Play, Question, Learn

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The final Grade 10 topic is the Cold War. I had thought before how play and experimentation could be guiding philosophies for this unit. I built upon an earlier post about creating mashups by assigning the students a unit project in which they create either  a mashup or remix to tell part of the Cold War story. I wrote the rubric and assignment sheet based in part on the work of Andrew Churches. I will post student samples when they are complete. I made a sample mashup using Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl which I have embedded at the beginning of this post. So far it has gone well. Partners are exploring cartoon archives for public domain material while cross referencing what they find with what they know, and need to find out, about the Cold War topics they have chosen to illustrate. It is an opportunity for them to explore, experiment, and be creative with content and media in a new way. As a flipped assignment, I provide coaching or guidance when I am asked and, occasionally, when I see that a word of encouragement might be good. The students are playing constructively for these three weeks in a setting in which content is the vehicle for practicing questioning, self-directed understanding, and communicating effectively with video. As this New York Times article points out, trying can sometimes be more valuable than extensive planning and history teaching can sometimes be more valuable as a compass than a map.
 This American Revolution role-playing game is the type of activity that I enjoy running in my classes. With a flipped approach, students can use the activity to better understand what the factors were which may have changed an outcome in history. Sometimes I am divided on what I think of the flipped philosophy. I wonder; was assigning textbook readings a flipped approach we used in the past? It was. However, teachers always had to choose from four or five major textbooks and try to adapt our dynamic lessons, and students, to the static readings. Now, I can create resources with my students in mind.  I am familiar with what they have already learned this school year and in a previous year. I know some of their common references, and can refer to those. That I think is the real advancement.
A friend says that the best PD workshops do not teach you something new, but instead remind us of what we know we should be working toward. Like ESL in the Mainstream, planning instruction using a video game model fits that description. I will be trying to include their graphic structure to teaching and learning. One area that I would like to be teaching better is multiple choice for external exams, like Advanced Placement  (AP). The College Board advocates an open enrollment approach to AP classes; if a student wants to be in class and will work hard, he or she should be permitted to take the course. I agree with this approach. My AP European History and AP United States History courses should be designed to work with students for whom English might be a second or third language, this content is relatively new, and are balancing a busy schedule and class load. I found something I could use using video games as a structure.
Perhaps a student could take the first diagnostic MC test and that score out of 40 or 50 possible could be the “starting point” from which we track progress. Incremental goals could be set. For example, for Unit 2 we could agree on a 10% improvement over the Unit 1 score. Further, each student could agree with me on what would constitute an A, B, and C with this approach. With the way that I weigh the essay portion of AP tests, the writing could take a similar approach but would be more holistic and identifiable skills, rather than content, could be the focus.
One thing that I appreciate about teaching at ISSH is that the admin team supports experimentation by the teachers. I work with many teachers who are accomplished in their fields. The admin team encourages teachers to innovate and experiment. That can help make the school an exciting place to teach.
If you matched Flipped Classroom with New Culture of Learning, you would have video links or video lectures for homework with the class time dedicated to simulations, writing, or the creation of new research questions that students could then pursue with the teachers’ resources or online materials. In my Grade 10 class, the current unit is China:  Opium Wars to Cultural Revolution. I keep materials linked to my wikipage for students to explore and during class I answer questions or provide other support, if needed. Otherwise, students are teaching themselves and each other, the content. I have been short writing tasks to help them better understand important changes with Mao. Students do ask very good questions. Lately, these are a few of the questions I have been asked:
–Was it true that Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist army was exhausted from fighting the Japanese Army (1939-1945), so that it was too weak to fight Mao’s Red Army when the civil war resumed in 1945?
–Why did Mao pick Hua Guafang as his successor if Hua was associated with the Liu Shiaxi’s anti-Mao moderates during the Cultural Revolution?
–Was Emperor Puyi the son of Emerpeor Guangxu?
These were all questions that I had not heard before and could only suggest answers. I keep two good China books on hand, Spence’s Search for Modern China and Chang and Halliday’s Mao: The unknown story.
It was summed up well by Thomas and Brown in their interview with Forbes:
Part of the point we try to make in the book is that inquiry is not about asking a “right” question, but it is a process of asking increasingly better questions. And I think we would say that the best questions are the one that ignites a student’s passion and cultivates their imagination. And it is very easy to tell when that is happening. When students have passion and enthusiasm, it is infectious and impossible to hide.
This is an approach worth developing.
Garry Leroy Baker

