Author Archives: dogtrax

From Digital Ethnography: A Video Collage

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You need to check this project out from Prof. Wesch and his students as they continue to explore the impact of technology on students. (Did one student say that 75 percent of what he knows he learned from Youtube?)

Here is what Prof. Wesch says at their blog:

Today the Digital Ethnography Research Team of 2011 is proud to announce the release of the Visions of Students Today: a “video collage” about student life created by students themselves and presented using the wonders of HTML5, allowing us to “cite” books and videos that are being presented in the remix as they are being shown.

Since the call for submissions went out in January we have received hundreds of submissions. The remix in the middle of the screen is in many ways a video of my own experience viewing these videos, shot from my own point of view. You see me sifting through videos, putting them in piles, checking resources, reading and re-reading the lines that have informed and inspired me. It took me 3 months to sift through these materials; you get to race through them in 5 minutes.

But just as important, check out all of the other various strands that come alive with this project, as students take the videos and ideas in different directions. You will have to read the blog post there to get a better sense of what I am talking about, or click inside the video collage itself to follow other strands (wow — html5 does open up some new possibilities, doesn’t it?).

What comes through loud and clear is a growing transformation of the daily lives of young people, and the question of whether traditional education is meeting their needs for learning, exploring and making a difference on the world. And we get to hear that story directly from the students.

Peace (in the collage),
Kevin

Stopmotion Movies from the Classroom

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Here are some of the stopmotion movies my students created this week. There was a mad rush yesterday to get as much done as possible. The one movie that did impress me, and would have been better with more time, is the remake of King Kong, using the black and white effect, and flashlights, and the scale of the figures. These boys had a vision, and I wish I could have given them more time. But, now that they know how to do it, I bet they will be doing stopmotion at home this summer.

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin

The Deadline Looms; Stopmotion Work Quickens

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Today is our last day for working on Stopmotion Movies in class. As I told my students, they either get done today or they won’t get finished. This is our final full day of school, with Monday eaten up by awards ceremonies and other last-day-things-to-do that won’t allow time for playing around and creating movies on the computers. We’re in the “now or never” phase of production.
A few students finished up their movies yesterday — they are short films and some are more focused than others. That’s what happens when a movie project that should be about three weeks gets crunched down to a single week. But I can say that the kids are totally engaged in the work, and they love making stopmotion movies and using our music creator software for the soundtrack.

Here are a few of their creations:

Peace (in the motion),
Kevin

Lessons Learned from the Ballfield

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baseball character

Tonight, my son’s Little League team plays in the city’s Championship Game. I am one of the assistant coaches, but to be honest, if you had asked me mid-season if we were going to go deep in the playoffs, I am not sure what I would have said. We had some erratic games and error-prone losses. But something clicked with these kids in the past two weeks. Our team ended up near the bottom of the regular season standings, but they have been on a tear through the playoffs — hitting, fielding, pitching, etc. We took on the top seed team that went undefeated all year and, twice, we handed them two decisive losses to knock them out of the playoffs.

The other day, the head coach sent us an email about positive comments that he has received from some parents about our style of coaching, which is to keep things fun and positive, and the parents’ appreciation for how we show support even for the players who might make an occasional mistake or lack bat skills at this point in time. It may sound obvious that you would do those sorts of supportive things with 11 and 12 year kids but I can say from experience that some teams have kids sit on the bench for even minor infractions or mistakes.  I’ve watched more than my share of kids on opposing teams kicking at the dirt in the dugout.

Last winter, I wrote a post about my lessons learned from the basketball court as I watched my sons play. This morning, I was thinking a bit about lessons learned from this Little League team, and how those lessons have some resonance with how we approach our classroom environment.

  • Starting the season out with some bonding activities (we held a picnic) set the tone early on that we would be playing together — through thick and thin, with an emphasis on “playing”– and that they should at least respect each other, if not become good baseball friends. Most have.
  • Everybody gets their chance to shine, and not just once — but all season. Even the kids who struggle at this level of baseball play have had plenty of time in the infield and outfield, and at bat. No one is feeling left behind by the team. Win or lose, they know they have a chance to contribute.
  • Practice is important. We’ve had many practices — where we mix serious skills with games, serious with fun — and that seems to have really paid off in many ways. I can hopefully say that every player seems much better as a player now than when we started the season in early Spring (during our rainy season).
  • Keeping things in perspective has been important. It’s a baseball game, after all. The balance of the world doesn’t teeter on the caught or not caught fly ball. We show support for the kids who make that catch just as we do for the kids who don’t make that catch. We set that tone early as coaches, and the team picked up on it, giving everyone high fives when an inning ends or begins.
  • But, there are always teaching moments. Our head coach is great at identifying small moments for teaching individual kids what he knows. Not everything is learned in practice. Sometimes, it is the one-to-one connection that makes all the difference in the world. I’ve watched him get on a knee and have a quiet conversation with just about every player our team.
  • Keep trying. Boy, we’ve come back from a bunch of games just because the team refused to believe the game was over. This mindset that anything may be possible at any given moment is such an intangible thing to try to teach but it is also so important to instill in young people. It’s what we call resilience, right?

