Category Archives: Digital Video

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A Tale of a 4th Grade Wiki Project OR Kids and Animals … How Can You Lose!?

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Nine years ago 2 of my sixth graders and I testified in front of the Nevada State Assembly Education Committee about how well using technology to enhance their learning had worked. At the time we had 7 Power Macs in our classroom running Netscape 3.0. We had made a web site for Animal Ark which is a local wildlife sanctuary. Per their web page:

ANIMAL ARK is a 38-acre wildlife sanctuary and nature center Northwest of Reno, Nevada. This facility’s rural setting provides an ideal place to house non-releasable wildlife and allows the public a unique opportunity to view these animals in natural habitat exhibits through glass viewing areas.

We had used Filamentality – “ a free web site even back then, to make “treasure hunt pages” about every animal at Animal Ark. We found web pages about every animal that users accessed to answer questions and do activities to learn about the animals. The state legislature did not have internet access at the time so I had captured pages that we projected on the lightest colored wall we could find in the chamber. The students blew the legislators away with what they had done and how well they explained it.

Since then Animal Ark has developed their own site and last year we took down our very well used, but worn out site. Well now thanks to web 2.0 and specifically wikis, we have made a new educational page for Animal Ark. Actually over 20 wiki pages. Each group of fourth graders in my class was responsible for making 3 wiki pages – one for each animal at the wildlife park. The pages can be used to do general research or as part of a “Design An Animal” project (see the wiki for directions and downloadable data gathering sheets). After researching info on animal adaptations students have to design a new animal that will survive in the area where the student lives – thus showing their understanding of animal adaptations and habitats through their design.

We did a trial run today and guess what!? We found out some (a few of over 80 total links) of the web sites students had selected as the best ones did not contain the information that was required to successfully design an animal. So, now that they could see that they went out with a clarified idea of what was needed and quickly found very suitable replacements. I know, I know, –  where in real life do we try things out and adjust what isn’t working right? (can you see my tongue in my cheek?). But this is the first time these students have done this kind of work and they didn’t get it right the first time on a small number of their pages.

FYI – students set up every wiki page except the main page which I set up to get us started. Students found the gold colored buttons with the paw print, made them, downloaded them, uploaded them to the wiki and put them on the home page and made them hot links to their pages. They also put the photos and links on their pages. Someone noted today that we didn’t have links back to the home page so we are doing that tomorrow ( I had missed that … duh). Students were responsible for finding web sites that were as age appropriate as possible that contained the necessary information. They answered questions as they searched to help them do that. My new student that only speaks Spanish has been finding links to pages in Spanish (Google lets you search that way … I didn’t know … way cool!), so our site will even be somewhat bilingual.

So now that they have replaced the links they found weak (weak links – get it? – sorry) we will gather the info they need and begin to design animals to survive in the Great Basin. We plan to make a video of the finished animals. More soon … I hope … last day is next Wednesday!!!!
Learning is messy!

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Come Join Me On WOW2 Tonight!

Women of Web 2.0, Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Sharon Peters, & Vicki Davis have asked me to be a guest tonight on their live webcast. On their web site they describe themselves as:

“…four women who not only love using the tools of the Internet but also love sharing the tools with others.”

I’ll share what my class has done and is doing right now using Web 2.0 tools and more. That’s tonight (Tuesday) 6:00pm Pacific Daylight Time – 9:00pm Eastern.

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The Cost of 1:1

workinghard.jpgWe read all the time about how cost is one of the disincentives to technology in schools, and certainly I don’t know if my current experience is anywhere near what does or would usually be the case, but I left this as a comment on Tom Hoffman’s blog and thought it was worth posting here too:

“My 1:1 laptop pilot is going pretty well so far with old Apple iBooks – 7 years old – we use Appleworks because it “came with” and iPhoto and iMovie and web browsers and Flickr and blogs and wikis and all kinds of free math and language and science software – haven’t paid for anything but new batteries – once (AND I’m rolling this class to fifth grade and plan on using them for an eighth year). I don’t know if laptops will usually last this long – they aren’t the latest and greatest and the screen resolution isn’t fantastic – but I haven’t found anything I wanted to do yet that they won’t do (I expected that to happen by the way – “sorry guys we can’t use Fun Brain, the computers are too old” but that hasn’t happened yet. We paid over $1600 per originally so we’re down to almost $200 per year per computer, but the price has dropped close to half and current computers have more power etc.
Maybe it depends on what you want to do with them??? But so far we’ve done everything we wanted to. I do have to use a newer computer when we video Skype, but how often would you need more than one computer doing that in your classroom at the same time? Not that I would necessarily start a 1:1 laptop program in Kindergarten – but 7 years means our current 6th graders (I’m in 4th) could have received these laptops in K and still be using them today as they leave sixth grade.”

