Lazyteacher

I am a technologically ept guy. My dad used to work on those big Wang mainframes that required punch cards to be force fed through in order to enter data. I programmed games in BASIC. Bill Gates had nothing to fear from me, but I come to technology young and it’s second nature much of the time. Now of course, we live in a Golden Age of Nerdocity.

Still, Twitter is a mystery to me (nstearns).

If you don’t know what Twitter is…the basic idea is that Twitter is a micro-blogging program that looks a lot like a party line Instant Messaging board. You have 140 characters to write what you want and then anyone who decided to ‘follow’ you can see what you’ve written. For some people Twitter is like fried, sugary manna from Top Pots Doughnuts. They love it; they rave, they gnash their teeth when it’s down (which is approximately 42.3% of the time).

Why would you want to do that? For me, the Internets are like a big stack of newspapers. I surf and link to find out stuff. I check out Slate magazine or my Google Reader or the New York Times. When my kids tell me, “I spent 6 hours on Facebook last night,” I’m not horrified, I’m mystified. What do you do for 6 hours on Facebook. Do you just write “Whasssup” on 1000 friend walls? That sounds like my version of Hell.

Apparently, even on the Web, I’m not a people person.

But in the classroom, I could see Twitter working. A number of edubloggers have talked about backchannels and how they relieve the tedium associated with paying attention in a lecture. When I watched some of the uStream or CoveritLive NECC conference, I noticed the accompanying chat was pretty off topic, irrelevant, messy, and human. People were responding sincerely to what they were hearing. Even if what people were saying wasn’t always enlightening, it was an improvement to being glued to a chair and having no contact with the people around you beyond passing notes.

If kids were able to chat with each other using one of those tools, would it enhance the classroom experience? Let’s say I were to do a class discussion on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Normally, people would take turns responding to my provocations or leading discussions in certain areas. In a Twitter-ed class, they could be discussing what’s going on on an entirely different level. I could even shoot the chat conversation behind me as we discussed. I’m worried that this violates an important Brain Rule (#4 Attention), but it might be worth it if I’m not able to maintain Attention anyway in a 30 minute discussion.

Anyone ever tried this in the classroom?

Image Credit: Screenshot from TwitterBlocks

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.

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The other brain book I’ve been reading is Brain Rules by John Medina. Dr. Medina works at the UDub as a developmental molecular biologist. His book is part of the wave of books about how brains work and the implications for work and learning. I’ve been hoovering them up lately, even though none of them has yet given me a silver bullet yet. In true blogging fashion, Dr. Medina has broken up his conclusions into 12 Rules:

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Despite the nifty graphics and a strong resistance to the temptation to overpromise, I’m not yet sure how to use this information. The information in the exercise section suggests that some of that TPR stuff might not be such a bad idea. For instance, in my writing class I could start with a fast paced walk around the park to get the blood going and at the halfway mark maybe take an exercise break wherein we could do tree pose or downward dog.

Also, the visual section suggests that we don’t do so hot when it comes to strictly auditory processing. Even static visuals such as Keynote slides seem to be less than effective. Medina blithely suggests that we “animate” our presentations: nuhprobblem! I just teach 185 days out of the year. How hard could it be? Still, I’ve thought about emulating the CommonCraft format of whiteboards and paper cut outs. Or, I could sketch out the basic info I want to communicate and make my kids shoot the animation.

Other bloggers have commented on the book, including Will Richardson, HomeschooledTwins, Engaging Learners, and History Tech. Still, I haven’t seen anyone really try to tease out how this information would play in the classroom. I’ll try in a later post.