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Video on demand for teachers

March 14, 2012 by

TED, a nonprofit known for its annual ideas conference, will provide free video lessons of 10 minutes or less on TED-Ed, reports the Washington Post.

Imagine you’re a high school biology teacher searching for the most vivid way to explain electrical activity in the brain. How about inserting metal wires into a cockroach’s severed leg and making that leg dance to music?

Starting Monday, that eye-popping lesson, performed in a six-minute video by neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage, is available free online.

“Right now there’s a teacher somewhere out there delivering a mind-altering lesson and the frustrating thing is, it only reaches the students in that class,” said TED-Ed project director Logan Smal­ley. “We’re trying to figure out how to capture that lesson and pair it with professional animators to make that lesson more vivid and put it in a place where teachers all over the world can share it.”

In contrast with many of the free lessons now available online, TED-Ed uses “sophisticated animation, professional editing and high-quality production values,” according to the Post.

Teachers also can find free lessons on YouTube Teachers, a new channel whose slogan is “spend more time teaching, less time searching.”

Here’s a clip of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

 

Filed Under: Education, Online Learning Tagged With: , , , ,

Cyberbaiting teachers is on the rise

January 7, 2012 by

Cyberbaiting teachers — provoking a rant that can be recorded on a cell phone, then posted on YouTube — is on the rise, reports Yahoo. Students have posted dozens of videos of teachers ”flipping out” as students jeer: “A music teacher smashes a violin; another spits on a student in full classroom meltdown.”

Recently the cyber security company Norton reported that 21 percent of teachers worldwide either experienced cyberbaiting themselves or knew a colleague who was cyberbaited. Many lose their jobs after their outbursts, even though students were the provocateurs.

All teachers need to remember that “the eyes of the world are watching every second,” warns Lynne Diligent, who teaches at an elite school in a Middle Eastern country where adolescents think it’s “cool” to mock teachers.

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YouTube launches teachers’ site

October 10, 2011 by

YouTube.com/Teachers will show ways to use video in the classroom, writes James Sanders, a middle school history teacher at KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy. That includes “lesson plan suggestions, highlights of great educational content on YouTube, and training on how to film your own educational videos.”

I use videos to spark classroom discussions, increase instructional time by assigning videos as homework, and create playlists for each lesson so students can dive deeper into specific areas that interest them. I also found countless educational videos on YouTube that energize and excite my students about a number of topics, such as medieval history.

This summer, YouTube Teacher’s Studio featured award-winning teacher trainers Jim Sill and Ramsey Musallam, who led workshops on “Finding your inner Spielberg” and “FlipTeaching.”  Sanders taught about using YouTube as a powerful educational tool.

Below is “Monster Foam Science Experiment.”

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Admissions staff check Facebook profiles

April 23, 2011 by

In the college application, you’re a teen-age saint who tutors the underprivileged and picks up trash in the park. Online, you’re a party guy or gal flashing gang signs and strewing beer cans.

College admissions officers are looking at applicants’ Facebook profiles, according to Kaplan’s 2010 College Admissions Survey. (Here’s an infographic.) They also check Twitter and YouTube. Sixty-two percent said social-media profiles usually help applicants get accepted; 38 percent said  online profiles hurt students’ chances.

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Mathemusic videos go viral

January 23, 2011 by

A “recreational mathemusician,” Vi Hart created a YouTube video about doodling in math class that’s gone viral, reports the New York Times.

The video never shows her face, just her hands doodling in a notebook. She talks about binary trees, Hercules cutting off the heads of a mythical hydra (each severed neck grows two new heads, which is the essence of a binary tree), and a fractal pattern known as Sierpinski’s Triangle.

She did another about drawing stars (really about geometry and polygons). Then another about doodling snakes (which segues into graph theory, “a subject too interesting to be included in most grade-school curricula,” she says). And another about prime numbers. (“Remember, we use prime numbers to talk to aliens. I’m not making this up.”)

More than a million people have viewed her videos.

A computer science professor’s daughter, Hart majored in music in college and took no math classes. But she attended math conferences and collaborated on papers with an MIT professor, Erik D. Demaine, known for his origami creations.

She started as a recreational mathartist, spending a week carving fruit into polyhedrons, posting photographs and instructions on vihart.com.

Last summer, she became enamored of hyperbolic planes, mathematical surfaces that are typically represented as horse saddles or Pringles chips.

Whereas others make bracelets or necklaces out of beads, Ms. Hart constructed hyperbolic planes out of them. She painted images of hyperbolic planes. She dried slices of fruit, which warped into hyperbolic planes.

“It just wiggles all over the place,” she said of a hyperbolic plane. “People don’t think of it that way, as being like a wild and beautiful thing.”

The doodle video has brought in some revenue and job offers. And it’s drawn a new demographic, teenage girls.

“I just think that’s really awesome,” she said, “because you’ve got girls in middle school and high school who are suddenly enjoy mathematics and enjoying being a little nerdy and smart, and we need that.”

Hart isn’t sure about her next step, though her goal is to be an “ambassador of mathematics,” like the late Martin Gardner, who wrote a math column for Scientific American.

