The Start of My Notebook & a New Story

I'm impressed by folks like Brad Ovenell-Carter, Amy Burvall and Austin Kleon.  Thinkers who produce steady streams of process and consideration, making and contemplating, giving us all a looksee into the state of their thinking.

While I don't have the doodling prowess of @Braddo . . .

Or the fanciful digital touch of @amyburvall  . . .

Or the effortless real cool of @austinkleon . . .

I do have a desire to pull back the curtains on my brain a bit more and do a more deliberate keeping recording and sharing of those thoughts.

I bought a notebook.  AC Moore.  3 bucks.  On sale.  This one stays with me.

I also bought a bigger sketch book.  Also at AC Moore.  5 bucks.  Recycled.  Made in the USA.  Nice.  This one stays in the house.

Helpful to have a spouse looking out for you with a keen eye for coupons and bargains.

I started drawing out some ideas and notions and putting them up on my Instagram.

Not going to force it.  Not going to set an unreasonable expectations for myself.  What I am going to do instead is use these two tools and my trusty -- and adorably pink argyle -- Galaxy 3, instead of the piles and piles of recycled leftover handouts and misprints that lead to manilla folders stuffed with haphazard.  (I've many of these folders.  They are difficult to flip through.)

And this should begin a new story.  A story of my upcoming doings and possibilities, my upcoming school year, and a story of trying to be just a little more intentional and seeing where that takes me.

Power of a Film Quote

I wasn't intending to blog on this topic, but a rousing Twitter chat (#caedchat moderated by @davidtedu) broke out this evening and wow . . .

Movies.  Film.   We've talked about trailers and condensing story and using those powerful elements of story to enhance student engagement with our content.

Tonight's chat was all about the power of a single quote and why film quotes, in particular, endure, pack so much meaning into a single phrase, sentence or paragraph.  We also discussed the inherent value of film quotes as a way of achieving common ground with students, parents and colleagues.

We also got ridiculous.  And that was a welcome feeling this evening.

Here is just a sampling:

On the value of a pithy film quote toward connecting with students, parents and colleagues, we highlighted the shared experience as having tremendous worth.  When we are virtual strangers, mutual enjoyment over a film, a piece of storytelling that has such emotional resonance.

Regardless of comedy or drama, great films cause us to feel.  And usually those feelings align across the audience.  When we bring up films in class, when we quote from them, that shock of recognition in our students -- that is powerful. In that one moment, we are compatriots with a shared love.  The walls of authority and obedience dissolve and we are all just laughing, or crying, or sighing, or shuddering -- together.

Why do they have so much meaning? Those single quotes?  Firstly, they come armed with aforementioned emotional experience.  Secondly, we remember those quotes and immediately the story returns as well along with all of its merits and understandings and semantic connections.  A single quote may ignite a near total recall of conflicts and character arcs, themes and settings.  And that is notable as we consider our storytelling.

While we never know just when a film is going to produce a memorable quote -- I don't think most screenwriters craft the lines with quotable intentions (notice I said most) -- we can craft stories with the foresight that if we make each do its job with tight, powerful impactful prose and verse?

Why, our students might be quoting from our stories and those of their peers well into the future.

Storytelling Kit?

Last year I started something novel for me as a high school teacher, but somewhat ho-hum for the elementary teaching ranks: school supplies.

I requested each student acquire a personal design kit, a collection of tools that would prove useful to the sorts of exploring and understanding we would be doing during the year under the tenets of design thinking.

Design thinking is empathy-fueled, user-centered problem solving.  DT involves a great deal of interviewing and uncovering, brainstorming and ideating,  sorting of collected data and insights, and piles of rapid prototyping before producing a solution and thus beginning the feedback and iteration process all over again.  To help those processes, and related activities, come alive I requested students provide the following:

Design Kit Starter Set

Medium and/or Fine Point Sharpies (2)

Dry Erase Markers (not yellow) (2)

Colored Pencils (small pack)

Colored Markers (fine or medium) (small pack)

Scissors (1 pair)

Glue Sticks (2)  

I priced it out using back to school sale prices and figured all of the above could be acquired for $10 or less at local retailers.

I also made certain the above could fit inside of a gallon-sized freezer bag.  I purchased the freezer bags along with six plastic dishpans (one for each class) on a heckuva deal at Target, used my Target card to save 5% and give back a percentage to my kids' elementary school.  Forty bucks and I had bags to spare and tubs I could reuse from year to year.  All of the kits fit nicely on a standard TV cart.  And since we no longer need the TVs with our LCD projectors, I was able to find a cart easily.  Portable.  Flexible.  And students have their own supplies at their disposal, making life much easier for me overall.  (If a student couldn't afford a set, I had some classroom supplies -- my stock just lasted much, much longer into the year.)  Plus, students had option to take their kits home at the end of the year. Most didn't.  Bonus.

