What it is:Video Search in 3D is a neat way to search for, and find, videos. Search videos by keyword and instantly get a 3D “globe” of video results. With the click of a button you can create a playlist of videos to be watched.
How to integrate Video Search in 3D into the classroom: Video Search in 3D would be a great way to search for and create playlists of videos for students and teachers. Create playlists for students to access on classroom computers as a digital-media learning center. These can be videos centered around a science concept, phonics rules, a period of history, math, foreign language or anything else that students are studying. For example, for language arts you might search “School House Rock”. During your writing block, students can visit the media learning center (your classroom computers) to learn more about grammar and parts of speech.
You can also use Video Search in 3D to create play lists for professional development opportunities. There are SO many outstanding educational videos available. Search videos by keyword or speaker and create an instant playlist. I started a Webspiration Wednesday lunch group at my school where I played inspirational videos in the library during lunch. I invited all the staff to bring their lunches to the library where we would watch and discuss inspirational educational videos. Mid-week video inspiration is just what the doctor ordered to put some pep back into your step!
Tips: Because this is a search engine, I wouldn’t let young students loose to search whatever they want until a teacher has previewed it.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Video Search in 3D in your classroom!
I’ll be honest, yesterday was not a very inspirational Wednesday. I didn’t get to hold my regular teacher gathering for inspiration because I was in a meeting. It seemed like everywhere I turned, discouragement was waiting to stare me in the face. So, what do I do when I am feeling discouraged? I look to my PLN, of course. You all are a constant source of inspiration and encouragement for me. From my Twitter friends to my blogging alliance bloggers, they are a constant source of sunshine. So, for today’s (late) Webspiration Wednesday, I am sharing the blogs that make me smile, and offering you another opportunity to jump into Twitter and join our PLN (personal learning network).
I get a daily dose of inspiration from my Blogging Alliance and Twitter friends, but in the past day they have spoiled me with extra acts of friendship. After I posted a discouraging tweet, I immediately got several encouraging messages from my PLN friends. This morning I woke up to more support and encouragement. @woodenmask sent me this: http://soytuaire.labuat.com/ and a gift song on iTunes The Roses of Success (from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). @lamoureuxr sent me this: Don’t Stop Believing Kid’s Choir. @TheNerdyTeacher included me in his tribute to Snick post that made me laugh out loud. To my PLN, thank you for the smiles and virtual hugs today. They were felt loud and clear.
If you haven’t joined Twitter and started building your PLN yet, let me encourage you to start by following these incredible educators. Jump in, you won’t regret it!
Today, I am doing something a little different for Webspiration Wednesday. As a staff, we still gathered for Webspiration Wednesday finishing the Guy Doud video from last week. Since I have already summed that up in this post, I thought I would write about a webspirational website instead. Sleedo is a great Webspiration Wednesday website.
What it is: Sleedo is a search engine that I learned about from @cspiezio today on Twitter. This is a search engine with a mission to better the world with each and every search. Every time you search using Sleedo, 10 grains of rice will be donated to help feed the poor. Sleedo is a Google powered search engine. Sleedo makes money through advertisements and donates that money to the World Food Programme, feeding those in need. So, for every search you do, you are helping improve the lives of people around the world. Pretty cool right?
How to integrate Sleedo into the classroom: Set up Sleedo as your homepage on classroom computers. When students perform searches, they can be doing double duty: searching and helping the hungry around the world. Sites like Sleedo are wonderful vehicles for teaching students about empathy, world issues, and compassion. Have your students dig in and learn more about how the World Food Programme operates or take a closer look at how website advertising works.
Tips: I have found that students are passionate about websites with a cause (Free Rice, Free Corn, Aid to Children, Free Kibble, Free Kibblekat). Often students feel helpless to do something important that makes an impact on this world. Sites like Sleedo help students enact real change that they can feel proud of.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Sleedo in your classroom.
