Professional Development through Twitter

I have to admit to having a Love/Hate relationship with Twitter.  I love the concept of Twitter.  Users get 140 characters to write about their thoughts, which gets sent out to all the people who “follow” them.  It’s technically considered a microblogging site since people are limited to what they can post.  Twitter has quite a following and it popularity has fostered a whole Twitter vocabulary.

But I also hate the inane remarks that people post on Twitter.  Although I’ve been guilty of this myself, there are only so many posts that I can read about people drinking lattes at Starbucks, walking their dog, going out to eat or hanging out with their adorable toddler. It’s enough to make a person stop using Twitter altogether, which I’ve almost done on numerous occasions.

But I think I’ve seen the light with Twitter.  Last week, I heard a keynote address by Will Richardson at the Leading the Learning conference at the Lancaster/Lebanon IU.  Mr. Richardson says that Twitter is the greatest professional development tool he’s ever used.  He carefully selects people to follow that will help expand his knowledge and push his worldview.  He calls the group of people he follows and learns from his Personal Learning Network.  Following his advice, I purged the people I follow on Twitter.  I got rid of family members and a bunch of friends and I’ve started to select a group of people who are going to aid in my professional development.  It’s actually pretty amazing the number of people and organizations that are out on Twitter.  I’ve started to follow updates from The US Department of Education, Wired Magazine, Clay Shirky, Clive Thompson and some others.  Some may wonder what you can learn from 140 characters.  But that’s the point.  In my Twitter feed, I now get short synopses of articles and websites with links to check them out myself.  I can follow up on the posts that strike my interest and ignore the ones that don’t.  If you’re wondering who is actually on Twitter, check out this post that lists 100 educators to follow on Twitter.

Still having some trouble understanding Twitter, check out this short tutorial from the Common Craft folk:

Roleplaying with xtranormal

Roleplaying can be a tremendous instructional activity to use with our students.  By planning out the dialogue for a roleplaying lesson, students visualize possible interactions and write scripts that capture the event.  By acting out a roleplay, students get to experience the interaction firsthand and vicariously learn from the staged performance. There are numerous ways that roleplaying can be used in our classrooms. For instance, an instructor can have her students roleplay a parent-teacher conference, an IEP meeting or a counseling session.   The possibilities are almost limitless.

In my experience with roleplaying, however, I have learned one important lesson:  Most of my students hate to roleplay.  The students agonize over the script and worry about acting out the dialogue in front of their classmates.  While I will continue to use roleplaying in my classes, these student reactions have motivated me to consider other options.  One option is xtranormal.  Xtranormal bills itself as a site where “if you can type, you can make movies.”  The site is really incredible.  Students can plan out a movie with two animated characters and have complete control over camera angles, dialogue, facial expressions and actions.  The best part of xtranormal is that the site is free.  Or mostly free.  It has recently started charging for more advanced options as changing characters, settings or voices but the basic options are still free.

I recently used xtranormal with a Digital Storytelling class I taught online.  One of the critical issues with digital storytelling is the use of copyrighted material.  For this activity, my students used xtranormal to debate whether a student product was a copyright violation or not.  Each student constructed a short movie with each character taking opposing sides of the argument and embedded their creations in the class Ning.

Be sure to check out the short xtranormal tutorial and this student example from the Digital Storytelling class.  The example was created by Kate Schantz, a teacher in the Bangor Area School District.

Xtranormal tutorial:

Seven streaming video sites

When I started teaching high school science around twenty years ago, a filmstrip was still considered an advanced instructional technology.  Incorporating films into a classroom was no easy process.  To show a movie, a teacher would have to request a film from a local repository weeks or sometimes months before she needed it and then keep her fingers crossed that the film was delivered when it was needed.  There was really no way to preview a film to gauge its quality or relevance.   Add in the expense of film projectors and the difficulty with setting them up and maintaining them, it’s no wonder that many teachers just avoided using movies altogether.

But the world is a much different place now. High speed Internet has brought us streaming video that we can access on demand.  We can use LCD projectors to display the movie to a class and easily cue up the parts we want to show.  We can even embed videos into other websites (Ning, Desire2Learn, etc) to allow students to watch movies in an online class or as part of a homework assignment for a face-to-face class.  Videos are a great way to engage the visual learners in your classes and a perfect way to reinforce a concept discussed in class.  Seeing how valuable videos can be in our classes, I thought I’d feature a bunch of resources for streaming video and what they can offer your classes.

YouTube: Any discussion of streaming video should begin with YouTube.  Although it is often maligned for the number of videos featuring Lady Gaga or showing Charlie biting his brother’s finger, YouTube offers tremendous opportunities for educators.  Besides the millions of videos on a variety of topices, YouTube also maintains an EDU section where you can find lectures from Columbia, Stanford, UCLA and many other institutions.

