the room as you've been showing pictures of Lake Titicaca or lecturing on Manhattan Schist. (Or maybe that only happens to me...) You can walk around and stand next to the Giggle Brothers and maybe even lean on the desk between them as you make your next point and effortlessly move on to the next slide.
Remote controls for your computer are reasonably inexpensive - usually under $100. (I got the one I use everyday for about $40 at Radio Shack.) They can range from the really simple to the extremely complex, from unbelievably easy to use to very, very difficult.
I've only tried a few different models - mostly because I really like my original one - a Keyspan PR-US2 Presentation Remote. I really like its simplicity; it has an almost zen-like lack of cool features. It has a left-click button (which corresponds to the left button on your mouse), a right-click button (which opens up all the magic possibilities of right-clicking), a small pad that moves a pointer, much like a mouse, and a laser-pointer.
I like it - aside from the laser-pointer, it doesn't do anything a mouse doesn't do, but it is basically idiot-proof, which is pretty much what I want it to be proof against. The downside of this particular model is that the mousepad is twitchy and takes some getting used to.
Okay, a LOT of getting used to.
The weird thing is, having put in the effort of learning how to use my twitchy little blue button (Okay - that sounds a little dirty, but it is better than the word "knob", which is the only other one that springs to mind.) I really don't feel as comfortable using the other, theoretically more user friendly models I've tried.
There are rumors though, of a new remote that is sleek, exotic, sexy and sophisticated - in other words, everything I'm not and would like to be. There have been press releases. There have been reports on technology podcasts. I covet this remote. Tragically, it doesn't seem to exist yet.
Okay, admittedly it took quite a while to put the different pieces of this project together, but my 8th Grade Social Studies classes have just finished with an unbelievably, mind-numbingly, chew-on-the-carpet, kick-butt project. (Umm... in other words, the kids did a really good job on this.)
If you'll indulge me, let me tell you a story:
Our Immigration Unit is designed to make students think critically about an important, emotionally-charged issue and decide what THEY think based on facts, rather than what their parents or friends or teachers think. Our Essential Question for the unit is, "Who Deserves to Be an American?" (This is phrased deliberately provacatively.)
As part of this unit, the students look at a series of somewhere between 40-50 political cartoons from the early 1800s to present dealing with immigration. The kids are really good at picking out details in a these pictures and speculating about what they mean. By the time we have spent three or four class periods interpreting political cartoons, they usually have a really good grasp on political symbolism.
The next stage of the unit is looking at two poems written at roughly the same period in American history - Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" (the "Statue of Liberty Poem"), which was very supportive of the idea of new immigrants, and "The Unguarded Gate" by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, which took a much dimmer view of immigrants and the danger he thought they posed to American culture.
Now, this can get pretty hairy. Victorian poetry is awfully dense stuff at the best of times and Aldrich's poem is pretty ornate, even by the standards of the time. In past years, I've asked the students to translate these poems into modern American English. This was a mixed success at best. Really good students who liked working out puzzles did pretty well, but most of them just sort of closed their eyes and "punted" and really didn't learn much from the experience. This year, I asked decided to try another approach:
I had each student pull a colored poker chip from a jar (the Awesome Jar of Destiny - Da Da DAAAAAHHHHH!!) [Don't worry if you don't get the reference.]. Students with one color were assigned to draw a political cartoon expressing the point of view from Emma Lazarus’ poem. Students who pulled the other color were assigned to draw a cartoon from Aldrich’s point of view.
The cartoons I got back were stunning.
No. Seriously. They were really, really good. Professionally good, in some cases. So good, in fact, that I felt that they really needed to be brought to a wider audience. Here's what I did:
I scanned each cartoon, creating a digital image (a jpeg file) and put each class' work into a separate folder.
In class, using our classroom projector, we opened up PowerPoint and used the Photo Album function to drop all the student artwork into a presentation. It automatically created a title page slide, which we changed to suit the class' tastes. We also quickly highlighted all the slides with cartoons and formatted them to have a neutral color in the background.
