Lazyteacher

Continuing the discussion on Brain Rules from yesterday, I want to use this post to sketch out some ideas for lectures or concepts that I teach all the time, lectures that might benefit from being set out in a animation or a video.

dy/dan, a math teacher who has a pretty fervent following as been putting out pretty impressive short videos about, well, video-making for the classroom. As far as I can tell, he is of the Ze Frank school of talking head+quick cuts+B-roll illustration school which is definitely workable and accessible to kids.

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

It’s chief flaw–as far as I can tell from what he’s done so far–is that it reproduces the structure of a lecture too closely. dy/dan himself seem to feel this when he worries that he is “feeling a bit ripped apart by the distance between Job & Hobby.” It feels too much like an enhanced lecture than a completely new structure. For instance, this CommonCraft Whiteboard set up or this elaborate video castigating Google’s ubiquity might have the kids wondering less about why they are watching a video of someone who is right there, but these would take even more time to make.

So, the obvious answer is to get someone else or the students to make the videos. Here are my top lessons I’d like to see get the video treatment. Of course, then it would make sense to do a little Action Research to find out if videos like these result in actual better learning.

• The Show don’t Tell principle in writing (Jerz’s handout on this is pretty amazing).
• Turning off your internal censor (in other words, dare to stink)
• Using strong verbs and avoiding passive voice
• Why the entire writing process is necessary for good writing
• Metaphors and other figurative devices: why they help writing come alive

Medina notes research that shows that we learn facts more readily and for longer if we have moving images, but is that also true for more conceptual understanding? Has research been done on that? I hope to take a shot at making at least the Show don’t Tell video. A really lazyteacher would just find what other people have done, but I haven’t found good vids on writing topics yet.