Teach Film Concepts Through iMovie

Learning how to create films was a challenge; but teaching others to create good film is a bigger challenge. Every day is a battle between getting people to understand the value of a good story and match that with the technical skill to pull it off. Most of the time, I can sell the idea of a good story – though it takes practice – it is easy to learn the value and appreciate a well told story. It’s the technical side of film that often scares most people away. My students – or adults – see what the editing panels in Final Cut or Adobe and tend to panic as they are unsure where to start.  Thanks to apps like iMovie on the iPad and iPhone the process has been simplified. Now, I can teach the basic concepts of story telling without creating a fear in others of not being sure what to do next.

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Eliminate the Excuse

One of the first lessons I got in teaching was to develop strong classroom management procedures to handle the problems that I did not want to deal with. For example, passing in papers, I have my students do “School Olympics” where each class passes in papers to the back, then to the right, then into their box. I do this activity in the first week and again several more times to keep it fresh. This way, when I say pass in your papers, the kids know which way to go and where the box is to turn papers. No more questions on where papers go, no more kids, “here” instead of passing it in to the box, just a smooth simple procedure. Technology is the same way for me, I developed my resources for the sole purpose of eliminating problems in class: forgetting assignments, forgetting work, not doing work because the student needed help, forgetting books, losing a handout and much more. By adding technology resources to my classroom I am able to build stronger connections with my students while at the same time eliminating the excuse for not doing what is expected. 

Working with Invisible Students

I recently took four students down to Chino Hills HS to see Janet Roberts and her high school put on an amazing rally. If you have not been, it is worth the visit. A connected and spirited campus is a high academically performing campus. What got me the most excited is not the rally nor the great conversation with my spirit and rally commissioners, it was a text from my ASB president, “We are going to have a picnic next Wednesday during lunch, easier to explain if you call.” So I did call, and what I heard was slightly short of amazing.

One of my students was walking across the common area when she saw many students sitting and eating alone. She came back to class rather upset where the kids had a conversation about inviting students to have lunch in the ASB room each Wednesday. The kids thought this was great, then another student suggested, “why don’t we bring some blankets and just invite people to sit with us each day on the grass?” We have four large grass areas in our common area, and all of the kids thought this was great.

So, every other Wednesday we are going to have an ASB picnic where all students are invited to sit in an area. The brilliance of the idea is its simplicity as well as the execution each week. Kids show up, take out blankets, sit and eat while we play some music and hang out. At the same time, our students, mentors and other leaders on campus are invited to go out and invite kids who normally do not have anyone to sit with out to our grass area to sit with other students.

This year my students have a strong sense of reaching out to kids on campus and improving the culture and climate. The old saying, “if you know someone’s story it’s hard to hate them,” is holding very true. We brought this idea up and one of my kids said, “if you know someone’s story it’s hard to forget them.” My kids dont’ want to forget any one on our campus.

Which Are You?

I had something interesting happen to me that I have not seen in a long time, a person actually went out of their way to tell me I was not good at something. In this day and age where teenage bravado is only matched by anyone’s desire to share or overshare whatever they are thinking whenever they are thinking it,  I’m still amazed at how far someone will go out of their way to put others down.  I got an email the other day that read, “Hey Guess What” in the subject line with the message of “Your videos are really bad.” I was a bit shocked. More so because these were not my videos, these were my students’ videos; and much like an overprotective parent, I was ready for battle. Then I was a reminded of a great poem I was exposed to a few years ago, and I asked myself, which are you, a builder or a wrecker? 

Keeping in Touch with your Students

With any new technology, it inevitably takes me about a year to get anything under control and integrated in my classroom. When it comes to communication, I feel pretty good about my system: utilizing Twitter and Twitter fast follow, making my Google Voice number available for my students to text me if they need anything, using my blog to update information, and sharing handouts via Google Docs. This worked for me for three years, was a lot of work, but was very reliable. However, I recently came across some new online resources that can make my communication even better.

Remind101 is a great texting service that is free for teachers. For any designated group, you get a unique phone number that kids can text. Kids are then prompted to reply with their name so you can see all fo the individuals who are logged into your account. This way, I know exactly who is accessing the texts I send out. I see a lot of freedom with this software. First, I can create multiple groups – one for each class to start. As an activity director, I see creating a group for the school, possibly for parents, for my freshman mentors as well as my leadership students. I can send secret messages such as “If you get this message report to the cafe’. The first five people there get a free shirt”, or “Mentors, give every freshman in your group a high five.”  This allows me access to students on the one item they are pretty much guaranteed to have on them at any time of the day. What’s more, remind101 allows you to schedule text messages so they can go out any time you want. I can time messages to appear at the start of class, end of class, passing period, after school or before school. I use Hootsuite for all of my Twitter updates. Now, while I will still use Twitter, I see Remind101 taking on a whole side of communication as it has the potential to reach a much wider audience.

