Students Published

I am very happy to announce that my spring 2012 American Literature class had their work published at Bookdrum.com. While reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the class gathered and formatted information about the book, the setting, unknown cultural references, unknown words, and the author, and also wrote a book review. I am so proud of the work they put into this project.

You can see their book profile on Bookdrum's Website. Included under the "contributor page" are links for student's Post Modern Multimedia Research Projects and their Letters About a Thing They Carry which were both published as missions on Youthvoices.net.

Surprises in Writing

Here are some inspirational words from a man who knows what it takes to be a writer. Lots of good suggestions for reading also.

Where is Education Going? pt. II

Here is Peter Norvig talking about the same project that Thrun was speaking of in my last post. This covers more about student motivation and why they set up the class the way they did. It also speaks about future experimentation with the process.

Where is Education Going?

Now, I first watched this movie because I am very interested in the PicoP display, but the video is actually about education and how technology is changing it. You will have to wade through the glasses and the self driving car to get there though.

What he says about education is similar to what I believe. It is not going to be long before people realize that the way to get around the one-size-fits-all problem we are encountering in education is technology. This man has achieved it at Stanford. He effectively taught 23,000 people by making recordings and interactive quizes. Those 23,000 people passed the same test he gave to his 200 students at Stanford.

I particularly like what he says about how student's feel like they learn only when they do something. "Engaged classes" in the traditional, lecture-based class are frequently only truly engaging for a few students; the majority simply watch the lecture and the few interactive students. When you do projects, however, everyone feels like they are doing something, and while they feel like they are doing things, they take the information and apply it. That is around minute 17.

Dance, Cross-lateral Movement, Multiculturalism, and Technology

Lots of things to think about here. I have been reading about using cross-lateral movement in the classroom to stimulate higher levels of thinking. This makes a strong case for a connection with technology also.

Media Studies Movies

For this project, students had to include product placement, greenscreen technology, some film shot outside of school, various types of shots, and a complete story. Most of the filming was done on phones, and the editing was done on iMovie and Windows Live Movie Maker.

The project started with creating storyboards for various scenes in the movies.

Once the movies were finished, they entered them into the Youtube's Your Film Festival Competition.

On the last day of the unit, we viewed all of the movies in class. We also voted on which film was the best. Students asked if the winning team could remake their movie using everyone in the whole class to help make it better.