We’ll see how tonight goes when the Championship Game gets underway. Win or lose, it’s been a magical season for the boys, including my son. I hope they can savor the moment.

Peace (around the bases),
Kevin

Writing a Rap Song: The Class of 2017 is in the House

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I wrote last week of wanting to try out the writing of a collaborative rap song with my sixth graders. Now, listen, they are 12 and live in suburbia. They don’t have hiphop in their blood. But they listen to rap, and they love music, and it was an interesting experience to walk them through the writing of a song. Most years, I bring in all of rock and roll gear — electric guitar, drum machine, amplifiers, microphones, the works. But, heck, times change. I went with rap this year. And using Garageband, there was a whole lot less gear to carry (my back thanks me).

Here’s what we did:

  • I wrote and recorded the first verse, which celebrates my sixth graders as the class of 2017 — the year they will graduate high school.
  • We listened to the introduction and then reviewed our work around couplets, rhythmic beats and flow from poetry.
  • I gave them a simple handout sheet with my verse written out and some blank lines. Their job was to write at least one couplet that continued the theme and kept the model of the introduction.
  • As a class, we wrote the rap, with students volunteering their lines in a Google Doc and then, again as a class, we worked on the editing of the lines. (Ideally, we would have had more time for this).
  • Volunteers came up to the front of the room, where I had my nifty Snowball microphone set up, and they “sang” the rap for the class. This often took a couple of tries and honestly, another day of recording would have been better. But it is the end of the year and time is our enemy.
  • I then took all four raps from my four classes and spliced them together into one rap song, which I noticed this morning has been downloaded almost 50 times from our class site by my student. And BONUS: a few students apparently took the song and used it as a soundtrack for some video project they are going to give to me. Not sure what to expect …

Why the Collaborative Rap Song Writing Worked:

  • We used elements from our poetry unit
  • They have a high interest in music — particularly rap and hiphop
  • They wrote for a purpose
  • They wrote as a class in a collaborative environment
  • Music became part of our writing experience
  • Some students could take center stage as performers
  • We published to the world

I know you must be dying to hear what they came up with. Right? Here you go:

Introducing: The Class of 2017

Or you can listen here.

Peace (in the hip, in the hop, in the hippity hop),
Kevin

A Quick Peek Inside Our Stopmotion Work

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stopmotion
stopmotion (1)

Shhhh.

My students are in their last week, engaged in making a short stopmotion movie.

Oh never mind. They can’t hear you anyway. They’re too engrossed in what they are doing.

The question is: do we have time to finish?

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin

PS — I love the shot of the two boys using the study desks. There’s something about that middle dividing line between the computer and the scene that just seems to perfectly capture the small scale of stopmotion work.

Two Writer/Teachers Chat About Twitter

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Here, in this podcast, writers/teachers Katie Keier (Catching Readers Before They Fall) and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind (upcoming Math Exchanges) talk about using Twitter as a tool for professional development and for extending connections from our classroom to the world. (If you want to follow me on Twitter, I am @dogtrax).

At the Stenhouse site, where I found this, they list a bunch of folks they suggest you follow:

Katie: @bluskyz
Kassia: @kassiaowedekind
@CatchingReaders
@FrankiSibberson
@KellyToGo
@acorgill
@KarenSzymusiak
@BarryLane
@ColoReader (Patrick Allen)
@GailAndJoan
@ruth_ayres
@WriteguyJeff (Jeff Anderson)
@skajder
@debbiediller
@spillarke (Lee Ann Spillane)
@justwonderinY (Cathy Mere)
@FountasPinnell
@alfiekohn
@susanoha
@DianeRavitch
#kinderchat
#mathchat
#edchat

Peace (in the tweets),
Kevin

Scenes from a Benefit Concert

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I had some time yesterday to make a compilation montage video from our Benefit Concert which I am sharing at our class website and with our school community, and here. The kids who were on stage had some great talents.

Peace (in the rock and the roll),
Kevin

Playing Saxophone in the New Band

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We don’t quite have a name yet, since this formation of the band is really that new (the bass player just joined us two weeks ago), but this is a short video montage of us playing the Benefit Concert at our school earlier this week. It’s a rough cut for now.
That’s me on the saxophone, stage right.

Peace (in the music),
Kevin