101questions: crowd sourcing perplexity

I've followed Dan Meyer { @ddmeyer | dy/dan } for a while now. Here's his bio blurb from his blog:

About

December 24th, 2006 by Dan Meyer

I'm Dan Meyer. I taught high school math between 2004 and 2010 and I am currently studying at Stanford University on a doctoral fellowship. My hobbies include graphic design, filmmaking, motion graphics, and infographics, most of which have found their way into my practice in some way or another. My specific interests include curriculum design (answering the question, "how we design the ideal learning experience for students?") and teacher education (answering the questions, "how do teachers learn?" and "how do we retain more teachers?" and "how do we teach teachers to teach?"). I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

(http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?page_id=2)

Dan has an excellent blog, but is also involved in many web projects as well. One such project caught my eye because of his tweets. Every once in a while he'd tweet a link and ask something along the lines of, "What's the first question that pops into your head when you see this?". This intrigued me. I would click on the link and be taken to 101questions. It looks something like this:

I would type in the first question that came to mind and click submit. I then get to ask a question about the next photo or video. Also, if I no question comes to mind, or item just isn't that interesting, I have the option to skip it.
This is pretty fun on its own, well at least for me, but Dan is using this to collect/create engaging and perplexing activators.
Here's how the project is described on its webstie:

We don’t care how well you lecture. We don’t care how well you engage us. We aren’t impressed by your fancy slide transitions or your interactive whiteboard. We care how well you perplex us.

Can you perplex us? Can you show us something that’ll make us wonder a question so intensely we’ll do anything to figure out the answer, including listen to your lecture or watch your slides? Here’s one way to find out. Upload a photo or a video. Find out how many of us get bored and skip it. Find out how many of us get perplexed and ask a question.

Then figure out what you’re going to do to help us answer it.

Signed,

Your Students 
(http://101qs.com/blog/about/)

 I thought this was a great idea and can relate to the feeling of seeing something and just needing to know how it works, so I joined the site. I haven't put much on yet, but I've already learned some things.

• It's called 101 questions because each post is capped at 101 questions. You ask a question about your post when you upload it and the post is capped at 100 further questions, well more like interactions. Both asking a question and skipping a question count as an interaction. The number of questions out of 100 interactions is what determines the posts perplexity. If no question comes to mind for 100 people and you get 100 skips, chances are students aren't going to be intrigued if you use that photo or video in class.
• The question you have in mind for a particular post may not come to anyone else when they see it. This allows you to get a broader perspective and gauge what types of questions your students would be asking themselves.

This site is fun and a great way we can work together to improve our classrooms. Thanks, Dan!

Classroom Video

I'm going to start by letting everyone know that I'm incredibly biased when it comes to video. I've lead two video making/editing projects with grade 7s and a professional development session at BU on making video in class. Making videos also makes up a significant portion of my spare time. If you click here you can see my previous thoughts on video use in the classroom.

I AM going to use videos in my classroom:

- "Educational" videos, like the Perimeter Institute's Challenge of Quantum Reality.

- YouTube videos, like

To provide students with another way of looking at the course material. 

Video can often be a great activator, too. I used this playlist

when going through Macbeth in my second placement. When we finished an Act students got time to work on their ongoing Macbeth project, a facebook profile for a main character. So, before we started reading the next act I played a brief summary of the previous act from this playlist. This got them back into the story and also showed them how other students around the world have interpreted the play.

- My videos, like

- And most importantly, I'm going to get students to make their own videos together. Video making incorporates teamwork, storytelling, critical thinking, ICT and fun.

My dream ELA project is this:

Thanks to Lisa for hashing this out with me last year.

We would study a novel and create a collector's/special edition box set of a video adaptation. It's all the language arts in one project! It would be filled with varied writing tasks: A summary and blurbs promoting the film on the back jacket, critical responses to the novel, film-maker's diary, the script. There would be representation tasks to: cover art, concept art, storyboards, back jacket thumbnails. And then the videos! There would be the feature, a making-of featurette, cast and crew interviews, bloopers (you HAVE to have bloopers, but including them on a separate DVD means half the feature doesn't get taken up with bloopers), deleted scenes, perhaps even a few versions of theatrical trailers and promos.