All of this led me to a pondering a storyteller's kit and what that might look like.

It is just a brainstorm.  Nothing prescriptive here.  And in the process of thinking about what my students would need to tell some story in a digital landscape, I stumbled on that idea of older gen smart phones.  Many families have them kicking around the house, stashed in drawers and cabinets, too expensive a purchase to discard, too old to be of immediate value.

What if students had old cellphones available as quick and easy audio/video recorders?  How might that change the game?

What might you include in such a kit?

What hurdles would you face in helping students develop such kits and, perhaps most importantly, how might those hurdles be surpassed? 

Exploring "Why Storytelling in the Classroom Matters"

Just a couple of weeks ago, Matthew James Friday's article on storytelling appeared in Edutopia.



Why Storytelling in the Classroom Matters



Fortuitous timing for  class, to be sure.



What I noticed more importantly is that list of suggestions on how to become a storyteller.

So How Do You Become a Storyteller?
I recommend the following:

1. Read as many different world folktales, fables, myths, and legends as you can.
2. Watch professional storytellers and take notes about how they do it. Every storyteller is different, and you can learn something from them all.
3. Build your confidence by reading your students picture books or chapter books with an interesting voice. Stop to ask questions. Make the book reading interactive. It will help you create a shared event with a story.
4. Pick stories with small numbers of characters and repeating events, as these are easiest to remember. Having said that, pick any story you like -- no, that you love! If it captivates you, it will captivate the younger ones, too.
5. Write the stories down in a notebook. Writing helps you remember a story, and it models the same to the children.
6. When you start "telling" your story, it's OK to have the book nearby and to take a look at it if you forget a part. Don't be too hard on yourself. You are a student again.
7. Get yourself a "prop box" made of old bits of linen, and fill it with hats from charity shops and random objects that children can use imaginatively. I got a lot of my materials from recycling centers.

What would happen if your students each chose one of those seven to focus on for their own development as storytellers?



What would happen if you chose one for yourself from those seven with which to develop greater facility within the first six weeks of school?



Which would you choose?



Which do you find daunting?



Which would come most natural?



One of my professional goals this year will be to keep a proper notebook.  I tend to scatter my thoughts across space and time in the shape of recycled handouts with lesson plans scribbled upon the back and a string of half-tweets and sorta-emails left in various digital environs.



I bought a simple, generic moleskin wannabe notebook, blank pages, sized small, covered in black.



I also bought a  spiral bound sketchbook of recycled plain white sheets.  It is much larger, less easily wielded but should plenty of space to vizthink, doodle, scrawl, capturemy ideas as well as possible via the static image.

I plan to stuff it full of stories.  Bits and pieces.  Things I may use for lessons.  Things I may use for theater.  Things I may share.  Things I may keep to myself.   Characters.  Plots.  Emotions.  If we take a moment to remember those core elements of story, it can help us organize our notes in ways that may make accessing them later, just that much more meaningful.

Then again, just the act of writing them down in one place?  That would be a great step for me.

What about you and your students?

Story: Gamification's Secret Weapon

I've become more and more keen on gamification, fancy talk for applying the principles of gameplay to other contexts to enhance engagement and, in the case of education, understanding.

These two articles, one from Matthew Farber, one from Vicki Davis,  provide both a nice overview of the concepts of gamification as well as direction for the future of this transformative pedagogical framework.  (Ahh, there's the academic voice again.)

In reading both, I noticed a little gap in their discussions.  One element surfaces in every compelling, cognitively-engaging game I've ever played -- whether digital or no -- and that's story.  Great games are thick

Vicki Davis makes reference to the emergence of story in games when discussing a student's relationship with gaming and learning.

My so-called "killer" student (and we really should rename this when applying it to education!) simply saw things as a battle between good and evil and wanted to fight on the side of good in an epic quest to make the world a better place. Points don't matter in gameplay, and grades don't matter, either. But when we tweaked the kinds of work he was doing in ourGamifi-ED project to focus on "world-changing games," he was suddenly engaged.

 "Gamification in Education" on Edutopia

And I think it goes even further than that.  I'm of a mind, and mind you I'm just starting to explore these ideas, that if you've got a great story, you've got a great game and vice versa. 

Mario.  Full of pathos?  No.  On a mission?  Yes.  Lowly plumber fights against a tyrant and legion of minions to rescue a princess.   Mario-centric games require not just hand-eye coordination but strategy, management of multiple variables, quick recall of information and such.  Why do players keep playing and keep wanting more?  Why does he continue to be relevant: the story.

