Beyond School

Just a quickie to share a new discovery: I just switched to Flock from Firefox - which I loved, but has been way too buggy lately - and I find it feels just like Firefox, but faster and more stable. Better still, I found a new addon called Split Browser (see a monster list of Flock addons here) that allows me to split my browser window. I know this isn’t new - I used a similar thing years ago when I was a PC user - but I’d somehow forgotten how useful this function could be.

An example: Say you’re reading a a long forum entry on Ning, and you want to be able to reply to it as you read. You can’t do that easily in one browser (and yes, you could simply open another window, but that’s clunky). By splitting my Flock window, it’s easy. See this screenshot for a glimpse of how, and click on the image for a larger view:

Added bonus: Flock seems to really take customer care to new levels via Twitter. See this post from John Larkin for the full, cool scoop.

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Thanks to Jeff Utecht and the students in my activity block for this little demonstration of what real learning can look like now. Jeff’s in Shanghai. I’m in Seoul. We’re both in Twitter and Skype, though, so distance doesn’t matter.  This kind of international travel is free. And no airport waiting.

Read the tweets, then watch the movie of Jeff’s visit. He taught me something I needed to know quickly. And it was easy and fun. But don’t forget: he taught me. It was real-world learning, “Natural Global Collaboration,” “Quick-in, Quick-Out Networked Learning“. Isn’t that what schools are supposed to teach students?

, I said.

, said Jeff.

So, we

for about 30 minutes.* He showed me the plugin I needed to make my school’s WordPress MU student blogging portal as cool as his is at Shanghai American School. And we talked with students about starting a new school. (I loved the outburst, “I’ll go!” in chorus from several students.)

Then I said, ,

and Jeff said, .

And that’s how learning can look today. Fun, conversational, as-needed, and above all, as WANTED.

Sad epilogue: Most students don’t seem to get it. Even when I tell them that this type of activity can get them an A, they resist. They really seem educationally traumatized to not see or desire the type of fun power involved in all of this. But there are a few exceptions, thank Goodness. I’ll be featuring some of them soon (and that means you, Patrick, and Paul, and Won).

*You can download it here, but it’s unedited.

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I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking beyond school-as-usual.

Any of you who have co-taught or team-taught know the mix of factors that can make it a nightmare or a paradise. Working with fellow history teacher Michael Harvey (now in Abu Dhabi) was a dream. I discuss this in the movie below, and students weigh in on why they liked it too.

I still miss having a second adult in my English and history classes today. ESL aside, it just creates possibilities for better teaching - primarily by giving students the experience of hearing two “expert” adults argue about literary, social, political, and other issues. Michael and I debated such things as Castro’s Cuban revolution, American imperialism during and after the Cold War, the merits of economic, political, and religious systems, etc, with sincere differences. We fenced about them in free-wheeling debates whenever one of us disagreed with the other. We told the students to decide whose arguments had the most merit.

Then we had scotch and nice long talks as best of friends outside of class.

The students loved it. It was learning the family dinner-table way, with two reasonably intelligent, informed adults discussing and debating world events. “Kids” with ears learn a lot that way about thinking and points of view.

So this 2005 ESOL-in-the-Mainstream co-teaching training video I made at Shanghai American School is a good example of team teaching that worked. It’s received good feedback over the years. And notably, it’s about teaching, not about technology. Disclaimer: The dreaded Five-Paragraph Essay rears its ugly head here, but remember - it’s in the context of teaching academic essay-writing and organization for 14-year-olds. I always unteach the 5PE once students have shown they’re ready for organic writing.

It’s my first-ever iMovie, by the way. And enjoy the goofy Baptist preacher look I was playing with back then. I’ve since re-embraced my freak-flag.

Note: I’ve added this to my Teaching Gallery page.

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In a post last month I mentioned seeing the need for short video presentations about web 2.0 in education, and posted a snippet from a parent presentation I gave at our 1:1 Apple Laptop School launch. That snippet focused only on the motivational power of a simple ClustrMap on a blog.

Here’s another one: Less than three minutes, it’s about how blogging can transform a person who does not write into a person who writes daily - because of the connective nature of authentic, self-directed, passion-based (or, for the lukewarm, interest-based) blogging. I use myself as a case in point.

This clip makes me chuckle because I loved standing with my school administrators on stage, talking to parents of a neurotically grade-obsessed culture, and announcing quite non-chalantly: “I don’t like school. I like learning, but I don’t like school. I want to take students beyond school and into real learning.” I wonder how such a thing sounded to Confucian ears.

I conclude with a brief pontification on the fact that homework scribbling is not writing.

I’ll also post this on the “Teaching Gallery” page of this blog. (And stay tuned for more “Cut the Crap” movie-making tutorials here, and on the “Cut the Crap” page.)

Here it is. Criticism is welcome, since this is part of my own project-based learning about multimedia production.

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Dean Shareski and Cindy Barnsley gave me valuable (though tactfully veiled) criticism for my original “Cutting the Crap (from Student Movies)” video. To paraphrase, “That first part was really good.” ;-)I took the hint. I’ve divided the original into two shorter efforts, and added end credits attributing the Flickr photos I used to model that for students.

So now, Episode One is simply about finding legal images and videos for mash-ups using Creative Commons Search (with a quick Zamzar-to-download-YouTubes, etc, thrown in). And Episode Two is a re-mix of the Ken Burns Effect lesson, with an added intro: an example of how bad the Ken Burns Effect can look if not done skillfully, in the form of one of my own “crappy” iMovies of late.

I’ve put them both on a new page on my new WordPress home entitled “Cut the Crap,” so you can always find them there. But here they are anyway:

Episode One: Keeping it Legal with Creative Commons Search

Episode Two: Still Photo Skills with the Ken Burns Effect

For more posts on digital storytelling, see:

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