This week in DS106 we’re supposed to be creating audio and design assignment based around three particular episodes from the famous series. I choose to create an assignment around none of them, because I like to rock the boat in seemingly harmless and inconsequential ways like that. We all have learners like this in our classrooms, right? Besides, if I had created the 4 Icon Challenge assignment around one of the three episodes suggested, it would have been too easy. As it is, for fans of the Twilight Zone, this should be easy enough; guess the episode based on these four icons representing four of the main elements from the show. Was this particularly difficult to do? No, I went over to the Noun Project (a website every serious digital storyteller in K-12 should have bookmarked), and grabbed the four Public Domain images above, lined them up in Photoshop (although GIMP would work just as well), and "bam!" Instant visual assignment that would be useful for anyone to help summarize a story. I’ve done this assignment a number of times, including having a group of elementary students use Google Image search to assemble their own 4 image stories. Come to think of it, the students had a blast doing the assignment, and it would be an excellent way for students to practice some proper image and web citation repetition. Not that I’m a fan of drill and kill rote-learning, but for me it’s ok when you get to have so much fun trying to craft the perfect visual puzzle that isn’t too difficult, yet requires viewers to stretch their imaginations for them to be solved. The first icon is obviously death, but does the little girl represent an actual girl, or just a child, or perhaps youthfulness? Does the tie represent some emotional connection to the other images, or does it merely represent an article of men’s clothing? If it is just a tie, what element of the story does it represent? A character’s costume, a "macguffin" to move the story along, or a visual cue from a scene? The paths you can take this assignment down in the K-12 classroom are endless, with students using 4 icon challenges to express their current understanding of a piece of informational text, or process new vocabulary words. Students could even use them as a storyboard for a comic or graphic novel review of a novel being read in small groups. I’ve harped about this assignment enough in other posts, so I’ll stop here. The potential for tapping learners’ visual areas of learning is reaching an untold peak of pedagogical "gold" with the advent of so many devices, connections, and tools present in many classrooms today. With new whiteboarding apps appearing in "app stores" almost daily, there’s an overabundance for students to create visual literacy processing assignments like this with just their finger and a screen if need be. Sure, it might be more fun to do it with crayons and paper (cheaper too), but there’s nothing quite like searching for an icon of "death" on a Wednesday night as part of homework for an online course

If you haven’t heard already, The cicadas of Brood II in the Eastern United States will be emerging in the billions this summer. Yes, billions. Science and Biology educators along the East Coast are likely in a state of teacher-nerd joy for the anticipated event. Once the soil temperature reaches a comfortably steady 64 degrees Fahrenheit, the nymphs that have been living underground for 17 years, surviving on the juice of tree roots, will emerge. The six weeks that follow will be an amazing display of evolutionary and biological events. The Return of the Cicadas video by Samuel Orr is a gorgeous 7-minute snapshot of a larger one hour documentary that could serve as a wonderful way to get students curious and excited about the event. It’s embedded below for your viewing pleasure. The time-lapse elements used throughout the film turn what many consider to be a slightly disturbing, annoying, and otherwise bothersome event (the noise!) into a gorgeously choreographed emergence of billions of lifeforms that occurs only once every 17 years. As a former middle school science teacher, I’m a little geeked for the full length documentary being completed. It seems as though I’m not the only one, as the Return of the Cicadas documentary has already smashed its $3,000 KickStarter goal with a whopping 28 days left! I’m tempted myself to "back" the project at the $20 level in order to secure the HD download of the final film once it’s available this August. The geeky fun doesn’t stop there! RadioLab has created the Cicada Tracker website, a whimsical portal that includes ways for you to help alert scientists along the Eastern seaboard when the cicadas are active in your area. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, The Cicada Tracker project includes a complete parts list and assembly instruction for building a soil temperature detector ($80 for all parts) using an Arduino board and parts found at RadioShack. Double geeky awesome!