I learned about Guy Doud in one of my education courses in college. We listened to a tape of a keynote speech he gave and read his book as part of the course. Guy Doud was the Teacher of the Year in 1986. He is an inspiration in education, even today. I had the privileged of presenting at a conference where Guy was the Keynote speaker. He is still an incredible voice in education.
Unfortunately I can’t offer you a full view of Guy’s speech (I have it on DVD only), but this clip should give you a look into this teacher of the year, and will, perhaps, encourage you to pick up his book: Guy Doud Molder of Dreams.
Guy Doud speaks about the focus of education: children. When we get right down to it, isn’t that what we are all in this for? He talks about the challenges that children face before they even step foot in a classroom. He speaks to fostering the heart of children before we try to foster learning. A child who is being abused, is hungry, is grieving the loss of a parent, has failed at life, really isn’t interested on your perfectly tuned lessons on superlative adjectives. Whether we like it or not, we are in the heart business. Teachers are called to be all things to the hurting kids who walk through our door. Sometimes we play nurse, other times counselor, and sometimes even social worker. Guy has an incredible rapport with his students and each of them leave his classroom knowing that they are important, that they matter, that they aren’t failures. Watching Guy renews my spirit and gives me the inspiration to love those students who are hard to love. To remember to get down on their level. Many of our students have already been convinced that they are failures. It is up to us to be their cheerleaders and let them know that they are uniquely gifted for a special purpose. Our job is not just to teach and grow learners, our job is to assure students that they matter.
Webspiration Wednesday normally consists of teachers gathering together in the library to watch and discuss an inspirational video or TED talk, followed by discussion about its implications in our classrooms. Today was a different kind of Webspiration Wednesday.
On March 10 I got a late night phone call that one of our second grade teachers had died. I was convinced that I was hearing wrong, Val was only 53 and I saw her that morning. She wasn’t feeling well when she got to school, so we called her a sub. Being that she is a teacher, she came back to school at 4:00 to write up sub plans and get everything ready for her absense the next day. Her husband and 7 year old daughter were with her, and gave her 5 minutes to get her plans laid out. Of course 5 minutes turned into 30 as she set out plans, answered emails, and wrote a morning message for her students at the board. As she was finializing plans, she collapsed. Paramedics weren’t able to revive her. Our school body went into a state of shock and mourning. The next day we had no school. Teachers gathered and cried together, and we asked a lot of questions about how best to minister to grieving kids. We brought in grief counselors and came together with our students the next day to help the students process the loss in any way that we could. As a school body we felt utterly depleted. An amazing thing happened, schools from around the country came together to support us. My PLN on Twitter immediately sent articles and podcasts for how to help children through the grief process and offered words of hope. Jason Schmidt (@jasonschmidt123) had his students write notes of hope, encouragement, and prayers for Val’s little girl. They arrived the day of Val’s funeral. A neighboring school showed us love and encouragement by providing our staff the opportunity to come together over a catered lunch. Today we broke bread together. We talked, and laughed, and reminiced together. We don’t often get that opportunity with staggered lunches and busy schedules. We were inspired today not by a video talk, but by the love showed by others. Thank you all for your inspiration, words of encouragement, and hope.
I’ll be honest, today’s Webspiration Wednesday was a flop. I wanted to introduce teachers to Daniel Pink’s a Whole New Mind and did a quick video search to see what I could find. I came up with an interview that Oprah did with Daniel Pink about his book. It would have been great if Oprah wouldn’t have opened her mouth. I think she mentioned that she donated 4,500 books to Stanford grads no less than 50 times. The interview wasn’t great, Oprah didn’t focus enough on the book, she was leading the questions to get the answers that she wanted. A flop. On the upside, teachers got enough of a glimpse into the book that they were left wanting to read it. So even though the video was a flop, the inspiration was still there. Our local library offers digital downloads and A Whole New Mind is one of the audio books available for download. My hope is that the staff will listen to it and think about how it relates to our classrooms and education. Daniel Pink has a discussion guide for educators that is free to download on his website. In the next few weeks, I hope to show Daniel Pink’s TED Talk on his newest book Drive (also excellent).
In A Whole New Mind, Pink asks us to consider the world that we are living in. He calls the age we find ourselves in the Conceptual age. In this age, many left brain jobs are disappearing. If a computer can do it faster, someone overseas can do it cheaper, or what you are offering isn’t in demand in this age of abundance, the job will become obsolete. So then, creativity becomes the competitive difference that can differentiate commodities. Pink outlines six essential senses that need to be developed:
Design – Moving beyond function to engage the senses.
Story – Narrative added to products and services.
Symphony – Adding invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus).
Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.
Play – Bringing humor and lightheartedness to business and products.
Meaning – the purpose is the journey, give meaning to life from inside yourself.
As an educator, I am interested in how we can help our students develop these senses so that they can be prepared for the world ahead of them. Here is a clue: it has nothing to do with standardized testing!
Have you read A Whole New Mind? What take aways do you have for us?
If you haven’t read A Whole New Mind, I highly recommend it.
A few weeks ago, I instituted Webspiration Wednesday at CHC. To find out what exactly Webspiration Wednesday is, check out my original post here.
Continuing the play theme from last week’s Webspiration Wednesday, this is Stuart Brown’s take on the importance of play.
TED Talk “Stuart Brown says play is more fun”
Stuart Brown suggests that play is much more than just being a fun and joyful experience, it is intricately connected with intelligence. So, why then, do we feel the need to strip it from education? If play is such an important piece of learning and intelligence, then we should be taking every opportunity to connect learning with play. Students should enter our classrooms every day, not with a sense of dread, but with a sense of adventure and excitement at what acts of play will happen there. Play doesn’t have to stop in the early childhood classroom, play can, and should, continue into adulthood. As Stuart rightly points out, play is necessary at every point in our lives. It offers opportunities to experiment, and grow, and find new solutions. Companies like Google and Pixar are keying into the necessity of play and if the work that comes out of those companies is any indication, play works.
How do you introduce opportunities for play into your classroom? If you have a great story of play, I would love to post it on my other blog, Stories of Learning.
Last week, I instituted Webspiration Wednesday at CHC. To find out what exactly Webspiration Wednesday is, check out my original post here.
Today we gathered over a TED Talk by Tim Brown on Creativity and Play.
Tim reminded me of something very important, there comes a point in schooling where we begin discouraging play. We ask students to sit in their seats, to fill in the circles completely with a number two pencil, and to stay on task. There is very little time in schools for play. I think that by making schools void of play, we harm our students. There is a lot of important learning that happens during play and discovery.
In the video, Tim shows some pictures inside some major design firms (Pixar and Google). At the beginning of the year, I asked students to describe what their dream school would look like. I was very sad to learn that most of them couldn’t conceive of a school that looked different. In our first brainstorming session, most of them talked about having more recess or a longer lunch and that was the extent of their wishes. I really tried to impress on them that their school could look and be structured any way they wanted. I was met with blank stares and confused looks. The problem in the first brainstorming session was that students were doing what they do all day long in school. They were trying to guess what I was thinking. They wanted to give me the right answer. But in this instance, there wasn’t a right answer, every answer was right. I showed my students pictures of Googleplex and Pixar and explained that there was a lot of work and creativity that came out of both companies. What they saw was a playland. Nearly all of my students declared that they would work at Google or Pixar when they got out of school. One of my students asked if I would help her write a resume so that Google would have it on file when she was ready to work there (she is 9). We brainstormed a dream school again. This time the students understood that there wasn’t a right answer, that the sky was the limit. Few of them included desks in their dream school, nearly all of them included animals of some kind, and most of them wanted slides and piano stairs to get from one floor to another. We collaborated on Wallwisher and dreamed together. At the beginning of the project, I told the kids the school could look like, and operate, any way that they wanted, but there were two restrictions: 1. it had to be a place of learning, and 2. they had to justify why they included everything in their school. Most of them cited an increase in creativity and innovation (we learned that word as we looked at pictures of Googleplex). One of my students wanted a huge cylinder tropical fish tank in the lobby with clear pipes branching out and winding around the school and through the classroom. She thought the fish would be interesting to study and an inspiration for learning. Another student wished for swing chairs hanging from the ceiling so that they could move while they learned. Several kids wanted dogs in the school that they could read to because, “dogs won’t make fun of you when you make a mistake reading out loud.” Once the students felt comfortable with not having one right answer, they let their imaginations run wild and came up with excellent ideas and suggestions.
