I was recently approached by Dan Spencer of the Jackson County ISD here in Michigan to be apart of the REMC Connected Educator Series. He really enjoyed the idea of all the work a lot of us are doing with Video Story Problems, and wanted to help highlight it at our upcoming state ed tech conference, MACUL. Seeing as the conference typically brings in between 3,000 to 4,000 educators from around Michigan, Canada, and the Midwest, I jumped at the opportunity to highlight not just want I’ve been doing, but hold up a lot of awesome work that other teachers and students in Michigan, Indiana, and Virginia have been doing with the idea of video story problems. It was also an opportunity to reflect on why I started playing around with the concept of video story problems in the first place, and why I think it’s such a powerful model for both bringing real world problems and curiosities into the classroom, as well as a great way for students to tackle some of the Common Core’s Standards for Mathematical Practice. Many of the students have had to model, demonstrate appropriate strategies, and use technology to "explain the mathematics accurately to other students". It’s still an imperfect process, but most learning worth tackling is, and I have no doubt that all involved will continue to grow and get better at using digital media to help students demonstrate math in the real world and share mathematical processes with their peers around the country. Dan Spencer asked me to create an "infommercial" screencast that focused on the basics of creating video story problems for the Connected Educator Series. After watching a number of other screencasts that covered a LOT of information, I wanted to create something that was simpler, and allowed me to showcase several examples of video story problems without the need for me to drone on and on. Below is the screencast I put together last weekend with the help of my daughter, teachers Brian Bennet, students from Michigan in Sean Dardis and Ben Curran’s classrooms and students from Virginia in Tyler Hart’s classroom. If you can’t view the embedded youtube video below, you can watch it here as well. I really wanted this presentation to be a "Video Story Problems for Dummies" type introduction, as I don’t claim to have as great an understanding of mathematical concepts beyond the rather simple elementary topics of numeracy, fractions, and number sense. I do have a decent grasp on creating digital media, including video work, and wanted to showcase several different ways teachers and students are using video to capture and/or create mathematical learning experiences. There are certainly a LOT more people involved with the video story problem project, but I wasn’t able to fit them all in to the screencast for time reasons. I would highly recommend also checking out videos from Chad Conklin, Jason Osborn, Derk Oosting, and Jason Valade. While I’ll be giving a brief overview of the concept next week at the annual MACUL Conference in Grand Rapids during an "Innovation Zone" presentation, there are several other ways to learn more about video story problems, and how you can get started with them in your classroom. Check out some of the links below to learn more. Video Story Problem Channel - All of the currently submitted to the VSP Channel on Vimeo are found here, and you’re welcome to hare your own if you create some, just contact me! Sean Dardis’ Video Problem "Think Through Form" - A nice graphic organizer to get learners thinking about the steps and processes needed to create a video story problem. Ben Curran’s "Leave Your Mark" post on VSP - A nice reflection on all of the "hidden" lessons students have to learn while creating a learning artifact for others. My Video Story Problem Planning Template - A simple graphic organizer for getting students started.

This year at the annual MACUL Conference there were a number of firsts. We had over 3,900 educators from around the state and the Midwest attend, making it one of the biggest conferences in many years, over 1.2 terabytes of data was transferred from attendees devices to the internet and back, and I was actually able to attend a session in which I able to chat with the featured speaker afterwards over lunch. I’ve always been a fan of the idea of "exploratory learning". Had I not possessed this undying devotion to working in public schools, I might have sought out a teaching position at a private Montessori school, where I could have helped students nurture their own independence and curiosity in a much less "standardized test craze" environment. As it is, here I sit, in a public school building, excited and humbled that I can work with amazing teachers and students that allow for explorative learning. In his featured presentation on Powerful PD, Rushton Hurley spoke of getting teachers to "open up" to whatever it is that may be new, not so much because it’s better than the old, but rather because you never know when you might find something engaging and exciting. I’ve been working on that for the last year in my district, and after building a LOT of relationships with teachers, I’m finally ready to start sharing their amazing work, because what’s often overlooked at large conferences is that it takes a lot for many educators to share. For better or worse, many of us in the teaching field are quite comfortable leading a group of 28 twelve-year olds, and sharing their work in the hallway, but when it comes to sharing their work with colleagues, standing in front of a room at a conference in which other adults will be scrutinizing their work, the situation is very much different. I’ve seen veteran teachers clam up, sweat, get butterflies, and while I experience the same anxiety of public speaking, I’ve always looked at presenting in front of my peers as something that makes my own instruction better, and is an essential part of the two-way street that sharing and collaborating requires. I’ve spent a lot of time building relationships with the teachers that I work with to make sure that they feel confident in sharing their work, and more importantly, they understand how much I value the work and activities