I feel like using video this way would get students excited to create and maybe even excited to write an essay if it would be part of their very own special edition DVD! Also, to make a video adaptation of a novel requires a thorough understanding of the novel itself: themes, imagery, character, plot.

So I say yes to using videos in class, especially if you can use video to complement other modes of representing.

Sharing is a Seed

Winding Down - Winding Up

The university semester is winding down. Final assignments are being given. Final class dates are being determined.
However, things are winding up for me. Fellow student and blogger, Miss L, and I have the honour of presenting at both the Byte Conference and BU. We're talking about why we blog, but Miss L does us more justice, so if you want to learn more about it click here.
Also, this week I'm heading back to a school I worked at last year to run a video editing workshop. I made the following video to capture the interest of the students and to use for guided practice with video editing.

I love making videos and am glad to help others learn how to make their own. I'm also going to bring this workshop to BU in February and a Professional Development session for education students.

I'm going to end up being pretty busy, but it's something I enjoy and rarely even seems like work. I hope to get permission to showcase some videos made during the workshops, so stay tuned.

More on Movies

My cooperating teacher at my most recent student teaching placement has a huge collection of video resources he uses in his classroom: from lectures to concepts in action. They are a very effective way to differentiate and engage.
However, physics is a real-world course. It attempts to explain the patterns and relationships observed in nature. Watching videos or simulations can abstract the concept and make it harder for students to see the real-world connections. Live demonstrations are great for showing concepts, but my CT strongly encouraged students to be more than just consumers, but to extend themselves and become producers. Why just watch the demonstration, when you can do the demonstration? Why just watch Youtube videos in class, when you can make the Youtube videos?
Every year, for every unit he encourages students to figure out how to apply concepts in their life and film their demonstrations. A large percentage of his video collection is past student-made video demonstrations. There are videos on the Doppler Effect, conservation of momentum, circular motion and many more. Making video demonstrations require higher order brain functions and forges a stronger connection to the concept than simply memorizing a formula and diagram.
I plan on implementing this strategy in my teaching and will model production over consumption by making videos (both for fun and for class-use) and sharing them with my students.
Here is a sample of some of my recent production:

I'm participating in the Star Wars Uncut project. Check it out!

Barriers to Inquiry

The video highlights some barriers to implementing inquiry based learning in a classroom.
How can we overcome them?

web 2.0

I'd heard of web 2.0 before, but that was really it. I did not pay much attention to the term.

Now I know that web 2.0 describes the shift in the web from text based, consumer content to multimedia based, interactive/collaborative content.

I think two things are responsible for the shift to 2.0 - computer capabilities and the ubiquitous world wide web. When I first got the internet and had to suffer through all the electronic screeches and howls of the modem connecting I would curse a website that included a picture. It would triple to octuple the load time! Now that modem speeds are approaching c and computers can process things even faster the shift to 2.0 makes sense. It's almost impossible to find a site without an image now.

The fact that the internet is pretty much everywhere, even on our phones, in addition to improved computer capabilities makes collaboration possible. In my lifetime I started with only opening one window at a time and had a click-and-wait mentality. If I went too fast or opened too much I was just asking for a crash. (Mind you I've never owned a Mac, perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I had.) Now, I can have seven tabs open in my browser, have desktop gadgets and skype running in the background and still be working on a document that 10 other people are editing simultaneously. The web has come a long way.

I don't think I can do justice to just how pervasive web 2.0 is. Luckily there are many other sites that have attempted to do just that. Go 2 web 2.0 is just one example. The screen shot I've provided shows just a fraction of one of the seventy-two pages of web 2.0 applications the site links to!

Flickr, Google Docs, Facebook and Twitter are all major 2.0 applications I use on a regular basis.