We need to help kids understand that there usually isn’t only one right answer. They have been so primed to believe that every problem has one correct answer because we overload them with tests and worksheets that tell them that it is so. We squash creativity. Pretty soon they become adults who don’t know how to play and as a result, aren’t creative. How do you encourage creativity and outside the box thinking in your classroom?
Today I instituted Webspiration Wednesday at my school. I have noticed over the years that second semester seems to be lacking motivation and morale January through March. Maybe it is because winter is STILL dragging on, maybe it is because it feels like a long stretch before spring break, or maybe it is because the complaints of the year are really settling in. I have noticed this phenomenon in all the schools I have been in. During last weeks #edchat on Twitter, I learned that low morale is a common problem that most schools face. As we talked about ways to boost morale, I thought about the ways that my amazing PLN boosts my morale every day. They encourage me, give me new ideas, and reignite my passion with the great links they share. I wanted to bring some of that to my school. I wanted teachers to have a chance to laugh together, and enjoy each others company, and get away from the teachers lounge which can end up being a place to gripe about everything that has gone wrong that morning.
Last night, in a moment of divine inspiration, I decided that it was high time for Webspiration Wednesday. So, this morning I sent out invitations to the entire staff to join me for Webspiration Wednesday lunch in the library. Teachers trickled into the library, lunches in toe, and we sat down and watched a TED Talk together. I chose “Sir Ken Robinson Says That Schools Kill Creativity”. It was a great Ted Talk to start Webspiration Wednesday with, not only is Sir Ken Robinson inspiring, he also has a great sense of humor. He had us laughing together (which as it turns out is a great stress reliever) and thinking about school and our students in new ways. After the video had ended a spontaneous and lively discussion ensued about those kids that we have in our classrooms that we are stifling. We offered each other ideas for giving them room to be creative. It was fantastic. We all left are short 25 min. lunch feeling refreshed and ready to take on the rest of the day. I wonder if the students noticed a difference in teacher attitudes after lunch? I plan to hold Webspiration Wednesday every week and have asked my PLN on Twitter to join in using the hash tag #webspirationwednesday if they come across inspiring articles, videos, lessons, stories, etc.
Now a disclaimer, I did not ask permission to start Webspiration Wednesday. I just did it. Sometimes I think it is better to ask forgiveness (if need be) than to ask permission. In our #edchat discussion, we talked about who should have the responsibility to boost morale in a school. My answer was everyone has that responsibility. I decided to take my own challenge and be the one who tried something new, something different. Will you be that person at your school? What boosts your morale? What have you seen work well in the school setting?
Below is the TED Talk that we watched together, I believe you will find it inspiring.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, my PLN (Personal Learning Network) on Twitter has been a great source of joy, encouragement, and friendship. I have never met 98% of my PLN in person, and yet they are always there for me, cheering me on and offering suggestions when I fail. If you haven’t made the leap into the world of Twitter, I highly recommend it. If you are looking for a top notch group of educators to follow, may I suggest the Edublogger Alliance group? Once you are on Twitter, be sure to join in on #edchat. There are two #edchat conversations that take place every Tuesday. I can feel myself getting smarter as I learn from the BEST educators in the world every Tuesday. Just follow the hash tag #edchat and be sure to add it to the end of your Twitter messages to participate. I can promise that you won’t be disappointed.
If I am speaking Greek to you, take a look at @shellterrell’s posts about #edchat and PLN’s. She will have you joining in the conversation and fun in no time!
