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You Learn Math Youjizz You Learn Math

Math Practice Fraction Worksheets Yourlearnmath MULTIPLICATION PRACTICE LEARNING MATH You Learn Math Power to Learn - Creating Video

Math Practice Fraction Worksheets Yourlearnmath MULTIPLICATION PRACTICE LEARNING MATH You Learn Math



Creating Video
by Jim Lengel, Education and Technology Consultant, 02/28/2006

The availability of inexpensive DV cameras, built-in digital editing software, and web-based distribution of movie clips has encouraged many teachers and students to learn to develop their own video for educational projects. It's never been easier to create your own clips, and they can be useful in many subject areas. But to create good-quality video that is viewable and audible is not easy. It takes a bit of planning and attention to get it right. From coaching hundreds of teacher and student videographers over the last decade, I have learned a few things that I want to share with you in this week's article.

Setup is key

Camera (and microphone) placement is crucial. We have learned through many unsatisfactory experiences that you can't just point and shoot and get useful results. The setup is key. Attention must be paid!

No single physical setup will suffice for all situations. The setup must be tailored to the physical nature of the space and the type of situation that you want to document. For instance, to document a teacher working around a table with a small group of students in a peer-editing situation, you would need to set up for a close shot, place an external mike on the table, and know how the teacher plans to carry out the session (so you can capture the relevant sequences).

Plan ahead

Without a plan, you lose. Before you begin shooting, both the subject and the camera operator need to have in mind what they want the completed video to look like: Do they want to capture the look in the students' faces? Do we need to see the text on the pages in front of them? The teacher's gestures? How long will the completed clip be?

I can't hear you

Audio is more important than video. More educational videos fail because you can't hear what's happening, than any other cause. For example, if it's a teacher's lesson that you are filming, you must mike the teacher. (To mike someone is to place a microphone on or very near them to pick up the sound of their voice.) Student speech will be inaudible unless you mike them, use a directional mike on the camera, or shoot from less than three feet away.

Steps to follow

My advice to students or teachers planning to create video would be:

  1. Think through what you want to capture in this session. What are they key ideas or activities that you want to show? When will they happen in the session? What images, and what sounds, are essential to communicating these key ideas? Make sure your actors and camera operator know the answers to these questions.
  2. Make a storyboard of what you'd like the final video to look like. ("First a wide shot of the students entering the room, 5 seconds. Then a close up of the teacher greeting one or two students and answering their private questions (close audio), 10 seconds. Then cut to a wide shot of the teacher introducing the lesson to the whole group (close audio), 15 seconds. Next a clip (with voice-over to be added later) showing students forming into small groups (10 seconds). Then two small groups of students at work, close video, close audio, capturing visual expression and voice, 20 seconds each. Close with a wide shot of final discussion with the entire class, with B-roll of close-ups of five students and three different teacher shots, 20 seconds.")
  3. Plan the setup with 1 and 2 in mind. This will in most cases call for the cameraperson to carry an outline of the script, to move around the room to get the best angle, and to re-place the microphones as necessary.
  4. Learn about light. Shoot so that your subjects are lit from the front. Never, never shoot into the classroom windows. Shoot with the light behind you.
  5. Close in. Most student and teacher videos are shot much too wide to be useful or interesting. Pretend you are following a reporter on 60 Minutes, trying to capture the beads of sweat on the subject's forehead.
You and your students might find the article in this series, Shooting Good Video, to contain additional useful advice on this topic.




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You Learn Math Youjizz You Learn Math

Math Practice Fraction Worksheets Yourlearnmath MULTIPLICATION PRACTICE LEARNING MATH You Learn Math Power to Learn - Creating Video

Math Practice Fraction Worksheets Yourlearnmath MULTIPLICATION PRACTICE LEARNING MATH You Learn Math



Collaboration
by Jim Lengel, Education and Technology Consultant, 11/08/2005

Most of the world's work is accomplished through collaboration. Seldom does an individual acting completely alone build the vehicle, solve the business problem, or farm the field. Most of the work that people do is carried out in small groups where several folks contribute to the final result. But much of the work of our students in school is solitary: the math worksheet, the spelling test, the research report, the questions at the end of the chapter. To prepare our students for the real world, we should be assigning more work that requires collaboration. But this is not easy. Collaboration takes time and energy that is often unavailable in the classroom.

At the same time, we hear that the new communication technologies offered by computers and networks can facilitate and encourage collaboration, and that our students when outside of school take full advantage of these tools to communicate among themselves to accomplish their personal cooperative activities. (See Today's Students, in this series.) And we hear of modern corporations that succeed through virtual cooperation, where groups of employees spread out all over the world work together to design a new product or solve a difficult problem. This week's article provides some practical advice on how to design collaborative assignments that rely on new technologies to accomplish their goals.

