I've had this sitting in draft for about 7 months. It goes all the back to the end of May when I had the good fortune to attend the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Conference held here in Winnipeg. The line up of speakers was excellent, but Rick Van Eck stood out as the highlight of the entire conference for me. (I blogged about Rick's Breakout session at the time.) He has a very down to earth, practical, honest approach to using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) games in education. Unfortunately the question period isn't included. Rick really shined during the Q&A afterward where his direct, honest, polite replies to pointed questions impressed everyone.

Anyway, I've mentioned this talk several times in passing since I saw it and now I can point people to hear the man himself. It's short; 22 min 21 sec. Worth every minute. You can click through Rick's slides below the video as he speaks.

(Download mp3, 25.4 MB)

Slides:

Microsoft Innovative Teacher Conference--Keynote

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: games learning)

Last night on twitter I tweeted:

That started the exchange below between myself and Gary Stager. Chris Lehmann joined in and we had a lively debate. I've decided to archive it here in response to the various communications I've received about it. Maybe extend the conversation a bit.

Gary and I

Chris Lehmann joined in. Chris' tweets should be interlaced with those of Gary and I above but summize.com doesn't do that. You can probably figure out where Chris' tweets fit in from the context of what came before.

Ian Hecht added this to the debate:

These things happen on twitter. While it's happening it feels like something of moment. Time passes, passions cool, and we realize we haven't necessarily added something new to an age old debate but perhaps we've articulated our thinking, and reasons for believing as we do, a little bit better. We might also come to respect the reasoned positions of colleagues who disagree with us and walk away having learned something about ourselves and each other. Identifying Similarities and Differences is one of the most powerful instructional strategies don't you know. ;-)

Why YouTube?



In the comments to my last post I was asked why I chose to use YouTube instead of TeacherTube as a platform for my students to share their videos. I answered:

I chose YouTube for three reasons:

(1) That's where the kids go for video. They feel comfortable there and have their own accounts from which they publish video outside of school. This allows me to model some digital ethics vis a vis what do you and what don't you publish on YouTube.

(2) That's where all the people are. There is a significant math community on YouTube and I am hoping to draw their attention and perhaps participation which would add value to the assignment in terms of authenticity and audience.

(3) Kids think TeacherTube is for teachers, not them. That detracts somewhat from the value added by publishing publicly online.

A number of people have left comments for my students on their class blog. Thank you so much for that. In one of those comments pirategirl mentions how slow TeacherTube can be. I guess we can add that to my list of reasons above.

Copyright


As part of this assignment we talked about copyright and I emphasized that using copyrighted material (music) is considered stealing unless they have permission to use the content. Generally, I believe that using 30 seconds or less of copyrighted music falls under Canadian Fair Dealing guidelines. (If I'm wrong about this I welcome the correction.) As part of this discussion I pointed the students to Jamendo where they could find free music to use without worrying about any copyright infringements.

I'm really proud of the way they all dealt with copyright issues and how they credited all the sources they used. Click through to their YouTube videos (see below) to read the details they included not only in the videos but in the informational text that accompanies their work.

The day before the deadline for students to publish their videos one of them left this comment on their class blog:

Maybe JAMENDO should be my name =D

it helps a lot.. thanks..

STATUS: currently cutting down 1:30 to 0:30 s.... 0__o

I was particularly chuffed about that "status update." (See the short podcast below.)

The Videos & The Podcast


Here are the four videos that the student groups generated (the 30 second time limit did not include credits) followed by a brief podcast reflection we did on the last day of classes before the winter break. Give it a listen, this project isn't over yet ...

Ben and Zeph: Calculus Commercial

Kristina, Jamie, & Joyce: YE OLDE DERIVATIVE

Paul, Shelley, & Yinan: Team PSY Derivatives Commercial

Francis, Lawrence, & Justice: Calculus commercial complete

The Podcast Reflection

(Download mp3 file, 3.3 MB)

One of the things we learned was that 30 seconds is too short. The next round of videos will have a 60 second time limit. They'll all be published by the end of January. Stay tuned. ;-)

When I returned to work after 10 weeks of parental leave I wanted to find a way to measure how well my AP Calculus students had learned and understood what a derivative was. So, the day I returned to class I challenged them to create a commercial that educates: What is a derivative?

Some of the parameters they have are:

• The video must educate people who know nothing about calculus.


• The video must be published on YouTube.


• Students may work in teams of up to 3 people.


• No images of students faces. Masks or other methods of obscuring their identities may be used.


• No algebra.