Hulu: If you aren’t familiar with Hulu, you need to check it out.  Now.  Hulu offers free (but commercial supported) streaming television shows and movies.  Although rumors persist that Hulu will eventually start charging members to use the site, there is an amazing amount of content available.  Besides current movies and TV shows, Hulu offers a treasure trove of oldtime favorites like Bewitched and the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  There are also thousands of PBS shows spanning the last thirty years that would be perfect for just about any class.

The Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is a little known resource for video. The mission of the Internet Archive is to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.  In addition to offering videos that can be streamed from the site, videos on the Internet Archive can also be downloaded and shared.  The site is pretty incredible.  Want to show a 1919 video on Democracy in Education?  The Internet Archive has one.  Want to show Reefer Madness?  The Internet Archive has it.  All for free!

The Open Video Project: The mission of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.  Unlike the other sites in this post, the OVP does not stream its videos but instead offers all of the videos as free downloads.  Although the site can be difficult to navigate, the OVP offers a wide variety of scientific, historical and educational videos.  For instance, check out this short film from the turn of the 20th Century featuring students in a school in Lancaster.

22Frames: Unlike the other sites I’ve featured in this post, 22Frames really stands apart.  While the content that 22Frames offers might not be that expansive, the videos offer closed captioning for students with hearing impairment.  The site can also be useful for students who are learning English as a second language since the words are shown and spoken simultaneously, which may aid in language acquisition.

Netflix: While I initially hesitated to add Netflix to this list, I think the site offers a great deal of potential in our classrooms.  Netflix is a subscription based video site that offers streaming video and DVD rentals.  Netflix is quickly entering the smartphone (and iPad) world and I predict will become more ubiquitous over the next year or so.  Besides popular theatrical releases, Netflix offers TV shows like This American Life and a host of documentaries like Food, Inc. which would be great resources educationally.

BBC Motion Gallery: The BBC has partnered with a few other broadcasters (HBO, CBS, etc) to offer a great deal of old news footage and television shows online.   While NBC offers a similar services with its new archives, NBC charges for accessing the contents.  BBC Motion Gallery does not.  For instance, check out this video of the desegregation of the University of Alabama from 1963 or this news reel from the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Introductions with Fotobabble

At first glance, Fotobabble might seem like it’s just an entertaining little application.  The site bills itself as “Talking Photos” and that’s it in a nutshell.  You upload a photo, record your voice and then share your creation with other people.  When you’re finished, you can link to your Fotobabble, email it to friends, share it through Facebook or even embed it in on other websites.  Fotobabble is extremely easy to use.  To use the site, you need to have a username to save your work but won’t need to download any software to your computer.

So, how can Fotobabble be used in our classes?  Since the site allows users to upload any image and record 60 seconds of audio, Fotobabble would be a great platform for mini-presentations either in an online or a face-to-face class.  This summer, I’ve been using the site as an introductory activity in my online classes.  Each student uploads a personal photo and then records a short introduction to the rest of the class.  Activities like this at the start of an online class can function as ice breakers and help to build a sense of community with the class.

Check out this Fotobabble introduction I used in a Digital Storytelling course.

Searching with Google’s Timeline and Wonder wheel

With all of the new developments on Google, I thought I’d spend one more week on Google tools before moving on to other applications in the coming weeks.  Last year, Google added two new search features that can help beginning researchers on topics of interest: Timeline and Wonder wheel.  Although the tools have been around for a while, I didn’t know how many people were familiar with them.  I think these tools would be tremendously helpful to students who are doing research projects on topics that might be new to them.  These tools can help students whittle the expanse of search results down to more digestible categories, either based on a timeline of history or based on related topics.  The really great part is that both tools display their subcategories visually rather than displaying long lists of text links that students have to mine.

To access either of these search tools, simply start a search in Google.  After entering your search terms and clicking Google Search, you’re taken to a long page of links.  To access either Timeline or Wonder wheel, just click on More Search Tools along the lefthand side of the page.  This opens up a list of options for displaying the search results.  Clicking on Timeline displays the search result based on the dates included in the text.  Clicking on any of the time periods in the graphic will limit the search to those sites that feature information related to those dates.  The nice aspect of this tool is that the list of links is displayed chronologically rather than how Google typically shows search results (which is based on an algorithm that considers the number of other sites that link to an individual page).

Clicking on Wonder wheel under More Search Results creates a graphic that displays terms related to the original search.  It’s called “Wonder wheel” because each term extends out from the original search likes spokes on a wheel.  Clicking on any of these “spokes” creates a new connected wheel of related terms.  A student can continue to refine her search by clicking on spokes and creating new wheels.  Wonder wheel will show each of the wheels connected through the shared terms and students can click backwards through the wheels.  Wonder wheel is a pretty novel search tool and would be tremendous beneficial to all of the visual learners we work with.