they’re doing with their students. Honoring fear, something that was essential to Rushton’s talk, is something that I put a lot of value in, and brushing off fears in a complacent manner can get you into hot water, especially if a teacher isn’t ready to present on their own, and you leave them high and dry when it comes time for them to stand up in front of an audience because you forgot about your own schedule (it’s happened before, and I’m not proud of it). So I got excited about the possibilities of "shifting" the sharing to on online forum, someplace where I could share teachers’ work without having the anxiety that some teachers feel when standing in front of their peers. I created the Mattawan Learning Connection (still very much in its infancy) where all teachers in my district can share student work, discover resources, and have an audience without having to stand up and perform in front of them. That’s not to say the work I’m sharing couldn’t be showcased by the teachers themselves, but it’s an easy way to get exciting happenings from the classroom up quickly and broadly. This blog has been up for a little more than a month, and as I’ve assembled all the pieces, it was this year’s trip to MACUL, and the words of Mr. Hurley to encourage me to "go all in" and dedicate a lot of my time from now until the end of the school year on getting into classrooms, sharing what I’m seeing, and getting teachers to share themselves on the blog. "There is something cool that happens on your campus everyday" - Rushton Hurley, MACUL 2012 My intention then after this MACUL experience is to be the "ambassador of cool" for my school district. I want to share and encourage sharing all the amazing little things that the teachers in my district do with the world, not just for their sake, but for the sake of parents, students, and others in the community that would love to look a little closer into powerful practice in our district. That’s my goal for helping others fight their fears about growing and sharing. If you’d like, follow along!  

Late last summer I went on a video-binge, capturing so many video story problem concepts that my iPhone and Flip cam regularly ran out of battery power before mid-afternoon snack time. While recharging and importing all of the videos to my laptop, I dumped all of the videos in folder, which I mostly forgot about until recently. Most of the videos weren’t terribly interesting after looking at them a second time, but a few stood out, particularly one I took from a playground at an elementary school somewhere in the middle of the "thumb" area of Michigan. The playground had one of those "zip line" pieces of playground equipment, and I couldn’t resist a chance to zip across the playground. It reminded me of my intern teaching, when I put together a small project, asking the students to share examples of Newton’s Laws of Motion in the real world. At the time, the students put together scrap-book like projects with magazine pictures glued onto notecards and whatever other materials they could find at home. I love those sorts of open-ended student assessment projects, and that thought popped into my head as I hurled myself along the zip line, so I got out my camera, and my lovely wife captured the video for the science challenge video below. If you can’t see it, you can follow the link here to view. I’m not sure if I asked the question correctly, or even if it’s as open ended as I thought it was when I was "geeked" up on playground fun, but I left the challenge open for students to create their own videos as well. What’s more important, is that any teacher could use a simple video prompt like this to get students up and out into the "real world" and complete assessments! That’s not to say I’m looking for a way to push more work into home time, but rather, find a way to get students engaged enough about what’s happening inside the classroom that they might actually want to keep exploring topics and the world around them outside of the classroom. What they bring back would be an excellent way to check for their understanding in the middle of a unit, or just give them a chance to show you that they’re playing with the concepts from the classroom.

I’m a huge fan of the Seinfeld TV show. Despite being in middle school when the show first aired, as I began to understand the world with a bit more cynism and farce as I entered high school, Seinfeld came to be the lens through which I perceived the world of hypocrisy, people behaving poorly, and observational comedy. There was a particular episode during the last season, in which one of the main characters, Frank Costanza, had been diagnosed with having high blood pressure. In an attempt to relieve himself of stress, he is advised to repeat the calming mantra "serenity now" when he feels his stress level rising. In true comedic fashion, whenever Frank begins to feel stressed during the episodes he yells, "SERENITY NOW!" at the top of his lungs, completely negating the calming effects that a peaceful mantra might have, and providing plenty of laughs during the episode. If Inner Peace truly was available at Target, I think the world would be a much better place. I often wonder how many people use a calming mantra effectively, and being someone who is far too hyper-aware of media, I’m always drawn to those calming music kiosks you see at many big box retailers like Target. I decided to produce a 10 minute video of calming music and scenery that might actually have some sort of beneficial nature when viewed, and then create a ds106 video assignment out of it. You can watch the video below, or see it on Youtube by following this link. The nature scenes in the video are very repetitious, which is by choice. I was hoping to produce a variant of the 10 minute "Insane Edition" Youtube challenge, in which a small piece of audio or video is repeated for ridiculous effect, and then copy and pasted for a total of 10 minutes. Many of these videos are nothing more than the same 3 or 4 seconds of video in a constant 10 minute long repetitive loop, making it a challenge to sit through. Since I didn’t feel that the idea of providing serenity