Teaching collaboration

While today's students may have figured out on their own how to use all of the new communication technologies to plan their own social events and share their gossip, they seldom know how to use them for serious collaboration on projects designed to produce a solid result. So we must teach them the skills of collaboration, and provide them many structured and guided opportunities to practice this art in school. Just about every subject area offers the possibility of collaboration, but we must plan for it carefully in advance with more detail than the traditional individual assignment.

In the beginning, the teacher will need to spell out the process of collaboration, and monitor students' progress along the way. As students develop their skill at serious collaboration, they may no longer need this step-by-step guidance, but at first it is indispensable. For example, a middle-school social studies teacher might design a collaborative research project for groups of four students to work on together. She begins by posting this table on the class web site (or on the chalkboard, or on a paper handout, depending on her progress toward the paperless classroom.)

Task

Location

Tools

Due Date

Define the question

Classroom

Word

12/1

Conduct the research

On your own

Library, Web

12/3

Organize the results

On your own

Email, IM, Chat

12/4

Outline the presentation

Classroom

Word, PowerPoint

12/6

Gather the elements

On your own

Web, Library

12/10

Build the presentation

On your own

Word, PowerPoint

12/14

Present the results

Classroom

Word, PowerPoint

12/15

This table serves to clarify the beginning and end of the process, and to identify the steps along the way. It shows that students will do some of their collaboration in the classroom, under the eyes of the teacher, but that most of it will be accomplished on their own, outside of class hours, and outside of the classroom itself. This is an important element of good collaboration, and better represents the kind of work that students will do in college and in the workplace.

The teacher begins this assignment by explaining her expectations for the presentation that is due on December 15, its purpose, its length, the kinds of information and media that need to be included. She then outlines her expectations for how the group should work together to get it done, and the kinds of collaborative tools she expects them to use. She then details each of the way-points in the table, and the product that is due on each date listed.

During this two-week period, the class will meet ten times, but only three class meetings will be devoted to this assignment. The bulk of the work is to be done as collaborative homework. As they do this work on their own, the students will employ technologies that are familiar to them, but not necessarily for doing schoolwork. Here's how each tool is used.

Email

At the first group meeting in class on December 1, the students share their email and instant messaging (IM) addresses. They divide the research tasks among themselves, and agree to share what they have found by the next evening, using email. They agree to collect their research results in Word documents, and to exchange them through email. In this way, the group will know who has done their work and who hasn't, and will have time to prod the recalcitrant members -- through email, telephone, and IM -- so that they have something to show when the research is due on December 3.

Instant Messaging

Two of the group members who have agreed to organize the results get together on a pre-arranged IM session on the evening of December 3. Before the IM session, they have each separately reviewed the research results submitted by the other members of the group. Their IM conversation focuses on how best to categorize and sequence the results in preparation for building the presentation. They agree to call the rest of the group together the next night for a simultaneous chat where they can present their recommendations.

Chat

A chat is simply an IM session with more than two correspondents. A chat uses the same software (such as AOL Instant Messenger, iChat, or MSN Instant Messenger) as one-to-one IM. (See Educational Messaging, in this series.) All four of the group members discuss the proposed organizational scheme, modify it a bit, and cajole one of the members to compile a combined result for submission to the teacher the next day. (A school that licenses the Blackboard software might also conduct these group conversations using its synchronous Chat or asynchronous Discussion features.)

By the time they meet in class on December 6 to outline their presentation, the group is well-along in developing its project, and so the class time is spent productively planning the next steps in their assignment. At this face-to-face meeting, they agree on a 12-slide presentation, they specify the contents of each slide, and assign among themselves the gathering of the necessary text and media elements.

As they gather the elements over the next two days, they share their accomplishments and frustrations over email and IM, providing helpful suggestions to those who are stuck. And they ensure that the other members are actually working. Another scheduled chat on December 8 divides up the work into three slides each, and an agreement to send the slides to one of the members who will compile them into a single draft presentation. The draft passes muster with the teacher when it is handed in on December 14.

Serial Markup

To prepare the final product, the students pass the draft from one to the next in a process called serial markup. The first student attaches the PowerPoint file to an email to the second, who makes a few adjustments before sending it to the third, and so forth. When they arrive at class on the 15th, the presentation represents their best work, well-reviewed and the product of true collaboration.

 The next time this teacher assigns a collaborative project, she may be able to cut back on the steps and checkpoints, and let the students take more responsibility to get the work done themselves. By encouraging the use of the new technologies in pursuit of solid academic goals, this teacher is preparing her students for the future.





