When watching Garr Reynolds' video on design this week, I was actually at my most doubtful. The example of the graphs with the bike, while I admit was "noisy" to begin with, looked a little too plain at the end, in my opinion. While I agree with doing away with some extraneous details, like the small logo, and doing away with that background picture, I thought some other elements were very helpful. I use a lot of Excel graphs on a daily basis to track behaviors in my classroom, and a variety of colors makes things easier for me. That said, he's the expert, and not me, so I thought I'd keep listening with an open mind.
As he began to talk about the superiority of pictures, I began to really buy into what he was saying. If someone is presented with an image that represents an idea, they have to work actively with it to connect that meaning. This was something I actually struggled with when I was fixing my own presentation. Mine was on common grammar errors, so I was having a tough time coming up with images to represent the differences between words. I can come up with a picture for "our" easily enough, but what about "are"? The second-person form of our most simple verb doesn't translate itself very easily to image. However, if I can show a picture, and get the kids wondering the same thing, they are all engaged in the activity when I finally say that my little picture of a guy with his arms up is what comes to mind when I think "You are!" As in, "Who's the best? You are!"
I think this is a great way to get kids thinking about ideas rather than just seeing a literal representation. If nothing else, perhaps they would be thinking about what image they would use instead. Based on this one presentation, though, I can tell that finding images for those ethereal ideas is a skill unto itself. I think the hardest one for me was "Kind of" or "sort of". I searched those two literally, searched "average", "normal", "middle", before finally stopping and thinking what I would draw if I had pen and paper. I figured I would draw a few people in order of height, and say the second one from the end was "kind of tall". So, a search for "average height" got me an image that worked. It reminds me of the way storyboarding really helped on the Civil Rights presentation. There may be something to be said for starting with the basics.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
Digital Storytelling Week 2
Before I start into my post, I need to yell at Lenovo for a second. Why did you ever go away from the Track Point mouse? I must hit this touch pad with the side of my palm every ten minutes. And just now, it hit the back button on my browser about six words before my post was finished. Fix it, Lenovo, because my hands won't shrink.
Anyway, I'll now continue with a post that will surely be less inspired than my last one.
For years, I was a summer camp counselor. As such, storytelling is something that I'm fairly used to. Without ever really examining what we were doing, we learned how to make tweaks to a story so that a group of 40 8-year-olds would listen to the whole thing without deciding to play "Run All Over the Place and Yell". In previous speech units, I've always started with one of my favorite camp stories, then asked students what made it completely awesome. We usually end up talking about some concepts that are pretty similar to "stickiness"- don't over-complicate things, try to talk about things your audience will understand, give them something to care about. I also mentioned somewhere else that I used a little story to teach run-on sentences recently. Since I'm a Language Arts teacher, and stories play a pretty big role in what I already do, I wanted to bring them in somewhere else. The great thing about it was, students remembered the story and understood the story, so I just have to remind them about it when teaching the concepts. Now, whenever a student tries to separate sentences with just a comma, I can remind them about the tiny police officer that was too little to break up the gang fight. They get the concept, and they get the reason. Beautiful.
I was also intrigued by Voicethread this week. It's a surprisingly easy tool to use, and I'm looking forward to using it in my class. A while ago, my father showed me and iPad app that would record both audio and any writing/drawing on the screen, and play them back simultaneously. I thought to myself, "If I could get this to project on my Smart Board, I could record and upload every lesson!" I don't quite think I could do that with Voicethread, but it would be great for posting lessons that would need to be reviewed often (subjects and predicates, why do you have to be so confusing to kids?). It would also be a really cool way for students to present. The commenting feature is a great way to leave specific feedback, both from peers and from the teacher.
Anyway, I'll now continue with a post that will surely be less inspired than my last one.
For years, I was a summer camp counselor. As such, storytelling is something that I'm fairly used to. Without ever really examining what we were doing, we learned how to make tweaks to a story so that a group of 40 8-year-olds would listen to the whole thing without deciding to play "Run All Over the Place and Yell". In previous speech units, I've always started with one of my favorite camp stories, then asked students what made it completely awesome. We usually end up talking about some concepts that are pretty similar to "stickiness"- don't over-complicate things, try to talk about things your audience will understand, give them something to care about. I also mentioned somewhere else that I used a little story to teach run-on sentences recently. Since I'm a Language Arts teacher, and stories play a pretty big role in what I already do, I wanted to bring them in somewhere else. The great thing about it was, students remembered the story and understood the story, so I just have to remind them about it when teaching the concepts. Now, whenever a student tries to separate sentences with just a comma, I can remind them about the tiny police officer that was too little to break up the gang fight. They get the concept, and they get the reason. Beautiful.
