21st Century Literacy Lessons

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Kansas State University anthropology professor Michael Wesch. I’ve shared his excellent videos (A Vision of Students Today, The Machine is Us/ing Us, and Information R/evolution) with colleagues and students alike.

This weekend I came across two different videos that draw on his work.

The first one uses the same Creative-Commons-Licensed music and video production techniques as The Machine is Us/ing Us to raise questions about  21st Century Skills. I think this video is a very nicely-done homage, and I’m glad to see that the Social Studies Department at Weymouth High School credits Wesch for the “creative inspiration and music” (the music is actually “There’s nothing impossible” by Deus). All in all this is a nice example of fair use – adapting a creative concept to a new purpose.

I also came across a video posted by McGraw Hill, which was basically just a bunch of footage from A Vision of Students Today and The Machine is Us/ing Us with additional text occasionally interspersed between clips. I wasn’t really interested in watching the whole video, but I waited until the end to see if they gave Wesch any credit. They didn’t!

The good new is, when I tried to link back to the McGraw Hill video today, I got the “This video has been removed by the user” message. So I’m glad they recognized that this was not fair use and responded so promptly to Wesch’s comment on the video. I’ll be sharing this story with my students as an example of digital citizenship in action!

I’m very excited to be taking a course in Virtual Learning and Teaching, which will give me the opportunity to explore Second Life some more this semester. I recently learned (via Twitter) that the University of Texas is the first statewide university system to have systemwide presence in Second Life. There is an article on the UTSA website called Virtual Possibilities: Exploring academic and island life in the metaverse of Second Life, which highlights the work of our professor, Carmen Fies.

Looking back at my last post about Second Life–a year and a half ago–I realize there are lots more resources now in the way of wikis and videos about the educational uses of Second Life.

Here are some sites I plan to re-visit:

Second Life Education Wiki-Sim Teach

Virtual Worlds Wiki

SL edu-wiki

ISTE in Second Life

The School of Second Life: Education Online

Here is my updated playlist on SL in Ed:

I’m taking a course on Constructionism, which can be defined as “learning by making,” or more precisely “learning X by making (with/around/for) X”–or can it?

According to Palpert and Harel in Situating Constructionism, to define “constructionism” would be against the core principles of the theory itself. Each person who encounters the idea of constructionism must form her own concept of what it means. It is only through sharing numerous examples and experiences that our “self-constructed constructions should converge” (Papert & Harel, 1991).

In order to understand constructionism, we must examine the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing (Papert & Harel, 1991). What does it mean to know something? Is it enough to be able to parrot back verbal or textual information about a concept?

Consider this passage:
There are tork gooboos of puzballs, including laplies, mushos, and fushos. Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they do not grunto any lipples. In order to geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples, you should bartle the fusho who has rarckled the parshtootoos after her humply fluflu.

Answer the following questions:
How many gooboos of puzballs are there?
What are laplies, mushos, and fushos?
Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they will not what?
How can you geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples?
(Kelly Gallagher, Deeper Reading, 2004)

Although you can answer all the questions “correctly,” you still don’t know what a “puzball” is or what it means to “bartle” something. But if I gave you puzballs and had you bartle them, they would become meaningful to you. That is what constructionism means for us to do–have students make and do the stuff to learn about stuff.

After all . . .

“You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.” ~Seymour Papert

On March 5th, immediately preceding the ASCD conference, the Google for Educators team will be hosting a Google Teacher Academy for Administrators here in San Antonio. This is a free professional development experience “designed to help K-12 educational leaders get the most from innovative technologies.”

Last month, I participated in the Google Teacher Academy in DC. It was a rich and rewarding day of hands-on learning and collaboration with educators from around the country. Not only did I learn tons that day, I made connections with like-minded colleagues who have become part of my Professional Learning Network in the blogosphere and on Twitter.

Based on my Google Teacher Academy experience, I would highly recommend it. The sessions are partly designed to demonstrate the power of the various tools in the Google Apps for Education, but they are not limited to Google tools by any means, and there is much sharing between and among participants as well.

If you’re interested, but want to learn more before making your one-minute application video, take a look at the following . . .

The Google Teacher Academy Resources where you will find everything we covered at GTA

The Mythbusters and FAQs slideshow on the Google for Administrators page

The Google in education wiki

Information about the Google Workshop for Administrators that was held last month

This powerful video about How Google Saved a School

I chose not to look at any of the previous application videos before creating mine.

But if you’d like to see some examples, here’s a collection of successful application videos for GTADC . . .

Don’t delay, apply today–the deadline is Jan. 25th!

Now that we have access to YouTube with our teacher logins, I thought it would be useful to share some video tips and resources…

Finding Videos

In addition to YouTube, there are many outstanding sources of educational videos on the web.
Here are just a few to get you started:
TED Talks
Fora.TV
WatchKnow
Vidque education channel
Vimeo
YouTubeEDU
iTunesU
TeacherTube
SchoolTube
Edublogs.tv
Academic Earth
OpenYale
MITOpenCourseware (Materials for High School)
For even more educational video sites, see my list on Diigo
or this list from Open Culture
or this list from RefSeek

Organizing Videos

One way to organize your instructional videos is to sign up for a YouTube account.
You can create playlists or mark videos as favorites.
These will be shared on your channel along with any videos you upload.

If you want to see an example, feel free to take a look at my YouTube channel and my playlists

Sharing Videos

As with the Slideshare tip from last week, you can embed a YouTube video on your teacher web page.
Simply copy the embed code (to the right of the video)–click the “customize” button to change your preferences–and past the code in the HTML view when you’re editing your page. This way you can play the video from your webpage, rather than YouTube. You can still use the full screen option.

