…so much so that I’m using the “Quickpress” feature of the Dashboard for the first time. Unfortunately for my pedagogical musings here on this blog, my grad school writing and reading obligations have been eating up my time. Moreover, my basketball coaching duties are now starting up (time to re-break in that second “hat”!), which will leave even less time for writing. Nevertheless, I thought I’d just post a quick follow-up on my last post about Google Earth.
In a word: Outstanding!
There is so much untapped potential that I haven’t even delved into yet, but the work that many of my students have done with it thus far is excellent. I had students present to one another on early empires (Roman, Han, Mauryan, Persian, Hellenistic) and make Google Earth tours to accompany and I found myself really impressed by the output. Many students harnessed the ability to overlay map image layers and created really nice change-over-time maps tracing the rise, peak, and decline of these empires.
Moreover, the 3D buildings feature proves to be an outstanding resource for talking about architecture and learning to read buildings as primary sources — both the Pantheon and Parthenon models are really nicely done and give a sense not only of the building, but also the surrounding city-scape.
Hopefully I’ll find some time soon to post a more in-depth follow-up. In the meantime its back to reading John Lynch’s Simón Bolívar and thinking about how to define “Intercultural Transfer.” Ah, grad school!
After one quarter of various social media-based tasks that stress various historical skills I’ve decided that my task of breaking down and discussing the way to tackle critical questions was not paying dividends, so it was time to scrap it. Instead, (and I’ve since garnered empirical evidence to prove this), the students could benefit from more geographic exposure and experience working with maps, which will help them more fully consider geography in the course of their thinking about various historical developments and how those are attached to the landscape.
So, my new task in the group rotation is to make a Google Earth-based geographical tour of at least ten significant locations in the chapter. At each location, which should be designated with an arrow, pin, or polygon, students will explain why that particular location is important in terms of its connection to the chapter. In the course of this explanation they’ll discuss key individuals, events, climatic features, etc. that make the geography of that location, or the location itself, particularly noteworthy. In essence, I see this task as yet another way for students to synthesize information in new, and hopefully meaningful ways — in this case merging geographic information with more traditional ID term type information drawn from the text.
I’m planning to illustrate this feature tomorrow and do some brief explanations about how to use the software. While fairly intuitive, Google Earth does have some quirky features, such as knowing to just click for the points of your polygon rather than holding down the cursor, which leaves a heinous trail of dots that are impossible to clean up into any semblance of order. I still have lots to learn myself about using the program effectively, and I’m interested in the potential for the recorded tours, but in the meantime, I think the placemarks feature will serve our purposes well and will get students more exposure to the geography that is so essential to fully grasping the subject matter.
As a way to demonstrate I created a brief Google Earth based tour of the educational institutions I’ve attended and/or otherwise been associated. Feel free to go on the tour yourself. The file is the first link here.
As for using the software, I found the tutorial PDFs at Google Lit Trips to be extremely clear and helpful. Additionally, this brief explanation guide about how to make Google Earth tour also seems good (though it may push the bounds of good taste in terms of clip art use. On second thought, is there any occasion where “clip are use” and “good taste” should be merged in the same sentence or otherwise considered compatible? Probably not.)
Few things are objective truths in this world, but one is that when ProfHacker mentions and hyperlinks to something you’ve written, the number of site visits you get increase dramatically.
Case in point:
CAUSE:
…
EFFECT:
Here is the link to the original post that sparked this brief renaissance of interest in my summertime musings.
The semester is now in full swing — both in my teaching and student identities. Having two colloquiums (or is it colloquia? WordPress suggests that “colloquia” is a typo, but I’m not so sure) certainly makes for a busy schedule. So, in case my lack of recent commentary and musings had caused anyone great consternation, fear not, it is simply attributable to my deep immersion in the minutiae of Atlantic revolutions and the development of transatlantic philanthropic culture.
However, on the horizon I’m planning on posting about my the progress of my social media-based classes, as well as write about the feedback I received from my Breakthrough teachers about how social media shaped their experience teaching this summer. Here’s the preview: they liked EtherPad, Google Groups, and (gasp!) Twitter for its ease of communication and the accessibility those tools created. However, I’ll refrain from writing that post here and will hopefully get it done later this week.
On a social media tools-related note, I’m planning on trying out my first quiz via Google Forms (which is one of the types of documents one can create through Google Docs) during class tomorrow. Setting up the quiz itself was quite easy as the Google Forms interface is very intuitive.
However, even more helpful for helping me accomplish this task was the tutorial by Robert Pollack about how to set up the form so that it’ll automatically grade the quiz once everyone’s taken it. I felt immensely accomplished after having successfully followed his instructions (which were outstandingly clear) and even did a little extra creative math at the end to have it hammer out the proper percentage grade.
While Scantron sheets are, of course, familiar and relatively fast to grade (and include an aural indication of progress given that those rough quizzes sound like machine gun fire at the Battle of the Marne), the major benefit I see in the Google Forms is the ability to break down and analyze student responses in clear, visual grapsh.
Maybe I’ll post the quiz here once all my students have taken it so that the rest of you can discover how knowledgeable you are about the Hittite Kingdom, the Shang Dynasty, and other events of the late 2nd millennium BCE!
Before its official launch earlier this semester, the Prof. Hacker blog had a number of interesting posts this summer about things ranging from blogging in the classroom to how to mentally prepare for a new semester. One of the most compelling posts for me had to do with a pedagogical technique that the author, George Williams, referred to as “students showing their work.” Not only did this technique make a lot of sense in the high school classroom where I have the good fortune of working with small classes, but it also made sense in terms of getting students to learn about argumentation, evidence, commentary, and how to organize information into sub-categories.
I’ve used this technique around four or five times already this year and it has continued to be a successful way to structure class in a manner that engages students actively. The technique has worked particularly well for helping students argumentative develop stances in response to essay-style questions, but this week I also realized that it can function as a sophisticated form of a K-W-L Chart.
So, in order to justify my purchase of Mino HD Flip camera at the end of the summer (it was such a good deal on Woot. How could I resist?) I made a brief video explaining the activity in terms of this particular question and covering student responses to it. Our discussion served not only as an interesting insight into what students remembered from their fifth or sixth grade social studies classes, but it also sparked an interesting discussion about the way in which our culture chooses to enshrine and portray these ancient civilizations.
What other active learning techniques have proven especially effective in other classrooms? Certainly, this one is very low-tech and unfortunately not paperless, but I think its a good way to spark discussion and a structured examination of a topic or argument.
I fear that we’re entering into flu season (or some other type of contagious disease season — if a particular term has already been coined for the disease du année, I’m not yet aware of it) and as a result I’m having a number of students missing class because they’re sick or still recovering from an illness. So, I’d ideally like to find an easy, non-obtrusive way to connect my class, either via recording or streaming, with those students who are home sick, but don’t want to miss what takes place during the period.
Thus far I’ve had a couple of ideas and have tried out one. My first foray into this territory occurred earlier this week when I tried to connect with a student who was sick at home by using TinyChat to stream the class discussion to a centralized chatroom. Ultimately the student who I sought to connect with was resting while class took place, but nevertheless I encountered a few technical glitches with the website. Firstly, I had to recreate the chatroom at least twice. Secondly, and perhaps because I’m using my relatively antiquated (but still functional) 12″ Powerbook G4, I wasn’t sure about the sound quality of the stream, nor did I have a camera to capture video of what took place in class.
Just this afternoon I realize that perhaps Drop.io might be a good solution given its phone call recording functionality. In this arrangement I envision using the speaker phone to capture the class conversation (which will likely have its own quality issues) and then pointing the students who missed class to the drop site where they could then download and listen to the class conversation. This arrangement has the benefit of creating a static recording of the class that students can download at a later time and don’t have to be at their computers during the precise time class occurs. However, it may also have quality and audibility issues, which might make the convenience element a moot point.
What other strategies have teachers used to capture their classes when students miss because of an illness or prior commitment? Are there other forms of social media presently available that would accomplish this goal in a more effective way in terms of quality, distribution, audibility? Any thoughts are welcome.