Using a TuneTalk recording device and an iPod, student volunteers recorded descriptions for each of the following slides –
1. An explanation of “The New Colossus”,
2. A reading of the actual poem,
3. An explanation of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s point of view,
4. A reading of his poem,
5. An explanation of the cartoon project.
We recorded each commentary as a .wav file using Free Hi-Q Recorder, then edited each clip in Audacity, taking out all the pauses and mistakes. (Once the clip was edited and saved, they loved hearing what it sounded like at a much higher or much lower pitch - the "chipmunk" or "kidnapper" versions.)
As a class, we searched for images to go with each commentary online and built slides with the images and the .wav files. The student whose voice was used on a given slide was given a lot of creative control over what the slide would look like and how it would run. Text could remain static for instance, or appear gradually, using the Wipe function. If he or she wanted it to appear gradually, the class needed to look at how many seconds the sound file took to play, then set the Wipe to run in that many seconds.
Each class picked a piece of music to play in the background, while the slides of their cartoons runs. They needed to calculate the number of seconds that the song was, then divided that by the number of slides that would run during the song. Then, as a class, they selected all those slides and set the animation to advance each of those slides automatically at that interval. (Less complicated than it sounds.)
Later on, I (maybe next year, it can be a student) played the PowerPoint and recorded it with AutoScreenRecorder, then used Microsoft MovieMaker to convert it to a movie file. The sound does not record with AutoScreenRecorder, so I ended up dragging and dropping the individual sound files that the kids had recorded into Movie Maker. Because I had recorded the PowerPoint in real time, they matched up more or less perfectly. I ended up with a video file that I was able to upload to our school server and to TeacherTube.
I'm really proud of them.
From the awesome website, Strange Maps, comes this amazing story of what we have learned from a cargo container of rubber bath toys that was lost at sea in 1992.
This would be a useful tool to engage students when teaching about ocean currents or weather systems.
Click here for the full story.
Click here for another map of the event.
Over the past few months, I've recorded several interviews and news stories from the various podcasts that I listen to. They are too big to post on Homeworknow.com or to email to collegues, so I've uploaded them to Mediafire, an online file-hosting website. Click on any of the links below to download a radio story that will thrill and amaze you.
Why Kids Lie - An interview from the Jumping Monkeys webcast. This is an interview with Ashley Merryman, a writer who has been studying the scientific literature about children and honesty (or lack of it).
Kids and Sleep - Another interview from Jumping Monkeys with the same author about the scientific research into the effect of sleep deprivation on children and young adults.
Archivest Alison - Yet another Jumping Monkeys interview, this time with an archivist with some ideas about the best ways to save your important documents. IS the refrigerator the best place to save your kids' art?
The Rubber Room - A startling story, originally from This American Life about the fate of teachers in the New York City School District facing disciplinary action.
I download a lot of pictures from the internet to use in my classroom - either in PowerPoints or as illustrations for worksheets and homework packets. Searching for really good pictures that really fit whatever purpose I want them for can be challenging.
Let's say that you want to find a good picture of ice cream for a class activity. If you do a simple image search on Google for "ice cream", you will get six and a half million hits. (I wish that was an exageration.)
Now, you are pretty sure that at least one of those six million images will be perfect for your needs, but you will have to wade through huge numbers of pictures until you find what you are looking for. (If you are like me, you won't know what that is until you see it.)
You can cut down on those six million hits by restricting the size of the images. If you are looking for something to use in a PowerPoint, for instance, "Large" is a good bet.
Unfortunately, that still leaves you with 26,900 pictures to slog through. At twenty images per page that means that you will have to look at...um...er... - well, a lot of pages, anyway! After three or four pages worth of searching, this whole process becomes a lot like work and you end up settling for any picture that more-or-less, sort-of, kind-of serves your purpose.
I've just discovered an application that makes the process of looking at large numbers of pictures a lot more pleasant. It's called PicLens.
Instead of presenting multiple pages of twenty or thirty images at a time, PicLens allows you to look at them all at once, in an almost three-dimentional experience. The pictures are laid out in a sort of a wall that you can zoom over, looking quickly to see if any of them look promising to you. If any do, you can zoom in for a closer look.