would be met with the same structure, I took three video clips that I gathered this last weekend at the Kalamazoo Nature Center, and cut them down to about 52 seconds each. I then repeated those same 3 clips to create the sense of circular passage of time, rather than linear. I then went hunting over at Soundcloud for a 10 minute piece of ambient music that someone had shared with a creative commons license for resuse, and I found this wonderful gem of a tune by "Psyeck" titled "Elements of Nature". The music is very serene, and the imagery coupled with it actually produced a rather calming effect for me. I’ll admit, it’s very simplistic, and in hindsight, I would have gathered more video clips for this, as I didn’t want to rely on "off the shelf" stock footage. I wanted the video to all be mine, reflecting places that I found serene. So why in the world am I sharing this then? Well for starters, I’m a HUGE fan of using imagery, video, and music to affect the mood of my classroom. I kept several playlists of different music to help coordinate and frame the different periods and activities throughout the day in my class. Peaceful quiet music for reading or independent work time, Classical music for taking tests, and high energy music for group work or bell time. This video would be something I could have used at the end of a long week, or a way to get students to try and "clear" their minds before doing some reflection. HOWEVER, pushing aside all of those touchy, hippie-like sentiments, an assignment like this might give a teacher an excellent window into their student’s lives. Ask them what calms them, what brings them to their center, and makes them feel safe. Maslow contested that if learners don’t feel comfortable and secure, then higher-order learning objectives would be very difficult to achieve, and asking your students to create something personal like this could help to establish the professional bond that teachers have with learners. It wouldn’t require much class time, and even if you did have students put this project together in class, it would be an amazing way to assess how well they understood emotion and persuasive storytelling through video and other media, a skill that is rapidly becoming necessary in an increasingly digital world.

I’m a terrible poet. No really, I am. Whether it’s over-using simplistic imagery devices, abusing similes, or providing rather juvenile metaphors that make other novice poetry writer’s efforts seem sublime, I can’t write consistently decent lines of verse to save my life. Which is why I need practice! So much of our educational experiences, including our own and those we thrust upon our students, is building up to the holy grail of reading and writing, the all hallowed "final draft". We become so fixated on that final goal, it’s often easy to miss all of the tiny little daily writing opportunities that help our students become better incrementally, and emphasize the process and practice over the final product. I don’t think I’d find many teachers that would argue with me on this point, but I do know many teachers that are often shoe-horned into instructional practice that has been prescribed by their school district or programs that are designed with a focus on "the test" or some other end goal. Which is one reason why I’ve been heralding certain aspects of the Common Core State Standards, specifically the "College and Career Readiness" standards for Grades 6-12 in ELA: Taken from the Common Core ELA Standards for College and Career Readiness for Writing - Grades 6-12 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences. There are many aspects of the Common Core State Standards which give teachers opportunities to participate in regular, online writing endeavors, and last year I created one such tool, the Poetry for People project. It was a bit clumsy, and I locked it down so that people had to be registered users, but I focused on just a few simple ideas; short daily writing tasks, publishing of student writing to the web in a collaborative manner, and focus on appropriate task and audience. This year, I’ve opened up the platform a lot (you can participate without an account), and emphasized ease of access by including Twitter and email subscription integration. I did away with all of the large trappings of a social network, and tried to make the Poetry for People project a very open, lightweight tool that teachers and students could do every day in about 5-10 minutes, or ignore for a week or two without worrying about not participating. It’s very much akin to the ds106 Daily Create site; you participate when you can, and no apologies for not participating. Click the image to visit the Poetry for People daily poetry writing project So with that, I’d like to invite you to come write some crummy, or magnificent, poetry with me each day in April. I know that I’ll get better the more I write, but more importantly, I’ll get better faster if there are lots of people writing along with me, sharing their poetic expertise, and providing me a glimpse into other perspectives, voices, and experiences! I’ve made it fairly easy for a teacher to use it with their classes. Every day in April, the site presents a daily poetry-writing prompt (around 10 AM eastern standard time). Each prompt takes the form of an inspiring image, and a suggested poetic form. Users of the site are encouraged to come back each and every day in April to share, read, and inspire others. It doesn’t matter if you’re a poetry novice, or a master wordsmith. The mood, style, or feeling of the poem is up to you, but please make sure to read the project guidelines before posting your poem. The project is dedicated to providing poets of all ages with a place to practice their craft, and give them a big audience. In addition to meeting several Common Core Teaching standards, this project hopes to serve as a model for effective and responsible online sharing, learning, and collaboration within a K-16 educational setting. For extra fun, feel free to submit an inspiring image to the project, because it’s more fun when you’re a part of any activity when you’re helping to shape it.