I haven’t blogged about anything music-related since November of 2012. That’s criminal. Especially considering the last one was a lazy post with several different examples of teachers parodying Rebecca Black’s "Friday". No I will not link to it, you can go search for it if you like. I’m going to pretend as though I never hit the "publish" button on that post. I feel as though I may have made up for it with this post; a special assignment from deep within the DS106 Audio Archives entitled "Make Your Own Ringtone". Considering this is the summer of the DS106Zone, I decided to add a Twilight Zone twist to this audio assignment, creating a funky fresh, beat-heavy ringtone based on the iconic opening bar of the Twilight Zone theme song. It’s guaranteed to grate on your ears like a piece of broken chalk down a slate chalkboard. You can hop over to SoundCloud and listen to my Twilight Zone ringtone, or listen through the embedded player below. This was a ridiculously fun little piece of work, made easy thanks to Garageband. I fired up a new ringtone project, and it provided me with a few examples of some pre-arranged loops. Better than that, this "starter" ringtone project came with a 13 bar looping playback, adjustable as you added or took away sound loops, and plenty of options for manipulating it. I choose to delete all of the loops in the example ringtone and start from scratch, using the opening measure of the Twilight Zone theme song as the base. I snagged the Twlight Zone theme from Youtube using Keepvid’s cousin-site, SnipMP3. For those immediately raising alarm bells of "Ben, you violated copyright, how could you!?" I sampled only 3.5 seconds of the piece, well under the fair use guidelines for media literacy education. That means, I can repurpose, remix, and republish the work for non-commercial educational purposes. Since this is for a class on digital storytelling, I think that counts. From there, I brought the MP3 into Garageband, where I chopped it down to my already mentioned 3.5 seconds, and then dragged that one little loop out to last 11 measures or so. I wish I could say that I started methodically placing beats and loops to help build the ringtone in a cohesive way, but I’ll be honest; I dug through the hundreds of loops that Apple provides with Garageband, trying out many different synth, drum, and guitar loops until I found the ones that "sounded good", being careful to create new tracks for each new instrument. Once I had assembled the loops I wanted, I then fiddled with adding some audio effects to the individual instruments. These effects included a host of terminology that I am completely ignorant of, including Resonance Ticks (that’s the one that makes the Twilight Zone theme sound so staccato and jumpy), Compressors, and Reverbs. I wish I could explain what these did, other than how it made certain instruments sound a bit more "crunchy", but I can’t. Just imagine how powerful Garageband would be in the hands of a trained musician, or music teacher? I’ve long harbored a guilty desire to work in a 1:1 school just so I could see an amazing band, choir, or music teacher have students compose their own short pieces of music and tunes using Garageband while providing the necessary background for learners to understand what they’re doing. Garageband even has a nice "Share" menu that takes projects directly into iTunes in MP3 or AAC format. There’s even an option to export as an M4R, a ringtone format used by Apple’s iOS devices. That means I can take this file and annoy people with my iPad every time someone "tweets" me, or a new message arrives Seriously though, if there are music teachers out there that have access to Apple’s devices and haven’t found a way for students to deepen their appreciation of music through creation of short, playful tunes of their own, I could only imagine the creative learning they’re missing out on.