So … how far offbase is my experience?

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Award Winning Students

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Tonight was the 7th annual Lumiere All School Film Fest here in Reno. My friend Paul McFarlane, an English teacher at Hug High in Reno, started and continues to make this superb festival happen (Yes, Hug High School, named for Procter R. Hug, a local judge).

My sixth graders from last year won for best science film for their movie about fossils. And my current fourth graders won for their “Inclusion” movie – (downloaded now over 50,000 times, but only viewed on YouTube about 14 times since I posted it there last week). Congrats class!

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Vidcasts of Grace Corrigan Visit And YouthBridges Skypecast

Here are the links to video of Grace Corrigan’s (Christa McAuliffe’s mom – the teacher in space’s) visit to our classroom. Well worth the time. You will see me occasionally intrude into the presentation because I put the laptop running the Skype feed in the best possible spot if I wanted it to be in the way. In my own defense It’s where it is when Celest joins us and it just didn’t occur to me I know dumb.

Full disclosure – I edited out the 5 minute plus – “school announcements” that overwhelm Grace’s presentation. I also cut it into 2 seemingly obvious chunks. The first is Grace’s presentation to the students – although I didn’t get the camera turned on right away so I missed the beginning – the 2nd part is the question answering part. I think you will agree that Grace connects well with the students.

Thanks again to Lee Baber and her students at YouthBridges who Skyped the event for us and added their questions. All in all a great experience. Enjoy!

The sound is not real loud (but not bad either) because the camera was in the back of the room. I boosted it as much as I could but depending on your speakers, you might need headphones.

Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s presentation: 13 + minutes
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Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s question and answer period: 24 + minutes

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Fun And Motivation With FD’s Flickr Tools

Years ago I came up with an idea for a writing prompt that I felt was pretty “schema neutral“-  all kids would have experience enough to be able to write a story about this prompt. I call it “A Day As Your Shoes.” Several years ago Corbett Harrison, who among other things had the concept for and started the Writing Fix web site and still maintains it, put my prompt on the site. He made it an interactive prompt to mimic how I have students brainstorm their ideas. Since all students have experience with shoes (at least in this country) and going to school – they will all be able to bring schema for this story.

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This year to add to the motivation and creativity I had the students make the covers for their stories by taking pictures of their shoes and using Fd’s Flickr Tools – Magazine Cover to design their bookcover. We took pictures with a digital camera and downloaded into iPhoto on their laptops. Each student designed several covers so they could build at least some expertise with the software before putting together their final product pictured below.

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Christa McAuliffe’s Mom, Grace Corrigan Visiting My Classroom Friday!!!

Update Friday Afternoon: We did make it work and it was great! (Thanks Lee!!) Picture(s) and more in awhile.

Friday morning Grace Corrigan, Christa McAuliffe’s mom (Teacher in Space on the Challenger Space Shuttle) will be in my classroom speaking to and with my students and answering their questions. In addition, Lee Baber’s YouthBridges students will be Skyping in from Virginia, and hopefully others will as well. Lee and I have been trying to work out all the logistics without actually managing to communicate with each other, which is always very exciting. I wasn’t able to let her know if we were really on until Wednesday night and then I was gone all day Thursday on a field trip  the 3 hour time difference doesn’t help, but I’m confident we will make it work… make it work … make it work …

We are trying to videotape her visit and to record the audio for a podcast. If I can manage to post how you can be part of this I will but chances are it will be very last minute. I can tell you it will start about 9:15am PDT. You might find out how to be part of the Skype on the YouthBridges site.

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Inclusion Update 4-25-07

I’m afraid this week’s update is not good news. Celest has been sick from her Chemo for weeks and that has developed into an infection that has progressed to the point that she was airlifted to a San Francisco Bay Area Children’s Hospital that specializes in treating leukemia last week. Now we hear that she will probably be there for a month … at least. This is a potentially life threatening infection. She has had this happen before and come out OK. Please keep her in your prayers.

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Applications On The Fly!

David Warlick, Chris Lehmann and others have posted about teaching computer applications. I’m not sure if I’ve been “doing it right,” but for years I’ve taught computer applications sparingly. If I had just started out using tech with students I’d probably claim it was because with all the testing and all that entails I don’t have time to teach applications. But years ago when I wasn’t so encumbered I didn’t spend much time on applications either – or maybe I should say I spent only as much time on it as it required so that students could do the work and meet the requirements of the project or assignment we were working on. Much of it was “on the fly.” A student or their group would want to know how to do something and I would show them on the spot (or a bit later depending on time). Inevitably someone else would need to know and either I would show them, or the expert from the first group would show them. Of course very often I would note that soon they were doing things that not only had I not shown them how to do, but didn’t even know you could do – so sometimes rolls reversed and they were showing me something.

