An accident happened to me while teaching Algebra 2 this year. A very good accident. I was teaching solving equations, and I always tell my learners that solving equations is about looking for 1’s and 0’s. I stress this fact, and point out the 0’s and the 1 every time we solve something.

And of course, before we can do equations, inequalities, or absolute value equations, we do expressions. And EVERY single person in the class can rattle off “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally For Looking Too Rough” (did you forget the “from left to right too?).

I taught the lesson, I had SADMEP written on the board, and as I looked at it, I realized that if I wrote the 0 and the 1 down in the right places, it would help. Then I taught Inverse and Identity, and I realized that I had the Inverse and Identity right there!

But then I had an IEP learner in my room later, and he asked me to explain it again. He was confused on when to use SADMEP and when to use PEMDAS. He has been told since elementary school that PEMDAS was how to do problems, and in high school it was all different. He really struggled in Alg 1(I had him then also), and his struggles have not abated. So, I wrote down something else on his paper. It looked like this:

Link: http://www.box.net/shared/2msix7air5

And the learner looked at this and said “AHA!  I understand now! We are doing different things.”

The whole issue of Expressions and Equations became clear to him, and I realized I had just written down something that made sense. It have him a HOOK to attach his learning.  PEMDAS was a hook as well, but it no longer works for solving, and putting them side by side made sense to him.

When the learner looks at it, she can see that if you have addition, you need a subtraction. If you have division, you need a multiplication. The Identity is written right there, and the inverse is the opposite! They groupings GIVE the learner a HOOK to LADDER what they know to solving equations.

My learners tell me it makes sense to them. I realize it is a ladder that allows them to practice what they know in a new situation and it gives them the same structure that PEMDAS did for expressions. It does not give them answers, it gives them KNOWLEDGE about how to solve equations.

I like it.

I am in cadre that was given MacBook Pros to do podcasting and vodcasting this Summer and upcoming school year. Not too shabby, I downloaded Handbrake already in order to convert video from one format into another.  This was made essential because my Flip video camera only records in .AVI format, something the mac hates.  Downloaded Handbrake, change the .m4v extension to .mp4 and I am all set.

But today I am scanning blogs on Reader, and I discover this video on on one of the blogs.

Do me a favor though. Before you watch it, turn the volume DOWN to zero.  Don’t listen to it, just watch it. It is 6:02 minutes long.

Then watch it again but turn up the music and listen to the music along with the visuals.

Do you hate the music as much as I do?

Someone has spent enormous amounts of time getting the facts, the visuals, and then the orange / black/ white color scheme just right. It is an amazing video that is ruined by the cheap GarageBand audio tacked onto the video.

I think Dan said it best.   Don’t Let Your Students Use Music In Their Video Projects. Really.  Don’t do it. This video is every reason why not to allow music.

If the authors had spent one quarter of the time on audio as they did on the video, they would have an amazing video. Instead, they get something significantly less than they wanted.

When we were doing our training on Garageband, I spoke up and asked why we were being encouraged to spend 4 hours on a video and 5 minutes on slapping a cheap sounding soundtrack to our podcast.   The answer from the Mac trainer was dismissive and pointless. “The kids really get into finding something they like.”

Big deal.

The authors of the video above “really got into finding something they liked” and because they did that instead of finding something that fit with the story, the visuals, and the emotional impact of the pictures, they weakened their video.

Don’t do it. Don’t let yourself or your learners use music in their, or your, videos.

In another case of “working together benefits all”.  Dan Meyer posted a picture of himself throwing a ball into a trash can.  Except, he only posted the first half of the flight.  (See the original here.) This picture is one in his series of “What can you do with this?”, that challenges educators to think outside of their comfort zone and think inside of relevant, challenging, and interesting lessons.

David Cox then takes that lesson, and explodes it into a terrific lesson on quadratics, measurement and all around engaging math.  Oh, except it really wasn’t David.  IT WAS HIS LEARNERS who exploded it and created a fabulous lesson out of it.  Crazy what learners can do when we stop spoon feeding them and give them tools and interesting problems.

Well, ColleenK had to one up everyone and create an applet that would allow for anyone to do the same problem with different initial conditions.

I can see starting with Dan’s picture. Throwing that on the screen and asking the question that Dan asked. Will he hit the can?  Leave it at that.   Let the learners decide what they need to know in order to answer the question.  Having Geogebra handy would be a great idea.  Allowing the learners to answer the question on their own, with support and guidance when legitimately asked for (meaning “i don’t get it” is not legitimate) and the encouragement to TRY.

Summing up with something like David did, allowing each group to show how their solution is different or the same, and then putting Colleen’s app on the screen and giving each group a completely different set of initial conditions.  Or better yet, out to the lawn with a digital camera and MAKE sets of initial conditions.

Now that is successful teaching at it’s finest.

Why don’t more teachers communicate like this to see the really innovative and creative stuff we can do? (sorry, not the purpose of this post, but still a question that must be asked.)

I was taking an online course on how to create online courses, and one of the assignments was to suggest pedagogical websites and sources. (That 6 week online course is one reason I have not posted in so long, but that is a totally different story.)

I suggested dy/dan, Dan Meyer’s terrific site. One of the other people taking the course did not understand why I suggested Dan’s site as source of pedagogy.  The following several links will explain that choice.

