Thanks, James Kennedy

Read James' blog post about his visit to my school.
We had a blast.

iMovie, Making "shorts", Newbery Winners!

With colleague, +Rebecca Guenther, I assigned 6th grade students to make short films celebrating Newbery award medal- winners and honor books and entered James Kennedy's 90 Second Newbery Contest. We invited the contest's creator, James Kennedy, to come to our school to host a screening of these films.

+James Kennedy did indeed come! He spent the day with students yesterday, presenting book talks through the day. James' book-talk about his zany Order of the Odd-Fish engaged and entertained the students. I got to see it four times! (I needn't see it again.)

In the evening, he hosted the Philadelphia area screening of 90 Second Newbery films.  If you are looking for a terrific, reasonably priced speaker for your students, check out James Kennedy. I really feel our day with him was a success. Our students loved the day,

Okay, promo aside, what do kids get out of iMovie projects such as this? What are my thoughts on this project as a teaching tool? It seems to me that digital video know-how should be explicitly taught in a more formal manner than most schools currently do. It should be a core competency. While my colleague Rebecca and I did engage +Josh Weisgrau to teach the kids a lesson in framing and film narrative, I think we still need to do more. I truly do believe that being literate will someday include understanding how to compose in multimedia (if it isn't already).

As a tool for generating student thinking, short movie projects like this one can be fantastic. A good short film challenges students in all sorts of important ways. They have the synthesize material, capture essential details, and consider plot and mood to make an effective film. In some ways, notwithstanding my point in the previous paragraph, I truly feel that process is more important than the result.

Though Percy Jackson is not a Newbery book and thus was not eligble for the 90 Second Newbery Screening, I feel that this student's project from my LA class last year best captures quality film making (notice Kai's effective use of framing!) while engaging the higher order thinking skills I point to in the preceding paragraph.


Kai Davidson - Percy Jackson Ares Motion - h264 from Alex McDonnell on Vimeo.

Letting Parents See Behind the Curtain and Using Literature Circles

I did a spring cleaning of sorts and moved a bunch of stuff off of my iPad. Some I uploaded to Google Drive and YouTube. I removed much from my iCloud storage as well. I had been paying 99 cents a month for extra storage. The cheap price let me be lazy. But why pay anything at all when free is also an option?

Anyhow, what I really wish to share is this video I came across while "spring cleaning".  I made it last year for the parents of my 5th grade students. I was trying to give them a glimpse into class. I like this video for many reasons:

• It explains far better than anything in writing ever could what is going on in class. (As a side note, as an elementary school teacher I communicated weekly with parents. As a high school teacher, I've only emailed them twice. I have to be better.)

• It reminds me that the best teaching usually isn't teacher centered. This video highlights Literature Circles.

• Literature Circles is a technique/ learning format which allow students to choose from a variety of good books, not everyone is reading the same thing.

• Literature Circles has kids assume different roles requiring different cognitive and executive skills. Twice a week, the children would talk about their assigned books through the lenses of a defined role. Some children were tasked to direct the discussion, other children were “word wizards” and had to define challenging words present in the text, still others were directed to serve as “literary luminators” and had to pick passages that they particularly liked and explain what they liked about the writing. 

• I clearly remember that as I circulated around the room, I was so impressed at how engaged the children were in their discussions. Sometimes good teaching is getting out of the way.

• If I may say so myself, I think the video is well made.

Takeaway? Good kid-centered teaching doesn't require tech. But tech allowed me to share what I was doing in class in ways I never could before.

Embedding Tech in a World Religion Project

Recently, I created a project that checked a lot of important boxes for me. I'd like to share it. But first, some context.

For starters, "digital natives" are a myth. I've heard it said that a person considers anything created after they are born to be technology. There is a certain truth to that. For kids, internet has been around longer than they've been alive. They consider its use natural.  I've also heard children born in this millennium are digital natives and that they intuitively know how to use technology. This is less true. Some kids love technology and they immerse themselves in it. These "super-users", however, are the exception. Most kids use tech more passively. I wanted to create an assignment that naturally incorporated technology into my school's traditional history curriculum. (I don't use "traditional" as a pejorative. I simply describe it as it is.)

Still in my first year as a technology integration specialist, I spend a good bit of time looking to see who is "doing" technology well. One school doing it well is +New Tech High School in Coppell, TX. Inspired by a science assignment from this school, I built a history assignment which required tech use to promote tech literacy. This was central to the assignment.

I also hoped to give students real choice (see my recent blog post). So I originally built the project to have 5 assignments with students choosing two of them. Within our department, we reduced the assignment to giving three choices and having students choose one.

This project serves as a culminating project for a months' long study of major world religions. It is not atypical for teens to dismiss religion. The teen years are a time when many question the beliefs with which they were raised. As we present these world religions, we present their religious texts, histories, and beliefs.  Yet, when religion is explained ONLY by its origins, beliefs, and customs one can simply view religion to be just that, a collection of goofy beliefs and strange practices. Beliefs and practices by themselves do not capture what millions and even billions of religious people get from their religion. Religion is a lived experience, an "inside job". This article helped shaped my thinking as I created this assignment.  I hoped the project would help students look within to see how religion and belief manifest themselves in their own lives. I also hoped that students would draw on some of the other belief systems they have been exposed to as they considered what they themselves believe.

Several years ago, PBS revived a series from the 1950's called This I Believe. Many began to post their own This I Believe podcasts to PBS' site. I thought this to be a great tool to foster the look within that I so wanted the students to do.

Finally, I wanted the audience for the project to be greater than just me. I had students update their blogs or build new and better ones (blogger, googlesites, and bulbapp) so that their projects could be posted in them. I will also encourage students to submit their podcasts to This I Believe.

Here is the assignment in its final iteration.

Epic Citadel Project

This assignment really showed me technology's potential for making my classroom a more dynamic place. Yet, though this project had "bells and whistles", a real "wow" factor, it also had the fundamentals of good Language Arts teaching. Students were immersed in this large, final creative writing project. We used the app, Epic Citadel as a focus. This frankly beautiful app allowed the children to roam an amazingly detailed and rich fantasy setting. What I liked about this app is that there are no characters, challenges or distractions; it is purely just a world waiting to be explored. The potential this left for creative thinking was significant. Plot and character development became central to the teaching in the unit. Students used BookCreator to publish their finished stories. They used iMovie to make introductions for their stories. 
Click the link to see some of the finished work. http://fcsepiccitadel.blogspot.com/. Below is one of the many fine finished projects. Folks at +St George  seem to have discovered this about the same time I did last year. I give full credit for the idea to Tim Parkinson's Blog

Using iMovie Instead of a Newsletter.

   I made this movie last year to explain to parents what was going on in class. Sometimes, actually letting parents see what we are doing is so much more powerful than writing about it.
   It took a little extra effort to make this than to compose a letter, but not too much more. Give it a try! Jump in, the water's warm.
    Also, the video explains the powerful learning practice of Literature Circles, first invented in the early 80's, but became more well known by the mid-90's. If you want to promote active learning in a lower or middle school reading or social studies program, give literature circles a try.
   For more information about Lit Circles, click here to see the book I used to help set them up.

Task iMovie

Is this cheating? Or should I make a new one from scratch? I don't really know about next year. This is something I did this past year.