“It’s a pen that can draw in the air! 3Doodler is the 3D printing pen you can hold in your hand. Lift your imagination off the page!” (Source)
“Forget those pesky 3D printers that require software and the knowledge of 3D modeling and behold the 3Doodler, the world’s first pen that draws in three dimensions in real time. Imagine holding a pen and waving it through the air, only the line your pen creates stays frozen, suspended and permanent in 3D space” (Source).
I’m old enough to remember the Schoolhouse Rock videos airing between cartoons on Saturday mornings. I really liked (most of) them as a kid. I rediscovered them years later as a classroom teacher and was even more impressed by them. Not only do these videos cover a lot of curriculum they are also artistically impressive. My wife and I are getting to enjoy all the Schoolhouse Rock fun again with our kids.
We’re looking at integrating higher order thinking skills and word processing in one of my classes right now. The following video is connected to the lesson. Reminisce and enjoy!
Let’s share ideas about how any/all the following could be integrated with teaching and learning.
Blubbr is a free website that makes it possible for you to create and play trivia games with embedded videos. Blubbr calls the games trivs. You can play trivs in different categories, from celebs and music to sport and education. Click on the image below to play a sample triv now.
I setup my Blubbr account (I’d be glad for you to connect with me) and gave it a test drive. It seems that at its core, Blubbr is about making interesting things into fun games. I see many potential educational connections and personal uses.
Educational Connections
Here are a few ideas that might be useful to teachers and students.
You and your students can create trivs focused on the unit you’re currently studying.
Students can develop a triv focused on personal interests and then extend that into research, writing, journaling, etc.
It can be a useful strategy for pre-testing, review and as a study guide.
Trivs can be an engaging alternative strategy for book reports, science presentations, social studies reports, and more.
Allowing students to design quizzes puts them in the role of the teacher. This technique can encourage higher-order thinking.
You and your students can create trivs to introduce yourselves at the beginning of the year.
Developing trivs can be a fun way for students to reflect on a novel, science unit, historical event, poetry, or the highlights of their school year.
You can challenge your students and their families by sharing trivs on your website, via email, through social networks, or by sharing the links in your print-based newsletter.
Personal Uses
In addition to it’s many educational uses, Blubbr can also be used for fun with family and friends. Here are a few ideas that I considered.
Develop a triv about your parents and share it with your family to celebrate your parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.
Prepare for the sights you’ll be visiting during vacation by sharing a triv with your travel companions.
Show your support for your favorite team or athlete with a triv about them.
Challenge your family to a scavenger hunt with a series of trivs that will lead them to a surprise.
You can challenge your family and friends to complete trivs by sharing them on your blog, through Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, or via email.
Your Turn
Blubbr is simple and fun. With well-designed activities it can make significant educational contributions. So what are you waiting for? Go triv something…and share your trivs in this post’s comments so that we can play, too.
I encourage you to resist the temptation to dismiss this video as silly, as soapbox-ing, or not worth your time. Instead, watch the video in its entirety and reflect on its message.
Reflection
I think the video sheds light on (and makes light of) some important issues in the classroom. I don’t agree that the Common Core is “the” answer. I’m not one to think a single approach is ever the best course of action. However, this video has engaged me in worthwhile reflection about learning, curriculum, preparing students for post-graduation, and more. I hope this prompts reflection for you, too.
I’d enjoy receiving your thoughts. I invite you to share them in the comments section of this post.
I was invited to be the speaker at the Arkansas Christian Educators Association Conference recently. Since I had more than 3 hours of time allotted, I was able to design a series of activities and discussions around the topics of facilitated learning and technology integration. I’m going to share some of the resources in a series of posts. This is the first entry in the series.
The information below is part of what I shared with the leaders of the various faculty groups participating in the conference ahead of time. This gave them a chance to consider some of the broad ideas prior to participating in the workshop. This was important as we ended the day by allowing attendees to breakout into their faculty groups. The goal was for the administrators to facilitate conversation about how the information presented during the day might fit into their schools, discuss some of the barriers and benefits, and to identify ways to support implementation. Flipping the instruction allowed the administrators to be exposed to the information ahead of time, reflect on it, and have the chance to better prepare to guide their faculty’s conversation.
Shhh!!! The Students Are Learning:
Being an Effective Classroom Facilitator
Description
We often hear that teachers need to be facilitators of learning rather than deliverers of information. Through this workshop, we will begin to develop strategies for managing a classroom where students have a leading role in learning and the teacher becomes an engaged classroom coach. Strategies for designing and practical tips for implementing units will be shared.
Before You Begin
Please reflect on your experiences designing and implementing facilitated learning activities and units.
