Beyond School

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.

I put a colon in the title of the last post. That made commenting impossible. I changed the slugline so people can comment, but it only works if you click the link on my blog itself. Commenting by clicking on the post title in your feed reader won’t work.

Lesson learned: avoid colons in your post title.

Thanks to those who pointed it out.

This is maybe the post I feel most strongly about from my whole year of writing and trying to grow. I hope those who tried to comment before will bear with me and try again.

E-School News just published an article (free registration may be required) about what we geeks would call “science digital storytelling.” What I find exciting about this is that it shows scientists in action, in their labs, explaining their real-world scientific experiments for the layperson. It links to four new online video sites, modeled after YouTube, that feature science films.

Here’s a clip from SciVee, an “online video-sharing startup designed to let scientists broadcast themselves toiling in the laboratory or delivering lectures.” The clip below, strangely, does not fit this description, but is instead a tutorial about the rain cycle. It’s notable for several things: quality of design, use of film, still photo, and animation, and its mash-up use of different video sources. (The embed screwed up my formatting and I couldn’t solve it, so click the screenshot to go to the site.)

Another site, JOVE (the Journal of Visual Experiments), is impressive for its inclusion of experiment abstracts, protocols, and videos. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t include an embed feature for the videos.

Two other sites discussed in the article are Lab Action and DNATube.

For the classroom, these sites obviously offer a way of learning about science beyond the textbook by watching and listening to real scientists at work on real research. Beyond that, though, they also invite science classrooms to film and upload their own lab experiments to the sites, a la YouTube.

As the E-School News article noted, such lab-filming classroom projects are a great way to facilitate learning by requiring students to articulate the why’s and how’s of real science, and thereby rise above the “trained monkey following directions” that I imagine many science lab lessons are liable to. You can’t fake understanding when you have to discuss and explain as you go.

One last note: the article mentioned that the digital storytelling skills we aim to teach in all our classrooms are decisive for the popularity of the videos on these sites. If the sound is bad, the camera-work is shaky, the editing bush league, and so forth - if the scientists, in other words, don’t “cut the crap” from their videos and embrace the “design matters” mindset Dean Shareski has been pushing - the real world “assesses with the mouse” by either rating the videos poor or not viewing them at all. The point here: scientists themselves are now studying the same skills our students are learning when they make iMovies, podcasts, and so forth. This is good to explicitly communicate to students, who otherwise might churn out digital products with the same indifference with which they write schooly essays or fill out worksheets.

Here’s how the article puts it:

Researchers who are uploading their experiments and lectures online are discovering that filmmaking is more art than science. If the narrators are boring or the image is shaky, viewers will quickly learn to click elsewhere.

“Scientists are not movie makers, so getting them to shoot their experiments and describe them properly can be a challenge,” said Anton Denissov, a broadband video analyst with the Yankee Group.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, SciVee encourages scholars with a paper hot off the press to make a short video, called a “pubcast,” highlighting the key points. It also accepts unsolicited submissions that have no connection to any published work.

Phil Bourne, a pharmacologist at UC San Diego, launched SciVee this summer after seeing his students hooked on YouTube. Bourne wanted a reputable virtual place where researchers could trade techniques without the potpourri of topics found on general video-sharing sites.

“It’s quite a quantum leap for scientists to present their research in this way,” Bourne said.

I really share this because, in my four-month old 1:1 school, I’m seeing students starting to display the “it’s just for school, so it’s irrelevant” attitude toward digital skills that they previously associated with pencil-and-paper work. This is a real danger to the whole enterprise of making schooling more relevant through digital literacy and connectivity.

One last thing: all of these sites invite submissions, so they’re yet another way for students to develop their e-portfolios for college applications by self-publishing their best science work online. Bonus: SciVee, I just discovered, includes video-making tutorials for iMovie and Windows MovieMaker. Too cool - science teachers can just provide the link and tell students to be learners by reading and following directions.

If you’re having trouble downloading David’s keynote from k12Online, I got an okay to share this link to my upload of the video so you can download it here.

Technorati Tags: k12online, k12online07

Dear Teachers,

Please excuse my recent absence. This

has just been proposed (and, goodness help Her, accepted). So we’re talking about buying one of these

in Oregon next summer, as a summer vacation home between international school gigs evermore. And if we’re lucky, this

will follow in a year or two (a nice Korean-American blend, I hope with Her triple-eyelids).

That’s all assuming I make it through the Korean wedding planning.

Life’s funny. At 45, I thought my window for family had shut behind me. I also believed myself every time, over the past three or four years, that I repeated the mantra, “I love being single; I’ll never get married.”

I used this personal case in class today as a classic example of situational irony. But what can I say? A good heart, a good sense of humor (in English, Korean, and Japanese), and the ability to put up with this monomaniacal workaholic.

Call it Clay 2.0. Life won’t be the same. We get hitched next May.