Creating Passionate Users

Creating Passionate Users is a website created by Kathy Sierra, one of the people responsible for developing the Head First Style of books available from O'reilly.  Head First takes difficult subjects and presents them in an engaging way.  I have several of the Head First books and enjoyed them thoroughly.  I think many of the techniques used in the books would be beneficial in any classroom: use of pictures, redundancy, emotional content, conversational style, challenging activities, and hitting multiple learning styles.

Creating Passionate Users has all kinds of useful ideas and examples based on her experiences and feedback from the Head First books.  Unfortunately, she stopped posting to the blog in 2007, but the posts are still valuable.

[Image captured from Head First Labs: http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfwd/]

Juggling Tutorials

OK...I know that juggling is a little out of place on this blog. Unless you stretch a little bit and think of it from a learning standpoint... and I've always wanted to learn to be a juggler.

Just Your Average Joggler had a post about a series of juggling tutorials from a contest sponsered by the International Jugglers Association.  Lots of fun stuff here.

I've watched several now and am working on the Three Ball Mills Mess by Tony Steinbach.  (embeded below)

[Image: Captured from the video]

Are Schools Dangerously Irrelevant?

Interesting talk by Scott McLeod.  He says the economic and information landscape is changing:
1.  Jobs that can be relocated where labor is cheaper will be relocated.
2.  Move from content consumer to content creator where we are hyper-connected with each other.

He then asks what are we doing about it in our schools?  To which he answers, for the most part, nothing.

Ends by asking the audience, "How do we prepare our kids for the next 50 years instead of the last 50 years?"

Good question!



Follow this up with a slideshow given by Scott to the NEA.   Elaborates on some of the previous points.  Also some good slides showing the shifts in jobs.

Entertainment vs Engagement

Talk by Doug Johnson titled, Entertainment vs Engagement.

"I think too often we confuse those two terms (entertain and engage), when we think we should be entertaining, we should be engaging."

"Engagement has a learning component that goes with it."

Reasons for teaching Facebook in School

Stumbled on this short post by Ewan MacIntosh titled, "Two reasons for 'teaching Facebook'in school".  He wrote a response to this parents complaint about social media in the classroom:

“Our students don’t need to be a part of a classroom experiment with all this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with real textbooks and real tests.”

Head over to his blog to see his response.


[Image captured from facebook homepage: http://www.facebook.com/facebook?ref=pf]

Diane Ravitch on the American School System

Haven't read The Death and Life of the Great American School System yet but the following quote got me interested:

Over several decades, Ravitch says, American schools have essentially lost their way, forgetting to focus on giving students a solid curriculum and strong teachers. Instead, she says, we've bumbled through a series of crises that have left us with "vague and meaningless standards," an odd, antagonistic public-private competition and an "obsession" with test scores.

Just stumbled across this quote in a USA Today article.  Think it will go on my "to read" list.

Anybody else read it?  Like it?  Hate it?

John Medina Interview

So here's my question. If scientists like John Medina say that we learn better when we are physically fit and exercise regularly, why is physical education a low priority in schools? Why aren't we running massive research to prove or disprove this concept? Seems to me if this were true, it wouldn't take a whole lot of extra money to build more activity into each school day.

One of the questions that comes up for me when I hear that exercise improves cognition is that from my own experience as a teacher this doesn't hold true. My best students haven't always been athletes or even athletic. Some of my worst students have been star athletes. And vice-versa. I've never noticed a pattern?

Anyway, here is a nice interview with Dr. Medina where some of the basics from his book Brain Rules are covered.

Claymation and Comics 2009

I've enjoyed following the progress of this Claymation and Comic summer camp. Some good links to resources. Some great pictures. Lots of ideas if you are planning on doing something like this in your own classroom.

Wish I could remember how I discovered this? I had it set up in my RSS feed and it just started popping up this month. I don't remember putting it there. Must have been a late-nite find.