Project Based and Challenge Based Learning

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I have been thinking about Project Based Learning and Challenge Based Learning for several months. It has been in the past two weeks that my understanding of how each can be applied well has improved. I began with sorting some real-world examples:

Project Based Learning examples would be Sarah Outen’s epic adventure, Model United Nations (MUN), and, a few years ago, when I wanted to learn how to use my South Korean driver’s license to acquire a Japanese license without taking the written test and the driving test. A person wants to learn something that will help them to do something else.

CBL: What can you do for someone else today?

Challenge Based Learning would include Jody Williams land mine campaign, ISKL’s work with the Turtle Conservation Society, Nepal Seeds, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Second Harvest Japan. These are individuals and groups who look for solutions that they can implement themselves.

Mayuka Thais visited our high school this week as part of Earth Day activities. She became active in helping to raise funds to move elephants from zoos to sanctuaries several years ago. This music video is one of several projects that she has worked on in addition to speaking to audiences in the US and Japan.  I appreciated the work that she is doing and it gave me an opportunity to speak to my Grade 10 students about a chance they have to step from Project Based to Challenge Based Learning in May.

This is the UbD Plan for the CBL extension activity. It has some general wording because each group will begin with research on a different topic and choose different goals.

Project Title:  CBL Action Plan

Standards Met: NETs

1. Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology. Students:
a. apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes.
b. create original works as a means of personal or group expression.

2. Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students:
a. interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
c. develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.

d. contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.

3. Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information. Students:

c. evaluate and select information sources and digital tools based on the appropriateness to specific tasks.

4. Students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources. Students:

b. plan and manage activities to develop a solution or complete a project.

c.collect and analyze data to identify solutions and/or make informed decisions.

d. use multiple processes and diverse perspectives to explore alternative solutions.

Enduring Understanding:

Individuals can choose to make changes if they select issues they are interested in and take action that is within their abilities.

Essential Questions:

What can I do to make a positive change?

GRASPS Task:

Goal: To make a positive change

Role: Plan, organize, implement

Audience: Will vary. Primarily students, family, and friends in Tokyo and Japan.

Situation: You have been invited to plan and implement an event or activity in which you can bring positive change.

Products:

1) Research and presentation on a topic of interest. Past student research topics have included:  clean water, teenage prostitution in developing nations, mangrove forests.

2) A viable plan which would bring about a positive change.

3) Culminating video

Standards or Criteria: Did the plan make the changes desired?

Six Facets of Understanding:

Explain: Draft plan which outlines the goals and methods each project group will use.

Interpret: Students look at other examples of Challenge Based Learning provided as general models for their own action plans.

Apply: Students design and implement a solution to a problem that they have identified from their research projects.

Have perspective: Students look at their own resources to see what they can do.

Empathize:  Students see the issue from the viewpoint of others and anticipate how to reach and mobilize others to meet the plan’s goal.

Have self-knowledge: Students reflect on how successful their projects were in combining the resources that they had available and their plan to make the change that they identified.
We have about five weeks left of this semester for the students to complete the CBL enhancement. I imagine that, of the nine groups, all will design actionable plans. Depending on the reach of each of the CBL plans, perhaps two to three may implement their plans. I will include samples of students’ action plans in a future post, and videos which may be finished. Primarily I see this as a chance to try this approach and learn along with the students.
Garry Leroy Baker

Teaching with NETs

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I thought more about David Warlick’s blog in which he proposed a modified, digital, capstone project that would demonstrate what students had learned though application. It sounds initially like a useful model in that it could synchronize Understanding by Design planning, NETs, and the mission statement of each, unique school. This could also be a goal around which a school could design an technology integration model, with different groups taking part. Each department and grade level could be assigned tasks that would prepare students for the capstone project.

