Modernist Posters

By Tom | February 5, 2010

This is a bent paperclip on a green background. It is awesome.

When it rains, it pours snows people panic and Richmond shuts down.

Also when I find one good thing on the Internet, others often show up.

So here are minimalist TV show posters by Albert Exergian.

I’d do this for sure. It’s another in the line of restriction = creativity possibilities. The drawing skills are really low. It’s all about figuring out the essence of the novel/era/historical person and figuring out how to represent it as simply as possible. You’d have to stress what makes things modernist and really get students thinking about using color, shape etc. with as much thought as possible.

The example would be key, as would your explanation of it1.

I ended up with this from one of the few email newsletters I find worth subscribing to – Very Short List. If you like this type of thing, it’s worth checking out.

1

Topics: 21st Century Skills, Art, Creative Communication, Design, English, History, creativity | 3 Comments »

6 Frame Comic Summaries

By Tom | February 5, 2010

We’re asking you to take your favourite film and re-imagine it for us in the form of a comic, within a six-frame panel (download template files). That’s the whole film, condensed into six frames.

This is another beautiful, reductionist way to analyze a book, historical figure, era, epoch or movement. I don’t see much use for math but I could also see some science possibilities.

You could pair up with an art teacher or just do it on your own. I’d have a stable of activities1 similar to these and allow students the option to choose between them at various points.

Keep in mind, they don’t have to be drawn. Let them use photographs. They could even take their own pictures. The concept/framework is simple but don’t let it box you in.

This is the stuff I really like in history and English. It’s low work on the teacher, high processing on the students. Deciding what elements are essential is a task that requires a lot of understanding and critical thinking, then representing those ideas graphically is another level of processing.

I’m working on a history example but it’s taking too much time (and thought) to do well immediately.

1 Of the condense and remix type. I’ve posted a few in the past.

Topics: 21st Century Skills, Creative Communication, English, History, creativity | 6 Comments »

Snow Days Don’t Stop Assessment

By Tom | February 4, 2010

This wouldn’t be worth of mocking except for the fact that it was retweeted time and time again by the Blackboard Twitter fanboy crowd and when I finally read it I couldn’t get the taste of bile out of my mouth. This is the garbage they celebrate as a success.

So the following post is an attempt at purging my system.

Original article here. Italics and footnotes, as always, are mine.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The snow led to more than 300 local closings and delays today — but if a district uses too many snow days, there’s less time to test. No one wants that. One local school figured out a way to have the best of both worlds -students at home *and*1 a full day of testing. Joe Webb says it works through technology -insert dramatic music here.

The kids at Taft Elementary will lose a day of class because they’re at home. McAuley High School has figured out a way to reach out to its students and have them in class at home. At Beechwood Elementary, Miss Burns’ fourth grade class beat the elements and had a school not a snow day. But in 2010 this is truly old school.2

McAuley sophomore Sam Rack kicked it new school3 today at home but taking all her regular classes online. It counts as a school day. Sam Rack has done the math. “I actually like this a lot more because if we have a lot of snow days like last year, we had to take days off of our summer vacation. Please don’t make me go to school a day longer than I have to.”

Sam had Blackboard to thank for her new found ability to add and subtract one digit numerals.

Blackboard CEO, Michael Chasen, crowed with excited when informed of this development. “Another 21st century skill down! Bb NG is transforming education!”

It’s part of McAuley’s high-tech teaching push4. The principal notified students and parents yesterday that today was an online day and all work had to be done. At his suggestion, we interviewed him online today via Skype5. He says McAuley uses the popular school software *Blackboard*6 to sort of “home school” on days like today.

“Don’t get carried away though” cautioned Webb, “You still need us. It’s not real home school. I used air quotes. Make sure you put the quotes in the article.”

“Students have to go on Blackboard and each teacher is going to post assignments and they’re doing all kinds of things. You know, like tests, quizzes, some timed quizzes and I bet you’ll see some timed tests. Others are probably reading stuff. It’s really amazing. Thank god for Technology.”

At 1:40 this afternoon, Sam logged in to take an AP European History quiz. She had 20 minutes to get it done. This wasn’t a full day on or off but she did get to sleep in and leave the uniform in the closet7. Plus not have her parents worry about her driving to and from school. “This was kind of a no-brainer for us. We thought this was a way to keep our kids safe and keep moving forward from an educational standpoint. We had to synergize our enterprise CMS to strategerize our learning outcomes towards our state standards. There is a race to the top to be won.“

Half the students at McAuley have laptops they’ve purchased through the school. That makes this whole thing possible. The other half weren’t going to graduate anyway. It’s better that they remain laptop-less so that they’re happier with their eventual role in life.

Technology is a great thing…but not everyone has the access. Until that happens…. snowy days will mean no class for most schools.8

1 Apparently the * has become an accepted journalistic punctuation mark. It denotes sparkles or jazz hands- depending on the context.

2 I read this 3 times and it made less sense each time.

3 I did NOT add this. This is real. Other phrases that didn’t make the final edit included bodacious, funky fresh, col’ chilling and maxing n’ relaxing.

4 Several high-tech pulls went terribly wrong.

5 Skype audio failed due to bandwidth issues and the principal refused to accept our phone call because it wasn’t *technologified* enough so the interview was carried out via text chat.

6 I have no idea why BB is in bracketed by asterisks.

7 Imagine the freedom to both wear the clothes you want and get up when you want.

8 And that ladies and gentlemen is a closing line. It’s deep, poignant and leaves you wondering why it didn’t have asterisks sprinkled on it.

Topics: Assessment, Humor, Lost | 4 Comments »

Calling E.T.

By Tom | January 29, 2010


This is another one of those little things I love that the Internet brings me on a silver RSS platter1.

From New Scientist

As part of our special feature marking the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial life, we round up humanity’s radio messages to the stars.

This is an awesome list of messages we’ve sent into outer space2 and leads to some potentially interesting English uses. Here are a few very rough ideas.

I actually did a unit on aliens and alien abduction in my 6th grade class. They were very reluctant readers and writers who, for the most part, were several grades below level. The alien abduction theme really captured their interests. We looked at crop circles, abductions, Area-51.

After reading a variety of abduction stories, we broke down the essential components and then they wrote their own stories as abductees. This opened up discussions about genera, point of view, descriptive writing etc. It was also a lot of fun.

Here are some random graphic organizers4 I made at the time. I’m putting them out here more as possible ideas. They’re pretty poorly done, although I still like a few of the ideas. It’s always depressing to look back at what you were doing 6 or so years ago. I had less than no skills but I was having a good time.


This one was done on the fly. The student was one who was there for a few days and then disappeared (only to return months later). It was a nice connection for the class to see someone they knew who actually, to us, disappeared.

1 Granted, I’ve piled this platter so high with various feeds that a lot is lost in the shuffle. It may be time for a reboot.

2 We’ve done some very strange things.

3 They can see, hear etc.

4 Sadly, probably closer to worksheets in most cases.

Topics: Creative Communication, English, Reflections, creativity | 5 Comments »

21st Century Video Remix

By Tom | January 14, 2010

I remixed1 this video for our new specialty center which is focusing on teaching. Once you pass Obama, there’s some decent video covering students working in groups with computers, Promethean boards 2, and digital probes. It might be useful to others.

1 I swear it does change.

2 AKA the giant, wall mounted mouse- my opinion of the IWBs, obviously, remains pretty low.

Topics: 21st Century Skills, Video | 5 Comments »

Weird Books

By Tom | January 8, 2010

My favorite kind of edtech use- free, quick and slightly odd1.


2 This is prime fodder for all kinds of entertaining creative writing activities.

Things I would want to try-

1 Thinking about it, it’s more about access to odd information and visuals. The tech part is relatively insignificant but could be expanding in most of the examples depending on what you had access to. For instance, with the time and inclination you might want to

2 Appropriateness varies. Probably not safe to have your kids wandering around on their own unless you live in Amherst, MA.

3 Choice is always good, but not too much choice or it’ll take forever.

Topics: Art, English, Poetry, creativity | No Comments »

Top 100?

By Tom | December 16, 2009

I got an email today passing on “The Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009” list. I know I should have left when some people chose Animoto as their number one choice but I didn’t. I wanted to see what the compiled list from 278 people looked like1.

In order to look at it in a more interactive way, threw the data into Exhibit.
Picture 4

It’s interesting to click around and see the data grouped in different ways. Mostly it makes me think that asking for a top 10 is about 5 items too many.

I also wonder a good bit about what people think of when they list “tools for learning.” Photoshop made it to #35 this year.

1 There are a number of problems I have with the way the whole collection of items works but we’ll ignore that for now.

Topics: Folly | 4 Comments »

Sharing Ed. Content In Ways That Don’t Suck

By Tom | December 15, 2009

I work in a decent sized school system. We have 69 schools and about 50,000 students.

That means we have a lot of teachers, a lot of teachers teaching the same content, a lot of teachers struggling with the same problems, a lot of teachers re-doing work that’s already been done.

At a district level we spend untold hours and untold amounts of money trying to provide support for teachers and trying to promote best practice. We have teachers who exemplify the concepts we’re trying to share but they are, too often, unknown outside their school, or their grade, or their subject, or their classroom.

So our current goal is to end anonymity, to effectively publicize best practice on a global level. One of the ways that we’d like that to happen is through online content distribution and building conversation around that content. The ability to put multimedia content online is nothing new. What has changed is the facility with which it can be done and the ability to easily have conversations1 around very specific pieces of media.

Changing the concept


It’s important to look at how educational content sharing has failed in the past and present if you’re going to try to get it right. I looked at as many different online sharing options as I could find.2 I’ve also been on the user end of a number of systems.

I think we can go ahead and skip the file hierarchy systems. They suck in such a huge number of ways. There’s no visual, no readily available meta data etc. etc. Their one benefit is they’re easy to publish with but that’s not much of a benefit when no one bothers trying to use them.

The place I’d like to focus is on the database backed web content creation systems. I think it’s key to have them on the web and open to anyone who’s interested and it’s key to have the database backend to prevent needless duplication and other hassles for the creator and consumer.

There are two big places these systems tend to fail. They can fail to provide what the consumer needs and/or they can fail to facilitate the creation of content on the producer end. I’m arguing that these two aspects are more tightly linked than it might initially appear. I see both issues stemming from a misunderstanding about what teachers want out of these sharing sites. Most sites focus on providing a highly structured and rigidly standardized lesson plan format. Essentially, ‘Here is your lesson in a box.’ I don’t think that’s what teachers want and it’s certainly not the way you get teachers thinking about changing practice. The other path for these sites is ‘Here’s your widget to add to your widget collection.’ The most interaction either option tends to give teachers is the ability to rate the content.

I think we’re pitching the wrong content and doing it in the wrong way. “This is perfect. Download it and follow the directions. We know what’s best.” is not a message that works. People drop in, they glance around and if they don’t find engaging content before having to go download a file, they leave.

My Pitch

So here’s my pitch on how I’d like to see this system work.

Philosophy: Teachers are looking for inspiration and community as opposed to directions. This is as much about the conversation that occurs around the content as it is about the content itself. As a result -

Display

Main Page: On the consumer end, you have to make this content look interesting and keep it fresh. What shows up, as well as how it shows up, is absolutely key. So my main page would be very similar to the way a number of consumer sites work. I think those sites have quite a lot to teach in terms of what people expect and want when browsing for content online. I think iTunes is an interesting model to look at. It has a wide user base and I think it does a good job of displaying content.3

Picture 4
We’re not talking rocket science here. Many blog themes also echo this display format. Essentially, you’ve got a larger box that is animated and shuffles editor designated content. Then you’ve got some content showing up based on user interest and activity. All of this is visual and allows the user to drill down into more specific detail. It is simple but it’s also the opposite of nearly every education based website I could find that shares content. Apple’s Learning Interchange gets close on the display side. I also really liked the revamped look of the CUNY Commons site. Compare these initial interfaces to sites like Merlot, Lola or the OER Commons. I’m not arguing content, social purpose etc. here. I just want you to look at the page and compare how you feel viewing it.