Anyway, worth a look if you are into this kind of thing.












[Image: Captured from http://claycomics.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/hello-world/]

Learning by doing

Interesting post on the Adobe Education Leaders blog by Peter French. Here is a snippet.

As I pondered this situation I realized a few things. First –I have years of experience doing this type of work. The students have very little experience. I not only know the software I also know the role and importance of the planning process, the problems these projects will likely encounter and how to solve most of those problems. In other words, I have learned on many, many levels, all about these projects. And – I did a lot of that learning by doing projects. I did not learn by reading books, watching tutorials, or listening to podcasts, I learned by doing. I freely admit that these supports were used occasionally but for the most part, I learned the most by doing, by falling flat on my face and by starting over – a little bruised but also a little smarter. It took years to learn the required lessons. If this was my process, then why should it be all that different for our students? Add to that the element of the creative process by which we come to our initial ideas and this situation becomes even more complicated.

Learning After Effects

As a guy who is going to soon tackle Adobe's After Effects, I found this article encouraging. Kevin McMahon did the same thing recently and came up with these "5 tips for learning After Effects".

1. Know your DV basics first.
2. Know what After Effects is (and is not) for
3. Know just enough of theAE keyboard shortcuts to be dangerous - and realize that this does not mean that many.
4. Start simple, and I mean super simple.
5. Use the wealth of AE resources - and take a class.

This is my summer learning project. Thanks for the plan of attack.

[Image: "Al Gunn pondering the computer"; Modified in Comic Life: No rights reserved]

Ten minute Attention Span

Quote from John Medina's Blog, Brain Rules:

Peer-reviewed studies confirm my informal inquiry: Before the first quarter-hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out. If keeping someone’s interest in a lecture were a business, it would have an 80 percent failure rate. What happens at the 10-minute mark to cause such trouble? Nobody knows. The brain seems to be making choices according to some stubborn timing pattern, undoubtedly influenced by both culture and gene. This fact suggests a teaching and business imperative: Find a way to arouse and then hold somebody’s attention for a specific period of time.

Watchmen Discussion Possiblities

Got to thinking about what I wrote in the last post about the Watchmen being a good choice for a book club. Why not a group of students. Might be a good way to get a book club started in your school, or mine. Went online to find any resources that might be useful and came up with these links:

Who Discusses the Watchmen? (TheBooklist.com): Short, general article on topics you might use to get the discussion rolling.

The Annotated Watchmen: Your complete guide to the series. (www.capnwacky.com): Not so much a guide for discussion as an explanation of the many references within the book. For example:

"In our world, Ford was vice-president from 1973 (when Spiro Agnew resigned) to 1974, when Nixon resigned and he became president. In their world, somebody, maybe the Comedian, snuffed Woodward and Bernstein before they could report Watergate, and this, combined with Nixon's popularity following the victory in Vietnam, led to his serving at least five terms."

Might prove helpful for younger readers as they tackle some of the cultural and historical references in the book.

Watchmen Questions (petermerel.newsvine.com): Seems to be based more on the movie than the book, but still some interesting questions that could be thrown in during a discussion of the book.

Watchmen Discussion Points (Jack Mangan's Deadpan): Online discussion of the book. Read through all the posts to get ideas for discussion topics. For example

• Question for the panel - who was really the most disconnected from humanity, Manhattan or Ozymandias? [Ed from Texas ]
• The title of “Watchmen” comes from a story written by Juvenal about guardsmen hired to watch the wife of a jealous husband. Juvenal posed the question “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” or “who watches the watchmen?” Why is this an important question when reading “Watchmen”? [ditto]

Wikipedia entry: Lots of information here including some discussion of the themes. For example:

"Putting the story in a contemporary sociological context, Wright wrote that the characters of Watchmen were Moore's "admonition to those who trusted in 'heroes' and leaders to guard the world's fate." He added that to place faith in such icons was to give up personal responsibility to "the Reagans, Thatchers, and other 'Watchmen' of the world who supposed to 'rescue' us and perhaps lay waste to the planet in the process"

If any other teachers or book club members have some resources that might be helpful, leave a comment.