In my position I get to try out a lot of new gadgets for use in the classroom. Sometimes our school pays for these "trial gadgets" and sometimes vendors are willing to give us a device gratis for testing. I’m not sure if it’s my blogging that helps, the large purchases we make at least once or twice a year, or the fact that I get to put the devices into real world scenarios with teachers and students, but it’s nice to be able to play with all of these gadgets. We recently received a Bamboo Create wireless tablet by Wacom, free of charge for full disclosure, to see how it would work in a classroom setting. I wanted to put it up against one of the Promethean ActivSlate wireless tablets that a few of our teachers have to see how it compared. Although we did receive one of the Promethean tablets for free with a large purchase of interactive white boards a couple of years ago, the rest we’ve paid for as teachers found they enjoyed the wireless freedom to move about the room. I found a couple of teachers that were pretty comfortable using wireless tablets to try out the Wacom device to see how it stacked up against the Promethean tablet.   The Promethean ActivSlate A standard Promethean Activboard The ActivSlate is one of those work-duty grade devices, built to take a lot of abuse, tumbling, fumbling, and still work like a champ. It’s designed primarily for schools, so the teachers in my district appreciate the sturdiness of engineering that Promethean put into the device. It’s reliable, uses an internal rechargeable battery, and integrates nicely with some of features found in the ActivInspire software that comes bundled with Promethean’s interactive whiteboards. As a side note, ActivInspire is one of my go-to applications for digital whiteboarding and interactive building in the classroom. The Promethean ActivSlate has seen limited success in a few classrooms in our school. The hardware has proven to be effective and work almost flawlessly. The teachers that have them originally requested them so they could be more mobile in their classrooms. It helps them get away from the front of the room, and wander around, while still being able to control what’s happening on their projected computer screen. It also makes it easier to hand control over to a student, who may or may not be comfortable getting up at the board. Mostly teachers use it for doing math work on our interactive whiteboards, and in those classrooms where traditional whiteboards have been removed from the front of the room, it’s been mostly a positive change. The Upsides The ActivSlate is great to setup, provided you have the necessary Promethean software already installed, and already have an existing ActivHub (pictured above), the wireless unit the slate uses to communicate with your computer. Just plug in the hub, and the computer instantly recognizes the tablet, and you’re ready to go. The tablet’s size makes it good to hold in your hand and walk around, and with the pen clip at the top, it’s easier to remember where you left your stylus. The ActivSlate also ties into the Promethean software’s polling system, so not only can you or a student drive the computer from anywhere in the room, but you have some control over polling as well. That is, if you have the additional student response devices (clickers). The Downsides USB ACtivhub for the Promethean wireless devices.   Did the see the massive size of the USB hub above for Promethean wireless devices? It’s HUGE, and on any laptop, once you have that thing plugged in, it covers the rest of the USB ports of your computer, so don’t expect to plug in any more peripherals without a USB multi-hub. Our teachers haven’t complained too much, but the tablet has a 4:3 ratio, while all of our laptops at school are closer to widescreen formats, meaning you have to lift up and move the stylus a few times for a lot of scrolling or moving about the screen. It’s a rather small tablet, so you have to do that a lot, something that not everyone can get used to. The responsiveness is decent, if a little off at times though. The biggest complaint for this wireless tablet though is the price and software needed. The price for the hub and the slate is close to $400, and that’s the educational pricing! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a rock solid product that has withstood many beatings and accidental drops from students and teachers alike, but that price tag is s bit steep.   The Wacom Bamboo Create Wacom’s Bamboo line of tablets have a highly polished look. As I said at the top of this post, the Bamboo Create was sent to me at school gratis to try it out. However, since I don’t get to work in a classroom on a regular basis, I had a couple of art teachers in my district try it out. They loved it! Niether had used one of the Promethean ActivSlates before, so this was their first experience with a tablet, wireless or wired. I played a bit with the tablet as well, to get a feel for it, and while it’s doesn’t seem as accident proof as the Promethean model (dentable aluminum vs. hardened plastic), the teachers that used it felt it was comfortable and light like the ActivSlate. One art teacher in particular that spent the most time with Wacom Bamboo tablet was really looking for the freedom to move around the room, without losing access to our additional USB ports on her laptop. In particular, she was hoping to make her drawing examples with