Making Classrooms Work

So here we are in the 21st Century and still stuck with 18th century schoolrooms and 19th century desks.

I've been exploring different seating arrangements for groups, and still like the easy mobility of wheeled chairs, central gathering places, and ways to quickly create breakouts of small groups that can still see the teacher/board and report back without too much furniture noise.

This younger children's class (described by Amy Spies at TeachingChannel  shows a nice option using the furniture at hand:

The groups of four are open-ended at the side facing the teacher/board, and the space between the desks holds a 3-drawer cabinet with supplies like paper, pencils and crayons:

SteelCase offers a much higher tech option, adopted at the U of Oregon's Yamada Language Lab, that is sleek and classy. Three boards/projection screens allow students sitting in any direction to see what is happening. The teacher is no longer fronting the class--at least in theory--though the computer/projector now seems to be the center:

From the Steelcase video

What students have to say about it is very interesting:

From the Steelcase video

With the flipped classroom, the projection multiplication may be a bit of overkill, but at least there is a strong move to put students' heads together.

Using About.me for student self-introductions

I've been away, mostly vacationing, but also working with the Electronic Village Online, which has been experimenting with some new venues, such as Edmodo and About.me. Hope to have more time to report later, but here is my personal About.me/ page:

Oddly, when I tried to embed it here, the script does not show the snazzy overlay with my picture. You'll have to visit the page at http://about.me/ehansonsmi/ to see it. However, it is kind of a handy way to do a short biography. The "3-2-1" snippet about me is an idea suggested by the EVO Coordinating Team to introduce ourselves quickly. Might be a good way to do introductions in a class. The student chooses the background and icon, and writes the text.

Mostly Free Diagramming Tools Online

I've been exploring several drawing tools, particularly those for making graphs and diagrams. I'm trying to stick to free and online in this discussion, though a few for-pay tools have some nice advantages, mainly storage space and collaboration.

Among other advantages, drawing tools can help students mind-map and brainstorm; collect and display numerical data in charts and graphs; demonstrate reflective learning in storyboards or networked images; and so on. Graphing skills become increasingly important as an academic tool as students progress through school, but charts and graphs can be a fun motivation even for younger students.

Gliffy is one of my old favorites, but it limits you to just 5 drawings, unless you go for the somewhat pricey paid account (5 users for up to 200 drawings, for about $10, as of this writing). It does very nice Venn diagrams from templates, has loads of pre-formed objects, such as arrows and rectangles, and supports HTML5.

Cacoo is entirely free and looks like a very friendly interface, and one appropriate for middle school kids. You can create:

wire frames, mind maps, network charts, and site maps . . . simply pick and "drag and drop" elements from a large library of stencils.

Cacoo is one of the free programs with a free-hand drawing option, too.


Creately is another free program with great features, and like Gliffy, allows up to 5 drawings with limited collaborative possibilities.  It gives you only diagrams, but offers nice Venn templates, and a large selection of templates for K-12, including:

...Storyboards, Fishbone Diagrams, T Charts, Y Charts, Venn Diagrams, and much more..

Google Drawings has only a very basic toolkit, so don't expect a great deal, but it is quick and easy and the interface will be familiar from Google docs.


If you want a very professional look, but have only a limited project, try Microsoft's Visio or SmartDraw. Both of these have a free trial period and many features.

Using QR in the Classroom

You may have noticed increasing uses of QR (Quick Response) codes, for example, to make a trail of ecology facts in a national park, or to provide a self-guided tour of a museum exhibition. I've returned to this YouTube video, from the American TESOL Institute channel, several times, as it has some great ideas for using QR (Quick Response) codes with students:



http://youtu.be/V0kdbBTwF7U


The video describes what QR is, how you can make your own, and how you can teach students to make their own for content-based projects, to link to podcasts, to make electronic portfolios, etc. For example, as seen in this image, students can scan the QR with their mobiles to get more information about skeletal structure.





If students construct the content they create reusable learning objects for subsequent classes to read, listen to, and improve.

Thanks to Webheads for finding this great video originally. There are a number of other videos on QR with more ideas in the YouTube sidebar.

EFL CLASSROOM MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

This monthly blog/newsletter from EFL Classroom gives you ideas, resources, and a place to set up your own online classroom. Links to video talks, new online resources, ongoing discussions and blogs, student-created content, ideas for current seasonal holidays, and their own Diigo Group, et al.

EFL Classroom has developed well over the past year or so, and is well worth following.

Glogster

Just revisiting Gloster again. Could be very useful for creative students, perhaps to build a collage based on their reading of a work.

Here's a little poster I built with my granddaughter. (Actual size is 960 X 1300.) The app is free.