The Edge

Doug Kelsey recently wrote a piece about Three things that make work and recovering from injuries meaningful. His focus was on physical recovery but I thought his comments about challenge and working at the edge were applicable to learning. He said:

"I refer to this as "edging". Push until you find the edge and then push a little more. Your body will not change on it's own. Sorry but every body is inherently lazy; always seeking the path of least resistance; spending the least amount of energy possible. Edge, edge, edge."

Isn't this also the space where learning takes place. As a teacher, I am constantly trying to get my kids to step up to the edge. I was demonstrating some simple animation principles in my multimedia class the other day. I was doing it old school, in that I was having the students draw in each frame within the program. One student had some previous experience with animation and knew about tweening or letting the program draw all the frames between two keyframes. This is a great time saver but used in it's simplest form, it looks like a ball floating across the screen. With a few animator tricks (squash and stretch for example) it suddenly looks like a ball bouncing. This young ma wasn't willing to go beyond his comfort level to try out my suggestions. Eventually he got angry that his results weren't as good as the folks on either side of him and he gave up.

My failure was not being able to get him to step up to the edge. To trust me enough to move beyond his comfort zone. It may be that he doesn't trust any teacher. His failure was not taking the chance. Maybe he has fallen off the edge one time too many?

[Image: Flickr: "Cliff Edge": Uploaded on June 19, 2007 by several_bees:http://www.flickr.com/photos/several_bees/571615016/Creative Commons-Some rights reserved]

Gever Tulley: TED Talk as a comic book

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, gave a talk at TED recently and created a comic book to hand out to the participants. It is available here for download. I highly recommend it. I often feel like we've got away from the idea of letting kids learn by doing. It's too messy. It's too hard to measure. It looks too much like play and not enough like instruction. It can be hard to match to a standard.

I may be wrong. Old fashioned even. I still think it is a valuable way to learn. Not the only way but one way. And one way we shouldn't deprive our children from experiencing.
















I'll link to his new TED talk when it come available. Until then take a peek at his last talk: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do!

Oh....and the idea of using a comic book format to present information. I am so going to use this!

[Update: I was inspired to buy Comic Life to help me create comic style documents after reading Tulley's comic book style notes. Probably write more on this program later, but I posted my first attempt.]
[via Make] [Images captured from TinkeringSchool: by Gever Tully: 2009: Creative Commons-no derivative]

Invisibilia: Photoshop Activity

Cool tutorial on replacing a part of a photo with a drawing. I find them strangely intriguing. In particular, the ones where there is more than one person in the picture. Invisibilia is the web site where the author of the tutorial has posted a bunch of examples. Warning: There is some nudity here. So take a look before you share with students. The top picture here is off the site. The second is one I did following the tutorial.

The author has this to say about the photos:

Maybe the pictures illustrate the idea that we all want to remove ourselves from life, and replace ourselves with fictional, self-created versions of ourself. We want to fictionalise our own existence, and impose order and narrative where there is none. Or maybe it's just tracing. Either way, I hope you enjoy the pics.

I'll be trying it out with my multimedia kids later this year. It isn't hard to do as long as you have Photoshop or some other program that lets you work with layers. I put this one together in about 15 minutes.




















[via Make]

[First Image: "Invisible Phone": Captured from Invisiblia: http://www.themanwhofellasleep.com/invisibilia.html]
[2nd Image: Group shot from a DU Poetry Slam (2008): Modified by Al Gunn]

File structure and web design

Generally speaking, my students don't understand computer file structure. After multiple experiences losing their assignments, the majority of them can at least save into their network folder. It's kind of like the backpack many of them carry. They stuff their work into the vast void and feel secure that it' in there somewhere. Maybe not immediately retrievable but accessible.