STEM is one of those edu-acronyms that gets tossed out at large conferences, as models for new innovative schools, and a "catch all" for science and math stuff lately, yet it still seems to mystify many teachers. An informal poll of teachers in my district revealed that while a good portion of them knew that it stood for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, many of them weren’t sure what it meant beyond students taking a more project based approach to science and math. Other teachers I’ve talked with around the state have a similar understanding, but a growing number of them have begun to understand that STEM is really about flipping the traditional classroom structure, from teacher-centered learning to more inquiry, problem solving, and exploratory learning. Yes, science, technology, and math play an important role in that, but language and communication skills are also are an important part of the STEM classroom; students must be able to effectively communicate with small groups, whole class, and project-groups both in face to face and online settings. My daughter programming the LEGO Mindstorm Robot with her very own special program. She was pretty proud. The stereotypical view of the STEM classroom is that of a group of students busily working around a robot (LEGO or otherwise) or some other highly technical piece of equipment, but that’s not always the case. Simply maintaining a classroom environment that focuses on hands on learning, student exploration, and experiential learning activities hits upon many of the STEM tenets. During a blogger’s round table I was fortunate to be a part of courtesy of LEGO Education in St. Louis last November, I shared a very sad story about a group of middle school science teachers down in Loxahatchee, Florida that had decided they were no longer going to allow students to do hands-on labs. Their justification was that labs are messy, introduce lots of opportunity for student failure, and don’t actually help move student data in a positive direction. To hell with data, I say! What about the powerful hands-on experience of failure; accepting it, learning to get past it, and most importantly, learning how to succeed afterwards. That’s not going to show in data, it’s not going to show in high-stakes testing, and yet these science teachers were claiming that’s all they were focused on now, the data. I brought up the article to make a point during the discussion I was having with Audrey Watters, David Banks, Eric Brunsell, and folks from both LEGO Education and National Instruments. As excited as people are about hands-on exploratory learning that will truly better prepare students for the real world, there exists a HUGE morass of reasons why schools aren’t willing to step away from the high-stakes testing prep model. Fear is the biggest of those reasons; fear of loss of stature, fear of falling test scores, and fear of the "unknown". So how can you begin to convince teachers in this mindset that the STEM approach might actually help students, address fear in a positive way, and allow us to explore education that doesn’t directly address high stakes testing? Audrey had a great post right after the STEM Summit that talks about how we need to start putting responsibility back in the hands of the student. When we hand students worksheets, bubble tests, clickers, and other prescribed forms of "learning", there’s no ownership, and certainly no sense of the type of responsibility we want students to have with their learning. We don’t have to return responsibility just through science and math though, we can do it in many ways, especially through some public narration, curation, and sharing of their learning experiences. Stephen Heppel understands this all too well. I was able to see one of his masterfully crafted student showcases in which the students were presenting high-level collaborative projects that most adults aren’t capable of achieving. Student powered mobile game development, CNC programming, robotics, and more were all on display last summer in St. Clair County, Michigan at "Be Very Afraid Extra". I don’t share this from the standpoint that these students were capable of working with applications and devices that adults couldn’t manage, but rather these students were working together in a way that most teachers (and often parents) don’t allow students to do, because they feel like students won’t be able to handle the responsibility, or don’t possess the skills to tackle large problems that the STEM model heralds. Unfortunately, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy if teachers don’t ever give students the chance to tackle large problems on their own, fail, and then provide the support their learners need to overcome that failure, adjust course, and continue on. Why all of this background information on a topic that has been around for awhile? It wasn’t until earlier this month when I really started to put all of these theories to the test. My 6 year old daughter and I built a LEGO Mindstorm Robot that LEGO Education was very nice enough to send me, and together we experienced the STEM model first hand. In fact, we made a time lapse of the unpacking, robot construction, and subsequent "play" after our build was done. You can see the time lapse below, or click here to view it on Vimeo. Besides the fact that I got a chance to use one of my new favorite apps, Frameography, to create the time lapse with my iPad, I was able to witness firsthand what many of the teachers on the discussion panels at the LEGO Summit were expressing when they talked passionately about students using all sorts of skills to effectively complete problem-based projects. Because LEGO build diagrams contain only images and no text, my daughter and I had to stop, tear down, and rebuild quite a few smaller pieces and structures of our robot during the overall build due to some of our mistakes. While