Facilitate Wonder

This post starts with some “how tos”: How do you embed pictures in pictures?  How can I make a “how to” video for computer instruction?  It closes with some questions and thoughts about “what fors.”

First, the how to:

On the VFE Workshops Page, I’ve added materials related to our most recent workshop.  That includes:

• the session PowerPoint , with the beginning of a Taughannock Falls State Park VFE and;
• a short video on how to embed pictures in pictures.

Some other resources for Taughannock Falls:

• If you’re after just some of the pictures of Taughannock, more than 40 are on a page I created on Flickr.com and,
• here’s the central part of the PowerPoint in pdf format.  Note that the links embedded in the pictures are preserved in the pdf.

And, just a couple of nice pictures of the falls:

It was pretty dry in August of 2005 when this picture was taken.  The people by the water’s edge give you a good idea of scale.  The falls is 215 feet high.  If you go today, you’ll note that the toungue of just below and to the right of the crest of the falls is missing its left half.

Here’s a picture taken from below the falls from just over a year later.  Do you see the difference?

There are more pictures on the Flickr.com page.

I wanted to share the simple and nifty way I made the “how to video.”

The Jing Project has free software for capturing video of your computer screen and, at least for the time being, allows you to share those “screencasts” for free.  The video tour on the homepage gives a good overview of its basic use and has the download link.

I was initially puzzled by where the icon went when I started the software.  It practically goes out of sight into the corner.  I could make an introductory video on how to use just about any bit of software with Jing - except for Jing itself as it intentionally goes into the background when in use.  And, besides, Jing has a page of “How do I…” videos.

Now, just a few thoughts on the What Fors:

Why embed pictures in pictures?

This is one small way we can simulate the field experience.  We want students to do things geologists do when in the field even when we can’t get students actually into the field.  One key thing is simply that, when in the field, you can take a closer look at the things of your own choosing.  Sarah Miller’s Virtual Fieldwork Experience of the area around Norwich, New York is a good example.

The examples for Tuaghannock provided here really only give the opportunity to look more closely at things I, as the teacher, chose.   Hopefully though, you can see how to build on that as you gradually develop your own VFEs.

What can you do with how to videos?

If you do a computer activity in class, you can create a set of the key technological steps.  That could let you focus on teaching your content rather than how to be a technician with the particular software.  If your kids are using PowerPoint, for example, your primary goal as a science teacher is the science they present, not the stylishness of their slide transitions.

Using Jing when you don’t have the Internet in your classroom…

This past year, I taught in a classroom without Internet access.  I used Jing to show certain animations from websites that didn’t save to my computer’s cache.  I could, for example, play sequences of weather maps from here: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/sfcloop/namne_wbg.html

Closing thoughts and questions…

It turns out making the video was about the simplest piece of this post.  I don’t think I’d have guessed that were I the reader.  Wow.  It seems as though something’s changed in the way I can post pictures on the blog to make it more complicated, and embedding videos too.

What uses do you see for these technologies?  What other techniques and technologies will or have you employed in VFEs (or teaching other stuff)?

I’ve uploaded the draft PowerPoint on the VFE Workshops page and included some supporting information on that same page. 

I hope to be blogging more soon.

Don

This post perhaps foreshadows what I thought I’d be writing after the last post. In recognition of Dina’s comment on the last post about the double-edged sword of radical reform in the edusphere, I’m trying to make the case that it’s inevitable that change is forthcoming. We can help to inform that change or not. (And again, I don’t sense she’d disagree with me there).

Last night in thinking more about the end of school, it occurred to me that it’s in certain ways akin to current bursting of the real estate bubble and the earlier bursting of the dotcom bubble. Things generally don’t inflate forever.

Of course the U.S. military budget (and the overall U.S. budget and debt) are unlikely to expand forever. We know the same kinds of expansions came to a close for both Great Britain in the early 20th century and the Soviet Union at the end of that same century.

What are the things I’m talking about inflating related to the end of school?

Well, college tuition is one. These costs simply cannot rise forever. A second is the overall inflation of academic credentials. And grade inflation. At some point there will be corrections in all of these areas. A tuition correction will come when a better way to learn becomes obvious to the masses. (Or when we have complete economic collapse). I think the popping of the tuition bubble will be simultaneous with a burst in the inflating bubble of credential inflation. Of course, not all inflating things burst. Some may stabilize instead of explode. I think that’s more likely if people foresee the coming change.

