It’s no secret that I like to dabble with social and visual media. The majority of my posts in the last 6 months have revolved around using media for digital storytelling purposes, or as a means of professional development aimed at teachers. So it was with a bit of confidence that I submitted one of my "Wild Wild Web" videos to Tech Smith’s Screen Champ Competition. Notice I said that I felt confident in the submission, not that it would amount to much. The video is campy, unpolished, and clunky in my use of Camtasia, the screen-casting tool I used to create the Wild Wild Web videos. Imagine my surprise last week when I received an email that said I’d been chosen as one of fifteen finalists! I was thrilled that the character I’ve created, Wyatt "Hoss" Rancher, was deemed worthy enough to be up against some ed-tech heavy hitters like John Sowash and Reg Nakoneshny. There are plenty of other finalists with much more polish than I have as well from industry and other walks of life, so while I don’t expect to win "Best of Show", I’m terribly flattered to be chosen. Feel free to watch the chosen video below, and take a moment to click the link for voting! Click here to go vote for the TechSmith Screen Champ "Best in Show". You can vote every day until December 16th!

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson Half of our district received training from Apple this summer on the concept of Challenge Based Learning. While many educators are quickly overwhelmed by Apple’s take on the latest instructional trend of student-centered learning sweeping the United States, many teachers in my district understand the need to introduce more inquiry and real world based education into our curriculum. The problem is, many educators question how and where such necessary learning fits into an increasingly cramped and compacted curriculum, especially with more high-stakes testing coming down the road. Most, if not all educators, understand why we need to change education, we just have a difficult time seeing how we’re going to do it under ever-increasing mandates. My rather snarky reply is…."bring the real world into class discussion using social media!" If we are to take Jefferson at his word, and acknowledge that a great deal of our democracy is indeed mob rule at its most basic level, then why not help students better understand the mob, and perhaps help cultivate a more critical thinking mob for the future? I found the image above from an Occupy Wall Street protester via Facebook this morning, and while I’m not trying to advocate for one side of the debate over the other, what value could you have in using this image for an impromptu conversation in an economics or political science course? As an educator, I know that fantastic unplanned conversations still happen in the classroom, pushing back important curriculum. The challenge then is to create a "planned" unplanned conversation using "in-the-moment" images, videos, and other resources shared via social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. You don’t need to have the entire platform unblocked for students, and it certainly doesn’t take much to follow a few interesting resources on the social networking platform of your choosing to get this kind of great "real world" content. And best yet, it opens up some of the more sanitized black and white conversations in the classroom to a little bit of the real world "blurriness". Storify is an excellent tool to bring such details, opinions, and resources together: You can frame the entire challenge in a 30 or 40 minute conversation; The essential question has already been posed, and it would be quite simple to add the challenge of "how do we get people to communicate?" by asking your students some guiding questions such as "do you see any differences, or commonalities between following the rules in the real world and in the school building?". You could even make this challenge homework, and ask the students to come up with half a dozen more questions each, helping reinforce that learning is questioning in a meticulous fashion. Who knows, they might even hop on their social network of choice in the evening to dig around for more examples of the debate and controversy surrounding the topic you choose. It would then only be a matter of selecting the proper learning activities, resources, and guiding discussions that would help answer the common questions your students come up with; almost like a contractor selecting the right tools to add a new addition to a house after consulting with the home owner on what’s needed. Or am I being a little too "ivory tower" on this one? As an educator that always strove to integrate some aspect of social studies or civics in my lessons (where appropriate), I’m thinking this would be an effective, and practical, way to kick off a challenge or inquiry based learning experience.