the images were very helpful, there were times when our excitement to build the robot caused us to rush, make mistakes, and use incorrect parts. This allowed us the opportunity to better understand the construction of the device, and why certain parts were assembled in a given fashion. It also taught us that slowing down a bit can be beneficial at times. At one point we were presented with a challenge of which size "rods" to use. Before realizing that the pieces in the manual were drawn life size so we could easily match the correct size rods to the designs, we were trying to come up with our own way of sorting them on length, good practice for arranging, sorting, and curating the tools we had available to us. My daughter and I had a great time trying to figure out which unit of measurement LEGO was using, even if we didn't figure it out. When we realized that we could easily use the manual to determine which size rods we needed, we were then presented with another learning opportunity. Each rod was marked with a number. My daughter cheerfully suggested that the numbers were in inches, which I immediately knew was incorrect as a piece no bigger than three or four inches was marked as a 7. I told her I had doubts, and then asked her what we could do to make sure. "A ruler, daddy!" was her reply, so we grabbed a tape measure from the kitchen junk drawer and started measuring. It wasn’t inches, and after some thought, we found a metric ruler, and discovered that it wasn’t in centimeters either. We were puzzled, but we enjoyed the fact we had stumbled across a minor mystery, and had come up with some reasonable ways we could tackle it, even if we didn’t discover what those numbers meant (if you know, please share, my daughter and I would love to know!). By the time the robot was finished, my daughter and I had not only been able to practice a heap of communication and teamwork skills (we had to decide who would build which part, take turns being the "part collector" and the "builder", etc.), but we had managed to work in several basic mathematics and science concepts. The best part of the build were the little programming tutorials and examples that LEGO builds into the process. With the addition of each new sensor or motor, the building instructions give you a simple 5 step program that you can input using the robot’s NXT "brick" (the big box with the display and the orange button). We were only able to play with the motors and the light sensor during our initial build, but it was very easy, and my 6 year old figured it out after just a few minutes. It reminded me of programming the old Logo turtle application, only the feedback was much more visceral in that we got to see our robot move around in a physical space, bumping into things, rather than a few pixels on a screen. It was so simple to program that after adding the light sensor my daughter wanted to create her own program for the robot, which I gladly let her do. She came up with her own simple program that controlled the robot’s movement forward by waving her hand in front of the motion sensor. In fact she wanted to share the story of it being built, which you can view below, or watch here over on Vimeo. And that’s when it clicked for me! I finally understood what STEM was all about! It wasn’t from listening to other teachers laud the instructional methods behind STEM education, it wasn’t a fancy conference that showcased innovative uses of technology, it was from me and my daughter, tackling a project by ourselves. To be fair, the great conferences and conversations with teachers prepped me for the moment, nudging me towards a shared experience of struggling and success with my daughter, something that all teachers are capable of achieving with their students. What really pushed me over the tipping point was the shared learning and exploration that I had with my daughter (lots of great discussion and scaffolding of learning concepts happened during this), followed by her independent exploration of the programming tools. It took the both of us learning together to introduce her to certain concepts, and become familiar with certain tools, followed by her own exploratory programming and play to complete the full learning experience not just for her, but for both of us. While my daughter was learning what amazing things she could make her robot do, I was learning how the idea of STEM education helps the learning environment model many real-world project oriented tasks. Now all I need to do is figure out how to help the teachers in my district have their own "robot building" experience.

I’m a HUGE fan of Google Earth. Ever since the terribly buggy and laggy days of its first incarnations, I’ve used the resources provided by it, oogled monumental structures from space, and found ways to encourage teachers to use it more in their classroom. Sometimes I get pushback from teachers wanting a resource that’s more accessible to students, doesn’t require the internet, and will always be there even if the power goes out (I believe they call these things maps, and they’re printed on paper). Other times I get teachers looking for ways to provide the sort of visuals that wouldn’t be possible with any form of conventional maps, and love all of the layers and information that the infinitely extensible Google Earth can provide. Whichever is the case, I find that if I’m not actually teaching, I forget about how amazingly and ridiculously awesome Google Earth is, which is a shame. So it was with great delight that I found a really cool tool via the Google Earth Blog that encouraged me to dig through some of my past links for Google Earth resources. The result was a great trip down memory lane, exploring resources both beloved and lost, and uncovering new gems that are providing me lots of excuses to once again share Google Earth’s resources with the teachers in my building. I thought I’d lay out