It would answer the important question of who will teach the NETs standards. We all would. We already meet many standards when we plan and teach units. For example:

–Safe, legal and responsible use of information includes using bibliographies, footnotes, and citations and understanding how these principles apply to digital information and images.

–Using models and identifying trends are standards already used in the sciences.

–Standard 3:  Research and information fluency list the fundamental skills taught from Junior School through High School that are evident in authentic report writing.

The next step is to continue these fundamental skills into the digital learning environment. Trista Meisner’s blog post on how they approached this at ISB was a valuable overview.

The value of the NETS standards is that they are a good starting point for digital scope and sequence planning, which would be required to prepare students for David Warlick’s digital capstone project. King George County (Virginia, USA) offers a good example. For this to be successful, it must be a school-wide conversation. Guided by UbD, teachers should agree on the principles and general form of the digital capstone project and participate by preparing students at each grade level with the necessary skills and experiences. This also would help the school remain true to its mission statement as the learning moves further into the 1:1 model and, probably, becomes increasingly project-based.

At ISSH, we use what could be thought of as a version of the just in time approach which has been modified to technology teaching. The philosophy has been that each teacher incorporates the hardware or software needed as they become available and meet instructional needs. It allows for flexibility and, as long as each department is checking back at intervals with the TIS or Curriculum Coordinator to demonstrate that NETs guidelines are being met, then it works as a grassroots-driven model. This can work well in an international school environment because new teachers will introduce or emphasize different applications depending on their training and teaching experiences. How well teachers are meeting NETs can be tracked with curriculum mapping tools and regular department and curricular.

This week my Theory of Knowledge students are working on a virtual museum in which they will tell the story of human history by selecting and grouping objects within a virtual museum plan as part of the History and Areas of Knowledge unit. This was based on the a review that I read in the American Historical Review. Students knew how to use either PowerPoint or Google Presentations, so I suggested that as the software. One of my suggestions was to create a hyperlink to a exhibit explanation card. The students who did not know how to do this could learn quickly. When my students created Digital Family History stories in Grade 10, I suggested using Garage Band or iMovie as the tool. Everything they needed to learn to achieve their own goals or incorporate my suggestions they could learn quickly.

We cannot assume that this will always be easy. Some skills, such as using and synthesizing diverse resources, may be better taught using traditional or digital tools. In other cases, there may be strong disagreement and the lines between professional opinions could also be seen as generational, with younger teachers or those with more recent training advocating more digital tools. The expectations related to tools like laptops, Smartboards, and Web 2.0 applications in the classroom (NETs 6.a, b, c) will need to be navigated with respect for both groups of teachers. This is essential in order to retain effective, experienced faculty, and sustain professional relations in the future.

As long as we are all contributing, and trying to incorporate NETs in our teaching, it should matter less which way we take to meet the goals as long as the approach works for our learning community.

Garry Leroy Baker

It Takes a Village: Full Tech Integration Plan

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Jennifer Anderson’s blog post was a great overview. I liked the analogy she created between IT and the way sea life can use camouflage. In class, people should not notice whether a presentation was created in PowerPoint, Google Docs, or Prezi if learning takes place. If that is the goal, how is it attainable?

We have all come to agree that it is the responsibility of everyone in the school community, teachers, technology and media staff, administrators, and heads of department, to teach to NETs or other appropriate standards. We cannot rely on a technology or computer applications teacher to prepare students to use software or online applications. Just as appropriate moral values or academic standards are taught and modeled by everyone, teaching technology belongs to all of us. So the question is how to ensure that the standards are being met with cohesion? By cohesion, I mean that it becomes so integrated and unified with the original school structure as to appear camouflaged.

