Kevin's Meandering Mind | Category | my classroom

The Future of the Book: Sixth Graders

Date July 17, 2007

Comments3

Towards the end of the year — as part of my digital book project — I had my sixth grade students take a final survey and one of my questions: What do you think books will look like in the future?

Here are some of their answers:

I think books in the future will have people popping out of the pages and talking like a mini-play. In the future, you will not even have to read the books, just listen to them.
I think they will be little squares that will be digital and project visual images
Books will be holographic.
Books will be high-tech and cool, and a printed out copy will have special effects.
I think books will still be on paper but they will have videos and sounds in them. They will be more high-tech. They will have clear, beautiful pictures and videos of what is actually happening at that moment. And they will have the feelings that people have (example: If the book says, she felt the cold wind on her face, then a chilly wind would come out of the book).
In the future, you will read books from the computer. I think this because it would save paper and would add cool effects to the stories to make you want to read them.
I think that in the future, there will still be paper but many books will be digital. I think that the digital book will be very interactive and voice-activated, with movie clips, sound effects, movement and even hyperlinks to different endings.
In the future, I think books will become automatic. They will have a special speaker inside that will tell you the story.

What strikes me is that so many of these comments suggest a passive reader, and I would hope that a push towards technology integration would allow the reader a larger role into the storytelling (for example: rearrange the story, or add a character, or find a way to alter the shape of the story arc).

Peace (in pages of the book),
Kevin

Four Days in Summer: An overview of Animation Camp

Date July 14, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments1

Last week marked the first of two claymation-animation summer camp programs that I am teaching (next week, with my wife) and I decided I needed to write down and record what I was doing each day for future reference. I will need to go back later and do some more details but I am sharing my overall plan for four days of working with middle school students.

Here is the summer camp plan

I created this document with Google Page Creator — a not-so-fancy but easy-to-use part of the Google Suite of Internet Dominance.

Peace (with clay),

Kevi

Summer Camp — part one

Date July 11, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments1

I have been running a claymation animation summer camp this week for middle school students (mostly fifth and sixth graders) as a new experiment (and more next week). Kids have been using Pivot Stickman, MovieMaker, Stop-Motion Animator and other tools to create mini-movies. I am working on writing up my curriculum (for myself and for anyone else who is interested) and will share that later.

I have a blog up and running so that parents can view some of the daily work (the blog is at http://masswp.org/claycamp/) and the final movies (with a sci-fi theme) are being worked on right now and we are inviting parents in tomorrow to view the showcase premieres.

Also, I have used TeacherTube for sharing videos because it is quite easy to use and seems to be a safe way to share video without any qualms about kids wandering around to different, inappropriate links.

But here are a few of the creations so far:

Download Video: Posted by dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.

Peace (in the hot classroom),
Kevin

My Collaborator and Friend: Massachusetts Teacher of the Year

Date June 27, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments1

June brought some really wonderful news to our school. My good friend and collaborator on claymation/movie projects — Mike Flynn — was awarded the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year designation for 2007. Mike is a wonderful second grade teacher whose emphasis on hands-on learning, project-based explorations and embedded mathematics certainly puts him in a top tier of teachers I know.

For the past three years, his second graders and my sixth graders have worked together on claymation movies and it has been a pleasure to develop the project with Mike. He is insightful, flexible and moves towards recognition of the abilities of all the children in his room. Last year, Mike also joined me in presenting a workshop on moviemaking in the classroom at our Technology, Teaching and Writing Conference at UMass (sponsored in part by the Western Massachusetts Writing Project).

He is also a talented musician and he and I have played together as part of an old band of his and he has brought his talents to the stage at our school when I have helped our Student Council organize concerts for Katrina victims and the Asian tsunami disaster. Like me, he finds creative refuge in writing songs.

Mike deserves all of the accolades and is now in the running for National Teacher of the Year (where do I cram the ballot boxes?).

Peace (in celebration),
Kevin

And finally … Stick Figure Movies

Date June 17, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments2

The last days of school for my sixth graders were spent working with a stick figure animation program and here are some of the movies they created:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=1158941878118862160" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=4626591408186972447" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

Peace (in frame),
Kevin

Claymation Collaborations, part three

Date June 15, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments2

This is the final installment of the short clay movies from my classroom — all student-created and edited and produced.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=193355201421657936" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

The movies here are:

Attack of the Evil Worm
A Day at the Beach
Bob and Super Cheetah in Invasion of the Mole People

Peace (in slowwwww mo),
Kevin

Claymation Collaborations, part two

Date June 13, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments1

This is the second of three short claymation movies created by my sixth graders (in collaboration with second graders). I have one more movie to go, later this week. This first movie — The Haunted House — features some cool animation techniques (disappearing girl!).