Yesterday marked my first opportunity to have students work on a collaborative editing assignment using the website MixedInk. I hadn’t planned to get my students working on the site quite yet; however, on Monday, I had a very productive and interesting conversation with Vanessa Scanfeld, the founder of MixedInk, who generously shared an hour of her time with me (on Labor Day, no less!) to talk about potential uses for MixedInk in the classroom and how other educators have employed it.
The interesting thing about MixedInk, which I didn’t realize until my conversation with Vanessa, was that she designed MixedInk not with educators in mind, but rather as a tool to foster civic engagement and get citizens writing effective, persuasive letters to their elected representatives. I should have realized this fact earlier when watching the tutorial video, which uses the hypothetical example of Mayor Quimby’s campaign in order to demonstrate the website’s functionality.
In spite of its original intentions, MixedInk worked really nicely in the classroom context, and I’m excited to see my students’ final collaboratively-drafted response, which I’ll get this weekend.
However, before I get to conclusions, I suppose I better outline what precisely I assigned them to do. Presently all the students are curating their own blogs, and for homework they were assigned to respond to a question related to their reading in chapter one. The textbook we’re using is quite interesting in the author’s embrace of an argumentative voice and his willingness to eschew an objective tone — its definitely unique. To highlight this point, I had the students respond to the following question:
How does Fernández-Armesto’s description of humans throughout the chapter (e.g on p. 9 “In this environment…”particular kind of habitat”; p. 14 “Creatures like us…”) reflect a different treatment and tone toward humans than the one typically found in history texts (and popular culture)?
Before answering the question for homework and posting the response on their blogs, the students spent the day in class collaboratively researching sources that would help provide a counter-balance to Armesto’s treatment and offer a more “human-centric” description of prehistory. Students scoured Google, Bing, and some database resources and posted the pertinent webpages they found to our ad hoc research repository at Today’s Meet. That night the students went home and responded to the question, drawing on the resources that each class had compiled and posted to the Today’s Meet website, and then posted their final responses to their blogs.
In class the next day I had all the students take their final blog responses and submit them as drafts on MixedInk. The students then spent the next 20+ minutes of class reading through one another’s posts and offering comments and criticisms — an area where I’m already seeing increasing depth and detail, which is really great. After that period for peer feedback, the students were then offered a contest/challenge: Re-write your post, drawing on the phrases and ideas of your peers, to create the best possible response to the question.
Students then embarked on creating their “remixed” response to the questions, and because of the inter-linked nature of the submissions on MixedInk, when they wrote a sentence similar to one of their peers, they would see that other sentence pop up and have the option of including it in their draft. The dynamic way in which MixedInk matches like ideas and phrases is really neat and illustrates to the students the variety of ways in which an idea or argument can be expressed.
After completing their remixed drafts, students submitted their revised work and we embarked on a “rating” period, where the students read one another’s writing and then rated each response on a five star scale. The rating period will close this weekend, and by Monday morning I’ll have a “winning” draft from each class. This draft will serve as our model for discussion of the question and how to structure a persuasive, well-substantiated response to this type of question.
I made a few initial observations during this first roll-out of Mixed Ink in class. First, students were very quiet and attentive when reading one another’s posts and offering their classmates constructive criticism. It was very nice to see this level of attention and focus given to their peers’ work. However, my second observation is that after we transitioned to the remixing phase the noise level increased and sustained focus seemed harder to achieve. Perhaps this dynamic developed because of the unfamiliarity with this type of task in contrast to peer editing, with which most students are familiar. Alternatively, the students perhaps started engaging one another in verbal conversation as they shared whose work they were drawing from and how they were employing it in their own essay. I don’t yet have any definitive thoughts about why this occurred, but I’ll be interested to see if something similar develops the next time I use MixedInk. Perhaps the remixing process is one best done at home as writing, and constructing an argument, is more effective when one has a greater opportunity for quiet and sustained focus.