Other examples? Some things inflate for an incredibly long time – like the human population. The population bubble will either burst catastrophically or gradually stabilize. That clearly depends on whether we’re smart as a population or not so smart (or if our leaders are smart and effective). Our track record isn’t so encouraging here, but last night I started reading Common Wealth, Jeffery Sachs’ new book. It appears to offer some hope for us.

One more: the healthcare bubble will either burst catastrophically or stabilize.

I think the analogy has legs. I invite you to either strengthen those legs or break them. Are there things that inflate forever? Are any of them human constructs? Are the things that seem to be forever inflating really endless or is it just that we can’t yet understand what will make them stabilize or pop?  Is the edusphere like the stock market — in the long term it grows and grows and grows, but are there periods where it shrinks in the shorter term?  I don’t know.

Again I ask, what do you think?

My professional goals have changed.  For most of the last twenty years, I’ve been trying to make schools better.  Over the last two years, that goal faded as I saw the problems of schools as firmly entrenched as the institution itself.  I came to Tapestry because I wanted to help make better schools.  Now I find this approach inadequate as well.  It’s time to make something better than schools.  

I see the institution of schooling (including academia) becoming vulnerable to collapse.  I came to Tapestry hoping, more or less, to be part of the overthrow of traditional schooling, and, curiously, I find myself using a more traditional approach than I have since I was newbie in the field.  What Tyack & Cuban call “the grammar of schooling” is very powerful indeed.

I came to Tapestry having given up on school reform. I came to Tapestry to engage in school replacement.  I saw (and still see) the rate of change within schools as, thanks to global warming, slower than glacial.  School reform can improve education, but I think the rate of change is doomed to be subglacial.

Allow me to expand on that a bit. When I was a beginning teacher back in the 1980s, school reform was often described as being like rebuilding a jumbo jet while in flight.  I was attracted to the metaphor. I thought, “Yes! It really is that hard!” I still like the metaphor, but for different reasons.  Now I think, “Yes, it really is that stupid!”  

They aren’t building the next generation of aircrafts by remodeling or rebuilding the current ones! They are making replacements, applying new engineering approaches, perhaps most importantly using much lighter weight materials for the aircraft bodies. Fortunately, they aren’t making these changes to airplanes that are in flight.  You really can’t substantially re-engineer either a school or a plane while it’s in use.

If you try, the thing will almost certainly crash.

That means make the change incredibly slowly. Or die. Or take the thing apart and rebuild it from scratch.

I think places like Tapestry might productively contribute to the partial collapse of traditional schooling, but I think homeschooling will play a stronger role in the end of schools’ hegemony in the edusphere.

Tapestry is an above average urban school, but it’s still essentially a school.  We put 25 or so kids in a room hour after hour after hour; day after day after day; year after year after year and expect kids to emerge substantially smarter at the end of that then they started.

That very commonplace idea certainly doesn’t seem like  a very good idea, but what should we do instead?  That’s a topic for another day.  Or for your comments.

I’ll close with a note to reiterate the point made in earlier posts and responses to comments on earlier posts — I know that it is possible for teachers to overcome the constraints of the system and change kids lives.   I personally know many such teachers.  A key point that I’m trying to make here is that I believe it is possible to create a new operating system for education that would make such an outcome much more likely.

Cheers,

Don

This is the visualization of an idea that I created while doing my dissertation research many years ago.

It’s been on my mind a lot lately. It’s easy to blame other parts of the system for the frustrations you (or I) feel. Of course, placing blame is only of limited utility. If you don’t use the determination of causality (a.k.a., figuring out who or what is to blame) of a problem to help solve that problem, there’s no real point to it. Except maybe to make you feel better. And that’s not unimportant, but…

But, it doesn’t really improve much other than your own state of mind.

If, however, it leads to helping to solve the problem, assigning blame is worthwhile.

It seems to me that the desire is often to blame individuals or classes of individuals (as in the diagram above). I think this misses the mark much of the time. Even blaming problematic institutions misses the mark. Schools didn’t create the problems of society (or at least not most of them). Is it appropriate for schools to fix them?