My next new favorite is Wiggio. Someone mentioned this at a conference I was just at, and I filed it away as Wiggio was described as a mass texting application. When I logged in to the account, I learned it was so much more, the features are abundant.  I was able to enter my students’ email addresses and names right off the bat and invite them to the site. Keep in mind, this site is private, so only myself and my students can see this information. Students can also add cell phone numbers and they have the option of getting sms updates without anyone in the group seeing their number (same for me, the teacher). In Wiggio, I can invite people to meetings, establish groups with smaller members of the main group, assign tasks (and set reminders via email or sms), share documents or even create them directly on the site. I can also share links, important as we are using a lot of items from other sites like Google Docs or Evernote; or there may be a video I would like them to watch before coming to class.

As an activities director, I am noticing more and more that my students are walking a fine line between being organized with a binder and being organized with their phone. In general, teens are disorganized with both except for a select few that teachers often refer to as their favorites. With Wiggio, I see the ability to communicate beyond just the planning sheets or post-it notes on the wall that declare something as being “do”, “doing”, or “done”. I like that it can text kids reminders, I am a big believer that if it has to do with a student’s cell phone they are more likely to do it than when they have to remember to look at a calendar. Every time I add a task, meeting, document or other item it appears in a calendar on the site and color codes it so we can differentiate between the items. I pull it up and on any given day I can see if something was done, not done or is due soon. This I can put up daily for the class to see so I know if we are on task.

Lastly, I like that in Wiggio I can create a chatroom for the kids to discuss items far away from Facebook. I like Facebook, it’s a good tool, but too many times the conversations get out of control and too many times we have read something about teacher/student interaction on Facebook. So, let’s keep it in the class here. I also enjoy the ability to set-up to do lists, and my new favorite, my ability to take a poll. We sometimes spend so much time in class discussing issues – most of which I feel is a waste of time in that it wastes class time. A quick poll online can solve a lot of those issues.

While I will still be using Twitter, Google Voice and Facebook to communicate, I will be adding Wiggio and Remind101. My philosophy with communication, hit kids where they are at. I use all of these services because I have a great chance of finding all of my students on some level. Now, I don’t always post the same content to each site, but I do post to each site as needed. I am excited at the possibilities these apps offer to my teaching and I look forward to seeing how they integrate with my classroom management style. What are your thoughts?

Fast Follow is more than Following Fast

I’m always impressed with people who feel that teenagers are the tech savvy generation. Keep in mind that teens are very good at texting and Facebook, but not much beyond that (in most cases). When I first started using cell phones in the classroom, I knew that texting was the key. However, I did not want to individually text 150 students. So, in a moment of inspiration, I started using Twitter with my students. After four days and only one student signing up I was in a jam. I took a chance on Twitter Fast Follow, a service Twitter offers that allows someone to follow a person on Twitter without even creating an account. It took me two days to get 80% of my students signed up with Twitter.

Fast follow is simple, send a text to 40404 with the phrase “Follow (username)”. For example, I had the kids text 40404 with the words “Follow Soethengclass”. This was a great way to do informal surveys, send out information, connect with kids and make myself available for questions or help.

The first thing I did to get student involvement was start some give-a-way projects. For example, I would tweet out that the first five people who replied to a tweet would get a prize. The next day, I gave out at least one king sized candy bar in each class. My goal, to create interaction in social media. I wanted the students to know they could reach out to me and to pay attention to the tweets going out.

In class, I started backing off the amount of writing the kids had to do, especially during discussions. We spent a lot of time going over class discussions and the expectations for class discussions, and I would have a student keep track on the board of the main points that we would go over. Then, at the end of class, I would take a picture with my iPhone and tweet it out to my students. Their job, make a copy for their notes. My goal, one tweet a day as I knew if I could get my text or tweet to show up on a student’s phone I could make them think about me or class. Anytime a student thinks about my class outside of school is a good thing.

Now, the evidence that supports using Twitter. About two years back I had a conversation with another teacher by the name of Corey Bess. Corey did what I did not, research. You can read Corey’s blog to get more specific info, but I will boil it down. Corey created two identitcal sets of students: grades, race, socioeconomic, and class size. At the end of one year, he found that his students who used twitter socred- overall – 8 percent better on their final grade than those who did not. This number grew significantly over the course of year as students who used Twitter scored almost 10 percent better on standardized tests than those who did not use Twitter. That gap grew over the course of the year. Corey did the same thing I did, one tweet a day. And the tweets can be specific like “HW tonight on page 29, make sure you read the paragraph first,” to the casual, “Happy Friday, remember to wear your Orange and Blue.”