While everyone has a role, each position has a different role and is in a unique position to support student learning and classroom instruction. I am interested in how this would work in a school with 600 students (K-12) in which faculty and administrators have the advantage of innovating quickly but may already be serving in several roles. These are the ways in which I envision each person applying their potential strengths in order to fully integrate technology into learning.

–Technology Integration Specialist (TIS)-based approach was novel and should be incorporated. Tom Johnson’s blog made a good case for why this person should be on staff and how they could both lead and support faculty and administrators in integrating technology. This was thought-provoking because I would have first thought of this person as being the Head of Media Technologies or belonging to that office. This model appears more flexible. This person, or persons, could be related to the office or, perhaps more appropriately, be a teacher who also fills this role. A teacher would maintain the daily experience of teaching and innovating with technologies available and might be easier meet with if the TIS were also part of a department, like Social Studies or Science.

A Head of Department (HOD) could might make a good candidate for ITS. They are experts in the content area, are familiar with the visions and values of the school community and would recognize when integration would clash with a school value, as Nick Bilton suggests, with time for reflection, prayer, and mediation. HODs also could coach teachers in how to rethink teaching methods and potential outcomes with 1:1, Project-Based or Challenge-Based Learning, and other innovations. Since HODs work daily with teachers in their departments, it could also be a person that teachers respect and are willing to share stories of successes and failures along the way.

Teachers, working within the school-based team, will be able to bring useful technologies into the classroom in several ways. For example, the Edutopia article came to the real value of technology integration, “…effectively integrated into subject areas, teachers grow into roles of adviser, content expert, and coach.” This is where educators can serve. Lecturing has some benefits for some students, but those students will ask for explanations when they are ready. The myriad approaches to the Flipped Classroom philosophy supply examples of how teachers can teach effectively this way.

However, not all technologies fit the model. Too often, Smartboards and their cousins are used as a new kind of lecture tool, involving only the teacher or perhaps one student at a time. The Student Response Systems referred to in the Wikipedia article on technology integration also sound limited in how much decision making is in the hands of students. E-portfolios are a step closer, if the content and skills were student-driven. Teachers will need to work with the ITS, other teachers, HODs, and the IT department in order to evaluate technologies before and after adoption to see how they fit the SAMR model.

For teachers, the guiding philosophy is primarily to add resources previously unavailable to most classrooms. In my case, that might be access to archives, original documents as in the FSA project, or historians and scholars through Skype or email. The technology available becomes the way that teachers and students can access these resources, analyze the materials, and display and publish results.

Teachers will want to explore online content to possibly modify and adopt for their own students. I was impressed with Prof. Edward L. Ayers’ course The Rise and Fall of the Slave South  at the University of Virginia. Looking through his materials, it was clear to see how the SMAR + TPCK model could be applied to teaching a unit in high school history that would create an opportunity to do the work of historians using online and print primary and secondary resources. This was a good site for understanding sources both tools for students and teachers to use and the accompanying interviews with scholars, unique in history teacher resources.

I found the SAMR to be a useful guide to thinking about which projects begin to reach the event horizon of technology integration, after which you teach in a true student-centered, project-based learning environment without wanting to go back to teacher-centeredness. I will be using SMAR with this technology matrix as a guide for planning upcoming units. Like good Understanding by Design, it is helpful to ask yourself questions as you go along in the planning and revising stages of units.

Ultimately, it is not the technology that teaches. We teach by knowing what the grade-approprite content and skills are for our students. We read journals in order to remain current with the content of our courses. We should also be exposed to, and be experimenting with, new applications like infographics, CIS applications, and video, for instance, in order to better see how each can support student learning.

Students can offer their assessments of how technology integration is going. We often speak of the students, but may not speak often enough to the students for insightful feedback that informs planning and implementation.