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danzen/105653250/in/photostream/ I was recently asked to create two "one-pagers" for a special project I had been involved in with Detroit Public Television. I was asked to write these documents as companions to the short video I helped create for a Fractions for 4th Grade App created by Study by APP. The idea was to create a digital learning tool that was brief, engaging, and incorporated a lot of visual elements, along with the typical multiple choice review questions. While the project ultimately didn’t go anywhere due to a lack of funding, it was quite an interesting experience (I got to work with some really amazingly talented video and television people), and I got to hold several bars of chocolate long enough until they were melted all over my fingers (only one way to clean that off, yum!). I tried to condense both papers into one, and while they have a bit of a disjointed flow (bullet points can do that), I had a lot of fun writing them, and even got a chance to interview one of Brian Bennett’s Honors Biology classes about how their they and their teachers use digital media to enhance the learning process. Special thanks to him and his students for helping me sort out my thoughts on the subject. The first one-pager revolved around tips for teachers on employing and creating digital media learning resources, while the second one-pager was aimed at parents, to help them support learning at home using mobile devices. As with most of my writing, there’s always room for improvement, and I’m sure other educators have a lot more to add to these points. Teaching and Learning with Digital Media Bringing digital media into the classroom is not something new, but has rapidly evolved in the last 10 years of education with the advent of social media, mobile devices, apps, and a host of other ways to access digital interactive content. The following list is a short collection of strategies to employ, and pitfalls to look out for when using digital media in the 21st Century classroom. Please take note that many of the strategies are employable even without the use of media, as many instructional strategies are universal in nature. Instructional Strategies to Employ with Digital Media Model the thinking process out loud - When using any type of media or interactive in the classroom it can be tempting to simply let the media tell the story. Sometimes the students still need the scaffolding of hearing the teacher "think out loud" as they process what’s being seen. Play with a purpose - When introducing new interactive media make sure to give the students time to play. Outline a few expectations or goals you’d like them to achieve during "play" time, but don’t be too rigid. Allow guided exploration. Avoid digital lectures - The lecture model does not always work as well in the digital learning space as it does in a traditional classroom. Students may suffer "lag time" between when they can ask the teacher about conceptual questions. Creating or finding short pieces of content can often be better than longer pieces of material if students are on the go or mostly using mobile devices. Choice - The power of digital media and interactives comes from the ability of learners to move at their own pace, skip around to find the information they need, and chose when and how to consume learning material. Make sure to give students a few choices of media or resources if possible, or at the very least try to extend the material with open-ended questions that gives them the chance to explore and reflect. Tips & Tricks When Creating or Employing Digital Media Publish in an open space - Whenever possible, publish or use resources that are available in as public a place as possible to make it easier for students to access content. Posting materials or resources behind logins can be cumbersome for students to access. Audio is key! - The quality of your video can vary depending on the camera being used, but if your audio is low quality and difficult to hear, the entire project will suffer. Make sure to have a good microphone, or re-record the audio in post-production. Put yourself and students in the spotlight - Students will respond much better to video and media that’s been produced and stars their very own teacher and peers. If they have an existing relationship with the people making the digital content, the authenticity helps drive engagement. Interact and Visualize! - The power of digital media is that it can be visual, aural, and interactive. Rely on text when necessary, but focus on the visual aspect of the medium. Supporting Your Child’s Learning with Mobile Media Mobile devices have come a long way in the last decade. Most are now always connected to the Internet, allow for two-way interactive communication, and serve as our primary means of how we interact with and make sense of the rest of the world. The following list is comprised of strategies and suggestions that you can employ to help support your child’s learning with mobile media. Load up on digital content before a new topic or unit of study - If you can look at your student’s syllabus or assignments ahead of time for a class they’re taking, try to load up their mobile device with podcasts, videos, and other digital media that pertain to the topic coming up. You now have a digital handheld library of content that serves as a good starting point for reference. Small "infobytes" can be just as helpful as longer content - Often all learner’s need are small pieces of information to help support their learning. Having longer pieces of media in the form of audio lectures and videos can be helpful, but often with a mobile device you just want a few minutes worth of an explanation or demonstration of a topic. Capture learning moments all around you - A lot of learning takes place in the real world, away from the classroom. Many mobile devices have cameras and microphones built right in, so you can capture audio, still images, or video whenever you come across a "teachable" moment. Students can use it later for studying, sharing with their classmates, or just as a valuable reminder of application of their learning in the real world. Play a little - When approaching the end of a unit or learning objective, students have much more to rely on when it comes to reviewing. Audio podcasts, videos, and apps are helpful, but increasingly games and other "play based" forms of review on websites and in mobile apps are playing a role in learning. Allow time for your child to play games and simulations related to the content on their mobile devices. Know when to put the device down - Although mobile devices are everywhere, don’t let them dictate every aspect of learning. Sometimes it’s good to put down the devices, get your hands dirty, or communicate with others face to face. Make sure to balance time spent "plugged in" with time spent communicating and interacting with others without the mobile device.