What worked well and what would you do differently next time?
What advice can you share with teachers preparing to facilitate learning?
Screencast
This screencast will provide you with an overview of the big ideas that we will be discussing. We will dive much deeper during the workshops and explore application across grade levels and curricular areas, strategies for implementation, benefits and barriers, and more. This video is simply intended to provide you with an early frame of reference as you participate in the upcoming workshops and as you prepare to facilitate the afternoon discussion with your individual school or division.
“Photographer Knate Myers has stitched together an incredible timelapse video of Earth and space with photographs from the International Space Station (ISS). Myers says every frame in the video is a photograph taken from the ISS, and that he removed noise and edited some of the images in Adobe Photoshop. Combined with music from John Murphy, the result is a captivating glimpse at our planetary home, set against the backdrop of all existence — a beautiful blurring of reality and human imagination.” (Source)
One of the principles that is of major emphasis at Project Zero is teaching for understanding. The following video is loosely connected with this idea. I intend to go into greater depth about teaching for understanding in upcoming posts in this series.
“You can forget facts,
but you can not forget understanding.”
— Eric Mazur, Harvard University
“How can you engage your students and be sure they are learning the conceptual foundations of a lecture course? In From Questions to Concepts, Harvard University Professor Eric Mazur introduces Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time teaching — two innovative techniques for lectures that use in-class discussion and immediate feedback to improve student learning. Using these techniques in his innovative undergraduate physics course, Mazur demonstrates how lectures and active learning can be successfully combined” (Source).
NOTE: This video is also available as part of another DVD, Interactive Teaching, which contains advice on using peer instruction and just-in-time teaching to promote better learning.
The Floating University is a new educational media venture that creates and distributes online multimedia curricula, rich in text, video, animation and graphics, that feature today’s biggest thinkers, practitioners and leading scholars.
Their video lectures “are paired with related texts to introduce complex multidisciplinary subjects in an entertaining and engaging way. Whether you’re a life long learner or a current university student, [their] goal is to take you on a journey of discovery into myriad disciplines — to let you explore unfamiliar territory in a new light — and to pose questions that will encourage critical thinking and robust debate.
For schools, they “aim to invert the traditional lecture model of learning to focus valuable classroom time on interaction, exchange, and discussion, rather than on the passive consumption of live, in-person lectures” (Source).
The Floating University launched last fall with an online course offered at Harvard, Yale and Bard and delivered the key takeaways of an entire undergraduate education. Learn more in this short video.
Disrupting Education: There Are No Boundaries to Knowledge Anymore
This clip/commercial has really gotten in my head. I keep thinking about the juxtaposition of traditional education, innovation, reform, media and technology that this represents. I see this as a sort of a microcosm of what so many of us are talking about and involved in education. In this clip we see a disruptive innovation, online and/or hybrid learning, and some would argue that the classroom has been flipped. I see connections between this delivery platform and the notion that some have that failing schools would improve if they had access to the best teachers. In higher education reports indicate that more and more students are preferring the perceived flexibility of online courses and institutions are strategically planning how they intend to respond.
I’m also really curious to see how interactive and engaging the courses are and how effective they are at promoting creativity and critical thinking. These terms are used frequently on the site and in this video. I also noticed on the website that everything is optimized for use on the iPad which could open the door for interesting opportunities related to engagement. However, I often see teachers, schools, and institutions make similar claims under the pervasive but misguided notion that the very act of using technology makes instruction more effective and more engaging while automatically promoting higher levels of thinking. That just isn’t accurate. Given the reputations of the universities and lecturers involved as well as the feature-rich and content-rich Floating University and Big Think websites I’m going to speculate that they are doing at least a respectable job, and perhaps even better, in these areas. I would enjoy the opportunity to view and experience the Floating University’s courses for myself. The idea of “robust debate” in an online class sounds like fun to me!
Change is in the air. I wonder how all of this will play out over the next few years and subsequent decades. We’ll we resolve these matters or will they have to be solved by the next generation(s) of educators? Perhaps you’ll share your reactions to the the Floating University and to some of the thoughts I have shared.
This video from Edutopia spotlights Manor New Technology High School, “where an unwavering commitment to an effective school-wide project-based learning model keeps both students and teachers motivated and achieving their best” (Source). It is “a public high school just outside of Austin in Manor, Texas. It is an entirely project-based learning school that has consistently achieved outstanding results since opening. We followed a project there for three weeks to find out what makes their model so effective” (Source).
“It’s a pen that can draw in the air! 3Doodler is the 3D printing pen you can hold in your hand. Lift your imagination off the page!” (Source)
“What would you do with your life if money was no object?”