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=1312872253261619570" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

The stories are:

The Haunted House
Bowser’s Race Track

Peace (with monsters and cars),
Kevin

Claymation Collaborations, part one

Date June 10, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments0

Some of our collaborative claymation groups finished up with their mini-movies this week (see movie down below) and five more groups are still working. This is the first year we have tried true animation (as opposed to still images) and it has been tricky. Not because of the software but because we just can’t seem to scrap together long enough blocks of time. We have tried to juggle the schedule of second graders with my sixth graders, and it isn’t easy. But, as in the past, except for some mini-lessons, I place the onus of the entire script writing, clay creation, recording/video, and editing on the students and only help when needed. I really want them to “own” the final product for themselves.

So here are the first four movies:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-8605309725608707121" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

The episodes here are:

The Lost Diamond
The Paper Shredder of DOOM
Island Gone Bad
The Walking Fish

As we finish up (next week is our last full week, so we are under the gun), I am trying to reflect a bit on what has worked and what has not worked, as my wife and I are running a claymation animation camp for middle school students next month.

Here are some thoughts:

Some kids have the patience, and some don’t. It takes patience to do animation and the more patience they demonstrate, the better the animation. It seems like a simple equation to me, but not always to 8 and 12 year olds.
The software and webcams have worked fine (although one seemed to have gone out of focus – even though the students didn’t tell me and I could have easily fixed it), although we should have done more to ensure they were all speaking loudly into the microphones. The audio is up and down.
We needed more mini-lessons about how to take a photo of a video image, and use that as a still image to stretch the movie to keep in sync with dialogue. This has been the greatest challenge for the kids — having the movie work with the audio.
The students have loved using the tech for this project, even when frustrated (which happens). They have been so engaged every step of the way and are always asking, “Are we doing claymation today?” (And to which I reply, “We also have other things we need to be doing, you know,” and then a sigh from their direction)
I wish I could have discovered the Pivot Stickman Animation program before this began because it is such a great intro to stop-motion animation. Oh well.
We need more than 45-minute blocks of time — at least an hour, or more, would have been helpful as momentum always seemed to be stalled at the end of a session. This project began in April (yes, April!) and we aren’t done yet. Phew.

Peace (with animation),
Kevin

Student Reflections: Digital Story Project

Date June 9, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments1

Most of my students (64 of of the 72 I have as writing teacher) took a final reflective survey the other day as the end of our Digital Science Picture Book Project. This gives me some feedback on how things went, but also will provide some data for a chapter that I am writing about the project for a future book.

I asked a range of questions and you can view the collected responses through this Google Docs document.

But here are some things that stood out for me:

97 percent enjoyed the assignment (a nice little boost for a teacher at the end of the year)
97 percent also said that using technology to create the books made the project more enjoyable
87 percent said that their books would have been different if we had not used the technology (and other written responses earlier detailed the ways in which they saw their books as very different from paper versions)
75 percent said they would rather use technology to publish a book than the traditional methods (which I am not sure is such a good thing, but I haven’t thought too deep yet on that)

Peace (in reflection),
Kevin

Science Picture Books

Date May 28, 2007

Posted by dogtrax

Comments0

My sixth graders are nearing completion of a book project in which they used MS PowerPoint to create and publish their own fictional Science Journey Stories as a picture book format. Their intended audience (we start sharing our books tomorrow at our school) was other students in grades first through fourth, and I have been presenting mini-lessons on some deeper aspects of PP to give them some ideas on how to use the tech to create a different kind of book.

They are also publishing their books to our Making Connections Science Weblog, which is a much larger project in which my students and other middle school-age students from three other schools in Western Massachusetts have been doing shared science experiments, posting scientific abstracts and now publishing science-based fictional stories.

Meanwhile, I am also planning to write about this science picture book project for as a chapter for a book on technology and the classroom that I am helping to edit with two esteemed college professors. As a result, I have been having my students reflect on how using the computer has been altering their composition process, and how their books will be different once I print them out on paper. I’ll share some of those observations at a later date.

Anyway, here are a few of the books: