Tag: Arts

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Haiku Deck – Free Presentation App for iPad

haiku deck

I’m prepping for an “iPad in the Classroom” workshop and I thought I’d try Haiku Deck – a free presentation app for the iPad. It’s an impressive and easy to use tool for creating a knock-out presentation on the iPad – a great way for teachers and students to quickly share their ideas with the classroom and the digital world beyond. Here’s a deck I created in a few minutes. I used the same image but typically you’d have different images for every slide.

haiku select image

Haiku Deck relies on strong visual content and minimal use of text. Think Edward Tufte meets Pecha Kucha. Creating a slide is simple. Add some text – there’s not much room, so keep it brief. You can insert your own image from a variety of sources – take a photo with the iPad or grab an image from your iPad camera roll, Instagram, Google Drive or DropBox. Haiku Deck takes the words you’ve used on the slide and runs a fast search for Creative Commons images. It even adds the sources in the small font at the base of your finished slide. If you don’t like the search from the words you’ve used in your slide, you can type in your own search term.

When you’re done you have a variety of ways to share. You can project from your iPad or push out to the big screen via Apple TV. You can post to a variety of social media – like Facebook or Twitter. Email it as a PPT or Keynote. Embed it on your blog. Or just keep it private.

If you want to reorder a slide, press and hold down on a slide in the sorter view at the bottom of the screen. It will enlarge and you can drag it to another point in the deck. (Be warned that the app does not run on an iPad 1.)

I can’t promise that the Creative Commons search feature will play nice with your school web filter (actually I hope you don’t have filters). But I did harness my inner 8th grader to search on a variety of “naughty words.” You’ll see my test below turned up a variety of innocuous images and even mocked me with a “aww you are making me blush.” 

haiku search

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Podcast: Reflections on Teaching Strategies That Work

I had a great time recording a podcast with Mark Hofer and David Carpenter for their series Ed Tech Co-Op. Go to show 26: Peter Pappas (Dec 9, 2012) via Web | iTunes 

If the art teacher taught art, the way I taught history, his students would be sitting there watching him paint.

Mark led off by asking me to reflect back on my some of the driving themes in my career. I confessed that as a novice teacher, I mimicked my experience as a high school student and taught primarily via lecture mixed with an occasional “guess what the teacher is thinking” whole-group discussion.

But I recalled an “aha” moment after repeated visits to the art class in the classroom next door. I realized that if the art teacher taught art, the way I taught history, his students would be sitting there watching him paint. I remember that got me thinking …

Our podcast continued with a lively discussion about what works in the classroom. Below are a few of the prompts they tossed at me. No ed theory or brain research in my responses. Just my candid and unrehearsed thoughts ranging from “why teaching should be the opposite of magic” to “how schools are not teaching good digital hygiene.”

  • Can you talk a bit about how you shift responsibility for the learning to the students. 
  • How did you support a constructivist model is information-laden, high stakes courses like AP / IB?
  • Did you get much push-back from your students and how did you deal with it? How do you deal with parents and administrators?
  • What do you say when teachers tell you “I’ve got so much to cover, I don’t have time for more student-based approach?”
  • Tell us more about your post “Why Johnny Can’t Search?” and how librarians and instructional technologists can partner to improve student information skills.
  • How is the analytic process different in different subjects – say science vs history?

See these posts for more on subjects raised in the podcast:

Stay tuned to Ed Tech Co-Op – a collaborative effort between the College of William & Mary, Alexandria Country Day School, and other educators interested in technology integration in K-12 classrooms.

Image credit flickr/ visual.dichotomy

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Calling Teachers, Lessons, Animators! TED-Ed Wants You

The folks behind TED talks have just launched TED-Ed to serve the mission “of capturing and amplifying the voice of the world’s greatest teachers.” More

They’ve put out a call to teachers everywhere to submit lesson ideas for inclusion in the new YouTube Channel – TED-Ed: Lessons worth sharing. (Hey, it’s your chance to satisfy your inner Sir Ken Robinson!)

Suggest a lesson and and nominate a teacher (or yourself) on this form. TED will review submission to find the great lessons. They will work with the educators to refine the lessons and make sure they are under ten minutes long. Then a team of animators will work with the educator to visualize the lessons and create a new video for posting on the TED-Ed channel. In anticipation of growing the initiative, TED-Ed is also looking for talented animators.

Right now there’s a gifted educator delivered a great lesson to their class. TED-Ed is looking for your help to find that educator, team them with animators, and amplify that lesson for all to see.

Nominate an educator | Share a lesson | Nominate an animator.

Here’s a few sample lessons to get you thinking (both animated by Sunni Brown). “Symbiosis: a Surprising Tale of Species Cooperation” Lesson by David Gonzales and “The Power of Simple Words” Lesson by Terin Izil

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Mental Mapping: Video Game Maps Drawn From Memory

Games are interaction with rules. They mimic the scientific method – hypothesis tested to overcome obstacles and achieve goal while operating inside prescribed system of boundaries. Video games provide failure based learning – brief, surmountable, exciting. While failure in school is depressing,
in a video game, it’s aspirational.

Super Mario World world map by fliptaco
Super Mario World world map by fliptaco

Josh Millard recently began curating a growing collection of video game maps drawn from memory at his site Mapstalgia. He writes,

We spend time in video game worlds, learning our way around the constructed environments.  We make mental maps of these places as part of the process of trying to progress through them.  We learn where the good bits are hidden, remember the hard bits that got us killed every damn time.  The worlds may be fictional but our mental maps of them are as real as anything else we remember.  And they’re shared experiences: my experience in Super Mario Bros. was a lot like yours, and even if we never played it together, it’s a space we have in common.  And the way our memories overlap, and the ways they differ — the commonalities and contrasts of our individual recalls of these shared spaces — is a really interesting and as far as I’ve seen mostly undocumented emergent result of decades of videogaming experiences. So let’s draw these remembered maps.  Let’s put it down on graph paper or napkins or MS Paint. 

The Legend of Zelda world map by themadjuggler
The Legend of Zelda world map by themadjuggler

Submissions range from detailed renderings to simple sketches. They all demonstrate a great way to teach mental mapping skills – spatial relationships, sequence, causation, scale, location, and measurement. Use Mapstalgia to inspire your students. Then give them a chance to have fun while demonstrating their ability to translate gaming worlds into two dimensional representations. Let them compare maps of the same game to design their own mapping rubric. Explore different representations of game elements for clarity and design.

 
Super Mario 64 Peachs Castle by GNM
Super Mario 64 Peachs Castle by GNM

Get students hooked working with something they know intimately – video games. Then transfer those visual literacy skills to more traditional mapping instruction as well as exploration of symbolic representations of all kinds.

Sonic Adventure 2 City Escape by cubeybooby
Sonic Adventure 2 City Escape by cubeybooby
Zork excerpts by ErWenn
Zork excerpts by ErWenn

Image credits: Mapstalgia

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Finding Math in Nature’s Patterns

Succulent spiral
Succulent spiral

As I recently wrote in Don’t Teach Them Facts – Let Student Discover Patterns 

It’s unfortunate that student don’t get to use their innate perceptual skills more often in the classroom. Instead of discovering patterns on their own, students are “taught” to memorize patterns developed by someone else. Rather than do the messy work of having to figure out what’s going on, students are saddled with graphic organizers which take all the thinking out of the exercise. 

“Doodling in Math Class: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant” captures the fascination of patterns in nature. Discover more patterns from Vi Hart – Mathemusician

Image credit: flickr/Duff Axsom