My friend, George Mayo, does amazing video work with his students. This spring, he asked if some of his students could interview me and one of my own students for a piece they were doing around video games and education. So, we hooked up on Skype one day, and his reporters chatted us up about our own video game project. The other week, they finally published the piece, and it is pretty neat (although Skype delayed our voices.) Check it out (and check out the other great videos that George’s kids did, too, at their Watch Out! site).
Video Games: Friends or Enemies from mrmayo on Vimeo.
Our work around video games can be viewed at our site: Gaming4School.
Peace (in the movie),
Kevin
On our last day of school, our tradition is to have every staff member standing outside on the sidewalk, waving goodbye to all of our students on the buses, which make about three or four passes through the bus loop. Horns blowing, voices yelling, we end the year in a rather raucous celebration of the time we have spent together and the oncoming summer break. I usually scan the bus windows for the faces of my students, making eye contact and smiling, and shouting out a few words. For some, it will be the last time we have contact, as they head off to the regional middle school and high school next year. There’s a touch of sadness to the day.
Yesterday, one of my students jammed her head far out the window and shouted, “Don’t forget me!”
No, I won’t forget you.
I’ll remember all those times you had books in your arms, and books piled in your desk, and how you somehow discovered every new book that I brought in and put on my desk. I have a feeling you were always waiting to see what came in to the classroom, so you could have first dibs on it. And I won’t forget that just the other day, at our last recess (actually, your last recess ever), you spent the entire time following a butterfly through the playing fields, completely focused on the activity. When I asked you later what you would have done if you could have caught it, you replied, “Let it go, of course.”
No, I won’t forget you. You, and all of your classmates, and all of the years of students, are lodged inside my heart, and in that place, it is hard to lose the traces of memories etched in there, like carvings of daily interactions.
Peace (in the break ahead),
Kevin
Today is our last day of school of the year. Phew. As I often do, I was thinking a bit about the various kinds of technology that my sixth graders used this year to complement, enhance and inform their writing. Here’s a list of some of the things they did, although I may forget a few here and there.
It’s been quite an adventure, and now I need to do some revamping of my Sixth Grade Curriculum Site to reflect the changes that we did and then think through what I need to do for next year, too, particularly as our district moves deeper into curriculum changes via our state’s adoption of the Common Core.
Peace (in the shift),
Kevin
Two of my students decided to use our classroom Cinch podcasting app on our iPods to create a podcast version of their essays. We talked about how to condense down the ideas into a short podcast. Here is what they came up with. The first is about solar energy and the second is about two kinds of engines (two stroke and four stroke) on the dirt bikes they like to ride. In other years, we often use Voicethread to have everyone do some podcasting with this project, but we ran out of time this year.
Two Stroke versus Four Stroke engines
Peace (in the voice),
Kevin
I played a bunch of my students’ video games yesterday as part of my assessment of their essay projects, which I have been writing about for a few days now (and more to come …) I decided that I would grab screenshots of some of the games made in Gamestar Mechanic and then dump those videos into Animoto, for a quick video collection.
Check it out:
You can also play one of their games:
Peace (in the games),
Kevin
A few of my students tried out the use of Word It Out to create word clouds of their persuasive essays. They were intrigued by the visual rendering of their essays, and I pointed out to them the question: if someone looked at your word cloud, would a viewer know the argumentative stance that you took in your essay based on the words in your cloud? (And it occurs to me now that this should be a required part of the essay project next year .. mental note)
The first one here is mine, which I shared as an example.
Peace (in the loaded words),
Kevin
I introduced my students to Google Search Stories the other day as one extension activity for their persuasive essay/multimedia project. Many of them were intrigued by the short digital storytelling tool, and we had a discussion about why Google would provide such a tool: search queries equals profits for Google, and there was an appetite for people creating their own search stories after a famous Superbowl ad ran a few years ago. I want them to understand both sides of the equation around “free” technology.
A few of them are using the search story idea within a larger media project (such as a Glog or video project) but we are collecting and hosting them at our classroom YouTube site. Here is a playlist of the search stories, so far.
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin