A Quarter of Innovation

My middle school technology wrapped up their latest Innovation Projects this past week. Since this is a semester course, it was their first round of innovating.  Since I love to showcase student work on this blog, please click the links as you are interested!

Waite used his Lego skills to create a Star Wars stop motion video. He admitted to me in the proposal stage that he was familiar with stop motion, but he wanted to learn how to edit and insert sounds.  

Kate wanted to learn about the Revolutionary War and presented that knowledge in her first ever blog. She did a great job of including pictures, quotes, and her own narrative. 

Connor has taken my class before and his first Innovation Project was a web site displaying his graffiti art.  This project was another web site about another hobby -- knife flipping.  He included videos of his tricks plus lots of text about the tricks and the history of the knife brand he uses. 

Daniel started this project with the goal of creating his own video game using C++.  It wasn't long into the project that he realized he was in over his head and we shifted the focus. He is now enjoying teaching himself Java and will eventually grow into the bigger stuff. He created a video to show off his newfound skills.

Dom is sports monster. I would not be surprised if you hear his name in college and pro ranks down the road.  He took his love of sports and created a highlight reel of our school's middle school football team.  

Drew has also taken this class. Last year, he created his own song on Garage Band.  This year, he wanted to try his hand at MineCraft. Actually, he used an app called Eden that I'm not familiar with and recreated MetLife Stadium, where the New York Giants and Jets play football. 

Sam wanted to learn MineCraft and did so by creating a pyramid with a maze inside to hide the treasure.  He ran into some troubles, mainly because he built the pyramid in the air. His final project include a few smaller pyramids around the main one, and I must say it looked great overall.

Justin also wanted to learn MineCraft and attempted to build the Empire State Building. Sadly, he learned a lot about MineCraft crashing on him.  He wound up with no final product to show us, but talked about the things he did accomplish and learn.  I tried to encourage him that sometimes bad things happen and what counts is how we learn from them. 

Jacob has had some MineCraft experience but really wanted to branch out.  He created his own working amusement park. (Keep in mind that I had a group of four students do this project last semester.)  His final presentation was a video taking us through the amusement park. The video is awesome, and I'll link it here when I finally get it uploaded to YouTube. 

Cooper walked us through a video game called Killer Instinct. Obviously, with a name like this, I was concerned about promoting violent video games within the school context. We agreed on a T for Teen version and to keep the violence to a minimum. Cooper did not want his work posted online, but he talked us through the history of the game and some playing tips, then presented a video showing us how to play the game. 

Matthew did something similar playing a game called Skyrim. His final project was to talk to us about the history of the game, show some playing tips, and walk us through a video of how to play the game (keeping the violence to a minimum).

Overall, I'm quite proud of these students for the hard work they put into these awesome projects. I hope you enjoy them.  Feel free to drop them a note on their product, or send me a message, to tell them how awesome they were!

Socially Aware Videos

My middle school students just wrapped up a project called Socially Aware Videos.  I selected five social issues and public service announcement videos to match them. Then, students broke into pairs to create their own videos about one of those same five social issues.

Overall, I'm proud of what they were able to create, mostly sitting in the classroom.  Both groups chose bullying as their issue (though one of them combined bullying with social media).  In the future, I may delete that issue from the project for a couple reasons.  One, there is so much talk these days about bullying that I think it wasn't too enlightening.  There are other topics out there that I would like wake them up with (water conservation, adoption, etc.).  Two, recording videos about bullying opens the doors to students enacting bullying situations, which -- trust me -- can lead to issues with parents and administrators.

The first video is actually a series of videos, strung together by a Prezi. Most of those videos were created on Animoto.  Not a bad idea, but I recommended to the students that it would have been better to use iMovie or Capture to create one big video.



The second video was about bullying and social media.  It is created to be like a talk show with an example of cyberbullying through texting.  Nicely done!



What I love about teaching this middle school course is giving them an assignment and watching them tackle it.  They learn the apps and software they want to use and figure things out as they go. While they are learning about social issues, they are really becoming more comfortable with the technology at their fingertips.  It's a great combination!

Innovation Projects, May 2013

It's the last week of school, and my 7th graders are presenting their Innovation Projects (formerly called 20% Time Projects) for the fourth quarter.  Back in January when I came up with this idea, I was very excited for something I thought was pretty original.  It turns out that Genius Hour has taken the educational world by storm when I wasn't looking.  Even though my grand idea isn't so novel after all, it's great to be part of something new and exciting in education.  I feel strongly that if we give students to learn what they are interested in learning they will get a lot more out of it than they ever thought possible.  I've been blessed to be given the freedom to explore this angle with my Tools for Tech class this year.