When preparing to show a video in class, mute your computer and let the video play all the way through once. Then, when you’re ready to play it for the students, you won’t have to wait for it to buffer.

Teach Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship

By the way, if we’re going to use YouTube videos in the classroom, we should also take this as an opportunity to teach students online safety and etiquette. Here’s a video to help you do just that:

I’ve recently been seeing professional publications move to online formats such as ISTE’s SIGilt Fall Newsletter on ISSUU, ISTE’s digital edition of the Dec/Jan issue of Learning & Leading with Technology (membership required), and NCTE’s new interactive online format for the Nov. 2009 Council Chronicle.

It occured to me today that I could publish the Internship Program handbooks in this kind of format so people could read them more easily and interactive-ly online. So I uploaded the Student and Mentor Resource Packets to ISSUU and embedded them on my course website.

I think they look great! Now I’d actually like to improve the document design, maybe add a colorful cover . . .

I think the world wanted me to learn about this (or else it was just one of those synchronicity moments on Twitter).

First, a tweet from Peace Dot alerted me to this video . . .

Then I saw a tweet from Matt Montagne about this survey (which I answered, and you should too, it only takes a few seconds).

Then a tweet from Lucy Gray mentioned a video, which was a link to the same survey.

Turns out it’s all connected.

Professor BJ Fogg spoke to the students at Montagne’s school today, and he is also the leader of Peace Innovation at Stanford University, the team behind Peace Dot. Fogg’s latest tweet as I write this post? Mentioning the Internet for Peace Manifesto video!

For our first advisory meeting of the new year, I shared the Two simple questions that can change your life in 2010 from Dan Pink and had the students answer the first question: What’s my sentence?

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

I did the activity with them, of course, and my sentence was:
She loved learning and shared that love with friends, family, students, and colleagues every day.

We put their responses into a Wordle to see what emerged. Several other advisories did the same activity, and this morning we tried it at our faculty meeting. Not surprisingly, the biggest word by far in the teacher Wordle is “student” followed by “helped” and “loved.”

Speaking of Wordle, here’s a great idea for using it to help kids analyze their own writing. I love how Mrs. Goerend has the kids annotate their own Wordle results to brainstorm more specific word choice. I think this kind of exercise would be heplful to writers at all levels.

Want to put your slideshow presentations on your teacher web so students can view them right on the page?
Or even create a cool playlist of related slideshows in one place like I’ve done here?
It’s not hard. Here’s how . . .

Step 1: Go to Slideshare and sign up (it’s free).
Click the “UPLOAD” button and follow the directions to upload your slideshows (bulk upload to do more than one at once).
Be sure to assign tags. This will help others find your stuff. It’s also very helpful if you want to create a playlist (see below).

Step 2: Once it’s uploaded (this may take a few minutes), you will see your slideshow on your “My Uploads” page.
Click on the title of your slideshow to see it in the presentation window.
Look to the right of your slides (under your user name) and copy the embed code provided.
You will probably want to embed “without related presentations”–select this under the custom option.

Step 3: Go the website where you want to embed your presentation.
Edit the page where you want to post your slideshow.
Switch to HTML view, paste in the embed code you copied, and save your changes.
View the page you just edited and check out your great slideshow!

Extra Credit: To post a whole playlist like I did here, click on “WIDGETS” (top center).
Select which slideshows to include (tags help with this).
Give your playlist a title and copy and paste the code in the box at the right.
Add that code to the HTML of your web page and all your presentations are in one place!

Here’s a basic tutorial and a tour of the more advanced features of Slideshare.

I just finished reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink. As he did in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (one of my all-time favorite professional reads), Pink presents a thought-provoking series of ideas through a reader-friendly blend of interesting anecdotes and scholarly research plus a few key lists, quotations, and visuals to make the ideas stick.

I love that he opens this new book about motivation with the story of Wikipedia. Whatever you think about its credibility or validity as a source of information, you have to admit that it is an amazing example of voluntary collective action. It’s motivation that explains why so many people choose to use their “cognitive surplus” (as Clay Shirky calls it) to contribute to an online encyclopedia rather than sit mindlessly in front of the television.

Pink lays out a compelling case for the values of intrinsic motivation over extrinsic rewards, showing that autonomy leads to engagement, and engagement produces mastery–”the desire to get better and better at something that matters” (p. 111).

My favorite chapter is the one on Mastery. It opens with this delightful poem by W. H. Auden, includes a nice synopsis of Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow and Carol Dweck’s work on the power of learning goals vs. performance goals, and concludes with the mathematically poetic assertion that “mastery is an asymptote” (p. 126).

Especially helpful for parents and educators are the “Nine Ideas for Helping our Kids” in the Toolkit. There are great suggestions for changing homework to homelearning, involving kids in self-assessment based on their learning goals, helping kids see the relevance of what they’re studying, and “turn[ing] students into teachers” (pp. 174-184). Overall, another must-read for educators.

My related posts:
What’s Your Sentence?
Dan Pink’s New Year’s Preview
A New Approach to Motivation

Other people’s related posts:
A Few Reflections On Daniel Pink’s New Book, “Drive”
Two Questions that can change your students’ lives…
What’s YOUR sentence?
“Carrots and Sticks are So Last Century”: A Conversation with Author Dan Pink
Two Life-Changing Questions
Two Questions to Make 2010 a Great One for You and Your Team