There is something about doodling…illustrating… as you are listening to, absorbing and reflecting about content or an experience. I have questions…?

• Does doodling calm a mind, that is constantly bouncing of its walls?
• Does doodling help one focus on auditory material?
• Can doodling help clarify content?
• Does doodling only work for the artistically inclined? (What if I can’t draw?)
• Is doodling only beneficial for the visual learner?

I have been wanting to find out about these questions for a while now. During an experiment with a fifth grade class last school year, I showed them parts of Ken Robinson’s TED talk “Changing Education Paradigm” that had been animated by RSA Animate. You might think that this age group would not have been interested in that topic, but surprisingly they were fascinated and begged me to watch more of the video clip. I wrote about the different jobs students took, including the one of a Doodler/Illustrationist, as they watched another movie about the American Revolution. Take a look at the post The Official Scribe: It’s All About Learning Styles & Collaboration.

My little informal experiment showed that students, who doodled their notes, retained more details of the content they heard and were able to narrate and explain content, connections and sequence better than their counterparts who took text with bullet type notes.

In another post, titled Third Graders- Called Upon As Experts, I mentioned the “Doodler” using an iPad to illustrate during a Skype video conference.

A few days ago, I clicked on a link from Twitter, which took me to the following TED Talk: Doodlers Unite! by Sunni Brown

In this short five minute video Sunni answers many of my initial questions I posed above.

She makes a point of the importance of doodling as a means to use visual language and talks about the perceived notion that doodling is too often NOT considered serious learning. She advocates that doodling has a

profound impact how we can process information and solve problems.

How can we, as educators, ignore this statement above? Processing information and solving problems are critical 21st century skills!!!

How can we not take advantage of Sunni’s definition of Doodling below?

Sunni defines Doodling as:

to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think

Take the five minutes to listen to Sunni and maybe you will doodle on a piece of paper or on your iPad about what YOU think? How can you connect what you are hearing to YOUR classroom and YOUR students and all of OUR learning. How can me make doodling acceptable in schools and even take a step further by strategically teaching and supporting it?

Screenshot of TED Slide by Raghava KK

This is a short TED talk by Raghava KK, the illustrator of the iPad book POP-IT – Raghava KK Inc. This video is not a commercial about the artist’s iPad book though, but shares a message about the importance of raising our children with PERSPECTIVE.

In his book, children can shake the iPad to change the configuration of a family (gay parents, lesbian parents of heterosexual parents). Raghava KK’s vision is to create books that teach history differently. He wants to create books that talk about historic events, such as Indian Independence. You read the book about the Indian perspective, shake the iPad and you will get Pakistan’s perspective, shake it again and get the British’ perspective.

I love the concept… my wheels are turning how to transfer that to the classroom with students… I know teachers are using multiple perspective storytelling in the Language Arts classroom, such as having students retell a fairy tale from the perspective of the villain (wolf, witch, etc) instead of the hero or Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart podcast to teach author’s point of view.

How can we transfer this to social studies, science and other subject areas?

The following Creative Commons video has been circulating on Twitter and on many other blogs. I wanted to share it with Langwitches’ readers. Being aware and knowledgeable about copyright and the different licenses, including Creative Commons, is imperative.
Take a look at the following Copyright related posts on Langwitches too:

• Backchanneling-Movie Watching-Note Taking- Information Scribes
• Creative Commons: What Every Educator Needs to Know

Fascinating tribute to humans on planet Earth and our similarities and differences.

As a teacher, you know when your students are excited about learning. It is what you work for. Is is part of the passion that makes you a true educator.

I had the honor of witnessing such display of excitement and learning a couple of weeks ago, as I spent a day of learning with educators participating in the Edweek2011 in St. Jospeh, Missouri. Not only did I want to talk to teachers and administrators about the opportunities of using Skype in the classroom, I wanted to show them first hand. I wanted them to experience the potential it could bring into their own schools by connecting, communicating and collaborating with others around the world. But the connection could not only be about the connection via Skype itself. How can we make a connection to curriculum content and 21st century skills and literacies? How can we turn an ordinary connection via Skype into a LEARNING CALL?

