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.

[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.

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

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbVSYJ-I8×8[/youtube]



Episode Two: Still Photo Skills with the Ken Burns Effect

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJXK6Zpf_-E[/youtube]

For more posts on digital storytelling, see:

Eight minutes on how to 1) find content on Creative Commons, 2) use Zamzar to download YouTube and other videos for mashups. (It’s also posted on my “Teaching Gallery” static page.) [Update: Photos credited in final titles, plus CC licensing added.]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbVSYJ-I8×8[/youtube]

Coming in Episode 2: Still Photo Skills: Advanced use of the Ken Burns Effect.

Long presentations are great and all, but maybe quickies have their place as well. I can see the need.

Here’s a 2-minute snippet from a presentation I gave to parents to launch our 1:1 Apple Laptop initiative back in August. I simply explain Clustrmaps by showing it on a blog with world-wide readers….written by a 15-year-old.

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

This and many other multimedia resources I’ve made will be posted on the “Teaching Gallery” page of my new WordPress home. I’ll be adding things there regularly in the coming weeks.

For more on classroom blogging, see:

[Update: I notice that I could have saved money by getting a FREE domain name when signing up with PowWeb, instead of paying $20 for two years with GoDaddy. Live and learn. Also, PowWeb needs 24 hours to set up my account before I can install WordPress MU, so hold tight. More: you can’t hear my students on this screencast – it didn’t record the Yugma-Skype conference audio. Even more: you’ll see Diigo website highlighting and annotating at work when you watch the screencast. If you don’t use it, you’re missing out. It auto-forwards your bookmarks and tags to del.icio.us (if you set it up to in preferences), and gives you annotating and highlighting and sharing power that del.icio.us itself doesn’t give. Finally *pant* – thanks to Wesley Fryer for the PowWeb tip and other advice he gave in Shanghai.)

If you’re interested in how to buy your own domain name (web address), and buy a webhost server package so you can run your own website, here’s the first of two screencasts walking Christina and Daniel, two of the Project Global Cooling members at my school, through setting up our Project Global Cooling website with WordPress MU at http://projectglobalcooling.org. The site won’t be up until we install WPMU, which we’re about to do. (Do yourself a favor and watch the large size on the Screencast-o-matic.com channel. Much easier on the eyes, and you can leave comments.)

That has to be the geekiest title I’ve ever written. I promise it’s English. Anyway:

Just a little tutorial share about one of the million reasons I love Firefox web-browser (and curse at my students lovingly when they open things in Internet Explorer, or even Safari). I’m talking about Firefox Addons.

This 4 minute tutorial simply shows people a handy little addon called “MeasureIt,” which is a ruler for quick pixel-measurements of screen areas. I use it to embed a Group Twitter Badge for our school’s professional development Ning (and yes, I’m flattering Jeff Utecht by stealing his use of this handy idea at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last month. He’s still my guru now and then, without even realizing it).

So here it is. Enjoy (and by the way, use the “embed” code, not the “html” code that I use in the tutorial – or try both and choose the one that’s best for you).

Back in August, I posted a screencast called “What is Blogging?” for audiences, educational and otherwise, needing a basic introduction to the read/write aspects of this new world.

Since I’m sponsoring a Web 2.0 club at school this year, and also setting my AP Literature students up with their own WordPress MU blogs on our school’s site, I made a follow-up: “What is Blogging? Part 2: Using Technorati to Connect with Your Readers.” As the title suggests, this one addresses the connectivity afforded by Technorati, and walks viewers through creating a Technorati account, claiming a blog, linking to the Technorati blog page, and so forth. It also discusses Technorati authority, rankings, and other minutiae. I had a bit of fun modeling the real-world connectivity and wonderfully unpredictable networking by following Norwegian blogger Jan-Arve Overland’s link to the first “What is Blogging?” tutorial back to his blog, and modeling the real-world process by leaving a comment there.

In case you want a glimpse of my AP Literature classes’ blended learning slice, which is only now beginning to take shape on our class blog, I take a brief detour in the screencast. Feel free to visit the class blog and see the constellation of tools we’re starting to deploy – Diigo Group, ToonDo, Scribe Blogs (so far artless and shameful, but give us time – and if nothing else, admire the beautiful WordPress theme I installed by Sadish at WP Themeshop), individual blogs, Moodle, Quotiki, wikis, Bloglines, and more.

Too much, you say? I would have feared the same last year, but not this year, thanks to another takeaway from the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last week – Alan November’s argument to throw our schoolified youngsters into the icy seas of info-glut that are the realities of this century, and force them to learn to swim now – rather than damn them to drowning, unprepared, after they graduate.

So here it is. I know it’s basic, but haven’t found a resource introducing this essential Technorati piece to students and teachers, so figured I’d just make one. For a larger, clearer, annotated version, click the video to go to my Screencast-o-matic Edtech tutorials channel. (I also uploaded it to Google Video for embedding in sites that don’t accept SOM’s iframes format.)

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works on permalinks, not on main blog pages) with the kisAP07 group. They use that as “test reviw.”

Here it is:

Just sharing this tutorial I made for my staff (95% of whom will not watch it, and therefore spend the rest of their lives making and grading quizzes and tests the hard way). It shows one way to use class Scribe Blogs to create test and quiz items on Moodle. Moodle then auto-grades, reports correct and incorrect answer percentages for each item, and more.

This is not a vote for objective quizzes and tests, by the way. We all should know how limited they are as a way to assess learning. But, since grades are a curse we’ve not been freed of, I see this test as a good way to generate an easy good grade for my students. And it does assure that they learn the basic literary terms and concepts covered in class discussions.

Note: If you click, “Click here to see full size,” you’ll go to the Screencast-0-matic.com site for a much larger video, much easier on the eyes. And you can leave comments and questions. SOM is very cool.

Let me know if you find these useful, and if you’d like more of the same?