This past Thanksgiving break was one of the most relaxing, peaceful, and downright memorable holidays I’ve had in a long time. Among the highlights of the break were homemade cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving Skype session with relatives in South Carolina, crepes for brunch, driving around Chicago with my brother while car shopping in the rain, and raking the yard with my kids (who are both old enough now to enjoy the raking and the jumping in the leaf pile). As I reflected on this Thanksgiving break while sitting in front of the fire Sunday afternoon after saying good bye and well wishes to the last of our holidays visitors, I couldn’t help but feel the need to make another "Speed up Your Work Day" video assignment for ds106…only with a bit of a twist towards the end. While my two previous submissions for this assignment focused strictly on speeding up my work day in an attempt to tell a particularly mundane story about a part of my day, I wanted to capture that small part of the tedious task of raking leaves which almost all of us have fond memories of; the jumping into and crunching of the leaf pile when finished. I know my visual stories are rather simplistic, domestic, and typically a bit saccharine compared to the deeper and more thought provoking fare that comes across the ds106 airwaves, but there’s something just as exciting (for me at least) in seeing my children enjoy the same "Americana" and fall traditions that I enjoyed as a child. What would happen if you were to ask your students to capture 30 minutes of video over the upcoming Holiday break at the end of December, and ask them to try to tell a story with it using just music and changing the speed of the video? What if you challenged yourself to try and tell your own story using video and audio? Look at it as an assignment of anticipation and reflection, a way to share and celebrate the simple tasks that we accomplish everyday, yet take up so much of our time.

Ladies and gentlemen, quite rarely do you see such an excellent triumvirate of educational potential than NORAD Tracks Santa. The ability to engage young learners with the prospect of watching Kris Krinkle, introducing the concepts of latitude and longitude using Google Earth, and being able to tie in writing and storytelling is a huge win in my book. It was with great satisfaction then that on my very first day of "getting back to basics" and reading my RSS feeds, I found the announcement that the 2011 countdown for tracking Santa is now live! While the North American Aerospace Defense Command has been providing live Santa coverage on Christmas Eve via Google Earth for a few years now, it actually started more than 50 years ago as a complete fluke! Apparently a misprint in a Sears, Roebuck & CO. advertisement had eager young children hoping to talk to Santa dialing the operations hotline for CONAD, the predecessor to NORAD, instead of the department store. They were nice enough to keep doing it for the next 50 years, and thus the tradition lives on in the digital realm. I don’t spend as much time writing and sharing sites and tools like this anymore due to my shifting interest in putting instructional practice before the piece of technology being used to enhance it, but having the ability to scaffold some real learning goals and standards on top of one of the most exciting days of the year for many students is something I couldn’t pass up today. There’s just too many opportunities to learn going on here in this site; countdown clocks generate conversation about time and calendars, maps skills, storytelling, history, but most of all, there’s a strong relational piece here; You can talk about and use the site all you want with your students, but in the end, they have to take it upon themselves to follow through come Christmas Eve, perhaps with the help of an excited parent or two, and actually follow the tiny sleigh and reindeer as they pull Father Christmas around the globe. Enjoy the site, and enjoy the upcoming Holidays!

Back in October I shared a few of my favorite videos from Vimeo, and mused about allowing your students to use them as visual writing prompts. The idea was simple. Rather than just give students a piece of text, or some script with which to base their creative writing, why not pull inspiration from another form of creative expression; digital media. To my delight, I actually got a few people that tried it! Daniela left a comment on the original post shortly after I shared the idea: I tried this with my students last week. I pulled the 1st, 2rd, and 5th video on our nine computers (three computers per video) and asked them to choose one of the three. After they choosing their topic of interest, we went to our school garden and, in between the trees and all the nature, my 6th graders began to write a short entry describing what they say and what they felt while the video was playing. I don’t know if it was the video, the outdoors or the combination of both, but students were still talking about this lesson during the week and asked me to prepare future activities with this rubric. I want to try it with a Science lesson and find ways to use it during Math as well… Thank you for this great idea! With that success story as ammunition, I hunted down a few more videos (one of which is one that I created), to try and help "push" the idea a bit more. If you end up using any of these videos as visual writing prompts in your classroom, let me know, I’d love to hear how it went, especially after the success that Daniela had with her students. Incorporating writing into Science, Social Studies, and other areas will quickly become mandatory for all teachers in Common Core states, so there’s no time like the present to start experimenting! The "how to lose $2400 in 24 seconds" is my favorite of this bunch