How To Use It:
Once you have downloaded the program to your computer, just do an image search like you normally would on Google Images, Flicker, YouTube, etc..., then click on the triangle button that appears on any of the thumbnail images. After ten or fifteen seconds, you will get the UltraCool Wall of Pictures. A little experimentation will show you how to navigate around and find pictures and videos quickly and gracefully.
Click here for a link to the PicLens website.
When you do find an image that you want to work with, click on the little icon beneath it shaped like a globe with an arrow (click image to see a larger picture), and a new browser window will open with that image's webpage on it.
I've only been using this toy for a few days, but at the moment, I'm still smitten. It seems to be an elegant program that is easy to use.
Plus, it looks really cool.
Geek Alert! - Warning: This post is pretty tech-geeky (unless you actually know something about computers, in which case, you'll wonder why I'm making such a big deal out of something so simple...)
I teach a Computer Applications class to 7th and 8th graders as an IA. It is a half-year class. For the first marking period of the class, the students do a lot of exploration and learn a bit about doing internet searches, editing photos and sounds, using PowerPoint, word-processing and other basic computer applications. For the second half of the course, I have the each student choose a topic, then build a project that includes aspects of everything he or she has learned over the course so far. This generally means a PowerPoint that showcases other types of work.
One of my 8th graders is fascinated by a one-celled organism called euglena. This particular student is extremely tech-savvy and enthusiastic. (He knows much more than I do about many computer applications.) While searching online, he found a website with a short movie featuring these one-celled organisms. He really wanted to include this movie in his PowerPoint. (I don't have a problem with that, as long as he cites his source - he's not going to try to make money with this or anything.)
Unfortunately, this was easier said than done:
The website simply has a window that shows the movie. When you go there, a box appears in the middle of the screen and a moment later, there is a short movie running there. There aren't any options for downloading the video.
I addressed this in a typically over-elaborate and complicated way. There is a command called "View Source" that allows you to read the computer code that a webpage is written in. (See the picture on the right.) By reading the code, this student and I found out the actual filename of the video, then used Zamzar to convert and download it. (See previous post for information on Zamzar.)
It was only later, that I realized there was a simpler way of doing this.
I could have just right-clicked.
On the any pc-type computer mouse, there are usually two buttons. the "left-click" button that you almost always use with your index finger and the mysterious, almost threatening button on the right that most computer users never use and try to avoid because it confuses them.
The right click is your secret best friend.
Clicking anything with that right-hand button will open up a window of options in any given situation that you never dreamed about.
Including, in this case, the option to just download the darn video without having to search through all that code.
(As it turns out, though, this particular movie is a Quicktime movie - meaning that it is Apple-based. PowerPoint is PC-based and the two don't get along. I would have still needed to use Zamzar to convert the Quicktime movie (.mov) to a format more suitable for PowerPoint (.mpg). Did I just make your eyes glaze over? I'm really, really sorry. I'll try not to do that again.)
Once I had actually downloaded the euglena video though, there was a second problem - it was an insanely large file. Yes, the video was "short" compared to Citizen Kane or something, but it was over nine minutes long and really, really huge - 26 megabites: way too big to fit easily into a PowerPoint presentation.
There had to be another way of finding euglena video footage that was a little more user friendly.
As it turns out, there was. Is. Er... whatever...
On a whim, I looked up the word "Euglena" on YouTube. "What are the odds," I asked myself, "that anyone would be geeky enough to actually post footage of a single-celled animal-like alga on YouTube?"*
As it turns out, quite a few. My student and I are somewhat spoiled for choice vis-avis euglenic video footage.
So I guess the main lesson to be learned from all this is, K.I.S.S. - "Keep It Simple, Student". Or Teacher. Er...whatever...
* When I asked my wife this question, she pointed out, "You would."
Sadly, she's right.
If there is any website that strikes terror into the hearts of people in education, it is YouTube. It is ALWAYS blocked from any school network. The idea of students having access to raw video footage uploaded from who-knows-where is pretty scary. On top of that, even a quick look at the content on YouTube doesn't inspire much confidence in humans as a species - there are some pretty dumb people out there with access to a video camera and the dumber they are, the more likely they are to have stuff posted on YouTube.
There is an old axiom called "Sturgeon's Law" that says, "90% of everything is crap". So what about the other ten percent?
If you know what to look for (and even if you don't), there is an astounding amount of really useful (and cool) footage on YouTube that works really, REALLY well in the classroom - footage from classical music concerts, political campaign ads, great speeches from history, important events as they appeared on the news - you name it.
The problem though, as stated above, is, YouTube is always, ALWAYS blocked from any school network. So how can you use it in your classroom?
The answer is Zamzar.com. This is one of several online services that allows you to convert just about any type of computer file to any other type of computer file. You tell it what you want to convert and when it's done converting it, it will send you an email with a link to download the newly converted file.
(If that sounds scary and techno-jibberishy, think about it this way: If you didn't like the color of your car, you could send it to a body shop to be repainted. When they had finished redoing your car, they'd give you a phonecall to let you know it was done and where you could pick it back up. This is sort of like that.)
The other really cool thing that Zamzar does is to convert online videos like those on YouTube into video files that you can store on your computer. If you find a video clip that you want to use on YouTube, you can use Zamzar to download it for use in your classroom later.
Just copy and paste the URL (web address) of a particular YouTube video into the URL box in Zamzar, fill in the rest of the information it asks you for, then select "Convert". A taskbar at the bottom of the window will let you know when the file has been converted. A couple of minutes later, if you check your email, you will find a link that will allow you to download the video to your computer. If you are planning to use the video as part of a PowerPoint presentation, you should probably convert it to an "mpeg" file. If you are an Apple user, choose a "mov" file.
There is another advantage to doing this:
A couple of years ago, there was a particular video I needed to use in a class. It was a time-lapse video of traffic on the Panama Canal. At the time, the only way I knew of to access it was on streaming video. I had to swear all my students to secrecy everytime I showed it, because it took so much of the school's bandwidth, each time we watched it, everyone else's internet access in the school crashed to a halt. By downloading a video to my own computer, I avoid that whole headache.
Secret, Emergency Trick to Get Around School Filters:
If you are at school and suddenly realize that you need to use a YouTube video, but are frustrated by the internet filter, there IS a way around it - sort of. Let's imagine that you need a video of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech:
Open a search engine like Google. Type in a search string that says something like:
YouTube, I Have a Dream
You will get something that looks like this. Choose the video clip that you want to use. (You'll have to take your best guess on which one that would be.)
If you do this at school, it will take you to the dreaded "This Website Is Blocked" Page of Doom. But it will also tell you exactly which webpage it is blocking. If you copy that web address, then plug it into Zamzar, you can send the link for the converted file to your school email account, then use that to download the video.
This is not a perfect solution, but I used it a few months ago to get a Barrak O'Bama campaign video that I needed on short notice.
Try downloading a video from YouTube this week. Your classroom might become 2-3% cooler.
YouTube: It's not just for idiots anymore.
I use PowerPoint a lot in my classroom to teach mapping skills. One very useful PowerPoint tool that helps me do this is its ability to animate shapes and lines. I can make a line, like a river or a border draw itself on the screen. I can make it repeat itself over and over in a loop so that students can draw along with it. This is also useful for having arrows draw themselves to point out a particular feature on a slide.
How to do it:
Somewhere on your PowerPoint toolbar or menu, you will find a box of shapes that you can insert into your slide. It should look something like this. (Each version of PowerPoint has it stored somewhere different, so it will be easier for you to find if I DON'T give you directions on where to find it.)
If you are tracing a squiggly line, like a river on a map, choose the squiggle tool. If you are drawing a straight line or an arrow, choose one of those tools.
Squiggly lines can be hard to trace. To make things easy for yourself, enlarge the view of your slide - maybe to something outragious, like 300% or 400% - that will make it easier for you to match the curves of the line.
Once you've drawn your line, it will show itself with a box around it like this to let you know that you can edit it. If you look closely, you'll notice that I was a little messy when I was tracing the Connecticut River. There is a way to fix that without redrawing the line.
If you double-click or right-click on the box outlining the line you just drew, you can edit it. Pick a color that will make it stand out, then pick Weight, which allows you to make a thicker line. If you went outside the line with your tracing, making it thicker will probably fix the problem.
I don't have a picture to illustrate the next step, but it is very, VERY easy!
1. Go to the toolbar at the top of the page and choose Animation.
2. Then choose Custom Animation.
3. Click on Entrance.
4. Choose Wipe.
Congratulations, you've just added a line that will draw itself in your slideshow! Now all you have to do is fool around with the details.
The Details:
You have to decide how fast you want your line to draw itself and from what direction it will draw itself. You will also need to decide if you want it to happen automatically or when you click your mouse. You can do all this at the top of the Custom Animation menu.
If you want the line to draw itself over and over:
On the right-hand side of box where your new line is listed in Custom Animation, there is a menu arrow. Click on that, then choose, Timing.
Use this menu to determine how many times you want the line-drawing process to repeat itself. The choices are pretty self-explanatory.
You're done! Congratulations! Look at you - all design-y and stuff!
I don't know about you, but I've had it.
There is nothing but bad news on tv and radio. There are still eight months of election foolishness to go. Your kids have lost their minds. The bananas are dying.
I have something to give you a little hope.
There is hope.
You have a job you love, that you are very good at.
Spring is only a month away.
And we live in a world where people can and do really just start singing and dancing for no reason other than to make us happy.
(If you are reading this at school and the video above is blocked, try this link - it worked last week.)
When I look at all the cool technology that is available to classroom teachers, it is easy to be seduced by a lot of flashy, "Gee Whiz" applications. You look at them and say, "Wow - wouldn't it be cool to...", then somehow, you never get around to actually using them.
On the other hand, what about the not-so-sexy, practical tools that I actually put to use? The ones of real value? The Mary-Anns of my little island, if you will? (Sorry - a totally wasted youth coming back to haunt me...)
The type of application that springs to mind is Mapping Games.
I've been using these in my classroom for the past several years to help drill students in study sessions for geography quizzes. They are practical, immediate and visual ways of studying that target a different type of learner than traditional pen and paper petagogy. If I have a student who swears he or she can't memorize a particular map, half an hour of traditional drilling - ("Okay, what's this one? Uh, huh... and this one? And what was the first one, again?"), followed up by half an hour or so of playing a mapping game will almost always nail the fundamentals into his or her brain.
Okay, granted - this isn't higher-level learnng we're talking about here. This is not going to inform a student in any meaningful way about the history of a conflict or the richness of a culture; this is rote memorization. There is a place for that, though, and mapping games really help with the tedious gruntwork.
Anyway - useful online mapping games:
http://www.lizardpoint.com/fun/geoquiz/ - These are games that I've been using for several years. They are very basic, but really get the job done. There are mapping games here that cover dozens of different topics, from very basic to very esoteric.
http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/ - If you are familiar with the old videogame Tetris, these games will make instant sense to you. If you don't know what I'm talking about, they will confuse and dismay you. These games are seriously addictive. Please, for the sake of your own sanity, if you play these yourself, start on the Easy level. (By the way, the fact that this set of games sucks you in so thoroughly is a very good thing when you can get a student into that zombie-like trance, where, quite against his will, he learns something.)
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games.htm - I've just discovered this series of games. They have several different sets that focus on the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, South America, etc.. Each set starts out with a very basic, easy(ish) game to lull you into a false sense of complacency, then presents you with more and more challenging games on the same theme. By the time you've worked your way up to Level Three or Four, you REALLY know this stuff!
I see all these as being particularly useful for 5th grade and up. I looked for a New Hampshire mapping game to help out the 4th grade with their New Hampshire unit. I didn't find a GAME, exactly, but I did find this page of very cool classroom support materials. I hope it's useful.
Hmmmm.... maybe we should have student's design their own online New Hampshire mapping game. A very Ginger-y idea.
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