I've read a couple of articles stating that because of tagging and improving search functions, it will someday not matter that you have your files scattered across a morass of oddly named folders and a hundred files all called "untitled". Considering the state of my physical desktop, my office and my garage, I don't have much of a high horse from which to preach. So, for most of my kids I only mock their tangled files, help them organize if they want and not accept "I don't know where I saved it" as an excuse for late homework.

Except.

My web design students need to know how to organize their files and understand their relative position to each other and how to describe the path to a specific file from another. Editing programs, like Dreamweaver, let you get away from thinking about this and link pictures and files from where ever they may lurk on your hard drive. If you were never to move those files up to a server and only look at your pages from your own machine separated from the eyes of the world, that would be fine. But, we create web pages to share. To post. To be looked at by someone other than the nagging, bearded teacher looking over your shoulder.

Therefore, I spend time trying to get my web students to understand the concepts of "tree" and "relative" and "absolute" and what "../file.doc" means. Every one of them will have to eventually troubleshoot a broken link on one of their pages. Every one of them will have to organize the multiple files and folders it takes to create a web site. I, as the teacher, need to figure out a way to help them do that in a professional manner without ranting or beating them with blunt objects.

I've tried having them map out a file structure using a graphics program but unless they are really adept at using the program, the process seems to get in the way. I was planning on looking into some of the online mind mapping programs when I stumbled upon WriteMaps from a posting by Jennifer Kyrnin on About.com. It has one purpose and that is to visualize a site map. It's simple to use. It's online. It's free. You can share your work with others. I am thinking this is the program for my class.




Students would each need to create their own account and need an email address to do so. You only have the choice of one graphic. One color. But, I think that may be part of it's usefulness. There are no distractions from the purpose of the program. You map out your site and that's it.

I'll let you know how it works out in my classroom.

[via About.Com]

[Image: A badge from the WriteMaps website: www.writemaps.com]
[Image: 2nd image was created in WriteMaps]

The Fifty United States and Their Mottos

This needlpoint of the United States and their mottos by Emily Wick is great fun. I was having a good time deciphering the phrases when the thought struck me that this could be adapted for a graphics project for my Multimedia students. They would get to practice several skills:

• Looking up information
• Inserting a graphic into a specific shape (they'd get to practice this bit 50 times)
• Making it pleasing to the eye (design)

Then I got to thinking (once I start it's hard to get this old rusty train of a mind to stop) that you could do a variety of things using a map of the states to represent concepts graphically. An activity could be designed to show the kids how to present information in a graphical way. I came up with several ideas.

• Census information (population/density/age/ethnicity/etc)
• Date each state became a part of the union
• Picture of a famous person from that state inserted into that state
• State Flower (oooooooo pretty!)

I also thought of creating two maps that show two different aspects and then let the kids pull out correlations like:

• wealth and murder rate
• population and environmental rating (how green)
• wealth and money spent on each student

I don't know what the correlation is but it would be interesting to find out. I might even let the students brainstorm their own correlations to test. I used to do this with blank maps and colored pencils back in olden times. Maybe it's time to update it?

What else could the kids represent graphically on a map of the states?

[Note: Strange Maps also had a post on this map and included a list of all the mottos and a history of their origin.]

[via Neatorama]
[Image captured from Two Eyeballs: http://www.twoeyeballs.com/]

Inexpensive kid proof camera

Kids are hard on electronic equipment. Some of it is malicious. I believe most is not. A lot of damage is the result of them learning to use a body that is changing daily. I saw this in my technology lab repeatedly. The worst offenders tended to be my sixth graders. Sometimes it seemed they didn't know their own increasing strength.

Oddly enough, I had more breakage with young girls than young boys. That ratio changed the older they got. In a twisted, hard on the teacher kind of way, breakage was good for the kids. It was good for me as a boy. I learned all about not stripping a bolt by stripping one. Splitting wood by accidentally splitting a board. Structural soundness by building something that wasn't. Why should I deny my kids the wisdom of failure? The trick is to try and build those experiences into your lab in a safe and cheap way. (Good luck!)