The push to make the teaching of Math a much more inquisitive process in education, an experience that mimics the real world challenge engineers, scientists, and even everyday "layfolk" come across in dealing with math, has an interesting and creative twist from Dan Meyer. His idea is based around taking a 60 second clip of video, or still image, and then presenting it to your students as though it’s a puzzle. No words are needed, no direction from the teacher, other than "are there any questions?" The idea is to nurture learners’ inborn curiosity and to pose questions without any prompting other than the media they’re presented with. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I’m quite smitten with the concept, and although Mr. Meyer often presents his "any questions" videos with a bit more creativity and flare than I have, I’m trying to be as cinematic as I can while capturing questions "in the raw". So it was with great excitement that my family discovered a new Christmas Tree Farm this past weekend, and I stumbled upon this Christmas Tree Baler (there’s an entire industry behind these machines). Everything about the function of this machine, from the spinning cartridge dispensing baling twine, to the way the tree is pulled through the baler screamed out to me "take video of this!" Even now, having watched the video at least 3 times, not to mention the actual "live" viewing while getting our Christmas tree, I still have questions pop into my head related to the experience: How many trees can be baled with one full roll of twine? If they sell 700 trees per weekend (I asked), how much twine will they need? How fast is the baler spinning? What’s the ecological impact of harvesting so many trees in such a short time frame? I’m curious to know, since the idea behind this approach to math instruction is for questions to be asked first, before leading students to the intended goal of the lesson, what questions do you have after watching this video? And would this idea play nicely in a science, social studies, or language arts classroom as well?

As a way of introducing more creativity into my daily routine, I decided to act on an impulse Wednesday night while making sugar cookies for a gathering at school the next day. My wife was helping me clean up from 3 hours of rolling, cutting, and baking up some of the best cookie dough we’ve ever made, and we looked down at two rather crisp looking cookie men. They were left over from the first batch of the evening, a batch that I had rolled out far too thinly, and thus had turned into crunchy little morsels of sugar and flour. Adding to their misfortune were misshapen appendages, pushed and pulled while still cooling into comical poses of surprise. As we washed the last dish, and sealed the last of the cookies into a tupperware container to keep the mice that live in our walls from enjoying our Christmas confections, we picked up these two cookies and rocked them back and forth in a crude dance. We both chuckled, and looking at my wife, I mentioned it would be fun to make a stop motion movie with them. She pondered the idea a bit, contemplating whether we could stay up long enough to actually make such a project (it was 9 pm, the unofficial bedtime of many tired parents), but I felt as though it was a good excuse to bring some of the digital creativity I’ve explored in ds106 to my personal life. A movie however, would require a story, and would be much too long to produce given the hour or so our sanity and consciousness could afford. Pulling out my iPhone, I fired up the GIF SHOP app, and mentioned something that all spouses and loved ones of those involved with ds106 are either loathe or long to hear, "let’s make an animated gif!" With a quick grin, my wife quickly went to her stash of art teacher supplies, and we began cutting paper, outlining the story, and deciding how best a care-free cookie boy could meet its demise. Thus was born the animated gif above, which my wife jokingly titled "nom, nom, nom, cookie!" While we’ve posted it to our respective Facebook pages, and even to my wife’s blog about our family’s daily lives, I thought it might make an excellent writing prompt to share here. While I did have an opportunity to practice my prose in writing up this piece, I thought it would be fun to write a short poem in honor of the brave cookies lost in the making of this digital art. So without further compositional delay, the following is my poem for today. sugar and flour roll and cut, yield to the heat nom nom nom cookie If you have your own poem for these cookie people, please share!