I was also intrigued by Voicethread this week. It's a surprisingly easy tool to use, and I'm looking forward to using it in my class. A while ago, my father showed me and iPad app that would record both audio and any writing/drawing on the screen, and play them back simultaneously. I thought to myself, "If I could get this to project on my Smart Board, I could record and upload every lesson!" I don't quite think I could do that with Voicethread, but it would be great for posting lessons that would need to be reviewed often (subjects and predicates, why do you have to be so confusing to kids?). It would also be a really cool way for students to present. The commenting feature is a great way to leave specific feedback, both from peers and from the teacher.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Digital Storytelling Week 1
Coming into this class, I was looking forward to learning some new tools for presenting in my class, and to get my students presenting to each other in new ways. After doing some looking at Presentation Zen, though, this may be more of a philosophical shift than I thought.
I had heard before that Power Point slides should be minimal, and I've had to sit through absolutely painful presentations where slides were filled to capacity with text, which the speaker would just read verbatim. The last time I saw one of these was at an RtI conference in Green Bay. It was an 90-minute presentation with a break at the halfway point. Once they announced the break, they said they would give free books to whoever actually came back. I considered trying to steal a book, but there was zero chance I was going back into the soul-sucking pit of a presentation. I left wondering, "If you know your presentation is so terrible that you have to bribe people to come back, why not just change it?"
I try really hard not to duplicate that in my classroom. I did find, much to my surprise, that I fell into that trap a fair bit. When discussing grammatical terms, I would have the definition up there, and I would read that exact same definition. Then we would roll through a bunch of examples so they could practice. This is where the shift has to come for me, and where I'm nervous about changing. I understand it's boring to see text and hear the same thing, because we read faster than we talk. What makes me nervous is that not all my kids pay attention all the time. (I think it's pretty close to 100% though. Right? Right?!) I feel understanding the role of different parts of speech is important, so I make sure it's up there. That way, if they aren't listening when I talk about it, when they finally snap back to attention, there it is for them. If my presentation just showed images and minimal text to support examples, like a cartoon adjective pointing to a cartoon noun, those zoning-out students might not understand what it means. Maybe they would get the impression that an adjective is always the word right before a noun. And then how would they ever contribute to society?
I understand that maybe if my presentations were a little better, I'd have fewer students zoning out, but that's just going to happen no matter what with middle schoolers. What I have to strive for is a balance between education and entertainment, because the second can easily lead to the first.
I had heard before that Power Point slides should be minimal, and I've had to sit through absolutely painful presentations where slides were filled to capacity with text, which the speaker would just read verbatim. The last time I saw one of these was at an RtI conference in Green Bay. It was an 90-minute presentation with a break at the halfway point. Once they announced the break, they said they would give free books to whoever actually came back. I considered trying to steal a book, but there was zero chance I was going back into the soul-sucking pit of a presentation. I left wondering, "If you know your presentation is so terrible that you have to bribe people to come back, why not just change it?"
I try really hard not to duplicate that in my classroom. I did find, much to my surprise, that I fell into that trap a fair bit. When discussing grammatical terms, I would have the definition up there, and I would read that exact same definition. Then we would roll through a bunch of examples so they could practice. This is where the shift has to come for me, and where I'm nervous about changing. I understand it's boring to see text and hear the same thing, because we read faster than we talk. What makes me nervous is that not all my kids pay attention all the time. (I think it's pretty close to 100% though. Right? Right?!) I feel understanding the role of different parts of speech is important, so I make sure it's up there. That way, if they aren't listening when I talk about it, when they finally snap back to attention, there it is for them. If my presentation just showed images and minimal text to support examples, like a cartoon adjective pointing to a cartoon noun, those zoning-out students might not understand what it means. Maybe they would get the impression that an adjective is always the word right before a noun. And then how would they ever contribute to society?
I understand that maybe if my presentations were a little better, I'd have fewer students zoning out, but that's just going to happen no matter what with middle schoolers. What I have to strive for is a balance between education and entertainment, because the second can easily lead to the first.
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