Pac-Man the original is fun, but simplistic.  And every effort to make him relevant again?  Fails. Really.  He's a bit of nostalgia.   Why hasn't he endured?  The story is just four ghosts want to get him and he wants to get away.  Who cares?  No one.  Why? There's no story.

Think of games you've heard students talk about lately.  Minecraft. Assassin's Creed. Animal Crossing. Call of Duty.  Halo. World of Warcraft.   Titanfall. Even if these games do not feature singular stories, they provide worlds in which players create their own narratives.  Produce their own stories.  Play out the scenarios that interest them.   (One should note, Assassin's Creed has a rich mythology, as do games such a Bioshock and Portal.)  

Sandbox games such as Minecraft offer huge opportunity.  Players literally build a world and the journeys through them.  As players, they start right in the middle of things with little available to them.  They build skills.  They acquire materials and tools.  They achieve.  They face struggles and conflicts, with opposing forces and themselves.  There is story.  And players craft protagonists to their specifications.  

And they may keep coming back because it is fun.  Why is it fun?  I believe it is because with every restart, they are telling another story.  Every restored saved game is a chance to continue the story.

If the game mechanics stink, you can't craft an effective story.  You can't tell the story you want to tell.  That's what really drives players nuts -- when they can't make the character DO the things, experience the things, go through the narrative arcs, they have shaped in their heads just moments before.

Can this explain Cookie, Candy and Tooth Decay Crush?  No.  Does Cookie Crush have the opportunity to teach us much?  Not really.

However, pattern-recognition games have been developed to help map genomes & explore possible cures for cancer.  What makes people want to keep playing those more meaningful versions?  Well, the game play is familiar and "mindless" fun, yet now people are part of a story.

And becoming an active part of a story?  That's what excitements me about bringing gamification to students.  

Unit Plan Outline & Guiding Thinking

Folks have been asking about expectations on the unit plan.  As this is the first time the course has run, I don’t yet have a full-sized unit plan model to share.  However, I can provide a template and some some sampling reference.

Here’s what I don’t want. Anyone familiar with UMF’s undergraduate program has seen the lesson plans and unit plans pre-service teachers create.  Those are new educators still proving they have a grasp of the essentials.  You folks are engaged professionals and don’t need to articulate four pages of detailed thinking around differentiation and learning styles and multiple intelligences as such.  I’m expecting those considerations to be self-evident in your plans.

Here’s what I do want.  A plan rich enough in detail that I can read it over and have a clear sense of how you are integrating digital storytelling, the goals of each lessons, clarity in the purpose of each lesson as a scaffold toward meeting the standards and demonstrating authentic understanding through student-generated products, and the tools by which you will measure the success of this.  If you look over your lesson plans and think, “I could share these with a colleague and they would have a strong idea of what my students are doing,” then you are likely in good shape.  If you look over your lesson plans and think, “I’d have to explain a lot of this in person,” then add some more detail.

I visualize one to two pages per lesson plan plus whatever rubrics or other materials you need to link. (I'm not counting pages to assess this work.)

Daily Objectives

One, two or three measurable objectives for the day.  Bullet style.  Keep Bloom’s taxonomy in mind.

• Students will identify the atmosphere/mood created by a given piece of music.

  
  

  Students will compare and contrast the atmospheric/mood effects of pairing different music selections with their slides

Alignment to Local Standards and/or Common Core

One, two or three standards you believe this lesson is working toward.  It may be the lesson is around hitting a specific learning target or performance indicator.  Copy and paste from the original.  No narrative needed.  If I have questions about alignment, I will ask.  In an effective lesson plan, it will be self evident from the rest of the details.

Example:8th Grade GEOMETRYProve, understand, and model geometric concepts, theorems, and constructions to solve problems.A. Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, surface area, volume, and angle measure. (CCSS 6.G.A, 7.G.B)Source: http://www.greatschoolspartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PBLS_Mathematics_Standards.pdf

Your unit as a whole should be realistic in terms of how many standards you are working toward.  More standards doesn’t mean a better unit plan.  It is about the depth of understanding you are looking for with your students.  At the same time, ten lessons around a single standard may not be in the best interests of your long range planning for your year.  

Which standards nest well together?  Which ones can be explored in the interest of the others?

Handy dandy reference tool:

http://www.sacscoc.org/institute/2014/2014SIHANDOUTS/Monday/Cleary2Mon.pdf

Love the second page of this particular document because of the “phrases to avoid” section.  

Formative Assessments

A description of what students will do during that class period to build toward an understanding of those standards and to meet the given objectives and how you will be measuring their success.  These formative assessments may be anything from observation and oral feedback to exit tickets to blog posts.  Consider this an opportunity to create -- or implement if you’ve already made them -- rubrics that can ease in these sorts of measurements and tracking of student achievement.  What might a classroom participation rubric look like?  What might an exit ticket rubric look like?  How might that data help inform instruction?