a few here to see if anyone else discovers (or rediscovers) something that might help rejuvenate your interest in Google Earth. Check out the floating fleet of SES satellites above our heads SES Satellite Fleet Coming from the Google Earth Blog, this really great Google Earth browser plugin tool lets you check out all of the "geo-stationary" orbits of several of SES’s satellites. Besides being a fantastic excuse to pretend you’re a character from Star Trek and use the word geo-stationary, it’s a great way to help students understand how far out satellites are, what they’re communicating with on the ground, and the importance of "line of sight" transmission. Check out the SES Satellite Fleet here. Use fantastic literature discussion guides embedded in Google Earth with your students Google Lit Trips Google Lit Trips is an oldie, but goodie! Imagine taking one of your favorite "journey" novels (Watsons go to Birmingham, Candide, Walk Two Moons, etc.) and embedding the discussion guide within Google Earth! You and your students can follow the journey taken by the characters in the book, talk about the setting with contextual imagery and street views, and include all sorts of opportunities to bring Social Studies content into literature discussions! Check out Google Lit Trips here! Ancient Rome in Google Earth! I am a total ancient history nut, so when you find a resource that shows you over 6,000 historical 3D buildings from the ancient city of Rome, I get really geeked. Interiors, high detail, and lots of other historical information is shared through this giant Google Earth map. Make sure you’re running a recently new machine to handle all of this content. Check out Ancient Rome in Google Earth here! It's a global game of hide and seek! PlaceSpotting Imagine playing Marco Polo or Hide and Seek on a global scale! Now mix in Google Earth so it doesn’t take several hours of plane travel, and you’ve got PlaceSpotting. It’ an awesome way to help students practice basic map skills, including latitude and longitude reading. The concept is pretty simple; you’re given an undisclosed location in Google Earth, and then you have to find it, using the clues provided. Once you feel like you’ve successfully located the "hidden" spot, you can check your answer to see if you’re right. Send "geo-hunt" quizzes to friends, or create your own, it’s like having you own mini version of Amazing Race! Check out PlaceSpotting here! I could go on and on with all of the amazing resources shared on the web that tap into the power of Google’s virtual globe software, and the ways you could use them in the classroom, but the point is that it’s quite often a great idea to come back and revisit a resource or piece of software that you haven’t used in awhile, because you’ll never know how it might surprise you when given a fresh look. There’s more than enough here to get me fired up and putting together some Google Earth sessions for my teachers at our annual "tech camp" this summer, and perhaps go on a Google Earth binge into the next school year.

It’s no secret that I’m a "hit and miss poet". While I’d like to believe that my expository writing has improved since I started writing on a regular basis via this blog 7 years ago (I’ll let you pass judgement on the quality of my writing), I find that prose and other literary forms escape my realm of competence. Sure, I can turn out a decent poem or two if given enough time to consider meter, verse, and similes that don’t harken back to my grade school days. In fact, I feel that I wrote a rather decent cinquain inspired by this image today. What luminous delights are these that flit and slide across the screen they flicker forth new life and tease of new found exploration’s sheen glowing dreams for us to glean On the other hand, more often than not my poems are much more pedestrian. Consider the following "silly" short poem I pieced together for this image of a shower curtain covered in fish. swim, swim, swim scrub, scrub, scrub wash your hair in the tub, tub, tub rinse, rinse, rinse dry, dry, dry bath time with fishes for you and I, I, I The purpose for sharing my poetry isn’t to fish for compliments or beg forgiveness from making it public. The idea is to encourage sharing and exploration. Which is why I put together the Poetry for People project. Taking some basic ideas borrowed from the Common Core Standards for ELA, I wanted to help encourage teachers and students to start sharing their work openly in small doses. The "College and Career Readiness" standards for Writing at the 6-12 level make it clear that we need to have our secondary students sharing, publishing, and collaborating with others on a regular basis via the internet. That doesn’t mean sharing long-winded finished products like research papers or persuasive essays is the norm, it also means sharing short little bursts of creative exploration. Consider the standards I cherry-picked below: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences. What does this have to do with you then? I’d love for you and your students to come explore the type of open sharing, collaboration, and regular creative expression each day in April with the Poetry for People site! It takes all of 5 minutes to participate each day, and I’d love to have you and your students practicing "routine writing" over very short time frames all April long in celebration of National Poetry Month! Just follow the link below, or click on the image to visit the site, follow all of the poems via Twitter, or just grab some visual poetry prompts for use in your classroom. There’s no formal setup or registration, just write when you can, as often as you’d like. Oh, and if you really get into it, consider sharing an image for others to write poems with! Click the image to visit the Poetry for People daily poetry writing project Poetry for People Project - Daily visual poetry prompts all April long!