You might argue that that is what schools are for.  You might be right.

However, schools, as they stand today, aren’t up to the task. As I’ve noted before, most Americans don’t understand basic science, basic mathematics, basic history, and on and on, even though they’ve been taught that stuff over and over again.

Schools seem intent on teaching that stuff, but I think in a decade or two we’ll look back and see that that was the wrong prescription for the ailments of our society.  I suppose that statement is me placing blame on schools for not fixing our problems.

Much to ponder, and I’ve been pondering much in my hiatus from blogging. Hopefully I’ll get more of that out there in the next little while.

Cheers,

Don

Check out the sunrise on two different days of the year shot from the same window.  The videos were shot out of my classroom window at Tapestry High School (on the third floor of St. Mary’s School for the Deaf) in Buffalo, NY.

Note too the times for sunrise on the different dates. The first video shows the morning of November 11, 2007. The second shows the morning of January 3, 2008.

Pay attention to where the sun rises on the different days. (The time is hard to read underneath the youtube logo, dang it). You can run both videos at the same time and pause them at sunrise.  If you watch the video on the youtube site, there’s no logo.  The dates above are linked to Youtube and will open each in its own window.

The building in the distance is Erie County Medical Center. The clouds, especially in the second video are pretty cool to watch too.

Cheers,

Don

Do your best to forget all you know about schools (but remember what you understand about learning).  Now, picture this conversation:

Fred: I’ve got a great idea! Let’s put 20 or 25 fifteen year-olds in a room for fifty minutes at a shot and have some adult tell them about algebra!

Jackie: That is a great idea! Say, you could have them do that everyday!

Nate: Yeah! Yeah! And you could do it with biology and history too!

Jackie: And Spanish and English and Art! They’d be able to maybe go down the hall to different rooms for each of those things for the fifty minute blocks.   That’d be so awesome!

Keesha:  Ooh!  We might be able to get a couple of thousand teenagers into a really big building all at once!  You all are geniuses!

Fred:  Oh indeed we are!   Indeed we are.

Of course, this isn’t how high schools came to be as they are.   But, if the idea sounds stupid in this imagined discussion, maybe that’s because it’s simply a bad idea.  Maybe schools fail so many students because the structure is fatally flawed.

Maybe the reason so many bright, hard working nice people leave the field of teaching is because the field has set out a task for itself that is next to impossible.

None of this is to say that schools don’t have positive effects on many students.  Clearly they do.   Most Americans, according to an AP-AOL Poll, can identify a teacher who changed their lives. But 37% of us can’t.  And by the time you graduate from high school, you’ve probably had about 40 teachers…

Is trying to improve schools in 2007 akin to trying to improve typewriters in 1987?  That is, something that’s possible (and important to the users) but…

The safety information is below.

The longer term plan includes having students create things a little like this:

To figure out how to do class-based video production, I’ve started the first one and we’ll work together as a class to make a copy with subtitles that describes ( but does not explain) what happens.  The original, without the descriptive subtitles, can then be used by other classrooms to puzzle over the demonstration.

They too can create a careful description and check it against their initial explanation. Almost everyone has an initial explanation that fails to correctly explain the order of observed events.

I’ve spent an absurdly long time processing this demonstration, and I hope it is ultimately worthwhile. As I see it, understanding the underlying science is required to understand convection and that understanding convection is required to understand an incredible amount of Earth science. Understanding a bit about fire is also helpful for understanding quite a bit more about Earth processes.

I’ll admit the production values need a little work.

Later this week, I plan to post #2: A Water (Vapor) Balloon: What happens when you microwave a sealed balloon with just a few drops of water in it?

SAFETY AND OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THE GLASS ON THE FACE DEMONSTRATION:

 I have burned myself in two different ways doing this demonstration:

1. Holding the glass on its side or at an angle before placing it against my cheek. DON’T DO THAT!!!   This allowed the upper rim of the glass to heat up and that created a semi-circular burn on my cheek.

2. I used too large a piece of paper and consequently had a large flame licking my cheek. DON’T DO THAT EITHER!  That was really just stupid on my part.

I am sure there are a number of other ways to injure yourself when you play with fire in this way.  Be smart.  Be careful.  Where eye protection.