Today students will explore the scientific process by creating visual pictographs that tell the story of an experiment.  
1. We’ll start by reviewing the steps in the scientific process that I introduced to them in the first four classes using the slide deck I created on Google Presentation.  (Link here.)2.  I’ll introduce the concept of pictographs by using images from the Noun Project posted around the room in place of the objects that are typically there.  Thus, where students would usually see our clock, instead they will see  
Alarm Clock designed by Matt Brooks from the thenounproject.com

3.  After a brief discussion of how images can include as much meaning as words and some other samples displayed on the projector, I will give students a few minutes to explore www.thenounproject.com.  
4.  After some exploring and sandbox time, I will show them how to set up an account and how to attribute the images they choose to use for our activity today.
5.  For the rest of class today, they will be using images from The Noun Project, or self created images, to tell the story of an experiment from beginning to end of the scientific process.  They can use the experiment I’ve walked them through earlier in the week, one they’ve seen from the YouTube playlist I’ve created of sample experiments (link here), or one of their own creating.  I will encourage them to go with the sample I’ve walked them through in the interest of time, because I really want them focusing on how to tell an effective story through images.  This should help them with their lab notebooks and creating quick visual information that makes sense when put in sequence.  
They will be putting those pictograms in order on either a Google Docs word processing document, Pages document, Keynote slide deck or Google Presentation slide deck for easy sharing.  If they create their own images, they will take pics of those images and put them into their product.
6.  This is a formative assessment so I will be assessing student progress using my standard classroom participation rubric, observation and oral feedback.   (Link here.)  Students will be posting their experiment stories to their blogs as well, where I can provide more feedback.  Our blogs are assessed using my blogging rubric.  (Link here.)

Summative Assessment.

Big project.  What are they building toward that demonstrates the culminating understanding of the content and how will you assess it?  How are you working storytelling into that product?

Rubrics.

Create rubrics to assess student understanding.  Provide them in your plan.  

Keep alignment to standards and four-point scales in mind as you do so.  

Consider the language of the rubric and your user: is this for your students to read and use or for your administrator?  

Materials.

Reading, videos, audio content, tools you are using. A master list is helpful but not necessary if they are included in the lesson plans.

Student/User Impact Analysis

Here’s where you explain in a narrative (appx. 1 page) how you believe your unit will create a value added digital storytelling-fueled learning experience for your students/users.  To what extent does your unit demonstrate the higher ends of the Puentedura’s SAMR model?  To what extent have you provided an effective delivery of content and technology instruction per the TPACK model?  This serves as a narrative self-assessment of  your unit.

UMF EDU 571: Boxes & Storytelling

Boxes are great. 

They hold things very well.

They protect things very well, as well.

They keep things hidden and easily stored.

They provide structure where there is none and create order where it is needed.

Watch this short film.

The Adventures of a Cardboard Box from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Several of you may have seen this film and that’s okay.  It’s good to watch things again after having not seen them in a while, informed by new experiences and new purposes.

How many stories did you see in this film?  One?  Three?  Seven?  Fifteen? More?

What would this story have been without a box?

What would this story have been without a camera?

What would this story have been without music?

What would this story have been with dialogue?

How might this story inspire a scientist hoping to prove a theory?

How might this story inform a mathematician trying to solve a problem?

When I watch this film, I see possibilities.  I see who we are before we become encumbered by expectations and self-awareness.  I see empathy and tragedy, acceptance and nostalgia.  

And I see a filmmaker who knows that we don’t need to see every detail to know the entire story.  I see deliberate camera framing that creates a box into which we look to see outside of that box.  I see a well-chosen handheld camera shot to capture the chaos of the moment and the ease with which an audience may recognize grief at a distance.    I see the power of silence.

I don’t know that writing this story would achieve the same goal.  I don’t know that drawing it into a comic book would have the same emotional resonance.  I am inclined to think that an oral telling of this story, in hands and lips of a deft storyteller, might come close.  And then I watch that final montage and I’m not sure.  Showing students the power of effective piece of editing, then providing them the opportunity to exercise the same power, makes them not just the audience for the films they watch, but critical colleagues in the culture of meaning making.  

And then I watch the film in a classroom full of students who have not seen it.

I gauge their maturity, sensitivity, empathy, discomfort, insecurity by their responses to a single moment.  Whether a tear or a laugh, both provide an opportunity for me to learn more about those individuals.  Why the tears?  Why the laughs? Conversations rather than judgements.  (A laugh can come from a sad place, just as well as it can from cruel place; I learned this the hard way.)

Gifts sometimes come in boxes.

One gift we may provide our students is the opportunity to think outside of the box.

It is a gift we may present to ourselves, as well.