TED: John Underkoffler points to the future of User Interface

This video from the TED (Technology, Education, and Design)conference in February (Long Beach, CA) has some astonishing new ways to look at user wetware-computer connections.




It's amazing to see Tom Cruise's Minority Report interface now displayed with many different ramifications. The new interfaces use computations that are "space-soluable and network-soluable," allowing a user to drag/send their visual information from one "monitor" to another,both co-located and in space, with a hand gesture. In five years' time will this be the computer we get??

For more TED Talks see http://www.TED.com.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is an amazing third-generation search engine that can tell you almost anything about anything: math, chemistry, socioeconomics, geography, etc. You can input a formula, or just a few words as a question, and Wolfram will make the appropriate assumptions about what you want to know. Especially good with relational data, e.g., what's the ratio of France's GDP to Italy's?



The screencast illustrates a few of the many ways this tool can be useful: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

This should be an excellent classroom tool, both in content-based projects and math work, and for general English, writing research papers, making predictions, etc.

Personas for Firefox

Just had some fun creating my own "persona" (theme) for my Firefox browser.


https://www.getpersonas.com/

This might be a good activity for your students. They need to create a long, narrow photo for the top and the bottom of the browser, and then upload it to the site. All the step-by-step directions and specifications are at the site (a good reading activity, and/or watch the tutorial video), and they can try it out before uploading. After the photo is accepted, they can share their personal favorites and/or make their theme public for others to use.

You will need to be able to download an add-on to Firefox before starting the process, so this may require the OK from your school administration or tech support. However, the download itself takes only a few seconds.

Web 3.0

Webhead Moira Hunter tipped me off (see her blog) to this interesting video about Web 3.0, the semantic Web, as seen on Kate Ray's Vimeo site:

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

It gets increasingly interesting as you watch: should the semantic Web have pre-defined ontologies? Of course, Vance Stevens and most Webheads would answer a resounding "no!" If contemporary Web is increasingly about social networking, it is left to developers to help us find and explore new ways of interconnecting.

Resources for Teaching Poetry

Just came across Google's tool, Search Stories, for creating a video out of your online searches. I did one on Resources for Teaching Poetry.

It's a pretty nifty tool, and students might get a kick out of using it as a way to present their initial searches in a content-based project.

Teaching Poetry

This great little slideshow, Teaching Poetry, at Slideshare, illustrates many of the types of poems taught by Kenneth Koch in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, my all-time favorite book on how to teach poetry.

Teaching Poetry

View more presentations from mungo13.

You can analyze each slide/poem and then have your students write something similar. It is amazing how rapidly they come to understand what metaphoric language is and how to use it. I have also put some more specific directions and other examples of poetry on my Website at Quicksteps to Teaching Poetry. This was one of the favorite parts of my Liberal Arts Teachers class in English.

A related site, Poetry Tools, offers a nifty little Flash tool so that students can generate some nice little Metaphors right online, or download the tool for desktop use. This is a nice way to introduce the poetry writing sessions suggested by the Teaching Poetry slideshow.


And be sure to get Koch's book if you want to know more. It's available at Amazon.com.

Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense Technology

These wearable technologies were seen about 10 yrs ago at the MIT Media Lab, but this goes even farther (and smaller). Clever, and Mistry wants them to be open source. (About 13 min., but a must-see.)



Thanks to Webhead Andy Picon for the tip!

WallWisher

WallWisher is not as useful pedagogically as other social networking tools I can think of.

You can add a picture (from a URL), or video, or audio file, but it doesn't have a way to put a URL into the text (without using up the tiny letter count), so that users can easily go visit the site. If you want to illustrate your sticky, you need another place/server/or knowledge of how to get an image location to stick it in. You can post to Facebook, et al., and link to pictures in Flickr.

The limited number of words/letters on a sticky means you can't say much--this is probably an advantage for young learners, but not necessarily for their education. A blog or wiki would give them the opportunity to be more expansive.


You could have a main sticky and then ask students to respond to it. But there is no way to organize the stickies besides moving them around physically. So this means the teacher/owner of the wall must do the work of organization, or let things happen at random. (See Nik Peachey's wall of teacher tools for social networking.)

So on the whole, I like the idea of a communal blog or wiki better: more opportunity to write expansively, ways to comment, RSS feed, easy ways to include URLs and lots of pictures, and esp. with a wiki, ways to organize pages.

But I can see Wallwisher as a way to make comments on an event or single Web page. You might have students visit a page or view a video (or put one into a head sticky), and then make a short comment on a Wallwisher page. If you have only 15-30 students, they could all read each other's comments (but if they then make more comments, you've quickly got a huge, disorganized mess...) If you use WallWisher the way it was intended, perhaps to wish a class member happy birthday, or to congratulate someone on getting citizenship, or to make a wish list, or to put up reminders for a project, then it's a nifty application.

