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Chris Champion: teacher, father, and thinker
So there is this great story… months ago but still fantastic – and I saw Best Buy had this same idea at NECC:
Dance Dance Revolution being used in gym class. And Joystiq.com reports that West Virginia schools all over the state are going to purchase PS3s and Dance Dance Revolution games for all the gym programs.
DDR in Gym Class
Did I tell you that DDR is WAY too cool?
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Great story today on NPR’s All Things Considered about what inspired teachers do during their Summer break. One woman in particular, Melinda Ross from Moss Point High, Moss Point, Mississippi, is working on becoming an Intel Master Teacher – and she went to NECC this year:
“I love to learn… and I guess that’s why I consider myself a good teacher.” (Ross)
Check out the streaming version of this story here: ‘Bye Kids’: Where Teachers Go in Summertime
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Or can you? Did you know that the father of video games escaped from Nazi Germany? Jewish, his family whisked out of Germany just before Kristallnacht.
Or how about the fact that the first video game was NOT pong!
You can TOO learn something – even about world history – from computer games. Or at least as you have your students conduct research on an INTERESTING subject that ENGAGES THEM!
Thanks to Robin Martin for linking me to her class Wiki (made with WetPaint)- where I saw Wired’s 40-Year Pictorial History of Gaming. We all know that pictures AND text help learners grasp concepts – this article is great.
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Mashuptown Logo from http://mashuptown.com
So I’ve been really loving Mashuptown Radio. On the website (with a nice RSS feed, btw), you’ll catch DJs’ versions of mashed up mp3s. My favorite download (don’t tell) is called “Toxic Love Shack”. I’m a B52’s fan.. not so much a Britney fan… but take the back beat and the synth, nix Britney’s voice and add it to “Love Shack” and you have a fantastic mix.
Immediately upon showing my students this website they opened Audacity and tried to make their own!
If you’re a Adam Curry fan (the Podfather), then I’m not telling you anything new
Note: as per copyright, you should buy BOTH songs that are mixed (or all of them if there are more than two mixed) if you plan to keep the music. No creative commons here
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Ok… so Ken’s response to my last post contained a neat video that should have been in my original post. Here’s the embedded version:
Here’s a link to the video in Ken’s comments, available with subtitles on DotSub:
http://dotsub.com/films/wannawork_1/
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I was participating in a Skype chat with another blogger, and perhaps an up-and-coming Ed-Tech leader, and we began this furious exchange of information… Wendy (an Advertising Arts & Design) teacher was saying that she was blown away by the information that other tech integrators have on their websites. And it occurred to me as we looked at all of the websites that the teachers/integrators all gave freely of themselves – they were putting this information out there for the greater good. Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is not just a way of identifying work, but a philosophy that many people are starting to believe in – the geek in me thinks about Star Trek: The Next Generation-style life: where you work towards something because it is personally fulfilling, and material needs are not important because everyone has realized that you are defined by what you do, not what you own. Few teachers went into this trade to become rich. Many (myself included) actually make less than they did before they left their career to inspire young minds. Part of teaching is sharing – whether it is with students, or with other teachers in your school and beyond.
So this is what hits me during the discussion with my colleagues – we all have so much knowledge – Wendy could teach most of us more than a thing or two about graphic design and layout, Kristin knows more about “connectedness” than I think I ever will. So as the three of us talk, I realize that without being paid, without some contract obligating us to do so, we share and share and share… I even quoted U2’s “With Or Without You” – “and you give, and you give, and you give yourself away” (in a good way, mind you).
It is so important that as we create information we do so in a way that can benefit not just our district, but all students and teachers across the world. We can do that by ensuring that we indicate the Creative Commons License that we wish to use. My favorite is “BY-NC-SA”:
Also known as “Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike”. What that means is that this work may be used for noncommercial use, that you can modify it and re-use it, that you must share YOUR modifications, and that when you do, give credit where credit is due.
I would think that if John Lennon were still alive he’d be fighting to share information that would benefit all. Thank you, Lawrence Lessig for founding Creative Commons and allowing “CopyLEFT” rules that permit teachers and others to use information and create information knowing it is for the greater good.
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Well… it’s been a few days since NECC. Time for reflection and to decide what to take from my experiences there. I attended a few excellent “paid for” sessions and I plan to use what I learned to make my classroom better and my students more active learners:
ePortfolios using Wikis (Dr. Helen Barrett) http://electronicportfolios.org/
I must admit that this session was my second choice – Apple canceled their “Panther” preview. And I also must admit that I attended this session thinking that I already knew how to create ePortfolios – I have mine online and I have my students create their own. And while I wasn’t surprised that she suggested using a Web 2.0 tool like Wikispaces, I was impressed by her presentation and her suggestion to build a “matrix” that viewers can look at. Building on her “portfolio at a glance” page, Dr. Barrett created a table in Wikispaces that highlights the skills and disciplines that she is demonstrating on the wiki. Since a Web 2.0 portfolio is hyperlink-able, she makes her “Artifacts” a logical starting point instead of just a footnote. See here: Artifacts Page
You can bet that I’ll take this “next level” with my portfolio, likely following Dr. Barrett’s “How to Create an Interactive ePortfolio” – and then extend that to my students’ portfolios.
GPS and GeoCaching for K-12 Educators (Dr. Alice Christie) http://www.alicechristie.org/
First of all, I just want to say that I want to move to Phoenix to study under Dr. Christie. She is the neatest prof I’ve met – full of energy and ALL about learning (she echoed what I heard time and time again at NECC: “it’s not about the technology”). Dr. Christie is preparing educators for School 2.0 in a BIG way.
This session was not so much about how to use a GPS and more about how to use a GPS and GeoCaching in a multidisciplinary environment. For instance, a language arts teacher could use GeoCaching to teach parts of speech. Or a Math teacher could use it to teach formulas. Pretty much any subject can be used. While I could try to explain exactly how, Dr. Christie does it so much better on her “Educators Guide to GeoCaching”.
So I have a few GPS units I bought with a grant from the Bureau of Career & Tech Ed at the PA Dept of Education. I have taught my kids how to “use” them, but now I know how to teach my kids my classroom concepts, from vocabulary to IP Addressing to…. it’s infinite!
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OK… so what happens when you want to actually talk to your computer… I’m not talking about speech-to-text… this is a conversational communication with a computer – just talking to a computer.
Alan Turing described it as “computer intelligence” – what people now call the “turing test” – when a computer can understand the conversational style of a user and interpret it as commands. Think of it as HAL 9000.
So want to know where the future of computer interfaces is? Talk to SILVIA, Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms. ( http://cognitivecode.com/ ). I’m sitting here with a futurist who is discussing how these SILVIA computers not only talk to us, but can talk to each other – if I’m looking for something, I just speak it into my bluetooth headset – my SILVIA-enabled cell phone might not know the answer, but it talks to other SILVIA devices and can find the answer without me having to know how to find the answer. I’m not talking about simple Google searches – maybe I’m looking for how many people are on line right now at Red Robin – their reservation system has SILVIA and so now I know how many people are waiting… and I can add my name to the queue.
Or what about this: SILVIA understands English and Japanese and many other languages. We teleconference between the US and Japan and SILVIA immediately translates our words… not just “word for word”, but actually with the nuances and inferences only a native speaker would be able to translate.
So what does this mean to us? Even more so we don’t need to teach students memorizable facts… we need to teach them how to find information
Thanks,
Chris
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