• Maximum video length: 30 seconds.


• Include as many different descriptions as possible in the time allowed.

The way we're doing this is I have published a video to YouTube describing the assignment and extended it as a challenge to the entire math community on YouTube. Students will "hand in" their commercials as video replies to mine.

I'm hoping other people in the math community on YouTube reply to the challenge. It will go a long way to adding another layer of authenticity to the assignment and create a more meaningful reason than "marks" to create high quality content: social credit.

Social credit is a powerful motivational force in the lives of teens; a force that hasn't fully been tapped in educational circles. It's behind the outstanding work some of my students do on their class blogs. I'm trying to be more deliberate about accessing that potential in new ways this year.

The video has just been published to the AP Calculus 2008 blog. The students commercials should be published by Friday morning.

If you have a moment, head over to their blog and leave them a comment telling them you're looking forward to their commercials. It'll help make real their sense of audience and perhaps encourage them to do their very best before they hit the publish button on their videos.

Calculus Commercial Seed Video

Whenever I drive to or from work I like to listen to CBC radio. On the way home I listen to Margaux Watt who hosts "Up To Speed". So on Friday, after my Extreme (web 2.0) Lesson Plan Makeover workshop I was a little chuffed to be interviewed by Margaux on her show.

A friend recorded it and sent me the audio file. It's only about five minutes long. While we were talking the podcast I do with my students, Student Voices, came up. Margaux suggested she might play one of those interviews on the radio. I don't know if that will ever happen, but if you listened to the show on the radio and came here looking for those podcasts you can find them here.

Two five minute talks in as many days ... I can say exactly two things about five minute talks:

(1) Five minutes is very short.

(2) Five minutes is very hard to do well.

Here are my five minutes on the radio:

All across Manitoba on Friday, teachers came together in about 28 different Special Area Groups for an full day of professional development workshops. I was invited by EBIT (Educators of Business and Information Technology) to do a presentation. Mine was the host school and the organizer of the conference is a friend so I said yes.

The idea was to a have more of a conversation than a presentation, where everyone came with a lesson plan they thought they might like to rework to take advantage of the affordances offered by social media and the suite of free tools available online. I shared a number of examples of how I had done this with some of my own lessons.

About 45 minutes into the workshop people started warming up and we had some good discussion. I tried to keep the focus more on pedagogy than tools but that can be hard in a session like this. Judging from the feedback afterward I think folks walked away happy for having been there. I created a wiki as a reference point for the folks that were there.

One of the examples that captured people's imagination was the mapping project my son is working on. It's not done yet, so I guess I'm outing him early. Many people seemed tickled at the idea that they could leave him an encouraging comment on his Google Map where he's bringing together text, images, and video to give an overview of the book Underground to Canada by Barbara Smucker. Remember, what he's got there right now is mostly a partial rough draft, he should have it done in about another 7-10 days. In the meantime, feel free to leave some positive comments or suggestions for him on his map. ;-)

Here are the slides and audio from the session, available here and there. A comprehensive list of links we referenced should be there by the end of the weekend.

Extreme (Web 2.0) Lesson Plan Makeover

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: teaching pedagogy)

Audio (1 hr 41 min 25 sec)


Fast forward through the boring bits.

I'm sitting at the 2008 Manitoba Edubloggercon being held at the Princess Street campus of Red River College in downtown Winnipeg.

Eight presentations later things have become a little more organic. People are asking questions and the chat room in Ustream is replying instantly with answers, links, information, and resources to share. John Evans has just invited people to come up to his laptop right now and he's setting them up with twitter accounts so they can start building their personal learning networks. Brian Crosby just skyped in to answer questions about students at risk. People are just starting to get a sense of what comes from sipping the electric kool-aid.

Andy McKiel is the brains and brawn behind all this. He arranged the venue, made sure there was food and drink, coordinated the schedules of eight crazy busy people from two Canadian provinces and Thailand (the airports there are still closed today, Jeff Utecht showed us the role twitter is playing in the capture of the airports). Andy is a class act in everything he does. More Manitoban teachers need to know how fortunate we all are to have him as the President of MANace.

All the talks are (or will be soon) archived on the wiki Andy created for the event. I gave one of the five minute talks. I actually managed to stick to five minutes. It sort of helped that the slideshow was advancing on autoplay. If you're interested in my "5 Minutes to Make A Difference" here is the slidecast:

Awakening Possibilities

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: presentation mbecon08)

Also available as a video archive from Ustream.tv:

Live Broadcasting by Ustream