Using the concept of  “The Digital Learning Farm: Students as Authentic Contributors”by Alan November, I had arranged a Skype call with Mrs. Yollis and her third grade students. Neither party knew the geographic location of each other. It was each groups’ goal to find their respective location by asking closed questions that could be answered with a “Yes” or a “No”. Mrs. Yollis had prepared her 3rd graders by distributing specific job responsibilities during a Skype call  in order to work together to figure out the location of their connection partner.

I hope you will be able to see, hear and feel the excitement of learning these students displayed by watching the edited video recording (for time purposes) of the call.

Make no mistake, simply by assigning these job responsibilities to (groups of or individual) students will not automatically create a learning call, nor will it welcome such an open display of learning excitement into your classroom. The credit goes to Mrs. Yollis for having prepared here students with her own enthusiasm and thirst for learning the entire school year up until this point.

The learning call was well framed by preparing students ahead of time. All of Mrs. Yollis’ students had had previous experiences with authentic contributions to their classroom learning community. Just take a closer look at Mrs. Yollis’ fabulous classroom blog documenting and describing their shared learning.

During the Skype call, Mrs Yollis continued to guide and focus students on the task at hand. It was obvious to us “on the other side of the screen”, that students knew their job responsibilities and worked well together.

Once the call was over, the learning continued by reflecting on the experience on their classroom blog. Mrs. Yollis posted  questions for her students to comment on. The class also received comments from teachers who had participated from Missouri as well as blog readers as far away as Australia.

image licensed under Creative Commons by Sean Nash

Image licensed under Creative Commons by Sean Nash

The Mystery Skype Call from langwitches on Vimeo.

Read more about Mystery Skype calls:

• Mystery call with Langwitches (by Mrs. Yollis)
• Mystery call with Mr. Avery (by Mrs. Yollis)
• Mystery call with Mrs. Yollis (by Mr. Avery)
• Mystery Skype call with Michigan (by langwitches)

You are reading another post in the series “The Digital Learning Farm” based on Alan November’s work of “The Digital Learning Farm“, which he also outlines in his chapter of Heidi Hayes Jacobs’ book “Curriculum 21“.

Adapted from Alan November (pp.188-193), Curriculum 21 (ASCD, 2010) by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.

I am looking today specifically at the role of “Tutorial Designer”.

You can read previous posts of mine about Tutorial Designers below:

• ShowMe App for the iPad- Good Tutorial Designer App?
• Becoming good Tutorial Designers
• Tutorial Designers- Empowered Learners- Contributors
• Middle School Math Wiki- Students’ Thoughts
• Teaching is the Highest Form of Understanding
• Math Lesson? Empower Learners?

They say

If you can teach it…you know it!

We put 4th grade Math students to the “test”… well not really… No traditional test was required to show their understanding of multiplication. We asked our students to create a tutorial explaining multiplication to peers, future fourth graders of our school, etc. We started out with a lesson on Becoming good Tutorial Designers to show them examples of tutorial design techniques as well as to give them an understanding of the importance of clear and precise step by step directions.

In groups, students set out to write the scripts of their tutorials. Each group decided to use different tools to create a video visualizing the math problem and the step by step solution. We had one group creating a PowerPoint document, another one used sticky notes and the third group used various apps on the iPad to film and record.

The process of creating a simple tutorial was elaborate. From breaking the multiplication process up into individual steps, to being able to express these steps verbally and visually to creating a storyline around the math problem/solution to make it flow. We definitely spent most of the time fine tuning the step by step guide and rehearsing the script.

Recording of tutorial video

Now my question is:

Is it Worth it?

Do I have evidence that student created tutorials are worth the effort. An effort that takes (especially in the beginning) considerably more time than filling out a worksheet?

• I think about the service that student created tutorials provide to fellow classmates (or global peers)? Some students learn (listen?) better (different?) when the concept is explained by someone their age.
• I think about the skills that go into the development of  tutorials:
  • communication/verbal/language skills
  • critical thinking skills
  • creation skills
  • media skills
  • presentation skills
  • design skills
  • problem solving skills
  • empathy (How can I explain best, so SOMEONE ELSE will understand better?… How can I put myself into their shoes?)
• I think about the motivation to do your best, that comes with the knowledge that it will not only be your teacher or your parents who will see your work, but by sharing it online, you have a global audience.
• I think about the reward when you find out (verbal, via comments, tweets, embeds, etc.) that your tutorial helped someone else learn.
• I think about the collaborative construction of resources- the curation of information (watch for an upcoming blog post on that topic), when work from one year is added to the work from previous and future years?
• I think about the metacognition of the learning process, the documentation of the process and breaking it apart.

