Five Reasons to “Like” Project Based Learning

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I’m the Aug 1st kickoff speaker for the 2011 PBL Summer Institute held at the Valley New School in downtown Appleton WI.  As the opening keynote, I’ll be setting the stage for what should be five days of valuable workshops, culminating in Project Foundry training – an effective PBL management system. Tweet us at #VNS11 and view our Twitter visualizer here.

To get things started I’ll highlight five reasons why the traditional approach to instruction is failing our students:

  1. Teaching isn’t telling.
  2. There’s a new literacy that alters the traditional information flow beyond the classroom.
  3. Life’s become an open-book test that has devalued lower-order thinking skills.
  4. Students need to be able to succeed in an unpredictable world.
  5. Most classrooms rarely engage students in reflecting on their progress as learners.

Along the way I’ll use activities and sample projects to illustrate five reasons to “like” PBL. Click here for a link to my presentation website with a variety of PBL resources, videos and more.

The conference is co-sponsored by the TAGOS Leadership Academy and the Wisconsin Project Based Learning Network

Image credit: flickr/FindYourSearch

What Happens as the Cost of Hating Pigs Approaches Zero? Focus, Literacy and Angry Birds

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The Angry Birds app for my iPhone cost me $.99. I just checked my app stats and it appears I’ve won a “medal” for playing the game for more than 15 hours. (Disclosure: I’ve owned the program for about two months.) The next medal comes after 30 hours of play. Thus, my cost of Angry Birds is somewhere between 3 and 6 cents per hour – and dropping. 

Where did I find the 15+ hours to destroy those evil pigs? What’s the opportunity cost of vengeance?

The price of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as cost of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. Despite all the claims of multi-tasking, we are stuck with a finite attention span. Thus the ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as the most significant digital literacy.

And it appears I’m not the only one distracted by green pigs. Peter Verterbacka, of Rovio (makers of Angry Birds) estimates 200 million minutes of play per day across the globe. Expect to see that number grow. Rovio recently surpassed a million downloads a day. 

200 million minutes less to accomplish _________  

…. I can only hope it comes at the expense of lolcats.

Teaching with Historic Photographs: The Google LIFE Photo Archive

Google has posted ten million photographs from the LIFE photo archive on their online gallery of images. It's a great source of material for teachers and students who support a document-based approach to teaching history. 

While I wish that Google had done more to curate the collection with robust search tools and more specific categories, I think that teachers will find it to be an invaluable resource to enable students to "be the historian."

I've put together this quick guide to help you get started.

1.  If you are unfamiliar with the document-based approach to teaching history, you might want to start with a quick visit to my web site Teaching With Documents. There you find many resources including Document-Based Questions (DBQ) for  students grade 2 – high school. Of particular interest are these Student Analysis Guides and for more detailed analysis – my Reading a Visual Document: Guiding Questions. (55KB pdf)

2.  If you are interested in how historic documents can be used to support literacy and critical thinking, visit my sample:  Homefront America in WW II.  It shows how to improve content reading comprehension with source documents framed around essential questions that link the past and present. 

3.  Now that you have some instructional background in using historic photos – it's time to visit the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google. It's organizes images by era and subject. Once you click on an image you get a brief description and some labels (tags) that allow you to find similarly tagged images. 

Lange For example here's one of the archive photos taken by Dorothea Lange in the Migrant Mother Series. It makes a great contrast to the iconic photo she took that day that is more commonly reproduced in textbooks. (You might ask your students which of the five photos they would choose, and why?)

The LIFE archive includes this description with the photograph: Migrant mother Florence Thompson & children photographed by Dorothea Lange.
Location: Nipomo, CA, US
Date taken: 1936
Photographer: Dorothea Lange

And LIFE archive uses these labels for this photo: Lange, Dorothea, Mothers, Fsa Photographers, Us, Tension Or Worrying, American, Poverty, Florence Thompson, Photography By, Migratory, Farmers, California, Expressions, Agriculture, 1930s
4.  If you don't already use Cooliris, I suggest you download this free browser plug in. It presents the photos in a broad panorama that  allows you to scroll through many images.  I've embedded a short clip below of Cooliris in action, so you can see how it can transform your browser when searching for images and videos on Cooliris supported websites.

5.  And remember that all Google image searches allows you to specify image size with this drop down box in the upper left of the screen. 



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Creating Presentation Handouts in Apple Keynote

I’m a recovering PowerPoint user that’s been using Apple Keynote for my presentations for about a year. I find it much friendlier to graphics and media. It took me a while to figure out how to create B/W six slide / page handouts that I could easily PDF to clients. Thought I’d pass it along. If you have any more suggestions, let me know!
PS. I use the Mac native pdf creation tools (too cheap to buy Adobe Acrobat for my Mac). For this illustration I’m working with a 108 slide Keynote presentation with lots of graphics.
Step 1: I open my Keynote handout presentation. I select File/ Print. Keynote defaults to Keynote in drop down box – I select “Layout.”
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Step 2: In the “Pages Per Sheet” box, I choose 6. Note: This “Pages per Sheet” choice doesn’t appear on the default “Keynote” print screen.
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Step 3: I click “PDF” button in lower left and chose “Save as PDF” This gives me a color pdf – 6 slides per page. In the sample I’m working on, I have now created a 16 MB PDF file.
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Now my goal is to convert to gray scale (for the client to photocopy) and to reduce the file size.
Step 4: Open the newly created PDF  handout in Apple Preview. I choose “File/Save As… “
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In the “Quartz Filter”  selection box, I choose “Gray Tone.” I save that new gray tone PDF. Nice looking handout, but I have greatly increased the file size. (from 16 to 103 MB). Too big to send to the client!
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Step 5: I open the newly created Gray Tone version of the pdf in Preview and do another “Save As…” Just like in step 4. This time in the  “Quartz Filter” selection box, I choose “Reduce File Size.” That creates a new PDF with file size reduced from 103 MB to 5.7 MB (Even smaller than 16 MB color PDF I created in step 3)
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Since I am usually sending of lots of handouts to multiple clients. I have another blog devoted to distributing them. That way I can email a link to my “Handout Blog”  and let them deal with downloads at their end.
Hope this helps!