Perhaps the most interesting observation of the day about MixedInk came from one of my students who immediately noticed the different ethics of writing in academia versus writing in the public, political sphere. While the website encourages an author to pull sentences and material from other authors, it only recognizes and notes the original author when one pulls verbatim text. However, often good ideas come from others, but because one has a different writing style or way of expressing the idea, an author will paraphrase or reformulate a sentence. In doing so, the original author that one pulled from is not recognized in the final product because the language has been so drastically reformulated. The student wondered if one should cite the original author even when not borrowing a phrase verbatim.
I think the point is a good one, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to engage in a conversation about the ethics of historical writing and the particular importance placed on citation and recognition of one’s intellectual and research influences. For this initial foray I didn’t have students worry about citing their peers, as I see this initial experience as being more about learning the website’s functionality and how one approaches this type of collaborative writing experiment.
In conclusion, I’m excited about MixedInk and think it has a lot of potential usages in any writing-intensive course. I’ll try to post an update about the final product once it comes in and we have a chance to discuss it as a class.
I had some good feedback yesterday regarding the design of my poster for the conference I’m presenting at this Friday. Rachel Donahue (hopefully I’ve got the URL fixed now, Rachel!) had a number of good, detailed suggestions both about visual organization and how to rein in my verbosity.
The other major change I made since the last draft involves the diagrams. Looking at the previous image in Scribd it appeared that the Bubbl.us created diagrams were way too hazy and would likely not come out well when printed at 48″ x 36″. So, I shifted my diagram making operations over to Gliffy. Not only were the Gliffy-designed images larger files (and presumably higher resolution), but the website also enabled me more flexibility in terms of designing lines, making them different weights and colors, and labeling them more precisely.
The only downside of Gliffy involved the fact that the site exports its images in JPEG (or PNG) format, and when these were blown up on the PPT, they became similarly fuzzy to the Bubbl.us images. To solve the problem (hopefully!), I did a screen capture with the Dashboard widget and grabbed the diagrams in TIFF format, which captured them in higher resolution and will allow them to be more legible — at the very least the file sizes were 10x bigger. I’ll guess I’ll find out whether this trick solved my problem once I print the poster!
I’ve whiled away a number of hours putting together my poster presentation for this Friday’s conference on Active Learning at the University of Texas at Arlington. In the process of preparing this poster I accomplished the following feats and/or made the following realizations:
Adobe InDesign is super-powerful, and that my learning curve for that particular program is super-steep.
PowerPoint, while perhaps the root of all that is evil in the world (the jury is still out), is pretty easy to operate (or least I have some degree of skill with it. Plus, I own it, meaning I could work at home rather than at the UTA Library’s Digital Media Studio.)
I haven’t forgotten all of my newspaper layout skills from my time as Editor-in-Chief of the august Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s Gazette.
Bubbl.us and the Bubbl.us 2.0 (beta) are intuitive and relatively powerful websites. I’d like a bit more functionality in terms of changing line weights, colors, and text size, but in general the websites fit the bill for designing schematic diagrams.
Twitter continues to serve as an excellent source of non-anonymous peer review. Thanks to Dave Parry, Rachel Donahue, and Seth Battis for the feedback they gave me on my initial Bubbl.us-designed diagram yesterday. Hopefully my revised versions better encapsulate the concepts I’m trying to convey.
The one area where I’m still not entirely thrilled has to do with the nature of the schematic diagrams. While I think the diagrams generally convey my conceptual arguments, the size of text in the images (and the ultimate resolution at which they’ll be printed) causes me a bit of concern. I explored OmniGraffle a bit, but didn’t find it as intuitive or quick to generate diagrams as I found Bubbl.us.
Now I’m seeking some additional feedback about my (relatively)-finished poster. I’ve got to get the poster printed on Tuesday afternoon, but will be able to make any necessary changes before then. So, if anyone sees any egregious typos, illogical claims, or huge design faux pas (is that the plural form? Should it be faux passes, or is that how one attempts to sneak backstage?) please let me know.
Just acquired a Digitech pedal that nicely emulates the vocoder effect of Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer." Neighbors: Prepare to be annoyed. 10 hours ago
@jrk yes! That was one of the best Married to the Sea's yet! 13 hours ago
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