What is some evidence you see of “being worth our time” when students create tutorials to teach and learn?

Take a look at the final product of each 4th grade group.

4th Grade Multiplication Tutorial from langwitches on Vimeo.

4th Grade Math Tutorial from langwitches on Vimeo.

4th Grade- Math Tutorial- Multiplication from langwitches on Vimeo.

I have been working with 5th grade for several weeks to upgrade “The American Revolution”, a unit in their Social Studies curriculum.  Along the Way I blogged about individual lessons.

• Bringing in Experts. Transformative Teaching & Learning?
• The Official Scribe: It’s All About Learning Styles & Collaboration

One of the creations that we had planned for students to show their research and knowledge about historic figures of the American Revolution was to create a fake facebook profile page. Since the students are under the age of 13, they created them offline in a PowerPoint slide, which we later uploaded to their classroom blog. There are quite a few few facebook templates floating around online for you to use. Thank you to the person (I am sorry that I can’t give proper name credit), who created the following one that we ended with.

Kids were very excited about creating these pages, since at their age,  “Facebook” represents something “cool” and “…when you are older…” for them. Once we got started, we ran into several hurdles though:

• Platform Familiarity: Although some of them (11 year olds)  seem to have already  an account of their own, peek over the shoulder of an older sibling or family member, there were quiet a few who were not familiar with the entire structure and the connections between friends, posts, profile, comments, likes, etc. Many of them had to get a handle on the reverse chronological order of posts.
• Process: After requiring a rough draft (paper version) of their facebook profile before they were able to start working on the electronic file, proved to be wise.
• Language: The concept of going beyond a “cool”, “awesome”, “Yeah, kill the British” type comments was the hardest to get across. Not all of them succeeded. We explained again, that they had to put themselves into the shoes of their character. How would they have written, if a communication medium like Facebook would have been available.
• Content: We had to repeat over and over again, that this page and its content had to SHOW their research and knowledge about the selected person. They needed to embed facts in the “conversation” between their character and their “fictitious” friends. We wanted them to show connections between events, characters and political point of view.
• Logistics: Some students had difficulty working in the PowerPoint environment and got very frustrated with the formatting issue. Moving text boxes around, aligning them properly, resizing text and images to fit their allotted spaces, etc., was not as smooth as we anticipated. We allowed the students who became frustrated to fill out a paper-version of the

In addition to the Facebook pages, the class worked with Andrea Hernandez to create a Snopes- Urban Legends inspired video. What myths about the American Revolution could they debunk? Students used the a range of programs (their choice)  to produce a short intro video:

• Google Search Stories
• Frames
• Garageband
• iMovie

Here are a few examples of the Snopes movies.

Debunking Myths- Paul Revere from langwitches on Vimeo.

Debunking Myths of the American Revolution from langwitches on Vimeo.

Why Haven’t We Heard More About Peter Francisco? from langwitches on Vimeo.

Watch Andrea’s blog for an upcoming reflective blog post about the Snopes video creation.

Part of the planning and reflection was to use the “Upgrade to 21st Century Skills, Literacies, & Roles” template and fill in the skill and literacies addressed. The template helps teachers realize how many skills and literacies they are addressing with a single unit upgrade. Over the course of a year, it also helps to make sure that we rotate through all roles to empower learners, even if one upgrade does not address (and does not need to) all roles.

Please click on the individual images to see a larger version.

21st Century Skills Addressed

21st Century Literacies Addressed

Roles to Empower Learners

I am honored to be able to cross-post Stephen Wilmarth’s blog post below on Langwitches.
If you are interested to read more about Steve’s International Experimental program at the Number One Middle School in Wuhan, China take a look at:

• Take a Peek into China’s First 1:1 iPad Class
• Learning…Young Chinese Perspective
• Bringing a 1:1 iPad Program to China

by Stephen Wilmarth
China has a problem.  It will soon become, if it isn’t already, the largest English speaking country in the world.