Search: The next place people will end up is the search page. There are so many ways this is done in unpleasant ways. I’ll use the Merlot example below because it’s actually one of the better options but suffers from pretty universal flaws.
Picture 5

The only image on the page is the “Editors’ Choice” badge. The data is laid out in ways that don’t really take advantage of the space, nor do they use formatting to help make the data more legible. I found the dual star based review systems somewhat unpleasant and for some reason it was hard for me to count the stars. What data is present in this view should also change pretty radically if it doesn’t function as a link to other information in that same category.

I remade it with the same essential information below.

Picture 8 4
or alternately
Picture 9

In a perfect world, I’d probably have a number of things activate based on mouse overs. So you could get a better description if you wanted it but a lot of the initial interest would be based on the look, title and metadata regarding ratings and conversation.

That’s probably enough for now. Next time around I’ll get into tagging, searching, aggregation and what the content and conversation might look like.

1 I’m defining ‘conversation’ pretty loosely here.

2 Feel free to send me any good examples you’re aware of. I have no need of additional bad examples.

3 Music is not an inherently visual piece of content but album art has played a major role in its packaging for some time. iTunes certainly takes advantage of that.

4 You may say that image sucks and has nothing to do with the content. I’d agree except it’s from the content which sucks in ways I have a hard time explaining.

Topics: Possibilities, Projects, Staff Dev | 6 Comments »

Progress on 21st century skills?

By Tom | December 11, 2009

I’ve got to deliver a 15 minute presentation tomorrow on what we’re doing in good ol’ HCPS with regard to 21st century skills1. The audience is high level people from other local school districts. My goal is to let them see where we made some errors and hope they’ll then be able to avoid them. In a perfect world, I might also inspire them to try similar projects in the future with the goal of sharing both resources and expertise.

Vision

Step one, will be to discuss how we’ve tried to set a vision for what a 21st century classroom looks like. That’ll basically cover the evolution of the TIPc chart which I’ve already done here. The focus will be on the movement towards simplicity, student focus etc. I also intend to bring up the effectiveness of the TPCK model in having this discussion with teachers and administrators. It really seems to clarify things.

It’ll also be worth noting that this is now our mission statement.

Henrico County Public Schools, in partnership with the community, will inspire, empower, and educate every student to be prepared for success in the 21st century.

There are some interesting things you can read into that if you want to.

Sharing

Step two, will cover how we’ve tried to share best practice and lessons. In my opinion, this has not gone well. Despite huge amounts of time and effort we simply do not share good practice and resources effectively. If you look at the content specific links here, you’ll notice that there’s a mixture of tools used (iWeb, blogs, Dreamweaver) and that many of the sites have been abandoned. Part of the reason for abandonment has been because of a push to put all these resources into shared object repositories in SchoolSpace (our Angel CMS).

It makes sense in a lot of ways to do something different. We have tried

None of these systems really meet what I see as our total needs. One major aspect is the ability to hold conversations around specific pieces of content. The ironic thing is that this conversation is probably more valuable in terms of changing instruction than whatever piece of media inspired it, yet we do very little to encourage this type of communication. We also neglect the community and social aspects that need to be addressed, built, and continually focused on in order to get real change to happen.

So we’re trying to define what our needs are in that area.

Data

We’re doing a voluntary program that’s been titled “reflective friends.”2 You can read about the process here.

Essentially, principals volunteer their school and then decide on what kind of data they want to collect on practice in their school. We meet with them and then come back with an outside team to collect that data. The data is then presented and we work with the administrators to provide support and direction

1 I have a number of issues with the label/concept but it does allow us to address a number of aspects which are positive.

2 Critical friends sounded too frightening. I have nothing nice to say about either title but the premise is good.

Topics: 21st Century Skills | No Comments »

Misplaced

By Tom | December 11, 2009

We build a lot of great “doors” in education and then wonder why no one uses them.

Topics: Reflections | 3 Comments »

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