Years ago when iMovie first came out we did a project where every group in my sixth grade had to produce a video about a geology topic (What is a rock? What is igneous rock?..) After we had been working for weeks most groups had finished all their shots and were ready to edit. However, 2 groups were still finishing up so I quickly ran around and downloaded each group’s video onto a laptop and showed them how if they clicked on a clip and pressed play you could watch that clip. I didn’t have time to show them more. I went back to work helping the 2 unfinished groups get their final shots set up and of course it took much longer than planned (it was very “messy”) I soon realized that the finished groups could have watched all their clips 5 times over – and yet a class that was prone to being noisy and off track if they didn’t have very specific things to do – was literally “humming” – just low talk and deep concentration on the laptop in their group.

I kept wondering exactly what they were up to. I would ask and glance at their goings on and they were still viewing clips, but it wasn’t until later that I had time to visit each group to see what they were doing. I was amazed! Each of the 5 groups that were done had figured out how to pull their clips down to the edit strip and put them in order. “How did you even know to do that?” I asked them. Shrugged shoulders and “I don’t know, we just did,” was always the answer. Their only frustration was that they thought the videos would be dumb because the beginning and end of each clip had stuff that needed to be cut out and they didn’t know you could do that. When I showed them that … the real excitement started.

The same is happening right now with my fourth graders. We spent some time this week cut and pasting URLs from web pages about animals into an Appleworks document because I plan for us to make numerous wiki pages and that is one skill they will need to have. I also showed them the shortcuts for copy and paste (command “C” and command “V”) and they wondered why I hadn’t taught them that before. My answer? “You didn’t need to know that before, and we didn’t have time.”

Learning is messy!

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From The Mouths of Babes – Our Contribution To Stop Cyberbullying Day

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Click photo to see video “Don’t Laugh At Me”

Four years ago my class of fourth graders was struggling. After almost every recess there was anger and tears about teasing and exclusion from games. We spent too much time in class dealing with these issues (at least too much time during that early era of test prep fever). We had been using the curriculum we had downloaded from Peter Yarrow’s – Don’t Laugh At Me web site, so they had seen the video that came with that. They felt they could do a better job and work on getting along with each other at the same time … so we did. We read Crow Boy and The Brand New Kid and others. We wrote every line from the song on separate pieces of chart paper and taped them up around the room. We discussed what each line and word meant, and brainstormed in small groups and then whole class how to act out each line.

Next, each group was randomly assigned a line to act out. They had to decide who in their group would act out each part, decide on props and location and repeatedly act it out for the rest of the class to be critiqued. We learned the song, because we were going to record ourselves singing it – but the students did not like how it was going. Someone suggested we just use the recording of Peter Yarrow singing it – that led to a discussion of copyright law (since they wanted it posted on the internet) and how artists don’t own the rights to their own music. They asked me what it would hurt to ask … so I emailed Peter’s representative … and to make a long story short the next day we heard back that we had permission if Peter could see it first.

We shot the video – while still doing other activities to work out our “issues” – and sent a VHS copy to New York. Several weeks later we heard back that Peter had shown it at a conference in Atlanta and it had brought him to tears (he later recounted that story with the class over a conference call). When Apple Computer wanted to use it we had to get permission from the song writers – Steve Seskin and Sony Records signed off as did Allen Shamblin and his record company (later that spring Steve Seskin visited our school and sang to the school and came to my classroom for a short discussion with my class).

I have no idea how many times our video has been viewed, but over the years I have sent copies to schools and libraries in 20 states, Korea the Phillipines and The Discovery Channel.

So did our bullying problems disappear as a result? Yes … er no … well both. They got tremendously better and when we had a bad spate of attitude, even when they were in my sixth grade class … the video would always come up and we would end up talking about why we made it and much more often than not the air would be cleared and we would have at least a a day or so of attitude adjustment.

I see some of these students from time to time (they are now eighth graders) and they always ask if the video is still online or tell me about seeing it recently.

One of my best memories however was that any time we would show the video in class … even when they were big, hormone-ized, attitudinal sixth graders – about 2 bars into the song – it would start out low and then build to a sing-a-long – the class would sing and when the video faded out it would be quiet and faint smiles to grins would illuminate most faces in the room.

When this class was in fifth grade (I rolled with them to fifth and then sixth) our local PBS station asked us to make a 60 second public service announcement about racial diversity – here is a link to “Being Different Is A Solution, Not A Problem.”

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