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Piraino (you can imagine the nicknames we had for her), was a teacher that loved creativity. Every year she transformed her entire room into Santa’s workshop, letting her students build life size reindeer out of cardboard and decorate the walls with paper-crafted strings of garland. During the small group novel studies, she encouraged students to build dioramas, even entire set pieces for scenes from her favorite books. But while she would let our creativity run wild for large projects, I always sensed that her comfort with letting her students "play" with learning concepts was always a bit more straight-jacketed. What elementary student wouldn't find this both funny and awesome? I remember while learning about homophones, she read aloud to us from "A Chocolate Moose for Dinner", a popular children’s picture book filled with images depicting what idioms and homophones might actually look like if they were real. She gave us an assignment to try and come up with our own homophones and idiomatic phrases, then illustrate them for comedic effect (i.e. "my dad put a new wing on the house" would turn into a drawing of a house with a feathery wing stuck to the side of it.). I failed miserably at the assignment. It wasn’t from lack of effort though; I illustrated half a dozen homophones that I hadn’t seen or heard in any of the books my teacher had used, and I was proud of "playing" around with the concept. Sadly, I had the assignment returned with red marker all over it, so I gave it a second go; still no good. After a week of trying to play around with the concept, and receiving little to no feedback beyond the red marks of "try again", I finally just turned in some copies of illustrated homophones and idioms lifted from one of Fred Gwynne’s books. I passed the assignment. While Mrs. Piraino had an amazing streak of creativity that I will be forever thankful for, I remember that one assignment as an example of how she didn’t really allow us to "play" when learning new concepts, or rather, she didn’t take into consideration or make note of the progress we were making while we played, and sometimes struggled, to make sense of some new piece of information. To this day I’ll never know if I actually understood homophones back in 5th grade, but what I did take away from the experience is that as a learner, I feel that I’m learning best when someone is supporting my playful learning, failure, and struggles, rather than just saying "copy what’s in the book". I’ve found that trying to build new understanding, whether it’s difficult topics like encouraging social activism or just learning how to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro, I usually learn best when working, failing, playing around with ideas,  and building something new with the support of a community. Which is why I’m so enamored with the ds106 community. They are a powerful community of educators that understand how to support one another through play, social media, and constructive criticism. To be fair, the ds106 community has its own set of quirks, trolls, and problems, but any group of people that gives me the opportunity to re-mix the train chase at the end of Back to the Future 3 as a silent movie, and then applaud my sophomoric video editing efforts, deserves high praise in my book. Check out "Silent Era Back to the Future - Dr. Brown to the Rescue", my "Return to the Silent Era" ds106 assignment submission below. If you want to view it on youtube, just follow the link here. So why the lengthy introduction for this movie? I felt my experience offered some value in helping to better understand how I learn, and why I teach the way I do. Whether it’s working with young learners or adults, I have always despised the "carbon copy" approach to learning, in which the students are expected to produce a reasonable facsimile of the teacher’s example in order to prove they’ve acquired new skills. Whether it’s learning a new writing form, practicing math skills, or learning a new piece of software, I find myself growing ever more fond of allowing learners to create what they want to create, or at least giving them a challenge to create something in a particular style, but giving them completely free reign over the subject. I followed that belief in my attempts to learn Adobe Premiere Pro, a terribly difficult video editing platform (I come from several years of just using the simple iMovie and Windows Movie Maker), and rather than just follow some simplistic "paint by number" tutorial on how to use the tools that Premiere Pro provides, I decided to do it the hard, yet infinitely more enjoyable way, by choosing a project and jumping in with both feet. How I made "Silent Era" Back to the Future - Dr. Brown to the Rescue I started with the following clip of the original train chase scene from Back to the Future 3: In order to make it look like it came from a silent film, I had to get it downloaded from the web first, so I used my good friend KeepVid, which allows you to download many different formats of YouTube videos. I chose the 480p version in hopes that would keep my video project on the small side. After downloading the clip I imported it into Premiere Pro and used the "razor tool" to slice it up and remove some of the bits of video. Note, the razor tool was great after getting used to it, but I much prefer having a nice keyboard shortcut so I could just line up the playhead and cut away with the shortcut. If I missed that shortcut, or an easier way of using the tool, please share! You can find the razor tool with all the editing tools, but I couldn't find a keyboard shortcut After slicing and dicing the original video clip to remove a few unwanted portions (although in retrospect I would have cut a lot more out to create a more polished flow with the music), I was ready to start playing with the "aging" process. Apparently there are a a lot of thoughts on how to best make a piece of footage look like it came from the silent era using Adobe Premiere Pro. Some people suggested using posterize and fast blur effects on keyframes to produce the "jumpiness" and uneven exposure of old silent film. I wasn’t quite ready to dive into key frames (perhaps on the next project), so instead I just focused on the degradation of quality, black and white, and film grain. I selected all of my video footage and then applied some of Premiere’s built in video affects by dragging them over to the Effects Control pane. Noise, Black & White, and Gaussian Blur effects helped produce the right low quality look I was looking for, while the Lighting Effects allowed me to add that "vignette" like effect with a few soft spotlights. The video effects and the setting I used to create the "aged" look Merely making the film look old didn’t quite do it for me. I played around with a lot of