the early elementary students (1st and 2nd grades) a little easier to make "mobile". She uses her document camera for drawing examples, but that tethers her to her presenter podium. With the Bamboo, she was able to move around the room and help individual students, while still doing some drawing examples using her wireless tablet and the always fantastic Art Rage painting application on her Mac. While it took some getting used to not being able to look down at her art as she was creating it with the Bamboo, she took to the tablet pretty well, and enjoyed being able to manipulate her computer from afar. It helped her keep tabs on some of the more rambunctious younger students The Upsides Super awesomely small USB receiver. The USB receiver for the Wacom Bamboo Create is practically microscopic compared to the ActivHub! It’s one of those nano-receivers that come with most wireless mice, and once seated, is barely even noticeable along side your laptop or in your desktop USB port. The wireless kit comes separately from the actual tablet, and includes a battery. Otherwise, the Bamboo Create has to be tethered via USB cord to function. The wireless package fit into its space nicely, and there’s even a spot in the side of the Wacom tablet to house the receiver when not in use, which was rather handy for one of the art teachers who tried it out, as she takes her laptop back and forth and didn’t want to lost the receiver while travelling. The Wacom seems to have a bit finer fidelity than the Promethean tablet, and possess dimensions that almost mirrored the Macbooks we have in the district for teacher use. That meant the Wacom Bamboo seemed better suited for the wider computer screens that our teachers use. Buttons along the side allow for turning touch capacity on the surface of the tablet on or off, with one art teacher enjoying touch mode for younger students. The Downsides We’ve had a few wireless issues, with the tablet just dropping its connection to the computer while using the wireless receiver. However, the helpful tech support at Wacom hooked us up with newer drivers, and helped remove some of the problem ones. It’s been running flawlessly now, but I was concerned that it had issues in the first place given the rock solid performance of the ActivSlate. The Wacom Bamboo Create was a bit more awkward to walk around with than the Promethean ActivSlate as well. Its longer width meant it didn’t cradle quite as nicely while being carried around the room. Other than that, the biggest beef I had with the unit was installing all of the software (drivers and applications) that it came with. Don’t get me wrong, the installation went smoothly, but there are a LOT of helper applications that want to "pop up" and run every time you start using the tablet; I’m looking at your Bamboo Dock App.   Closing Thoughts I hope this post doesn’t come off as an advertisement, but rather a reflection on how we explore technology in my district, and some of the rather practical questions that get asked, and hopefully answered, as a part of that process. There are many educators who feel the need to champion one piece of technology over another, and even though I may be guilty of that at times as well, I’m always striving to try to find the best solutions for the situation. Both of these tablet offer strong points for classroom use. They’re fairly durable, have good battery life, and work well (once I worked out the driver bugs). Students felt comfortable using either tablet, but the teachers seemed more willing to hand the Promethean ActivSlate over to students more so than the Wacom Bamboo Create. Perhaps because it was still too new, as the teachers wanted to keep it "shiny". The Bamboo would probably make a much better "teacher demo" device for art and other fine application control give its seemingly higher fidelity. The price of the Bamboo is MUCH better as well, costing around $99. The wireless kit was another $40, so the entire package is still significantly cheaper than the Promethean ActivSlate. Given that price difference, it’s hard to justify more purchases of the Promethean models, given their more clunky USB receiver and large price difference. The ability for the Wacom to go back to wired USB mode is also appealing, as the ACtivSlate is only wireless, so if the receiver is damaged, you have to get a replacement before the unit is back in service. Both are solid wireless slates, but the price difference is enough to give my nod to the Wacom Bamboo Create for this battle. However, districts that are already deeply invested with Promethean hardware, should consider the ActivSlate’s added functionality of the polling integration as an excellent option as well. Expect to see more of both of these in classrooms soon as teachers look for ways to be more mobile, but don’t yet have an iPad or other mobile device with a screen.

