If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. ~ Charlie Parker
Archive for November, 2011
Writing with My Students: Earth as Experiment
Nov 14th
I have been trying to work for more content-area related connections to our mostly-daily writing prompts in class as part of our shift into Common Core writing, and of course, as they write, so do I (and so should you). One resource that has been making my life easier is the blog simply called Writing Prompts but which is completely made up of visual prompts. Many of them connect nicely with science, math and social studies. And most are very thought-provoking. It’s a wonderful site.
On Friday, we used this one about earth as a science experiment, and it tied in with their recent work in science around the Scientific Method. We talked about what the alien might hypothesize, and then what kind of data collection it might do, and what conclusions it would discover. Then, they had a choice: they could create a fake science experiment write-up, a dialogue skit between the alien and a teacher, or a short story. I wrote this short story with them, using humor to tell my story.
“I can’t stand these planetary science experiments,” I grumbled, pushing another nebula galaxy towards my best friend, Zingledoop. “It’s so … meaningless. Like, when will we ever need to know how to make a planet?”
”I know. And it always ends in disaster,” Zingledoop replied. He took the galaxy and popped into his nutrient chute. “Remember the last one?”
Of course, I did. I still have a vision of that flattened planet, all smooshed because Zingledoop had sat on it accidentally. We’d thrown that planet away into the intergalactic trash bin, just like the others.
“Maybe this one will be different,” I said hopefully. “What do the instructions say?”
Zingledoop pulled the instructions out of his left nostril and looked it over. “Create a planet with life forms that are destined to destroy the planet. Come up with a hypothesis, data collection and be prepared to write a conclusion of your experiment.”
“Great,” I said. “We’re just going to let them destroy it?”
“Unless we do it first,” Zingledoop said, and we both laughed.
We quickly got down to work. In some ways, we were old pros at this. We’d created our fair share of planets and done plenty of intergalactic science experiments. With this planet, we decided that we would see what happens if we incrementally increased the planet temperatures. With ice caps and large oceans, the place would soon be flooded out. Or at least, that’s what we predicted. We’d be speeding up time to see if our prediction came true or not.
It was sort of boring. We’d “done” planets. What we wanted were Universes, but our teacher kept telling us “first things first.” So, here we were, creating this planet called …
“What’s this place to be called?” I asked.
Zingledoop looked at the instructions. “Earth,” he answered.
”Earth? That’s a pretty lame name.”
“Yeah. But on the bright side of things, it won’t be around for long.”
We both laughed again.
Peace (in the experiment),
Kevin
App Review: My Doodle Game
Nov 13th
I was about one minute into trying out My Doodle Game, an app for the iPad that allows you to make Doodle-Jump style games, when my seven year old demanded (with vigor) that I let him take over and create the game. And by the way, Dad, go away for while and I will call you back when my game is ready to go. So I left the room and came back, and then I played a pretty neat game that my son designed and created within a short amount of time.
My Doodle Game is surprising rich, and robust (and I thank my friend, Skip Via, for showing me how students he is documenting in Alaska are using iPads for this app). Best of all? The app is free. That’s right. Free. (There is a cost for the software version for computers and it runs about $15. I’d rather have free, to be honest. Now, this free cost means that you don’t have access to every character and every option in the pretty extensive library, but there is plenty to do with the free options, including an array of heroes and villains and various objects to place in the path of your little stickman. You can also pay to add more to your library.
If I had a class of iPads (oops, I mean a class of students with iPads … hehehe), I would add My Doodle Game to the list of apps I’d like to see on there. In fact, I’d want more apps to be like this one — shifting the student from player of the game to creator of the game.
See what the kids from Alaska were up to:
Peace (in the app),
Kevin
Book Review: Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out
Nov 12th
On the second day of school this year, two of my sixth graders came up to me, incredibly excited. These two bous asked if I would watch their latest video on Youtube. It was a video that captured them and their friends on scooters, on our school grounds, doing all sorts of neat tricks, set to pounding music. They were doubly-excited when I allowed them to share the video with the rest of the class, and now give me regular updates on their video exploits. The proud look on their faces was priceless, particularly that early in the year.
I mention this episode because these boys were on the back of my mind as I was reading through Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, a collection of ethnographic research studies out of MIT around youth and media and technology that are pulled together in a collective voice around themes such as friendship, family, intimacy, gaming, work, and more. What stands out for me here is how the authors so successfully captured the voices of youth through their various interviews with their subjects. We “hear” the kids talking through the use of social networking, and video gaming, and video production. It’s a fascinating look at what young people are doing, and why they are doing what they are doing in these various ecologies of connections. The sections around gaming and video use was particularly insightful as a teacher, and the sections on the disconnect between parents and their children was eye-opening as well.
It also reminds me that we need to have more of these conversations with our young people in our own spaces, whether that is our classroom or our homes.
It’s clear that the learning going on in traditional classrooms is not reaching many of these media-saturated youths, who see school only as another place to network and not necessarily as a place to learn skills around media production and technology use. After-school clubs and spaces fill that gap, to some degree, but mostly, it is youth turning to other youth for mentorship and collective knowledge around these ideas. They are driven by passions that we don’t always acknowledge or cherish in our schools. What the authors rightfully note, though, is that this horizontal learning of friend-to-friend can also leave a lot of kids out, adding to the difficulties of the digital divide/app gap/whateveryouwanttocallit. Access to technology remains a huge hurdle for many communities of kids.
Although much of the networking chapters revolve around MySpace, I just substituted Facebook in my head and it was fine (although the elements of MySpace that kids liked — such as completely designing your homepage yourself with hacks — doesn’t quite pertain to Facebook, and that lack of personaluty makes me wonder if another site will come along to drain young people away from Facebook now that MySpace is just about dead and gone.) I also imagined that the networking elements described in the studies, now a few years old, has magnified and intensified dramatically for many kids.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who teaches young people, or who has children growing up in this age of media and technology. The collection here is very scholarly in tone, as befits these enthnographic studies, but don’t let that academic tone turn you off. It’s worth diving through all of that to get to the heart of the matter: the fact that the ways in which kids are learning is changing and most of that learning is being done outside of school. The book certainly made me think of my own boys, and my students, in a different sort of light.
As I was reading Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out, I was using Goodreads as a place to stop and reflect at various points in the book. Here is a copy of that page, which you need to read in reverse order if you want to follow my thinking from the start of the book until the end.
Peace (in the inquiry),
Kevin