Administrators and principals are visionaries and managers. They see the whole student as part of the whole school and his or her own family. With this position, they can liase with parents and faculty. Principals and heads of schools generally know a school community well and understand its values. They would be the ones to help ensure that the technologies and methodologies that are adapted continue to generally fit the spirit and values of the school. This is very important. These are the team members who support the school’s founding vision and values in the long term.

Vertical team building is an element that Jeff Utecht highlighted in Evaluating Technology Use in the Classroom, he offers clear guidelines that administrators and Heads of Department can use to critically evaluate how technologies are being used. This style of vertical team building is important step for success. There are activities which may appear cutting edge, which, when evaluated correctly, are old things in new ways. Teachers who create projects which are new things in new ways, the ultimate goal, might not be noticed because what they are presenting does not have something eye-catching, like a Vimeo link. This criteria guide would help administrators and Heads of Department see past surface appearances to recognize what is being accomplished and then evaluate on merits. It would also give feedback to teachers in order to better help them to see when their projects or activities are making the most of the resources available

Technology in the classroom should be like windows: we see past the media to the information and gain better understanding of the concepts. Just as children ask for books but what they want is a story. Lessons in class can be optimized by merging the right technologies and activities.

Garry Leroy Baker

Revise a presentation

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Afghanistan Stability / COIN Dynamics Chart

From The Joint Chiefs of Staff

According to the New York Times article, this slide was included in a PowerPoint briefing on the war in Afghanistan in 2010. Edward Tufte described in his blog how a PowerPoint presentation during the critical 2003 Columbia flight misrepresented the risk to the damaged spacecraft. Dr. Tufte included an image of the text-heavy slide that he cites as being the most essential for understanding the situation at the time. These are good examples how to not create presentations. Where should we turn instead for good examples?

Garr Reynolds’ blog on good presentation design was helpful. There were six points that I would use as tests for revising a presentation or assisting others in creating one in the future. Don McMillan’s video should also be bookmarked for the short list of what not to do.

 

This is a Richard Nixon presentation that I made on Prezi a few years ago. There are some changes that I will make before I use it again. One would be to include more images. I recently read a review of the remodeling of the Nixon Presidential Library in California. The reviewer described how the Watergate episode is presented quite dramatically. One example was a filing cabinet that Nixon men battered in order to access the medical records of Daniel Ellsberg. The library also has audio files. I would link to Nixon’s briefing of Congressional leaders of the importance of better relations with China. Resources like these would help to contextualize President Nixon and the extralegal means to which he went. This might develop what Garr Reynolds calls empathy with the story. Further, the design should be reviewed. I like the way that Prezi allows for visual organization by movement and clustering of information. However, the zooming and sweeping effects should be scaled down. It can be distracting.

I will be using this presentation in May when the revisions are completed. Students then can tell me if this presentation is becoming clearer and how it might still model a few bad presentation characteristics.

Garry Leroy Baker

 

Betty Boop will be playing the part of Richard Nixon

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Mashup Mingus from ISSH on Vimeo.

What would you get if you combined a political address with great jazz and your target demographic was the Remix Generation? Mashup Mingus from ISSH on Vimeo.

Digital storytelling is an obvious partner to history teaching and learning. With the tools easily learned and widely available, digital publishing has quickly joined history’s pillars of books, photographs, and documentaries to convey what has happened and why. The challenge is how to use it well. Digital projects can be time consuming so the content and skills to be learned or practiced should be proportional.  Author Tanita S. Davis posted a good example of this kind of digital storytelling from Singapore American School on her blog.I think that I have found two projects which meet the criteria.

Inspired by the many tools, like Garage Band and iMovie, my Grade 10 students created Digital History Projects in which they told the story of someone in their family using an interview, background research, and, when available, family photos. The results were pretty good. It was an opportunity for students to do the work of historians while applying digital tools and techniques they were excited to learn. When I have developed more experience with this project, I would be interested in supporting students who wanted to submit their work to the National History Day Contest.

I learned about the Internet Archive this week. This has great video and audio resources which are searchable with Creative Commons.

My Grade 10 History students’ final topic this year is the Cold War. I am drafting a unit project in which students would mashup video to tell parts of the Cold War story. I like the Cold War as the basis because the topics are usually presented in segments with little linear narrative to string each to the others. We teach Yalta, Korean War, Hungary 1956, Berlin Wall, Marshall Plan, Cuban Missile Crisis and Prague Spring, for example. A mashup could tell the story of a decade like the 1960s or three interrelated events.

As I watched the Betty Boop cartoons, I recognized how a mashup could be created from three or four to illustrate many different stories. Using Betty Boop’s Snow White and Minnie the Moocher, a story could be crafted about post-1945 Germany. Germany, played by Betty Boop, could experience the struggles between USA-NATO and the USSR-Warsaw Pact. NATO could be played by the seven dwarfs. If you wanted to teach detente, it would be easy to cast Betty as Nixon and find two others to play Mao and Brezhnev.

Popeye stories would also work well. Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl reappear. Perhaps the three could play the US, USSR, and different strategic aims: Berlin, Korea, Vietnam. At the 3:40 point of the episode included, Popeye and Bluto compete to plow a field. That could be used to illustrate the Marshal Plan. Again, this project is in draft form. The important element is that the source material is available and licensed to create something humorous, creative, original and educational.

The final mashups would indicate how well a group understands the historical events.  The video, though, would be secondary to the process. I would build in steps that demonstrate, research, planning, storyboarding, and appropriate bibliographic citations. The media will change in the future, but these essential steps should remain constants of good scholarship.

I tried a mashup. My thought was what would you get if you combined a political address with great jazz and your target demographic was the Remix Generation?

I admit that I have things to learn about creating a sense of story and making my mashup more transformative of the original. I enjoyed combining the media and look forward to the next project.

The step that I am working on now is downloading and importing the source video to iMovie, where it can be edited to tell the story that I choose to model. Music and voice-over would follow. The Betty Boop Jump video below is an experiment. This is what I am learning to do so that I can coach others.

Betty Jump from ISSH on Vimeo.

Your advice is welcome.

Garry Leroy Baker

UN Secretary General Ad Campaign

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The assignment that I gave to my students was to create a 60-second ad. The ad would support or disparage the candidacy of a current controversial world leader for the fictional election to the position of United Nations Secretary General in 2012. Student groups were given the assignment sheet, rubric, and shown an exemplar that I created with Adam Seldis and Adam Clark. I also referred students to two Mitt Romney ads. Students were required to use factual information only but present it to support their view of the candidate that they chose.

This is the assignment sheet that I gave to the students.This is the assignment summary for teachers that my group created and the rubric.

The group that created this ad spent some time viewing campaign ads for the 2012 Russian Presidential election. They borrowed some of the feel of those ads which targeted younger voters. Overall, I thought that their use of text, music, images, and wording were cohesive in creating the overall message. They have met the assignment’s challenge to make a leader, who can be seen as unpopular in the West, appear more viable.

When I use this assignment again, there are a few modifications that I would make. The first would be to specify, or ask the groups to specify, the target demographic. This ad appears targeted to 18-24 year old females. It might be a greater stretch if the assignment specified 60-75 retired men and women pensioners. There should be greater emphasis placed on citing the sources of the photos and music. That is a good digital habit that we all should practice. I had originally presented samples that used voice-over for narration. I think it would give the fictional ads more impact and substance, but I would like to think about that more before I make the decision for next time.

Garry Leroy Baker

21C Speech Contests

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Winston Churchill’s Blood,Toil, Tears, and Sweat, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream are speech exemplars that we teach. They are great speeches in part because the speakers had very real goals to achieve, they were collaboratively drafted, and they were prepared with the intent of both addressing those who were in attendance and the wider audience available through media like radio, television, and film. Today, speech contests are intended to provide opportunities for young people to practice and improve their public speaking skills in preparation for their future roles as leaders. To better prepare students, we should consider expanding speech contests to include categories that better match the conditions of the adult world and the power of the internet.

We should begin by emphasizing the collaborative nature of public speaking, rather than the competitive, and add more realistic speaking categories.

Racing is supposed to improve the breed. That is a form-follows-function approach to design. With speech, the emphasis has been on competition based on a relatively narrow range of public speaking skills. What has happened is that the function has been to win in a category and all preparation, or design, has been focused on this goal. In public speaking, emphasizing collaboration, rather than competition, would make public speaking both more valuable and more reflective of real-world experiences. A good example of this type of speaking is offered through Model United Nations (MUN). Student-delegates arrive at a conference prepared to represent a country on several important issues. Collaboratively, a working group of delegates forms, with delegates contributing clauses for a resolution, creating compromises between delegates’ positions, modifying wording, lobbying other delegates for support, drafting a speech and delivering the speech to the committee. Each speech represents a group effort, which is one element of public speaking that is more realistic. A second element is that success is not based on how many points were awarded on a rubric. Success, and growth, is based on the ability to work well with others and to persuade an informed audience that a proposal is a solution to a serious problem. This is the type of public speaking for which we should prepare our students.

The speaking categories should also shift to more authentic types of speeches and presentations. TED Talks and TEDx at Tokyo International School are authentic experiences. Another example is  Yokohama International School’s Pecha Kucha. In each of these examples, individuals speak on topics of real interest with a range of presentation tools available. People are not restricted to carefully rehearsed recitations, making the experience more valuable to everyone who attends.

The focus of a speech contest should be on bringing ideas to the community for discussion, debate, and reaching consensus. With the current format there is an over focus on the win and less on the ideas. Then, when the speeches are finished, the conversation is over. We congratulate students on delivery and confidence, but we do not begin to debate the merits of the persuasive or expository case that has been made or the extemporaneous issue discussed. These speeches are end products. There should be further steps toward greater understanding and, when possible, consensus.

We need opportunities to use public speaking as a tool for delivering good proposals and helping to solve problems by bringing them to the community. Gamers recently solved an HIV/AIDS research problem in three weeks that researchers had worked on for over ten years. The breakthrough came by taking it to the world community for an answer. This is in the nature, as well, of open-source software. That when you make tools available for many people, there will be better, more ingenious developments happening sooner. The X Prize, and similar challenges, were always about challenging everyone to find a solution to a problem. While these examples may appear to only stimulate competition, no one could do it alone. Formal and informal teams must be assembled in order to be successful. Researchers and academics frequently attend conferences in order to present papers and hear about the work of others. Speaking is a means of sharing ideas.

It might be valuable to move from awarding medals and toward criteria-based judging for feedback. More comments, from teachers and peers, could be more valuable and help students improve.

With the spread of WiFi and internet access, the nature of audience-speaker relations has changed. Students should be coached to make the most of this advancement. In larger venues, create a moderated back channel. Teach students in the audience how to use it responsibly and speakers how to anticipate the benefits and drawbacks. Consider how Sarah Lacey was unprepared for her audience’s feedback during her Mark Zuckerberg interview. The issue is not the technology, but respectful audience-speaker interaction. This would help all students learn to work well with this new feature of public speaking.

Speeches should also be available through live streaming. Just as students in class now write for a real-world audience using Facebook, blogs, and Vimeo, students can now speak to a world audience. Further, speeches should be archived for future presenters to learn from and past speakers to refer to as part of their digital portfolios.

Speech contests should provide opportunities for students to develop  authentic skills. To better prepare students, we should consider expanding speech contests to include categories that better match the conditions of the professional world and the expectations of those accustomed to the internet.

Garry Leroy Baker

 

Art, Mashup and Project-Based Learning

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Mixup, Mashup, Remix. Pop did it with newspapers. Dadists did it with teacups. You could say that  Raphael did it with the Greek philosophy. What is promising today is that the amount of content is limitless and the possibilities boundless with a simple laptop and a goal or concept.

I have been looking for  a better way to teach art movements in AP European History and AP United States History this year. I think mashup and remix could be the way to go.

What I have found is that students can usually learn and remember the main characteristics of art movements. Italian Renaissance was realistic and more secular than Byzantine. Romanticism rejected the extremes of Enlightenment and industrialization. Surrealism attempted to incorporate Freudian psychology and Einsteinian physics. What I have been looking for is a way to teach the art movements that will help students retain and deepen their understanding beyond this academic year.

The assignment I am developing would be based on three steps. The first would be discovery in which they identify the main characteristics from a set of prints. The second would be a flipped-lecture on the artistic movement and its genealogy. The third would be a remix in which students apply the style and philosophy of the artistic movement create their own video or photographic work.

The successful project would take about a week to complete. In this, students would produce their own works using the philosophies and approaches that the artists of the specified movements followed. For example, I would like students to have a clearer understanding of the work of Cubists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and the goals involved. They would need to be able to translate an understanding of Cubism’s characteristics and way of viewing the world to their own working piece.

For this project, students would use a combination of their own video/images and those taken from sites, supported by music and/or sounds, to replicate the Cubists goals of seeing a subject from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, flat colors to avoid emotional responses, overlapping planes, no perspective, and traditional African and Oceanic artistic inspirations. I have written before about how Man with a Movie Camera related Russian avant-garde art to film. I am sure that once a student completed this project they could confidently discuss Cubism alone or as it might be contrasted with another Western art movement.

Based on our project in which my group developed campaign ads for UN Secretary General candidates, students will need a good example that I create, a clear rubric, a review of Fair Use, and software suggestions.  I will be working on my sample over the next two weeks and anticipate having it ready to show to my AP class during the upcoming academic unit. I will link to it here when it is ready.

Garry Leroy Baker

 

 

 

 

“I can see clearly now…”

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I have been including visuals in my history classes since I began to teach in 1999. They can be a great way in which to help students grasp the abstractions of concepts or historical forces. Some of the classics, and my favorites, include Napoleon’s March on Moscow. This is considered to be a classic because it briefly explains with six factors how 400, 000 men in the French Army who marched on Russia in 1812 were reduced to 40,000 within a few months. This is my standard by which I have always evaluated the usefulness of graphics. Fortunately, the current generation of infographics designers contribute valuable materials to the understanding of the world around us.

I have written previously about the work of Dr. Peter K. Bol and GIS. To paraphrase Dr. Bol, infographics are like the game Jeopardy. Infographics are the answers. You, the students, and I are the researchers who must then ask the right questions which will help to contextualize the information.

Wages of Craftsmen and Farmworkers per day in English Pence Many EyesIn the Grade 10 Twentieth Century History class that I teach the Holocaust is a topic. I appreciated the graphic which divided the Holocaust deaths by nationality. I think this is a good place to begin with understanding the Holocaust. Most people associate the Holocaust primarily with Germany or with France. However, the graphs indicates that some understanding of the Holocaust should answer a question like, “Why were there more victims in Poland and the Soviet Union?”

Another infographic displayed the wages of farm and skilled workers during the European Middle Ages. The first spike of 1348 corresponds nicely with the information we have about wages during the Plague years. Curiosity could lead to other questions. Why did wages for both groups never return to pre-1348 levels by 1500? Wages for farm workers appear to have collapsed three times after 1475. Could this be explained by missing data? This corresponds with the Hundred Years War, is there some correlation? We know that many Europeans were open to Martin Luther’s message in the 1520s because it came during a time of great inflation. Are we beginning to see the trend with this visual? Why other data sets should we find that would help create a more comprehensive picture?

As with many COETAIL topics, the resources are rich and varied while the applications for teaching and learning are limitless. I look forward to including more of these resources in my courses. They are important as visual aids. However, they are more enriching when student-researchers first generate their own graphics and then ask, and answer, their own unique questions.

Garry Leroy Baker