Last week I flew to Madison, Wisconsin from South Bend, Indiana. There was a short layover in Chicago, and the entire trip was supposed to take a little more than 3 hours. It turns out, a small fire on a plane is good enough cause to ground it (thankfully) and thoroughly checked over by the mechanical crew. It also turns a 45 minute layover into a 5 hour layover. I know it’s not the worst layover an air traveler could have, nor was it the longest I had on this particular trip (which is another story). I do know when a trip that you could have driven in 4 hours turns into an almost 8 hour air adventure (there were other delays on the first leg of the trip), the passage of time seems to come to a stand still. It’s as if each minute is stretched into ten, an uncertain tempo of time takes over, and you find yourself nervously checking the flight boards only to find that what you thought had been nearly an hour was only just a few moments. I tried to capture the sense of it with the video below, in which 2 minutes of quick travel along the neon-lit underground walkway between terminals is stretched into 20 minutes. To recap, I was delayed for almost 5 hours, a length of time that was longer than my original intended flight time. I had been up since 4:30 AM in order to make my original flight, which was delayed 2 hours upon arriving at the first airport in South Bend. United gave us no snacks, drinks, or any other form of comfort while we waited for the plane with mechanical issues to be checked out and then ultimately replaced with a new plane. And I missed the bulk of an important meeting of the advisory board of an exciting new platform for sharing ideas, activities, and ideas around games in education. By the time my plane finally boarded I was a bit groggy, my brain fuzzy around the edges, and was thoroughly convinced that I had spent 24 hours at O’Hare International, not 5. I hope the video captured my mood effectively; it was a rather simple creation, and I had fun putting it together in iMovie, so much so that I turned it into a ds106 video assignment entitled "Video Your Mood". The challenge for participants in ds106, or for any students in a digital storytelling or creative writing course, is to recreate a mood or feeling using nothing but the original audio and video captured during the moment. You can time-warp the video, add effects, or remix the audio, but no other elements can be added.   In this case, slowing the video down to 10% of its original speed worked nicely. Not only did it turn the neon-lit wave across the ceiling of the underground into a slow motion rainbow, but the low bass-filled growl of the moving walkway mimicked the constant white-noise of aircraft in flight, the "engine" of the underground becoming a soothing soundtrack for a long layover. I felt the effects of the "time-warp" helped convey my sense of time passing slowly. Thanks to iMovie, it was rather simple to alter the speed. Users of iMovie please take note, this is the full iMovie application on Mac OSX. The mobile version of iMovie does not allow you to alter video speed.   The "fuzzy around the edges" clarity brought on by waking far too early in the morning (4:30 AM!) and having far too little caffeine in my body was made equally as simple in iMovie thanks to one of the Video Effects. A simple double-click on any video clip gives you access to both one-click audio and video effects. From ethereal "grogginess" to alien x-ray vision, there are enough simple effects to make most amateur videographers and digital storytellers happy. As it turns out the trip wasn’t all that bad, as I did get the pleasure of sitting next to Lucy Gray for the final leg of the journey (we both serve on the same advisory board for the Playful Learning Network). It was nice to meet her, and get to know a little bit about the work she does in education, the connections we share, and have a rather pleasant travel companion after so many hours of wandering the back corridors of Concourse F, looking for an unused power outlet to charge my phone and laptop so I could put this video together.

I’m currently NOT at the 2013 ISTE Conference in San Antonia, Texas. In fact, the vast majority of educators in the United States and around the world are most likely not at the conference either. However, the amount of buzz that ISTE generates dominates the mindshare in the greater education blogging and tweeting world. Some individuals lament not being able to attend, determined groups banding together to form "I’m not at ISTE" support communities to talk about the intersection of education and technology from afar. At least one prominent and vocal member of the education community is questioning whether conferences like ISTE merely reflect a lot of what’s wrong with our educational system. What am I doing? I’m surviving not being at the conference the best I can with my kids, a little bit of Twitter mischief, and keeping myself busy with summer work for school. Oh, and I’ve created a couple of short videos with some tips for surviving the 2013 ISTE conference, in case you’re not there either. Enjoy!   Not enough tips for you? I made another one last night after the kids and I had some fun around town.   If you have your own tips for surviving the 2013 ISTE conference for those that aren’t there, I’d love for you to share them! Rather than mourn my lack of being unable to mingle, learn, and party with my colleagues in San Antonio, I’m trying to make the best of being home, and finding ways to connect with my family, friends, and colleagues here in Michigan. There’s no sense in torturing myself with incessantly watching the #ISTE13 twitter feed; sure I’m checking in on it from time to time, but there’s probably a lot of amazing experiences, opportunities, and people to connect with where you are too (at least I hope there are) without having to check in on a twitter hashtag. Make the most of the week, my fellow non-ISTE friends!