This quarter, my students were given the opportunity to build upon their third quarter project or start something totally new.  About half chose to dive into something new.  We had some new GarageBand songs, a slew of websites, a logo hijacker, lots of wallpapers, and a Lego gun/saw.  In every case, I have no doubt learning took place, but I'm fairly certain I should have pushed them a bit harder to create (aka innovate) something new rather than mash up what already exists. Look at the examples below and let me know what you think....oh, and try a few recipes.  I highly recommend the brownies on Kent's page.

• American Sign Language (ASL)
• Everything Random
• Food, Fun, Friends
• The Plagemans
• All About Evan
• Games, Games, and Guess What? Games.
• Maxx and His Saw/Gun
• The World of Desserts and the world of desserts
• T4Tinnovation
• Wallpapers
• Minecraft Pocket Edition
• All About Evan (A different one) 
• Sports Fails 
• mattst4tappreveiw

Over the summer, I'm going to read up on Genius Hour and connect with some other Genius Hour teachers to try to hone in the happy medium of giving students a chance to pursue what they want to learn while making sure it's a learning experience worthy of one-fifth of our class time.  As always, I'm open to suggestions.

Click here to see the students' original instructions. 

20% Time Projects

The end of the third quarter is upon us, and we are wrapping up our first round of 20% Time Projects. I'm quite proud of the work these seventh graders have produced.  The links below are evidence that if you give students some tools and the freedom to work, good things can happen.  Please take a moment to enjoy some of these sites, videos, and songs and encourage these students with your comments.

Websites/ Blogs
Cam APPaloosa
All About Animals
Connor's Art Wall
All about Animals
Evan's Awesome Site
Whit's Snake Site
websitecreator
Soundboard
Minecraft Pocket Edition

Robots
Maxx and the Robot

eBook
The Discovery

Original Songs
20%
Oh!
My Song 7
Tools for Tech
Please tell me if you can't access these songs. I had some trouble making GarageBand songs public.
With You

Wallpapers
My Wallpapers

YouTube in Your School?

I recently read this blog post written by a former student of mine.  He is on staff at a church in Chicago, in charge of the church’s social media program. Apparently, we watch four billion YouTube videos a month.  Let that stat sink in for a moment.  Josh takes a few moments to ponder how churches can use YouTube in creative ways to increase their online audiences.  He even used a personal example of an eyeglass store who sent him a 15 second personalized video clip to invite him to the store.  

This all leads me to ask... How can we use YouTube to increase our audience at MVCA?  If YouTube is getting bigger than Facebook, can we somehow put our content out there?

Right away I thought of two hindrances to doing this.
1. Our students (like all K-12) students are minors.  What legal issues surround putting their faces and voices on video and online?  Is there a waiver we need parents to sign?  Could that be something we put in paperwork parents need to sign when enrolling students for the year?
2. What copyright issues would we run into?  It would be tempting to post clips of our fine arts performances, but would we be breaking laws?

Let's look past those legal issues momentarily to see the benefits.  
1. One goal of educational technology is for students to user higher level thinking skills, and creating content on YouTube can help achieve that objective. If our students can create excellent promotional videos, they can learn a life lesson that can be carried well beyond graduation.2. As a private school, we rely on enrollment to maintain our budget.  We are constantly marketing ourselves.  Here is an excellent and free method to do this.  
3. Parents, grandparents, friends, and potential donors can view videos and see what's going on in our school.  This positive press show our constituency what our students are learning and doing at our school. 

Overall, I think that we can effectively utilize YouTube to promote our school and increase enrollment, funds, and good will. It is in our best interest to jump on the YouTube bandwagon.  

How do you use YouTube in your school?

Good-Night iPad

As the father of a toddler, we have read Goodnight Moon more times than I would care to count.  That may be why I find this video so hilarious!  I guess sometimes we have to turn off the machines and say goodnight.

Newberry in 90 Seconds

A school mom sent me this link.  I had to share.



As it turns out, there was a huge festival in the fall, where kids had to compress a Newberry winner into a 90 second video.  I think that the one above is my favorite.  There are a ton of them, and I could watch them all day.  Just do a search on YouTube for "90 Second Newberry Festival."

I love the idea for combining literature and technology.  Maybe I'll do a project like this one... next year.