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.

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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsl72OFzat8[/youtube]

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:

Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes - and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for being the first 1:1 Laptop School in Korea.

The first project is “A Broken World,” a student-created wiki textbook and companion whole-class reflective blog about world history from World War I to World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War. (There’s lots of frustration in the sphere right now about blocked sites in schools, so this might be a useful demonstration of how valuable YouTube, wikis, and blogs are for enhancing creativity and learning.)

(By the way, I’ve been scratching my head lately about what to do with that Broken World wiki textbook. It’s really good stuff, and I’m proud of my students for making such an impressive resource. It seems a shame to just abandon it like one of Graham Wegner’s “learning jalopies” or some piece of digital flotsam. Anybody have any ideas of how to put it to use? I’m open to others fact-checking, extending, editing, using, donating, whatever. I just feel like there’s some experimentation possible here on how to put the “legacy products” we so easily talk about in the theoretical to the much-harder-to-pull-off practical use. In other words: help?)

The second project shown in the video is the first annual 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom writing workshop on Wikispaces: 130 students at my school, Chris Watson’s school in Honolulu, and Michele Davis & Karl Fisch’s school in Denver. The promo walks through not only the wiki, but the (damnably) still-under-construction but worth-a-peek anyway 1001 Flat World Tales blog and website, featuring the prize-winning stories selected by our international student editorial board, plus author profiles, author podcast readings, editor profiles, student testimonials, and more.

Those student testimonials are highlighted in subtitle bars on the movie, which might be effective for persuading your admin to unblock these sites, again.

I really went over the top promoting my 1:1 Apple Laptop School as being “on the 21st century map,” since the point of the thing is to entice parents to send their kids to my school. It might produce a motivating jealousy in your own admin or school board to go 1:1 so they have such bragging rights themselves.

Or maybe the thing’s just a piece of junk. You tell me. (If nothing else, I got some iMovie practice out of it. Still trying to hone those skills.)

(And if you click on the video, by the way, it’ll take you to my AP Literature class Ning, which is open to the public. Sylvia Martinez of the Generation YES blog, and Diane Cordell of Journeys have both joined my students for literary discussions in the forums. You’re welcome to come inside yourself. Interesting talks about “schooliness” and literacy in there.)Find more videos like this on KIS AP Lit 07-08

Tuur Demester in Belgium sent me the link to this netroots Ron Paul for US President video. It’s very well-done.

I’m vexed. I’ve never voted Republican, but see little to no difference between the front-running Democrats or Republicans these days in political courage or will. I don’t get the hype about Obama or Hillary, for example, when I hear their punch-pulling sound-bites about our invasion of Iraq, our crumbling constitution, or our need to confront the creeping religious fundamentalism that threatens our environment, our education system, and more. They seem afraid to speak with courage.

But I’ve got problems with Paul too: his views on gun control and reproductive rights, as well as on trusting the “free market” to self-regulate its pollution output, frankly disturb me. But in so many other ways, I have to admit Paul seems shockingly – a sad but accurate adverb – intelligent, rational, educated, knowledgeable.

I’d be really curious, as an American abroad, to read any comments from my compatriots at home, as well as others around the world. This election, in the age of a disastrous American Empire, is fatefully important.

Here’s the video:

Technorati Tags: ronpaul, politics

[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.)

This TED Talk [update: about "Redefining the Dictionary"] is a must-watch for 20th Century Students (there are more of them than we realize) who are as reactionary as their parents about Why 2.0:

And Graham Wegner’s presentation about Personal Learning Environments makes great use of metaphors to sketch out the bewildering shape of our attempts to transform Learning 2.0. I found his critiques of e-portfolio’s particularly interesting: too much work for teachers, not enough audience for students. In Shanghai recently, I was asking about the value of online student work without actual (as opposed to theoretically possible) audiences. (Non-Aussies and Kiwis, are you grokking my drumbeat about the value of Antipodean perspectives on education yet?)

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.)

I stumbled upon this. I’ve seen text versions in chain emails, which always struck me as slightly sappy. Not so with the performance version. Love the buildup and conclusion.