Earlier this month, I was given an opportunity to attend the inaugural Playful Learning Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a full day of playful learning workshops, conversations, and professional development dedicated to educators, education researchers, and web/app developers who have a keen interest in creating game-ful and playful learning experiences for students. That’s right, a game-ful environment, NOT a "gamified" learning experience. The summit was part of  the larger Games Learning and Society Conference, or GLS, a gathering much akin to the Games 4 Change conference in New York, but on a slightly more intimate scale. If you love games (video or otherwise), and strive to find ways to create playful learning experiences for your learners, I highly recommend attending next year. The GLS conference is an interesting mix of educators, developers, researchers, and theorists that gave rise to sessions about multiplayer gaming & collaboration in the classroom to effective analysis and research tools for digesting click-stream data from educational game-based apps (a topic that took me a bit of time to figure out).   Dani Herro’s keynote helped me better understand the underpinnings of game-ful and playful learning a bit better, but I’m still fuzzy about some of the details and implications for K-12 education. I was particularly fond of the opening keynote speaker, Dani Herro, an educator working with Clemson’s Digital Media and Learning Lab attached to their school of education. Dani is the most recent addition to my list of "edu heroes" (no pun intended), a small yet growing collection of mostly constructivist and game-based learning theorists and practitioners. While I wasn’t entirely new to the playful learning concept, I would consider myself a "noobie" when it comes to understanding some of the deeper implications of game-ful learning. I highly suspect that many teachers already include elements of play and lusory attitudes in their instructional environment, but do so in unconscious and informal ways.   You know you’re at a playful gathering when you see someone donate the use of their laptop all day long for this. Dani challenged us to ask "what is playful learning?" From the simple steps we take to help "game" classroom behavior, to the more powerful methodology of allowing students to set their own goals, risks, and rewards, there are many levels in which we can "play" with what and how our learners assimilate and reconstruct knowledge and information. The conversations around these topics are of personal interest to me, as I always sought out simulations and interactives with which my students could better play with a concept, and develop some sort of working knowledge, rather than rely on book reading alone. I personally have recently accepted an advisory board position with the Playful Learning Network to better explore, understand, and share how digital games can be used within the context of learning, as I recognize that there’s an emergence of both serious games, mainstream games, and simulation-based games to help students explore learning in ways that might have been restricted to pencil and paper previously.   I found some #michED spiritual brothers and sisters in the #WIAMIGOS group of Wisconsin educators. Groups that can transcend the digital connections to form real-world connections are some of the most powerful and productive. Particularly noteworthy in Dani’s speech, and the workshops throughout the day, was an emphasis on the connections we form among ourselves as learners, with technology becoming de-emphasized as it enters a new, more ubiquitous role in education. I love that lots of people are talking about this regardless of where you go in education; increasingly it’s all about the connections, rather than the tech. During the social lunch period conversations about the intersection of personal interests and passions, aspects of the home-school peer tutoring culture, and production-centered academically oriented learning environments were all fair game.  Dani emphasized that a lot of these conversations are happening among our "Digital Media Networks", and I personally see that among the digital communities I frequent, but I’ve recently been asking myself if this is necessarily the best way, or just the easiest.  Local, face to face, and blended networks exist as well; it’s the reason we come together at conferences. But there’s a level of difficulty that exists in the "real world" that makes it less attractive at times than working with your digital network. Co-workers may have too many dissimilar interests, trying to coordinate schedules to meet face to face is a challenge, and when the going gets rough and our ideas are challenge, we can’t just simply "walk away" from the computer, and retreat into our digital fortresses and echo chambers.   Further evidence of the amazingly playful learning atmosphere and Wisconsin hospitality. A group participating in my Video Story Problem workshop bought fried cheese curds for everyone in the workshop while working on their videos….about cheese curds. As if to drive home the point that learning should be "fun", I was able to work with a group of very playfully minded educators, and at least one software developer, during a Video Story Problem workshop that I led during the morning session. One of the smaller work groups had excellent chemistry, and decided to put together a video story problem based around the length of time it takes to order, prepare, and then eat fried cheese curds, a Wisconsin culinary staple that rivals the Chicago style hot dog or a New York slice of pizza. Many had come to the session looking for how I was encouraging teachers to use video within games, and how assessment could be coordinated seamlessly around the medium. Sadly, I didn’t deliver what some of them expected, as we took a much more DIY approach to instruction and curricular materials development. The assessment based upon the Video Story Problem idea is still relatively informal and much better suited for formative style assessment, and the learning is much more akin to play than to game-based learning. However, I think that the open structure of the workshop, and the cheese curds, helped sway them, and in the end we had some excellent examples of video work born out of genuine curiosity and play.   