For the holidays, she took advantage of the musical side of her mathemusician identity, rewriting “The 12 Days of Christmas.”

For example, “On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: the smallest possible number of sides on a polyhedron, the number of points that define a plane, the divisor of even numbers and any other number to the power of zero.”

Mathematical translation: polyhedrons have a minimum of four sides, three points define a plane, two is a divisor of all even numbers, and any number raised to the power of zero is one.

STEMposium, an April 1 event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, is holding a video contest to generate ideas on how to improve science, technology engineering and math learning in schools.

Students, teachers and anyone with an innovative idea can submit a 60-second video. Finalists could win up to $5,000 in cash and prizes and will be featured at STEMposium.

For example, here’s Judah’s video and here’s John’s idea.

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Gaga over history on YouTube

January 5, 2011 by

Music videos by history teachers are hits on YouTube, reports the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Hawaii residents Amy Burvall and Herb Mahelona have won rave reviews for “The French Revolution,” set to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”  Dressed in period costumes and wigs, Burvall sings lines like, “La la liberte,” and “Walk, walk scaffold baby.” The video has topped 166,000 views.

Mahelona and Burvall produce their music videos in their free time, mostly on weekends, and from start to finish the process takes about three months. So far, they have posted 49 on YouTube, including “Black Death” set to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” “Martin Luther” set to “Manic Monday” by the Bangles, and “Henry VIII” set to ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money.”

Napoleon will be next.

“The kids just eat it up,” said Mahelona. “And then they take the exam and just from singing the songs, they would remember everything.”

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If you’re calling to lie . . .

December 22, 2010 by

Here’s the (alleged) answering machine message at a school in Australia.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , ,

Growing up digital and distracted

November 23, 2010 by

Young people today are wired for distraction, concludes a New York Times story.

Vishal Singh, a 17-year-old student at Woodside High in Silicon Valley, gets through only 43 pages of his summer reading because he’s busy surfing Facebook and YouTube and making digital videos.  On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

Trying to fight wired with wired, Principal David Reilly “has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.”

Instead of skaters, jocks and band geeks, students split into texters and gamers, “Facebook addict and YouTube potato,” write the Times.

Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.

. . . But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report.

“I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”

Shy students escape into the world of video games.

Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school.

“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

Yes, it’s the same Woodside High as in Waiting for Superman.

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The video application essay

February 26, 2010 by

College applicants are trying to wow admissions officers with personal videos, reports the Boston Globe. Tufts is the first selective college to encourage video submissions as an “optional essay.” More than 6 percent of 15,436 applicants sent in a one-minute video; many are on YouTube.

Amelia Downs performs a series of dorky dance moves named after math terms like the scatter plot and the bar graph. Sam Zuckert plays a song made solely from the sounds of a piece of paper ripping, crumpling, and waving in the wind. And then there’s Mike Klinker, using a remote control to fly a Styrofoam elephant — with his name on it — through a clearing in the woods.

Tufts students and alumni are commenting on their favorites on YouTube.

Lee Coffin, Tufts’ dean of admissions, says the clips showcase a creativity and personality that would be hard to convey on paper. The idea is part of an effort begun by the university in 2006 to evaluate aspects of applicants’ intelligence not reflected in SAT scores and grades.

. . . The videos are judged as one part of a whole picture, with a student’s academic record still weighing the most, Coffin said. Production value will not be a factor, nor will public comments be considered in the admissions team’s decision, he said. What counts, he said, is creativity and wit, something that shows a student’s voice or talent – that can answer, “What spark do they bring to the class?’’

While other selective colleges don’t solicit videos, applicants often submit them along with blogs and personal websites.

Harvard College has for decades asked students to submit any supplementary materials — art portfolios, manuscripts, music recordings, and films — that display exceptional talent. But Harvard’s admissions dean frets that video applications may give an unfair edge to students from affluent families.

At Tufts, Coffin said more than 60 percent of the videos were submitted by financial-aid applicants.  “Access to video capabilities — via computers or cellphones, even — among teenagers is almost universal,’’ he said.

I worry more that flashy extroverts will edge out shy, nerdy students.

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Teachers seek cellphone camera ban

March 25, 2009 by

Connecticut teachers want a law to ban cameras from classrooms, reports U.S. News. They’re worried about students using their cellphones to record teachers’ worst moments — or to record routine moments and edit them in nasty ways.

Union leaders say imposing limits on the use of cameras and other recording devices in school might be necessary to prevent damaging videos and pictures from ending up on Facebook and YouTube.

The Hartford Courant reports that there are thousands of these videos online. One pokes fun at a Connecticut high school physics teacher who is shown “flailing his arms, short-hopping across the classroom, then pushing against the wall” in an attempt to demonstrate how molecules move. The problem is that the surreptitiously shot video doesn’t carry the teacher’s explanation of the principles, only the sound of instrumental music.

. . . Legal experts argue that teachers have a limited expectation of privacy in the classroom.

I’m not sure what I think about the proposed law.

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