OTHER TIPS:

1.  Teachers should spend time processing the demonstration. Too many science demonstrations are dealt with too quickly. Kids may think it’s cool, but they should also figure out what’s going on. Please don’t simply tell them. (Note too that I haven’t told you why this does what it does).
2. Newspaper burns better than paper intended for the copy machine or printer.  And it’s cheaper.
3. The glass needs to be clear and clean so people can see what’s going on.  Wash it after a few uses to keep it clear.
4. The glass needs to be glass so it won’t melt.
5. Razor stubble makes it so the glass won’t stick.  Shave shortly before the demonstration (if your face requires it).
6. Tik Liem, who I saw do this years ago at a STANYS conference, put the glass on his forehead.  I’ve never had my hair short enough to do that.
7. If you leave the glass on, it will leave a hicky, according to Liem.  I trusted him on this and have never left it on for very long.
8. You may know that accupuncturists do stuff like this as part of therapy.  I don’t have any real sense if such things have any health benefit.  (That’s more an aside than a tip, I suppose.)

And, on a completely different note, I’ve added some folks to my blogroll.  Take a look at what Joe and Melisa have to say.

I should be sleeping at 2:00 a.m. on the night before classes start, but I’m not. I’m thinking about what I’m doing. About what we’re doing at Tapestry. About why I’m doing it and why we’re doing it. Certainly it has some feeling of trying to save the world. Or some kids in Buffalo, anyway. For whatever reason, I’m drawn to that type of work. And I wasn’t doing it at Colgate. Striving to serve the best served didn’t serve me very well.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve twice had jobs that I loved — as a teacher at Norwich High School and as a graduate student (and instructor and researcher) in Michigan State University’s College of Education. I left the first job because I could find something more fun and more important (and because even though I loved it, there were problems that I truly drove crazy and I thought I might be able to help fix those problems). I left the second because I graduated and they wouldn’t let me stay.

Both of those jobs I loved had a few commonalities. Teaching and learning to central to both and so was saving the world. I am trying to save the world, but why? Partly it’s because I think and hope I have skills and knowledge that can be useful in the task. Perhaps more than any of that though, I’m trying to save myself.

While having had good jobs was a blessing, it was also a curse. I know good, rewarding, fun jobs are out there and I can’t settle for a job doing some variant of the wrong thing. Part of what (for me) has made a job fun has been a focus on the public good; on making the world a better place.

So, I’m a goody-goody.

Nah, at least not through and through.

I’m looking to save myself. I’m at my best personally and  professionally when the center of the work is helping others understand important ideas in ways that inform their our action.  That also creates the environment in which I learn best. If I’m doing reasonably well at the task, the energy from my students energizes me. More importantly, students teach me about the world.

Another part of a good job is working with fun and smart people. It looks like I’m doing that too. As things look right now, I’m about to engage in this venture with some very impressive colleagues — we’re committed to doing good work and I think we each hold visions of what might be that resonate with one another. I think that we will make a difference. It looks as though those who got it off the ground already have. An added bonus is that I’m married to one of these wonderful folks. What fun. Life looks good.

G’night.

Don

I’m settling in and back on the blog! Tonight, just some quick thoughts that grew out of some of my summer professional development. I intend to expand these ideas a bit in a future post.

When you make a graph of something, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to show others something you think is important? Or are you trying to figure out what might be important? If you teach, why do you have students create graphs?

My gut (backed up by experience in many, many different classrooms) says that when graphing is used in teaching, it usually is about showing. Do those who are out to discover something have different purposes for their graphs?  Does that have implications for inquiry-oriented teaching?

Can we have our students use graphs to explore their data?  What does that mean?  What does it look like?

I suppose I should note that it is quite important to use graphs to show things to others and that’s key to the work of many researchers, but it’s not the only thing they do with a graph.

Do you have good examples of how you’ve used graphing in either your teaching or your research? Do you have some examples that maybe aren’t so good that you’d like to think through?

These thoughts were catalyzed by The Expeditionary Learning Schools’ High School Institute in Boston last month. The science and math slice of the institute was facilitated by Ron Berger and John LeCavalier.  It was truly good stuff.  Again, more on that later.

It’s good to be back in blogland!

Don