Any conference that includes open "gaming" time is now high on my list of "must attend" gatherings In short, the Playful Learning Summit, as well as the greater GLS conference, was magical. The ideas and mentions of James Paul Gee’s work were heavy in the air, and the after hours Arcade, well stocked with both serious and mainstream games, created a perfect after-note to the day’s activities. Meeting and conversing with amazing educators like Zack Gilbert, Lucy Gray, Jen Groff, Jeremiah McCall, and many more that I’m sure I’ll regret for not mentioning, in addition to reconnecting with Remi Holden, cemented the Playful Learning Summit as one of the few professional experiences in my life in which my personal hobbies and interests co-mingled with my professional role in a serendipitous way. While I’m not certain if these were Dani Herro’s closing remarks during her morning keynote, they were certainly the lasting ones for me; creating spaces for and encouraging time spent around learner agency. The incredible metaphors that exist between effective game design & mechanics, and effective classroom instruction take some of the more rudimentary theories of game-based learning and amplify them to the point where learners have choice in just about every aspect of their learning environment. We shouldn’t be focused on turning our learning environments into games, but rather adopting game-ful habits that encourage our learning environments to flow much more naturally and authentically, in ways that encourage students to adapt and grow in ways that help both the teacher and learn alike. Links & Resources For some resources ideas discussed during Dani Herro’s keynote, consider visiting the links below: http://gamesandimpact.org/ - Interesting site to get your feet wet with gaming http://www.simcity.com/en_US/simcityedu - If you own a copy of the latest SimCity, this site has lots of lesson plans and activities built around urban planning and civics http://dschool.stanford.edu/ - Standford d.school looks to be a group that helps learners with their projects, creating a space for people to work on creative implementations of learning http://www.k12lab.org/ - K12 Lab network looks like a good stepping stone into the play space.

It’s no secret that I’m openly in love with the anti-MOOC that is #ds106. It’s also no secret that my wife makes amazing digital art…when she actually has time to create. Last summer she created a 60-second narrative of her day, capturing small moments with her phone’s video camera. She cut each of those moments into one-second vignettes then stitched them all back together to create a minute of video that was a heart-warming and compelling narrative. You can watch it below or follow the link here to see it on YouTube. I should have tweeted, blogged, and Facebook’d it last summer, but I didn’t. I’m a bad husband (sorry, honey). I’m trying to make up for that now, and took last Saturday to create my own version, with my wife providing a few cameos throughout the day. There’s been a lot of buzz about the 1 Second Every Day App, mostly thanks to keynote speakers at educational technology conferences showing off the pieces they’ve created with the app. The pieces created are moving, playful, and fun….but require a lot more time and fore-thought to slowly build a narrative than I was willing to create. Sure, you could capture what’s happening in your life at the same time everyday for a year or a month. You could even try to capture at least one powerful emotion everyday, or a moment in which a human interaction has left you feeling just a little bit better about life. Personally, I would be tempted to capture at least one smile or laugh a day; from a co-worker, a friend, a family member…small moments of joy compounded over 365 days. I didn’t want to wait that long to create a one-second narrative, nor did I want to tackle the more ardent task of creating a narrative over several days; I can see where it would be very easy to create a disjointed narrative capturing just one moment everyday if there isn’t much thought put into it. Then again, what I created may not have a strong emotional impact either, as the staccato transitions from one second to the next creates a rapid-fire movie that often requires repeated viewing to capture small subtle movements, sounds, or emotions. Your narrative is much more limited as well; who knows if you’re encounter 60 amazing laughs or smiles in a day (I hope you do), or whether any given day will be particularly note-worthy. My goal then was to give everyone a glimpse into a typical summer Saturday with my family….farmer’s market, raspberry picking, skinned knees, and all. I hope you can get a sense of my day below, or over on YouTube. There’s so much room for broadening the definition of narrative story telling in our schools, not just from closer alignment to Common Core Standards, but as a society as well; YouTube and Vimeo have become the defacto video space for most individuals to tell their stories, with Twitter and Vine quickly becoming the standard bearer for snarky conversations and witty visual jokes. Even the animated GIF, once derided as the "this website under construction" butt of many web-based jokes, has seen a resurgence as a powerful storytelling medium. Imagine the impact a teacher could have on students and parents by redefining what the classroom newsletter could be, or how daily messages about homework or important papers could be transformed into 6 second videos? You don’t need a special service or app like Vine to do it either. A digital camera and the standard video editor that comes with just about every platform works in a pinch. Most students are already carrying the devices you would need to capture the video, so in many cases it’s just a matter of seeking permission, or moving forward in a deliberate and "safe" manner (for those teaching in districts with more conservative social media policies) and seeking forgiveness later. Regardless of whether you agree that narrative story telling is in need of a 21st century facelift in many classrooms (and be mindful, I’m not advocating doing away with written narratives), I hope that many would agree there’s a certain power and emotion that video makes it easier to elicit from viewers. I’ve created a ds106 assignment for the 60-Second Day in the assignment bank, but I’d love to see what other stories someone creative could tell. Perhaps a field trip, the life cycle of a frog, or an entire reading of a novel in class, each chapter distilled down to one sentence? Expand the parameters, allow 4 or 5 seconds instead of just one. Challenge students to tell the same story through video from multiple perspectives. You could even start telling your "summer story" right now, and have a one-second vignetter video narrative to show your class on the first day back this Fall.