This is the result of English being a mandatory subject for every student who graduates from high school and goes on to a university.  The Chinese national college entrance exam, known as the GaoKao, consists of nearly 25% English language related questions, including English grammar, English vocabulary, English sentence structure, and English reading passages.  And the GaoKao is the only criteria used to select students for China’s most prestigious universities.  So, every public high school in China is focused on teaching students English as a second language.  It is a national priority and a national obsession.  In this heated environment, the teaching of language takes center stage.  Questions abound.  Is the teaching of English being effectively accomplished in China?  Why are so many English learners, who score well in English sections on all-or-nothing tests like the GaoKao, unable to “function” in English?  Can an emphasis on the “test” really be a successful strategy for learning a second language that is as different from the Chinese native tongue as English and Mandarin are?

The evidence that the conflict between the “test” and the “need” is not very promising for the current system of teaching methods.  But closing the gap between the need for Chinese students to score high on the GaoKao, while achieving better results in using English in professional and daily transactions with foreigners, does not have an easy or clear answer.

In my own boot-strapping attempt to improve the teaching of English for my students at the International Experimental Class, I’ve made a choice to try and give students a much wider range of active learning options.  I can do this because I’m not bound by the system to prepare my students for higher education in a Chinese institutions.  My students are all focused on going to a university abroad, predominantly to the US.

I offer the following project as an example of one of the kinds of methods that we’re trying.  Observe these artifacts and make your own judgement.  Give me your feedback.  I’m interested in improving the outcome and the methods for achieving better results in language learning.

The Project Description:

A class of 45 students at my school in China were matched up with a class of 20 students at the All Saints Catholic Girls College (high school) in Liverpool (Sydney), Australia.

Each class broke up into teams to make a total of 6 short movies per class – 6 movies made by our Chinese students, and 6 movies produced by the Australian students.  These movies were storyboarded, scripted, filmed, directed, and produced strictly by the students.

The final versions were then stripped of soundtracks – music, dialogue, and sound effects, and the silent versions were exchanged between the schools.  The students were then asked to put their own soundtracks – music, dialogue, and sound effects, into the exchanged silent films.

The culmination of the project is to share both the original versions with sound and the updated versions with sound from the other class.  Students are then asked to analyze the films for cultural, language, and creative differences.

I’ll offer some examples of the work here.  I’m interested in finding “evidence” of learning.  How does making a movie, including storyboarding, scripting, filming, directing, and producing help to improve language and communication skills?  Is there evidence here that language teaching objectives are being met?

This is a clip produced by students at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University.  The clip is titled “Hide & Seek.”  This first sample is a complete production with sound.

This next version is the same clip, but stripped of all sound, which was passed along to the students in Australia.  It’s now their job to create their own sound track for this video clip.

Here’s one of the versions returned by the students from Australia, with their own “script.”  This is titled “Hide & Seek” by Jennifer, Shalona and Ashmita.

This next clip, titled “Recurring,” turned out to be of great interest to the students in Australia.  It’s dark overtones and desire to “turn back the clock” in order to get a second chance, seems to be a strong theme among students.

Here’s the original version with sound.

Here’s the stripped version without sound.

And here’s one of the versions, titled “Recurring” by Cindy, that were returned by the Australian students, with their own sound track.

Here’s another clip produced by students at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University.  The clip is titled “Friendship.”

Again, this “theme” seems to run strong in students in every culture.

Finally, here are the remaining clips, with sound tracks, produced by the students at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University.

“IMAGINE FLYING” by Aqua Group

“Angel Beats” by Grape Group

“A Story About a Dog” by Lime Group

In all cases, I think this project demonstrates to me, at least, that there are common themes that interest teenagers everywhere.  I also think this work shows the strong influences of global “macro” cultures.
I’d be interested in feedback on this project.  This is but one of many projects we’ve run this year, using multi-media channels to help students build a better working knowledge in foreign language and use their creative energies to express complex ideas and feelings.

As promised here is the follow up video to the trailer from my previous post Bringing a 1:1 iPad Program to China. I am back in the US now and am trying to sort through and make connections to my experiences from the past 2 weeks.

Taking videos and pictures while we were traveling in China… has helped me tremendously in reflecting on these experiences. Choosing the right images (from over 1000 files between Mike and my Flickr account) and then editing the movie was an integral part of my learning experience.

1:1 iPad Initiative in Wuhan, China from langwitches on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts when viewing the video? What parallels can you draw to education in the US? What implications do you see for the global future of our students?

As we are asking ourselves: “How do we upgrade a traditionally taught curriculum unit and bring it into the 21st century?”

… We need to test, probe and continuously experiment what works? How does it work? Is the upgrade transformative? Does it increase student motivation? Engagement? Learning?

Automating...

I observe carefully if an upgrade, with the use of technology, is just automating the way we have always taught or is it informating and transformative? Alan November explains what he means by automating and informating in an article titled Creating a New Culture of Teaching:

I have learned about two ways to think about technology: one is called automating, the other is called informating. One will give you incremental improvement; the other will give you big improvement. Unfortunately schools and technology planning tend to focus on automating. This means that you bolt technology on top of what you’re already doing. Most of the investment in education is automating. We have kids write a five-paragraph essay with a $2,000 pencil in a word processing lab. The best improvement you can hope for if you automate is incremental. For example, if we automate report cards, the result is we have prettier report cards, but we don’t improve learning.

You get very different results when you informate. The real revolution is information and communication, not technology. Let go of the word technology. If you focus on it, then you’ll just do what you’re already doing. The trick in planning as we move forward is to think about information systems, whole systems of the flow of information and communication.

As our fifth grade class at the Martin J Gottlieb Day School prepared to study the American Revolution, I am conscientious of the upgrades we are planning and implementing for the unit. Take a look at my previous post titled: The Official Scribe: It’s All About Learning Styles & Collaboration, where I share the transformative use of collaborative note taking (some with..some without technology involved) to address different learning styles.

Collaborative 5th Grade Bulletin Board

Another upgrade we are monitoring for results is bringing in “experts” into the classroom via Skype. I consider someone an”experts” who has a passion for a subject or topic, personal experience or can bring in another perspective.

As I started to mention on Twitter our planning to upgrade the American Revolution unit, Travis Bowman picked up on it. He is

a 6th generation descendant of Peter Francisco and has written an historical novel about Peter’s life entitled Hercules of the Revolution.

Travis agreed to skype into our 5th grade classroom to talk about his ancestor’s story and life. Students were able to ask questions, make connections to what they already had studied in the classroom and digg really deeper into their understanding and visualization of “what life was like” for a soldier during the American Revolutionary war. Take a look at a shorten summary of our Skype call. I hope you can get a feel of our students’ engagement of the topic as well as the quality and critical thinking skills that went into their questions. Ask yourself if questions like these would have been encouraged with the use of a textbook alone? As Travis was speaking with the students, their teacher was circulating her iPad among them to pull up images or other info Travis was mentioning.

A second opportunity presented itself, when Richard Byrne, a History teacher from Main, and famous author of the FreeTechnology4Teachers site, accepted our Skype invitation to the classroom in Florida. Mrs. Z., the 5th grade classroom teacher, asked Richard to talk to her students about the battles of the American Revolution. Richard, instantly, was able to create a connection to our students through the screen. Students (ten & eleven year olds) who usually would be fidgeting when asked to sit and listen for 45 minutes to a lecture where engaged and interested. They were absorbing, questioning…making connections…

I also want to point you to a guest post from Heather Durnin, she wrote about HER students experience during a Holocaust unit, when I had been asked to skype in as “the expert” and share my family’s history.

Is technology being used to transform teaching and learning by bringing in experts? Are students experiencing that learning and information does not only come from the pages of a textbook or a teacher lecturing in front of the class? Are students starting to make connections about the value of a network and being able to contact people from all around the world to learn from them? What are your experiences from bringing in experts into the classroom? Is technology, like video conferencing, truly transformative? Can examples, as the ones described above, help other teachers get tools, like Skype, unblocked in their schools and districts for the sake of new forms of teaching and learning? Are we on the right track?