I started using my Twitter for various purposes. I would do spirit updates, pictures, assignments for that day in class, or motivational items like “do your best today.” Over time, I found my students were very happy to contact me via Twitter and ask questions on assignments. In the past year, I have seen my students who use Twitter increase by fifty percent. While I used to have to explain Twitter, I am finding that less and less as kids are jumping on board and following each other or their favorite celebrities. Additionally, with only 140 characters, Twitter forces students to be concise with their communications. At the same time, the Twitter community frowns on abbreviations and misspelling, so a lot of the text speak that kids use is fairly non existent in the Twitter-verse.

One other passionate educator I know who uses fast follow is Ron Ippolito. Ron and I have had some great discussions on fast follow. On of those discussions involved using fast follow as part of a school Twitter account. Now, you have a free way to communicate with parents via text or Twitter. Granted, there are a lot of text services out there, but I don’t know too many that are free. Twitter is a great way to have a conversation with your students, parents or staff. It’s a great way to stay connected and gives your community one more option in getting their information or contacting you. That’s a great lesson in customer service for your students to take to their professional lives.

 

Blue Mountains and Absailing

Day 2, or day 3 if you are playing the home version, came with the leadership group Fullon out of New Zealand.

The three sisters in the Blue Mountains of Australia

We took a two hour drive up into the Blue Mountains of Australia.  Weather, perfect. Slightly cloudy, but warm, and fog in the valley’s which created some wonderful views of the mountain range and the scenery below.

We did a quick stop to see the three sisters.  The story goes that two tribes were fighting. To bring peace, the father of one tribe wanted his sons to marry the daughters of the other tribe.  This accord did not come to fruition and so the groups went to war.  To protect the daughters, a medicine man turned the daughters to stone.  Unfortunately, the medicine man was killed, and being the only one who could turn the sisters back, the sisters have remained in their current form for eternity.

At this point, I cannot say enough good things about Fullon, a highly interactive and well put together program.  We were fortunate enough to have Paul, founder of Fullon, lead our group of intrepid high school students.  We were also endowed with a couple of young leaders with a few years of experience with Fullon, Susan and Sandy, all from New Zealand.  Fullon runs programs in several countries: New Zealand, Australia, Italy, England, Scotland and many other parts of Europe.  Needless to say, if you are traveling abroad with a group, they are worth the call.

Video Time Machine

Living in a media drive age, it would make sense that we, as educators, have access to videos and clips that feature some of the great moments in our history: movies, music, tv, news, sports, games and ads.  To truly understand history in any context is to know what is going on in that time period. There are many ways to set the scene, YouTube is one, though researching all of that video footage takes time; the Library of Congress has some great videos to download via iTunes if you have the time; or how about the vidoes and DVD’s which are delivered with our textbooks (in my case, laser discs and reel to reel – totally up to date on technology here).  Even better, how about a device that let’s kids research or identify the videos that best describe the time period? Enger Video Time Machine, a new app available for the iPhone and iPad that carefully selects videos that best represent the time period they were made. As the site claims, “You can watch over 10,000 handpicked videos from 1860-2011.”

Podcasting Made Easy, Part IV: Video

My introduction to video came in 2001 with an early edition of Final Cut.  I had to work on two different computers as the file sizes – at 14 GB – were too large to use on just one Mac.  This was so much better than using two VCR’s to create the high-light tape for our college team.  That’s right, I was at a UC school and we were using two VCR’s to create the high-light tape for our final awards dinner … not any more. This idea stuck with me as I began to incorporate video content into my podcasts – I needed to provide video of good quality to make my episodes interesting to watch.

Podcasting Made Easy, Part III : The Interview

For one of my first podcasts, I called upon Phil Boyte who lived up in the foothills two hours from where I live.  He agreed and I offered to drive up and meet him.  We sat and spoke for a bit, and it became clear I did not have a vision of what I wanted the subjects of my podcasts to be.  I had ideas, and most of the time I left that idea choosing process up to the person I was interviewing.  However, with that much choice, my subjects would often get lost and be unsure of a topic.  I lost a few interviews that way, especially from people who are not used to be recorded.  Phil and I eventually did a great podcast on ideas you can use for the first days/week of school – but it took a little time to get there.  I began to learn – thanks to my conversation with Phil – that I needed to get dialed in to the content I was looking for in the podcast.