So I was always on the look out for equipment that was built a little sturdier than what I might get for myself. I saw this camera by Fischer Price recently and thought that it might make a good classroom camera even for older kids. I don't think my middle schoolers would have taken it out of the room as it looks like a child's toy. But it looks like something we could knock around with in the lab, suspend from the ceiling, attach to a 10 foot pole or build into a Lego robot. Every time a child dropped it I would cringe just a little less knowing that it probably wouldn't break and that if it did the price wasn't prohibitive in me quickly replacing it.

I wish there were a line of cameras designed for kids with a nice balance between price, value and features. I'd spend a little more if I didn't have to plan for a certain number to break every year. Anybody have suggestions along this line for older kids?

[via Gadget Venue] [Image captured from Gadget Venue: http://www.gadgetvenue.com/fisher-price-kid-tough-digital-camera-12172005/]

Tape Measure Basics

Did you ever have one of those "dotty" relatives who talked to themselves while they worked?

We'd giggle about how Uncle Sam would be talking to his tools and describing to the tool what he was going to do before doing it. Now that I've taught for a few years I realize that this was a great teaching technique. I use it all the time now and will often think out loud so my students can hear my thought process. It makes me sound a little dotty and I'm sure my kids giggle behind my back too. I started doing this when I was a Social Studies teacher and would talk to the text book's author and ask him questions as though he were there in the room. I'd admonish my students to develop a two-way relationship with their textbook. "There is a person behind those words, learn to talk to him. Ask her questions!"(I'd like to take credit for coming up with this idea but I heard it in a workshop.)

I use this often with my kids as I talk myself through the steps it takes me to accomplish something. I find when I don't do this, what I've done looks like magic. Like it just happens. I had a friend once in frustration say to me after I solved a technical problem she was having, "How did you do that? Do you want to keep me stupid?" I realized that I had done all my thinking in my head and it just looked like magic. I'm trying to do think outloud more with the adults around me but for some reason I feel more self-conscious with my peers. Maybe I don't want them to think I'm dotty?

I wish my dad had talked to himself more while I was around. I think maybe I would have learned more as I followed him around the construction sites where he worked. I think we would all do better with a few more dotty adults hanging around. But, if you are short on dotty relatives take a look at this site, Remodeling for Geeks. I read the posts regularly to pick up a few of those tidbits of wisdom I missed while growing up. He has a couple of posts that explain tape measures. I thought when I saw this, "I know how to measure." Well guess I had a few things to learn.......if Dad had only talked to his tape measure!

[Image captured from Remodling for Geeks: http://theheadlemur.typepad.com]/remodeling_for_geeks/]

Work the Information

In a recent post on David Warlicks Blog, he wrote something that struck a chord with me. He was listing challenges (or obstacles) to implementing various technologies in our schools and in response to the often heard comment, "The kids know more than we do", he said:

"No they don’t. They are more savvy at using technology, but we are better at using information. They know how to play the information. They desperately need us to teach them to work the information."

I've been struggling to put this concept into words the past month or so as I work with kids who are tech savvy but are failing in school. They can find their way around a keyboard and navigate the network but when it comes time to apply their knowledge, they choke and burn.

In my classroom, there is always going to be a kid who knows more about a program or piece of technology than me. I have a few advantages though, when it comes to seeing the bigger picture. I have the experience gained from living through previous technology successes and failures. A wonderful kind of learning occurs when student and teacher both accept the other's strengths and recognize their weaknesses. In that place learning can happen.

In my new semester class that starts next week, I'm going to be asking my students to let me show them how to "Work the Information". I'm also building in some time for them to show me what they think I should know. I'll let you know what happens.

[Image: My own attempt to visualize this idea. Don't like this graph as I think it simplifies what happens. Why is it some work feels like play and vise versa? ]