For those of you who haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, and aren’t consumed with the various benefits and drawbacks of the myriad of Twitter clients available for the popular social networking service, these reflections may not be of any value to you. For those of you who ARE using Twitter, and are familiar with Tweetdeck, then you might already know about the huge shift that the application has taken with it’s most recent update. Native apps can be overrated I use a LOT of different devices to perform my job, and as I bounce around between iPads, laptops, PC machines, Macs, and more I’m increasingly dubious about the benefits of native apps over well written and executed web apps. I come across teachers asking for good "image search apps" or "math apps", and they’re surprised when I point them towards a website that I’ve been using for years, that’s available on all platforms via a web browser. As an added benefit with the recent update to Tweetdeck, it used to consume massive amounts of energy and processing power from my computer thanks in large part to having Adobe AIR installed in order to make it run. The new client runs as an HTML5 web app, which makes it play nice with almost all devices now, and my laptop’s battery doesn’t take such a hit. My ADHD is both a curse and a boon to my job I’ll admit, I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but my work patterns would indicate I exhibit many of the symptoms of the disorder. Being able to be connected to a dozen Twitter streams at a time via Tweetdeck feeds my brain in a way that both hinders some of my more contemplative job duties (for which I’ll often have to turn twitter off), yet also gives me a river of information that usually provides me with several timely & relevant resources and information that I can then share with others that don’t have the time to be rocking half a dozen hashtag chats on Twitter. I’m beginning to fear change Perhaps this is a function of aging, empathizing with those I’m serving, or increased stress in my personal and professional realms, but I’ve begun to grow more and more attached to the tools that I’m using on a regular basis. The methods I use are generally always shifting, and I’ll occasionally use new tools in a deliberate or playful manner, but I’ve found myself increasingly resistant to letting go of established tools and applications that have become an integral part of my workflow. That having been said, once I do accept change, I often do it with reckless abandon (those of you still lamenting the death of iMovie 6 need to LET GO, iMove ’09 and later ROCKS!). I have become the 20th century educator’s worst fear Along with my fear of losing my beloved tools, comes an increasing awareness that I function best, and almost exclusively, when I’m working with others. I find myself feeling more creative, the feedback I receive is immediate and actionable, and when I fail, I have a network of support to lean upon. When I’m forced to complete tasks in isolation I feel as though one of my limbs has been tied down, and I’ve been left to figure out to scale the cliff face with only one arm; it’s doable, but it isn’t going to be pretty.

This morning I discovered one of the most ridiculous, over the top, and just plain head scratching commercials from Burger King thanks to one of my twitter friends. It appears to be a Russian produced video for Burger King, and while I’m not sure if it’s intended to be an actual commercial or just some rap gone horribly wrong, it turns the "wacky" meter up to 11. Now, I’m not one to quickly dismiss another culture’s take on what is a quintessentially American form of communication; over the top commercials for fast food places. If anything, I appreciated the fact that while this video did have some sexually charged references, it was actually quite tame compared to many American produced commercials with scantily clad women, including the following commercial for Burger King starring Darius Rucker (Dallas Cowboy cheerleader’s giving me a shave, really?). After watching both of those I was curious to see what other countries and cultures were putting out there for Burger King commercials (my mind works in strange curious patterns like this all the time), and I was rewarded with a commercial apparently from Korea. While it was refreshing to see that the advertisement didn’t settle for the "sex sells" model, it was equally strange from the standpoint of seeing a grown man "snake" his way across a room to eat an entire burger in one computer-augmented bite. My curiosity for watching other culture’s take on the common fast food commercial filled, I then pondered how you might use media like this in a classroom. Provided you have YouTube unblocked in your district, or have the foresight to download the videos ahead of time, I started to think about the influence that media has on myself, and those around me. It’s a question that I remember being asked of me by teachers throughout my K-12 experience, so I decided to pay a visit to ReadWriteThink to see what sort of lesson plans and ideas they had for dealing with the influence of media and advertising on society. I was rewarded with an excellent mini-unit of lessons about the influence of media and commercial advertising by Laurie Henry. She put together a four session activity that gets students reflecting and analyzing their own media consumption (print and video) to identify any hidden messages or attempt to interpret the messages being broadcast or printed. While her lessons seem a bit dated (they focus on print and television watching), it would be very easy to adapt her guiding questions and discussion points to web video, product placement in movies and video games, and a other forms of commercial media. What I really didn’t enjoy about the lesson was the culminating activity for the unit, which asked the students to write a reflective piece on how advertising affects our culture. When dealing with visual media, whether it’s print, video, still images, etc. I think it’s important to respond to it with a similar form of media. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t write about it, in fact I would require the writing portion myself, but it would only serve as a reflective piece to then build a media response to the commercial messages in question. In other words, let students respond to covert commercial messages with their own commercials, or create their own print or digital advertisements in response to those found in magazines and websites. It’s time to adapt good lessons and reflection to the reality of today, if not for the sake of being media savvy, but at least for the humor and curiosity to be found in the way other cultures and individuals attempt to manipulate others through commercial messages.