Animoto

Animoto is easy to use and a lot of fun! You can upload photos and video, and the app puts them together in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms. You can also add music from your desktop or purchase something from iTunes. Once the video is completed, you can edit it, and share via email or embedding your blog or Website, as I have done here:



The free version of this editing tool is only 30 seconds long (about 12 photos). For $3 US you can upgrade to an any length video, or for $30, you can make any length videos for a year. Ronaldo Lima's school uses the latter option, and students use Animoto extensively as a way of publishing their projects.

To use the program, students would take and select photos and video of their project, arrange and upload the shots, and select appropriate music. (There is very little writing involved, unlike other programs where there might be titling on each photo.) I believe students could, however, create a desktop recording (e.g., with Audacity) describing the photos as they flash by, and use that file instead of the "music" accompaniment. For an additional $5 per video, you can make a higher resolution or MPG4 version that can be downloaded and/or burned to a DVD.

Thanks to Ronaldo Lima of the Webheads for mentioning this app.

Online Magazines

Webheads have been collecting ideas for creating e-zines. Here is the list of potential Internet sites and software that might be used for free or cheaply:

To create a magazine online
http://www.formatpi xel.com/go/ en/index. php
http://www.presspub lisher.com/

To publish in the form of magazine (first you need to create the
contents and export to pdf)
http://issuu. com/
http://www.yudu. com/
http://www.mixbook. com/

To export to pdf (an example):
pdfcreator:
http://sourceforge. net/project/ downloading. php?group_ id=57796& use_mirror= switch&filename= PDFCreator- 0_9_7_setup. exe&a=75987836

For desktop publishing
Scribus (locally in your computer)
http://sourceforge. net/project/ downloading. php?group_ id=125235& use_mirror= dfn&filename= scribus-1. 3.3.12-win32- install.exe& a=17416234

to draw a poster
inkscape (Vector Graphics Editor)
http://sourceforge. net/project/ downloading. php?groupname= inkscape& filename= Inkscape- 0.46.win32. exe&use_mirror= garr

OpenOfice Draw
Download: http://download. openoffice. org/

to create posters online
http://www.glogster .com/

Thanks to Fernanda Rodrigues in Portugal for summarizing this thread.

Jonathan Zittrain, the Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It (video)

Zittrain's video came at a most timely moment, as my friend in France, Mike Marzio of the Real English School had just had his wonderful videos ripped off by a Brazilian "entrepreneur," who was cutting CDs of the recordings. Painful!

After many messages from outraged Webheads, the offending works were removed. You can see the comparison of the works and the outcome at Mike's site.

The tie-in to Zittrain is a little thin. He describes how spam is ruining the Internet and how that problem may affect future development of and user choices on the Web. He suggests that a top-down solutions can be oppressive to creativity and the "generative Internet," while community cooperation and resources may be able to stop the looming danger and keep the "creative Internet" safe. However, I see the connection to Mike's case in that user-generated content has to have protections without being oppressively legalistic. In this case, the community responded to protect its member from being ripped off--and it worked!

BTW, the Real English videos are now accessible for free, and Mike continues to add new content frequently at Real English.

Free Digital Photos

This looks like it might be a useful site to find imagess for a vocabulary exercise or for student projects. Photos are free and copyright free. Of course, there is always the option to add the extra $$ for a print version. Also, student photographers can upload their work and ask for money. Good potential.

VUE - Visual Understanding Environment

I have explored VUE, a project of Tufts University, while looking at a variety of mind-mapping or concept-mapping sites and software. VUE is free and has an excellent, visually attractive video explaining its features. It seems to combine the best of mind maps, presentation software, and the flexibility to link across several different concept tracks. It is well worth exploring for advanced student projects, for example, involving research and media, and is a free download and cross-platform (but not for Mac X.3). It looks to be an excellent presentation platform because, unlike PowerPoint, it can combine linear and non-linear approaches to presenting.

AuthorStream

Authorstream is an interesting way to quickly get your PowerPoint presentation online--without going through the fuss of saving it as html, and then mounting all the pages and files to a Web page.

I created a wiki for my presentation at TESOL on CALL and SLA research, copied it to PowerPoint slides, and then uploaded the resulting ppt to my Authorstream page. If there were video or audio attached, AuthorStream would convert the file to a YouTube format. Mine is just a slideshow.

UPDATE: Thanks to all who visited the slideshow. I now have the audio uploaded to both AuthorStream and Ourmedia.org.