It’s a brand new school year, I’ve got a shiny new theme on the blog, and the K-2 teachers in my district all have iPads in their classrooms to use with students this year! YAY! Alright, so we’re behind the curve on the whole "iPad" adoption thing, but I’m cool with that; I’m a huge fan of emphasizing pedagogy over devices in addition to our district being on the more conservative side of spending (Michigan schools are weathering both the financial meltdown and legislative re-allocating of funds to more post-secondary schools). I say this as a preface for my most recent "how to" video on redeeming app codes and restoring purchases on iPads, as it’s a rather simple task, but one that’s new to many teachers in my district. Most teachers who have personal iOS devices in my district usually purchase apps through their own personal iTunes account, and while many have redeemed gift cards, a fair number don’t personally own iPads, nor have they ever redeemed anything via a code on the device itself. Hence, one of the easiest "how to" videos I’ve created yet, and one that I hope will help a lot of them as professional development training that teachers receive before students show up can quickly be forgotten or pushed aside with the excitement that a new school year brings.

What a difference a few years can make! A recent post on Mashable about some radical differences in satellite imagery over the course of just a few years in Google Earth got me thinking. How could a Geology or Math teacher use a time-lapse video of the terraforming taking place in the thriving Middle Eastern metropolis? Over the last decade or so, Dubai has managed to build extravagantly expensive archipelagos  for development, and with the advent of satellite imagery and the "time slider" in Google Earth (more formally known as the Historical Imagery tool), you can peer back to a time when all that existed off the coast of Dubai was ocean. Below is a brief example of myself walking through a quick "time travel" in Google Earth. I’m not sure how a roomful of students could escape asking the curiosities about how much time is taking place, how much land, soil, and silt is being deposited in the ocean, and what does it even cost to build one island, let alone an entire peninsula out into the ocean. Using some of the other tools in Google Earth you could challenge students to find the average land area added each year, or the rate of expansion from one year to the next. Science teachers could challenge students with some great open ended questions about the systems being altered by such human activity (tides, long shore currents, animal habitats, etc.). Social Studies and Civics teachers could even delve into the deeper implications that such activity possess; where do resources come from for projects such as these, and at what cost to other projects and realities that municipalities deal with? I’m not sure if it’s the particular subject matter (the environment,  science, terraforming) that captures my interest, but I’m left wondering what other areas of the Earth could we explore through time, to see how human beings have changed their habitats. It might play nicely into an opportunity for teachers to invite older members of a community into their classrooms, to talk about and share photos and stories of what our urban landscape and the neighborhoods around us looked like decades ago. I have one of the last remaining apple trees from the orchard that my neighborhood was built upon in my front yard; I would LOVE to know the history of how the neighborhood developed, how long people held onto a fruit tree or two from the old farm, and how the changing landscape also changed the local economy as rural lands turned to residential. There’s a lot of questions here, and I feel as though I’m only starting to scratch at the surface; it makes me wonder if time-travelling in your classroom might spark the curiosity of learners as well.