Tag: Prezi

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Teaching Continuity and Change: Crowdsourcing My Lesson Idea

SI-Neg-46-859

I've been invited by the education department at the Smithsonian Institution to do a guest blog post for the museum’s blog using resources from Smithsonian’s History Explorer. I have an idea for a document based question (DBQ) that explores the historic perspective of continuity and change. I thought I’d “crowdsource” my idea to my readers for some feedback. 

Note: the post went live at the Smithsonian blog on Oct 4, 2010  

Premise: The student get to be the historian

I think we often “over curate” the historic artifacts and documents we share with students. For more on that subject see my post:  "Essential Question: Who is the Teacher in Your Classroom?" I want to use documents that students could investigate without much background knowledge. Visual images offer the broadest access for students and I found a great collection of historic bicycles in the “Smithsonian Bicycle Collection.” My lesson would include images of about five bicycles with a brief description and key details. Text description would be limited to allow students to explore the images and draw their own conclusions. I think it makes sense to provide pdf download of historic bicycle the material. I’ve also considered displaying the content as a Prezi – what do you think?

Analytic approach: Exploring continuity and change

Students need experience using a variety of analytic approaches across the curriculum. Continuity and change is a perspective that has a central role in historic thinking. In this lesson, students would be asked to view a series of images of historic bicycles and develop a model for analyzing the features – the elements that changed (size of wheels, gears) and those that remained relatively constant (human powered, seated posture).

Multiple level of Bloom: Moving from low to high
Students would begin with the lower level comprehension skills – what am I looking at? But would quickly move to analysis – what design patterns do I see in bicycles? Evaluation – which are important to my model? And creating – can I develop a comparative model to share my learning?

Relevance: Authentic audience, variable product, peer and self-reflection
I think the target audience for this lesson is middle – high school. I will prompt the students to design a way to explain their model to 3rd graders. (someone other than the teacher that will require them to consider audience and purpose) I won’t provide a graphic organizer. That would mean mean that I, not the students did the comparing. I’d like to leave it opened ended for students to develop their own graphic or text model to express what they’ve learned. Student would be invited to develop different models of comparison and be offered the chance to compare and learn from each others conclusions.

Extensions: Thinking more about bicycles continuity, and change

  • Consider how contemporary bicycles fit your continuity / chance model. Example – recumbent, mountain, fixed gear.
  • Design a bike
  • Apply the continuity / change model in another subject or discipline – fashion, architecture, musical styles, advertising, fictional characters… I could go on, but I hope you see the potential for learning.
  • Technology extension – Student could also be invited to view the world's public photography archives at the Flickr Commons using a  search by "bicycle." They could help describe the photographs they discover by adding tags or leaving comments. The collection includes works from the Smithsonian and other leading international photographic archives.

Image:
A.S. Wieners with 1887 Rudge Racing bicycle
Smithsonian Institution, Negative #: 46-859

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Top 100 Tech Tools for Teaching and Learning

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has assembled a useful survey of top tech tools for learning professionals. Jane Hart of the C4LPT compiled input from nearly 300 ed tech experts from around the globe who were asked to rank their "Top 10 Tools for Learning in 2009." 

The Top 100: Full Survey Results

Top100techtoolsTo get you started, here's the top 10 in order:

Twitter
Delicious
YouTube
Google Reader
Google Docs
WordPress
Slideshare
Google Search
Audacity + Firefox (tied)

The majority of the top 100 are web-based and free – great news for educators in an era of scant educational funding. New the list in 2009 are two of my favorites  - Prezi (presentation software) and Wordle (word cloud generator). For ideas for on how I use these free web resources follow my links to Prezi | Wordle.

Note: The 2010 survey is being in progress.  All learning professionals are encouraged to share their Top 10 tools to help build it further. Submit here.  Kudos to Jane for conducting the survey.  (And thanks to @russeltarr  for his tweet pointing me to the survey.)

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Follow the Twitter Backchannel at Cy-Fair’s 2010 Leadership Conference

I'm presenting at Cyprus Fairbanks ISD's "Rigor, Relevance and Relationships Conference" near Houston Texas. (June 9-11). My keynote, "The Reflective Principal / the Reflective School," is based on my Taxonomy of Reflection. For more on my reflective model click here.  Here's a link to the Prezi tour of the Taxonomy of Reflection. I'm also giving  breakout sessions in Strategies for Summarizing and Comparing. For a sample of those strategies click here.

To follow the conference Twitter stream, I created this Wiffiti visualization based on the conference hashtag #RRRCF. Stop by my session and I'll have it running live. Click in the lower right corner of the visualizer to view it full screen 

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A Prezi Guide to an Effective School – The Reflective Student, Teacher and Principal

Reflective School
Reflective School

This week I’m presenting at the “Teaching and Learning Conference” in Amphitheater SD (Tucson AZ). Next week, I will keynote at the “Rigor, Relevance and Relationships Leadership Conference” in Cyprus-Fairbank ISD (Houston TX). 

In addition to workshops on learning strategies and educational technology, I will feature a session on “Teaching, Learning and Leading in a Reflective School.” This workshop is based on my 4-part blog series “A Taxonomy of Reflection: Critical Thinking For Students, Teachers, and Principals.”

To visually introduce my taxonomy, I created the Prezi presentation below. Click on the arrow at the base of the Prezi to navigate. Then click “More” to view full screen or embed.  For a direct link to this Prezi click here.

Enjoy, reflect, and leave your feedback with a comment.

 

The Reflective School by Peter Pappas on Prezi

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Your Mission is Life-long Learning: A Video How-To

Most school mission statements include a reference to “fostering life-long learners.” Nonetheless if you walk through most schools you’ll find an information landscape that seems designed to suppress that goal. Far too many adults telling students what to know – as if that will inspire them to take responsibility for their learning. 

To explore the meaning of life-long learning at your school, I suggest you show this video (and a few of the comments it received) at your next faculty meeting. I’ve included a few questions for your follow-up discussion. 

Background: “help with a bowdrill set” is a YouTube video posted by a young man looking for help in using his bowdrill to start a fire. After detailing his materials and techniques, he states “I know I’m doing it wrong. Please comment down below so you can teach me how to do it.” If you view his YouTube post you’ll see that his video has over 8500 views and fifty people took the time to offer concrete advice. I trust he’s now successfully starting fires.

Guided questions:
1. How would you define teacher and student in this video? What roles / responsibilities do they have?
2. What information / skills / strategies did the young man lack? What did he have?
3. In what ways is the teaching / learning environment of this video similar to / different from your classroom?
4. What does all this suggest about the paths to life-long learning?

 

Tip of the hat to Angela Maiers and Ben Grey. I first saw this video at their 2010 ASCD conference workshop   Link to my Prezi coverage of the conference