Web 2.0 Info and Resources

Looking at web 2.0 with web 2.0

Animoto

I had wanted to title this Kangaroo Island but forgot, so here is my Animoto creation, Untitled Project


Try our video maker at Animoto.
Animoto automatically makes videos around a chosen theme, imported pictures, and text. Free videos are limited to thirty seconds, four plus of which are taken up with the Animoto advertising at the end. Longer videos are available if you purchase a subscription. I would assume that the final ad would be much smaller, or non-existent, on the longer videos. However, I haven't subscribed so I can't say, but it makes sense to me.
I wish there was a theme preview I could see when I am choosing my theme. They were all static thumbnail images and I had to chose one without knowing how it would display, and transition between, my pictures.
All that being said, Animoto is easy and fun. I especially liked the suggestions given in class as to how it could be used: Mini-stories, Phys-Ed skill demonstrations, even Christmas cards! I think Animoto would be very effective as a summarizing tool. Say a student read War & Peace (it was the personal choice reading assignment...) and they could do the book review, but really that could be the length of a normal novel. Here comes Animoto! The challenge is to summarize the novel in pictures, in 30 seconds. This forces students to pick out important information and interact with the text in a new way. I use an English example because I'm familiar with English, but I believe it can be an interdisciplinary tool.

On a side note, here is the shortest review of War & Peace I could find in ten minutes of searching that also was thematically relevant to this post. It's almost two minutes and doesn't actually say anything about the book, aside from it being very long. 

Movies

was very helpful in diversifying lessons and content in class. During Macbeth I frequently used short video summaries of each act, often made by students elsewhere in the world, as a reactivation before going on to the next act. (e.g. - ACT I Summary, Macbeth Rap) With this, I discovered the joy of play lists. I can group similar videos and not have to waste time finding the next one I want to show. I created Macbeth, Diversity, and Social Justice play lists as thought provoking activations for new units.
However, when in student hands I found YouTube could be distracting. When I arrived at my placement a few students were finishing up a music interpretation lesson in ELA. They had to analyse the lyrics of a chosen song and the music video as well. Often after watching their chosen video students would just start watching another and then another. A majority of my cooperating teacher's time was taken up with reminding students to stay on task.
On reflection, I don't think this would have been any different if these students had been analysing poetry in a collection. I think there will always be distractions and I won't let a useful tool like YouTube go to waste because of them.

The above is a demonstration video I made for tutorial lesson on Windows Movie Maker. This lesson was to ensure everyone was comfortable in editing video for the following project where groups would make videos celebrating diversity. I created this by hand drawing each frame and then taking a picture of it. I made use of Movie Maker's transition, panning and zoom effects to simulate movement.
When I presented it to the class they were amazed I was able to make something like this and even more so when I told them I had uploaded it to YouTube. I then had each student open Movie Maker on their netbooks. I had previously copied some of the pictures I used to make my movie onto each student's account. They followed along as I modelled how to import files, arrange them in the timeline, edit length, add transitions and effects, and make subtitles and credits.

Once the students had practised the skills, I had them apply them in making unique mini-stories from the pictures I had provided them. I was then free to offer individual assistance, circulate and observe.
This lesson enabled the students to approach their major video project with confidence, which in turn allowed them to let loose their creativity.
The one issue I had with Movie Maker is that it is very picky as to which formats it allows in the program. Mp3, one of the most well-known and widely used audio formats, is incompatible with Movie Maker! If you add it to a movie project it will appear to be there and you can edit it like you would any other audio, but it prevents a movie project from being exported to a movie file, which is the whole purpose of Movie Maker. I learned this the hard way, when every group was unable to save their projects as videos. It took me hours of  troubleshooting and poking around to discover the solution and luckily was able to quickly find an online audio format converter to change the mp3 files to wmv (I can't believe I said that...).

Movies, whether used to diversify lessons or as a medium for student expression, are a great tool for the classroom.