the other video effects (there are a ton more than what I’m used to in iMovie), but none of them seemed to add what I was looking for without investing a lot of time fine tuning each setting. That’s when I decided to go digging around the internet some more and came up with this great Particle Illusion project that had a video overlay of 8 seconds worth of film grain, scratches, noise, and flickering. I simply looped the 8 seconds over and over for the entire length of the film to ensure that it had all of the same noise from beginning to end. Making the film look like it had come from the silent era was only half of the task, however. After making sure that the video footage looked reasonably old, I had to make sure that it sounded right (since silent films were typically accompanied by a piano), along with some title cards to share dialogue spoken on screen. I decided to complete the title cards first, since I like to save music and audio for the very end. By finalizing the video and stills first, I have a clear idea of just how much music I’ll need, so I started looking for a "silent film" title card. I came across this awesome silent film title card by Farrin who blogs over at CopyCatFilms. Not only was this a high quality piece of work that she had produced using Adobe Illustrator, she had provided it for free, yay! If you take a look at an image of the original title card below and the final version you’ll notice a few changes. I opened up Farrin’s title card in Photoshop, removed the fleur-de-leis, and replaced it with a snippet from this graphic of the flux capacitor (it’s what makes time travel possible, don’t you know). I’ve already blogged about the awesome Back to the Future font that I found on dafont.com, so I just used it again to create each of the title cards. I turned down the opacity of the flux capacitor image and the text to help age it a bit to match the aesthetic of the original title card. Notice the "yellowish" tint to the final card? That’s from the film grain and noise video overlay that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. title card before I made a few modifications title card after adding the flux capacitor and text Once I had successfully spliced together all of the title cards, my aged video footage, and the video effects, my last stop was music. While many people have commented that they would have liked to have seen this video with an "old timey" piano version of the Back to the Future theme, I was hard pressed to find one. Oh sure, you can find plenty of piano renditions on YouTube of the main theme, but many of them aren’t terribly polished, and none of them really captured what I was looking for. It worked out for the best, because I was able to find this amazing collection of royalty-free silent film scores over at Incompetech (such as awesome name) by Kevin Macleod. I used a couple of tracks from the site, one being "Iron Horse Distressed" which was perfect for producing that stereotypical "silent film train chase" atmosphere while Doc Brown and Clara are struggling to hold on for their lives. The second piece, "Merry Go Distressed" was a chance to be a bit playful with the storytelling, as this much more cheerful music kicked in after Doc successfully rescues Clara with the help of Marty and the hoverboard. The original speed of the tunes didn’t quite fit well for me (they were too slow for the action in the video), so I used the Clip Speed/Duration pane in Premiere to adjust the speed of the audio clip to produce a much more "frantic" train chase. Although I didn’t alter the speed of the video, having the faster music almost makes it appear as though the action is sped up as well to me. Having access to "distressed" music also helped add to the ambience of the piece in my mind. playing with the speed of a music clip can often change he entire mood of a video Once everything was tweaked to my liking, I then had the the fun task of learning a new way to get my finished project out of Adobe Premiere and uploaded to the internet. It seems as though no two video editing application are alike for even the simplest of tasks like exporting your final piece; iMovie uses the Share menu, Windows Movie Maker Live has you Publish your videos, and Adobe Premiere uses a much more straight forward Export command. My first attempt to export the video resulted in a helper application being opened, the Adobe Media Encoder. While it was quick, I realized I had exported a low quality version of my movie, so I went back to the FILE>EXPORT>MEDIA command, choose the Quicktime format to export too, and then checked a tiny little box that I hadn’t before called "Use Maximum Render Quality" which took a bit more time, but apparently didn’t need to open the Media Encoder (at least I didn’t see it open), and produced a much higher quality video. Sometimes it's easy to miss little things like this checkbox With that, my day long editing and remixing task was over! While I had worked on this piece off and on for the better part of the Friday before Spring Break (I had the day off of school), in total I must have spent about 5-6 hours editing this together; not terribly long or difficult, just time consuming as I learned what each of the video effects did, searched for tips and resources, even stopping to figure out just how to export the final product. It probably took me longer than if I had followed some basic tutorials in a text or watched a few prescribed videos, but the end result was a labor of very playful love, and I value the time spent with the entire project that much more because I was able to play, and fail a few times, on my own! Want to try remixing one of your favorite films as a "Silent Era" movie? Head over to the ds106 assignment bank and give it a try!

I don’t mean to imply that this video fits the generally accepted definition of propaganda; I don’t find anything particularly biased or misleading. Instead, I applaud the Common Core State Standard Consortium in their attempt of tackling the huge task of informing educators about what the Common Core Standards are all about. I just wish it wasn’t so cheesy. This is a HUGE time in education. The "powers that be" are finally giving educators standards that blend both the "what" and the "how" of education, have built in structures for students to fail (on purpose, crazy huh?), and demand that we bring real world challenges into our classroom on a regular basis. While technology will play an increasingly important role in that last idea, what will be more important is that educators be willing to let go of entrenched lessons, projects, and activities that only reinforce the "what" of education. If someone could create a piece of propaganda that speaks to the honest need for serious change in "how" we educate students, I imagine it would be much less "cutesy" than the above video.