Dan begins with this posting, on editing a single slide from Darren Kuropatwa.  Dan takes the slide donated from Darren, and reinvents from traditional, “here is the info, find the answer” to “Find the question, interpret the information, and defend your answer”.

Hmm, higher levels of thinking anyone?  Using digital media and digital tools to force thinking and challenge learners to push beyond the school room walls?  Pure Pedagogical Mastery. 

The story did not end with Dan’s pedagogical tour de force.  Jason Dyer takes Dan’s take on Darren’s take on statistics and pushes it even more! Now Jason has taken the  data, changed it so the range and the mean is identical, while leaving the question alone.

What is a learner to do now?  Anyway, Dan posts a follow up to the entire conversation here, allowing anyone  to follow the entire course of the thinking in one post.

Does anyone else marvel at the power in this kind of collaboration? Dan says, “This is the culture of criticism we need.” I agree. The collaboration involved in this series of posts is tremendous.

I need to do more of this.

So, I finished my last post, and realized that I was talking, but showing nothing.  So, start to finish, including the time to upload to Vimeo AND for vimeo to convert the video and Photo Story to render the video and me to type this second post. 

Meaning this is all inclusive time, here.  I am not pulling punches or shaving time off just to make it seem like this was not a big deal.  I started taking pictures at 6:20 p.m., and Vimeo is showing me the video in the window right now at 6:40.  20 freaking minutes!

And here is the link, just in case as well.  http://www.vimeo.com/1312528

20 minutes, start to finish.  This is absolutely possible to do in the classroom.

Well, some of us are not as good as Dan is when it comes to video. Heck, I bet 99% of us couldn’t do the things he does with video.  But why let that stop us from using video, and more importantly, coming up with ways to have our learners constructively use video in the classroom.

So, before we begin, we will need some software.  First, download Photo Story 3 from Microsoft.  You can find it here.  Say what you want about Microsoft, but this piece of software is darn good, it does exactly what it says it does, and it does it fantastically.

Next, you will need some way to get voice into the story (if you want the learners to narrate).  If you don’t want the learners to narrate, but instead you want music, then skip the next couple of paragraphs.  Photo Story 3 has built in music that will solve your problem.  You are ready to go!

Okay, I am doing math, so I need some way to narrate. …. Hmmm, I have an iPod, so I could use the iTalk.  Griffin Technology makes it, it would set us back $49.99.  But I am a teacher and cheap, so I hoof it on over to eBay and find that it will cost less than $20.00 including shipping from many sellers.  Decision made.

But if I am uber-cheap, I want to do it for free.  My laptop has a microphone built in, so isn’t there some software that would record and more?  Yes there is, and it is open source and it is called Audacity.  If you want to do sound, then you want Audacity.  I even used it in a Trig class to demonstrate sound waves, beats, constructive and destructive interference.  Audacity will do all your sound needs.  Cost = $0.

But, I don’t have my laptop with me today.  Yea, I suck.  But WAIT!  Hey, there are two other different ways to do this for free.

  and

Gabcast and Gcast both allow a person to call in using a phone (or perhaps a cell phone!  what high school learner doesn’t have one of those these days!!!) and make an mp3 recording of their voice!  This is called a podcast.  For free.  From a cell phone.  From anywhere  (I see possibilities for storytelling here).

Okay, so we have software that will take our photographs, or any jpeg files and will combine those jpegs into a video.  Along with that video, we can insert music, or, in the case of math, perhaps a learner’s slow explanation of how they did the problem. 

You see, I took my digital camera to school (not really, this is a plan for something I am going to do later) and took pictures, one after the other, of the learners doing a problem.  I just took a picture of the page using my old 2 megapixel camera, which is plenty of resolution for this, and then using Photo Story 3, chained the pictures together.  Next, I recorded a narration, and saved it.  Imported the mp3 file into Photo Story, and now I have my voice, narrating me doing a problem.

More importantly

Imagine having teams of 4 – 5 working on the problem.  In a class of 32, that is 6 to 8 teams, each trying to explain how to do a different problem.    They come up with a video explaining how to do it, post the video to YouTube, or Vimeo, and now we have 8 -  4 minute presentations on how to do the problems for a test.

I did nothing but facilitate the learning.  (hopefully).  Cost = $0.00.  Time = about an hour or less.    Isn’t this what learning should be?

Ok, so the lesson on reading graphs in the book was boring, I knew it and more importantly the learners knew it. So, to liven it up, I brought in my spreadsheet that I keep track of my utilities every month for my house.

In it, I have my gas therms, my KWH (Kilo Watt Hours) and water by 100’s of gallons, and then dollars per day. Four graphs, a combination of bar graph and histogram, with real data for the last 9 years of living in my house and graphs for the last seven years.

Here is one of the four graphs. I told the learners upfront that this was the data for my house, and I explained how I did it. The first asked things like, “how much time does it take to do this?” Answer is 1 minute a month, and about 5 minutes every year to start the data and set the colors for the new year.

Then we started talking about the usage graphs. What months do I use more water (summer), what months do I use more electricity (summer) what months do I use more gas (winter). Then, what months do I spend more? that graph is above. Obviously, winter. From this they determined that gas is much more expensive that water or electricity.

Was it successful? I think so. The learners definitely were into talking and asking questions about the graphs. The February water graph has a broken pipe, so there are interesting things to talk about. Would I do it again? Absolutely.

More graphs below the fold (lets see if this works!) I did lose some formatting in changing from excel to openoffice.

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