Storytelling for the YouTube Generation: The remixed culture

During the technology update portion for our district's opening day, I spoke with staff about viewing YouTube as a genre.  This genre is viral short-form film and is embedded in the lives of each and everyone one of our YouTube generation students.  Here are a few strategies and examples as discussed during the presentation that we didn't have time to go in depth with.  

When giving students "creative briefs" like this, remember that they don't necessarily need "training" on how to do this. Try to make experiences like this as organic as possible and avoid the traditional "how-to" step by step list of directions for them.  In the end, remember you are grading them on CONTENT - not on their video skills. It's how they communicate what they know that matters. 

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Active participation in literary experience enhances the development of comprehension, oral language, and sense of story structure." 

- LM Morrow

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Stop-motion via Vine (for smart phone or tablet)

• 6 second science fair (#6secondscience on Twitter and examples on Mashable created with Vine)
• Idiom Vines (with lesson plan): http://alessonplanaday.tumblr.com/post/57158019675/using-vine-videos-for-lessons-on-idioms-by

Google Doc stories via Google Storybuilder:

Story builder with math word problem example:

Swede Videos (example from Star Wars remixed and remade)

1-minute, 1-take videos (sum up anything - i.e. sum up all the rules of football in 1 minutes or sum up a story)

1 minute 1 take video summing up Forrest Gump movie

Remixed Music for Parody videos (aka any song "goat-edition") :)

 

Paper-slide video

How-to guide for creating the paper-slide video

Newsletter 2.0

Get the kids involved! 

Example via a Principal along with students sharing weekly updates from school.

Nonfiction video voice-overs (sum up anything)

ex: Planet Earth - narrated by kids

Directions on creating a video like the one above - Taking nonfiction video and having students remake it (i.e.: strip out voice and have the students read it)

• Save/download media from DiscoveryEd or YouYube, etc.
• get something that’s like 1 minute 14 seconds (short)
• You or the students import the video into the online video editor website WeVideo
• when ready to do a voice over...
• put volume down for the main video on WeVideo screen (not on device)
• record your own video with webcam directly on WeVideo
• drag it into the timeline editor and click “edit”
• drag the scroll bar to the left to make your own video small and drop into the corner of the screen

Doing this or K-2 is so possible! Just find the clips ahead of time, cut them down to the length you'd like on WeVideo or MovieMaker and have the kids do the self-webcam video reading portion.

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#D68learns: Opening Day 2014!

Welcome back to a brand new school year!
Here are a few materials we will be utilizing during our Opening Day session:

Link to presentation slides

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Padlet Story Starters
Learn more about Padlet here.

Padlet #1

Created with Padlet

Padlet #2

Created with Padlet

Padlet #3

Created with Padlet

Padlet #4

Created with Padlet

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Interactive Assessment via Kahoot

• Teachers, sign up for a free account at https://getkahoot.com/
• For students to play a Kahoot assessment, they need to go to https://kahoot.it and wait for the code provided.

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Closing Activity
This Year I Will Padlet

Created with Padlet

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District 68 Twitter Talks

I had the incredible opportunity to spend an hour after school with the staff of Murphy Elementary School yesterday to talk about the benefits of using Twitter.  As I shared the benefits for using this incredible tech tool, it wasn't so much about "how" to use Twitter as opposed to "why" educators use it.  The presentation revolved around this essential question: "How many ways can I get connected and build community by using Twitter?" Instead of just going over the basics of Twitter, I used this question to let us go deeper in our understanding.  The great thing about this type of PHAT question (pretty hard and touch) is that it allows for our brains to give us exactly what we ask for.

Take a look at the presentation slides below for my notes:

In addition, here's a link to the spreadsheet containing weekly Twitter chat dates/times, d68 staff members Twitter handler names, and recommended edutweeps/gurus to follow!

http://goo.gl/UKDnLj

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Blubbr.tv: The edu-version of Scene It!

Growing up, I used to love to play the game Scene It with my friends and family.  It would usually be the common staple to bringing together my family with our family friends on a Saturday night back when I was in high school.  In fact, it became so common place that my dog would charge to the TV screen when the film reel sound played, and we also learned that about 80% of the time the answer to the question had something to do with Harrison Ford.  When I previously taught 8th grade language arts, I used to always wonder what it would be like to have students review information in a way that was similar to Scene It - a provider of immediate feedback that is game based, interactive, and media rich.  Insert: Blubbr.tv - a user-created, pop-culture savvy, and YouTube ready site for playing and creating video trivia with friends.

On Blubbr, users create Trivs, which is basically shorthand for Triva. Here's an example of a Triv I put together on Personification:





Users can sign up for free accounts (and as of right now there is no age restriction on the site - users just must agree to not place inappropriate content online).  Once you click to create your own Triv, Blubbr will ask you to title it and then search for the video (held via YouTube) that you'd like to search for and place on the Triv.  For example, I searched "personification".  You can search then for more content on the next screen.

On the editor page (as seen below), you can search for video content, crop the video with the sliders underneath it (to shorten to only the portion you need), include a question (with 4 possible multiple choice answers), and submit your work.  You need a minimum of 5 video clips to submit your Triv.

When someone goes to take your Triv, they can receive points getting questions right/wrong and answering them within a certain period of time (i.e.: the faster you answer correctly the more points you are awarded).  They can also send the Triv to their friends and "challenge" them to beat their top score. As the Triv progresses, the small circles above the video will turn either green for correct or red for incorrect.  If someone clicks on the incorrect answer, their response will turn red immediately and the correct answer will be highlighted in green.

Of course, you do not have to create content on there as there are plenty of searchable Trivs for you to use.  Just browse the categories or search directly for what you are looking for!

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Infusing High & Low Tech Strategies with Student Reflection and Feedback

In my previous post I discussed the beginning portion of my workshop with 2nd year teachers in our district (see the Tech Timeline post).  Here's a copy of the slides I put together via Haiku Deck (and then later hosted and tweaked on Google Presentation) on design thinking to help promote metacognition.  The ideas presented in the slides are from things I fused together from workshops done by Martin Moran on design thinking/project based learning (@martinmoran21) and Paul Solarz on Genius Hour/passion projects (@PaulSolarz).  Using what I gained from them, I co-taught a 4-day inquiry workshop for students in an 8th grade ELA intervention class.  Included in the slides are the steps the teacher and I took to deliver instruction that allowed for student inquiry and self-reflection and meaningful (and timely!) teacher feedback:

In a perfect world, it would be great to be able to do all of these steps.  However, you don't have to do all of this when it comes to just getting kids to stop and think. When I asked the teachers what strategy they can walk away with and implement immediately, the top-two take-aways for the 2nd year teachers seemed to be one low-tech reflection strategy and one high-tech: the "Where Was I, Where Am I, Where Am I Going" post-it activity and the "One Minute Video Reflection".   As I continue to share this information with teachers, I impress upon them that although this 4-day lesson went incredibly smooth, the format may not work for everyone.  Instead, I ask teachers to again consider any strategy that they can transfer into their instruction in a way that they see fit.  Here's a list of high and low tech related reflection strategies to use when students are completing mini-research/inquiry/PBL activities:

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From fire to Google Glass: a technology timeline

I was privileged to spend an hour after school with a group of 2nd year teachers in our district to talk to them about strategies to promote metacognition via the design thinking model.  Before we got into the nitty-gritty of it all, we had a conversation around what the word technology really means and how a new perspective on it can impact our understanding of how to infuse technology into our instruction.  By today's standpoint, we typically think of educational technology as an electronic, computerized, online tool that can be used to enhance and engage students during our instruction.  However, if you really think of the word in the context of the definition, technology really is just something designed/built/created for the purpose of making life better/faster/more efficient.  When you think about it this way, it really opens the doors for conversation on what exactly we are implementing into our instruction because...HINT... it can definitely go beyond computerized tools.  

When you think about the use of the word over time, it makes it seem that technology did not exist before the early 1900's, but that simply cannot be the case from our mindset of what the word really means today.  If technology is anything that has been created to make life and learning more efficient, what items can you think of that belong in the gap of time where the word was virtually non-existent? 

I put the 2nd year teachers to the test (this was an activity that I picked up on in grad school and tweaked a bit).  Their quest was to create a "history of technology"... a tech-timeline if you will... that had them use post-it notes to map out what technologies have improved and directly impacted life and learning over time starting from fire and going all the way to Google Glass.  Here is a snapshot of the task (if you'd like the full lesson I used with students in the past, check it out on Google Docs here).

With a timer of 2 minutes on the board (via eg.gtimer.com), the results were extremely creative and thoughtful as the activity pushed the teachers to think differently on how they viewed technology.  There were post-it's that included...

• slate
• hieroglyphics/development of language
• heater
• toilet
• shoes
• printing press
• ink
• wheel
• dry erase

...and the list went on - it was amazing to see all that could be conjured up within 2 minutes! We stopped our activity with the Tech Timeline there, but if you'd like to do this with students there are definitely numerous talking-points to tie into this to make it something larger (see earlier link for activity on Google Docs).

How can you use this in your classroom?  How can you use this with staff in your building to create a mindset shift on the purpose for integrating technology?

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My Brain on #ICE14

I've been at the 2014 ICE conference for the last three days... yeah, it's my first time here. I can seriously say that my brain has caught on fire at ICE.  I've had the privilege to surround myself with brilliant Illinois educators and listen to my techie, passionate, guru mentors delve deep into what it truly means to engage the learners of today. When I finally have a chance to decompress and dump my brain out on my colleagues, I'll post some ideas that I've gained over the last three days. For now I'll resort to a quick snapshot of my blog posts yet to come.  D68 educators be warned! You'll probably see another one of these appear on the wall in the PD Center!

Wed. @ ICE:  Do you have lessons you can sell tickets for?

I spent the day learning from #HashtagMan...the pirate himself, Dave Burgess (author of Teach Like a Pirate, @burgessdave).  I use Twitter, but I've never taken part in a Twitter chat and I'll say that the #tlap one will be the first one I try out!  This is my first year out of the classroom, and as an instructional coach I have the power to impact the lives of all of our students.  Yet, I couldn't help but feel that my heartstrings were being tugged on (or completely torn out of my body at some points) as Dave Burgess reminded us all to teach with a fiery passion.  Three remarks of his resonated with me...

If the students didn't have to be there, would you be teaching to an empty room?

Do you have lessons you can sell tickets for?

It's not supposed to be easy.  It's supposed to be worth it! 

A few take-aways...

• Twitter filters out all of the energy vampires
• It's okay to create a superhero or supervillain to teach your content
• Three words... the mullet ratio
• Wedding photographer resilience
• Can I... How can I.... How many ways can I....?
• Creative alchemy: Zombies vs. humans vs. pirates vs. ninjas
• It's hard to be passionate about... railroads
• Pulling a red bra out of a bag may get you fired, but the kids will never forget that learning experience!

Thurs. @ ICE: Aren't you glad that we benefit from people who can't stand to be bored?

Thursday kicked off with a brilliant keynote by Mike Muir (@mmuir) followed by a mishmosh of workshops.  Although some workshops highlighted very different tools or learning experiences, they all held a common thread: giving students and teachers access to plugged-in power to amplify their voice, choice, and empowered leadership.

A few take-aways...

• Scout-like badges for adults: Digital Badges for PD
• Feed-forward instead of feedback
• Oooh... that question was P.H.A.T!
• Genius hour will seriously blow your mind
• So long KWL... Hello KWHLAQ!
• The most incredible tech tool on team common core: SubText
• 1:1 is about more than just giving all kids a device, and it is SO beyond just having phones aka "pockets of excellence"

Fri. @ ICE: #BeMoreDog!

I've followed George Couros (@gcouros) on Twitter for awhile, read his blog posts, and have viewed his TEDtalk, but this was the first time I've gotten to hear him speak in public when he did Friday's keynote speech.  I told my boss, Greg Wolcott (@TeachLearn68), that this was the best keynote I've ever seen, but then was quickly reminded that I say that for just about every keynote I see, haha. Here's a re-cap of his best points:

A few take-aways...

• Transform yourself... aka: #BeMoreDog (you've got to watch the video above).
• Embrace connectivity... and take selfies with the Pope
• I'd take a video-gram on YouTube than receive a card any day
• Newsletter 4.0... we were ALL engaged in a NEWSLETTER! Wow!
• Disrupt your routine.  We can learn a lot from Taylor Swift "Trouble" remixes
• "The need to create never goes away," says our 12-year-old self
• Kids are sick of the cyber bully talk. We’re just saying “don’t be horrible” and instead we should be saying “hey kids you have the world at your fingertips - go do something amazing!"
• A Must-Do: the Innovation Day
• insert Justin Bieber joke here.

So how can I possibly wrap-up the last three days?  Learning... it's messy, and success is equally as messy. It’s all over the place. The biggest game changer in education has NOTHING to do with technology.  Rather, it all comes down to the educator's mindset. Think differently and grow.

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