Beyond School

If you happen to be so good at Photoshop or Illustrator that you can knock out a decent website banner in 20 minutes or so — unlike me, for whom a miserably failed attempt takes hours — I’d appreciate your help. I’m ready to launch a new website that I think is important, and want it to look more than Bush League.

I can’t pay you for it — I’m already paying for the website hosting and putting free hours into the concept and content, all for the sake of education, not profit — but I can give you credit and free advertising on this site and the new one.

If you’re interested in helping, fill out the contact form below — and thanks.

[Update: Form closed. Thanks to all who responded!]

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread:

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can find and do similar things in their subjects.

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt’s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month.¹ I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman’s course on the same subject.

Here’s the rub: Yale’s courses are better watched at Yale’s Open Yale site, where you can find transcripts, video downloads for iPods, and all sorts of supplemental goodies for each lecture. But I haven’t been able to find the UCLA course on any UCLA-hosted site, so all we have for Prof. Hunt’s course is Academic Earth’s video. That means no transcripts or text of any sort. [Update: UCLA has a YouTube channel that allows downloads of the lectures -- something Academic Earth doesn't do. I'm putting my floating stickies on the YouTube lectures too. Here's the Modern Western Civ course playlist.]

Dr. Hunt’s a fine lecturer. She opens each class with a musical or artistic piece from the period covered, for example, and discusses its significance in the wider historical context. Her lectures are also well-organized, tight, and interesting. So my new routine, as the screenshot below shows, is a simple one: While I watch a lecture, I have a Diigo floating sticky-note open on the page, and simply outline the lecture with time-stamps. You can see it live here, if you have Diigo [Update: And here on YouTube]. Obvious uses:

• I — or anybody else — can use the time-stamp to show exactly the segments wanted in class.
• I can also adapt and/or condense the entire lecture for my own presentations in my classes. Simply extract the time-stamp and notes on my Diigo page, print them out if needed, and voila — an outline for a lecture, presentation, or discussion.

Again, this is simple and no big deal. It’s just taking notes while watching a video. But the cool thing is, other teachers worldwide (if they use Diigo) can share mine and add their own. (Among other possibilities.)

Here’s the screenshot:

Dr Hunt's UCLA lecture, my Diigo floating sticky-note (click for larger image)

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

Talking to Yourself is Good

I love Voice Memo. My daily routine in Singapore is an hour metro ride to school, then a 10-minute walk from the metro station to my classroom. I use it as planning time, and my best tool is my iPod Touch’s Voice Memo app. My iPod earbuds have a mic in the wire, so all I have to do is spend five minutes or so thinking about how I want to structure the day’s classes, and talk it into my iPod. When I get to school, I listen to the voice memo to write my lesson plan on the board.

I know some people can plan classes weeks in advance, but I’m not one of them. Too many ideas worth incorporating come in the days,  even the hours, before the class. So this has been a godsend for me. I don’t forget my best ideas, and don’t have to write them down. I literally talk to myself as I walk to class about the best ideas I have for the day.

Again, no big deal. A drunk could do this in his worst hangover. And that’s the beauty: low-labor, high-leverage changes in routine, thanks to new tools.

What about you? Any to share?

And Happy New Year, by the way. May the five-fingered fist of fate always smash the mean person next to you, and pet you like a kitten until 2011.

1. Be warned: the audio is sometimes bad, but the lectures are quite good. Dr. Hunt’s a trooper for not tearing off the microphone and telling the tech crew she’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more. [↩]

Oh, the French wit. Just the right sauce for my Freedom Fries:

Asked to sum up Bush’s record on the [climate change] issue, France’s climate ambassador Brice Lalonde chose instead to pass on a story he had heard.

A man comes to the White House asking to see Bush. “He doesn’t live here anymore,” he is told. The next two days he comes again asking the same question, and receiving the same answer.

On the fourth day, the exasperated guard shot back: “I’ve already told you, he’s no longer here.”

“I know, I know,” the man replied. “But it’s such a pleasure to hear you say it.” (source)

It really is a pleasure.

It’s also a pleasure to hear the (at long last) outgoing Texan-in-Chief tell us that there’s “proof of evolution” that Biblical literalism can’t reasonably refute. If you missed that, here’s a little video I cooked up to applaud the occasion:

Help the Texas Freedom Network in their work to defend science in schools.

In case you missed the post on Smart Mobbing against creationism in U.S. science textbooks – my, how I’d love to see high school students jump on this idea – the post is here.

Yes, I’m still gushing. I know he won’t be perfect, and is possibly farther right than Nixon in several ways, but by god, I just almost choked up watching Obama say these words in his Meet the Press interview with Tom Brokaw:

MR. BROKAW: Let me ask you as we conclude this program this morning about whether you and Michelle have had any discussions about the impact that you’re going to have on this country in other ways besides international and domestic policies. You’re going to have a huge impact, culturally, in terms of the tone of the country.

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA:  Right.

MR. BROKAW:  Who are the kinds of artists that you would like to bring to the White House?

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA:  Oh, well, you know, we have thought about this because part of what we want to do is to open up the White House and, and remind people this is, this is the people’s house.  There is an incredible bully pulpit to be used when it comes to, for example, education.  Yes, we’re going to have an education policy.  Yes, we’re going to be putting more money into school construction.  But, ultimately, we want to talk about parents reading to their kids. We want to invite kids from local schools into the White House.  When it comes to science, elevating science once again, and having lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars or breaking down atoms, inspiring our youth to get a sense of what discovery is all about.  Thinking about the diversity of our culture and, and inviting jazz musicians and classical musicians and poetry readings in the White House so that, once again, we appreciate this incredible tapestry that’s America.  I–you know, that, I think, is, is going to be incredibly important, particularly because we’re going through hard times.  And, historically, what has always brought us through hard times is that national character, that sense of optimism, that willingness to look forward, that, that sense that better days are ahead.  I think that our art and our culture, our science, you know, that’s the essence of what makes America special, and, and we want to project that as much as possible in the White House.

Jazz. Poetry. Classical. Science. Reading – these things have been objects of scorn and smirks by the outgoing regime for the last eight years. I shouldn’t be close to tears that America’s incoming president understands the beauty and wonder of the mind and the creative spirit. I shouldn’t be.

But I am.

I’ve spent the morning telling my little Korean nieces and nephew that their grandmother has “gone to sleep,” while others are telling them she “go into the sky.”  Always the teacher.

It makes me think of the end of Gilgamesh. But that’s ten chapters away.

Wherever my mother-in-law is, my wife’s family and I agree it’s a more peaceful state than her last five months hooked up to machines in the hospital.  I have to say I find it ironic that laws based on ancient values forbid us the freedom to make one rational choice concerning medical care: to use it to end our lives when we see fit, sparing us unnecessary agony and our families unnecessary burdens both emotional and financial.

And that, too, makes me think of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and all sorts of non-schooly relevances we can draw from these stories, and how they influence our lives.

Anyway, I’ll be back after the three-days’ mourning and funeral.

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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOJSD5MGy4I[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvS3_6FZ1As[/youtube]

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.