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You Learn Math Youjizz You Learn Math

Math Practice Fraction Worksheets Yourlearnmath MULTIPLICATION PRACTICE LEARNING MATH You Learn Math Power to Learn - Creating Video

Math Practice Fraction Worksheets Yourlearnmath MULTIPLICATION PRACTICE LEARNING MATH You Learn Math



Yourlearnmath v LEARNING l Worksheets osearchE7searchE Yourlearnmath %%E7%A5%9E%E5%A5%87%E5%AF%B6%E8%B2%9D5%9 Worksheets %E5searchA MATH %search7 Math E Practice % Math FB PRACTICE % PRACTICE 8youjizzB Practice %9searchA PRACTICE %youjizzEE Math % Yourlearnmath 5search8%E7%A5%9E%E5%A5%87%E5%AF%B6%E8%B2%9D% Yourlearnmath 5 MULTIPLICATION A Fraction % MATH 6 Worksheets E%2%E7%A5%9E%E5%A5%87%E5%AF%B6%E8%B2%9D9j MATH zsearcha%E7%A5%9E%E5%A5%87%E5%AF%B6%E8%B2%9Di MULTIPLICATION gsearchSsearchu Practice cs
by Jim Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 11/29/2006

On one single day last week, two national reports led the news cycle: the secretary of defense and architect of U.S. strategy for the war in Iraq resigned; and singer Britney Spears announced that she would divorce her husband. The news arrived at the school I was working at in many ways: over the CNN monitor in the video lab; through text messages to students' mobile phones from their friends; over web pages displayed in the school library; and from news feeds relayed to faculty email addresses. The next day in the faculty room an interesting discussion occurred. "In your classroom, which news item generated the most discussion? Which one did we spend more time on in the faculty room?"

Before computers and networks and the Internet extended themselves into the lives of our students, neither of these topics would have been discussed in school until the next day, if at all. But so much more information flows into our schools and into the minds of our students these days. It used to be that perhaps 90% of the published information that a student confronted in school -- in the textbooks, in the library, in the classroom --was mediated by a responsible adult educator. That is, it was reviewed by a publisher or a teacher or a librarian and deemed appropriate for use in school. And 10% was unmediated information, about which we developed perhaps one short lesson per year on how to evaluate the reliability of such data.



Filebusters
by James G. Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 01/28/2008

Vignette #1

The students had completed their slide show tracing the dissemination of Islamic art forms through areas of Spain and France in the 11th - 13th centuries. Replete with animated maps and photographic examples, the slide show supported their well-researched spoken narrative on this topic. Now it was time to post the PowerPoint slide show to the class web site.

With the help of their professor, they uploaded the slide show...but it did not make it. The system told them it would take six hours to upload the file! (And so, of course, it would take anyone wishing to view the file the same six hours to download it.) This was not what they were aiming at.

Vignette #2

The kindergartners' beautifully-published books on animal habitats were a big hit at the PTA Curriculum Fair. Printed in full color on glossy paper in a hardback binding, they told the story, in words and pictures, of adaptation, predation, and protection. The students used iPhoto to create the book, based on extensive online research, original photography, group discussion, and serious composition. Now it was time to provide a copy for each student.

But not every family had the iPhoto application on their computer at home, nor did the school have a .Mac account that would have allowed easy uploading and viewing of the book over the Web.

Vignette #3

The three faculty members had worked long and hard to prepare the grant proposal. They each sent their narratives, supporting research papers, and curriculum vitae to the grants manager, all in the form of Microsoft Word documents. As the grants manager compiled the final copy for submission, he noticed that some of the tables looked a little odd, and he remembered seeing a pop-up window warning of some missing fonts. But he'd learned to ignore all those pop-up windows, and so thought nothing of it.

Their proposal was rejected, on the grounds that two crucial data tables were indecipherable to the grant-review committee. The main ideas on the proposal were quite sound, remarked the committee, but the garbled tables did not allow them to see the results of the previous research.

Who are you going to call?

All three of the educators described in these vignettes have problems with their files: they are either too big, too strange, or too messed up to be useful. What they need is the digital equivalent of Ghostbusters, perhaps called Filebusters, to come in and save the day. Most computer-using teachers and students have at one time or another confronted issues such as these, where the files just don't work for the intended educational purpose. And a few have discovered a solution that applies in many similar situations, called Portable Document Format, or PDF.

The PDF format was pioneered by the Adobe company to make it possible to publish a document that would be eminently readable, and nicely printable, no matter what kind of computer you displayed it on, or printer you printed it on, or software you used to view it. And once published by the author, a PDF document could not be altered by the reader. This format was based in part on on Adobe's patented PostScript technology, which is used in many printers and some computer displays.

Here's how PDF could have helped our three disabled digerati:

Had the students of Islamic art saved their slide show in a properly compressed PDF format, it would have been small enough for posting to and downloading from the school web site. That's because the PDF format saves only the information it needs to display the slides on a computer with standard resolution. PowerPoint, on the other hand, saves the full resolution of each image in the slide show, which can amount to many megabytes of unnecessary pixels. And just about everybody has a PDF reader on their computer -- most are free or built in. But not everyone has the latest version of PowerPoint, which must be purchased. So PDF is concise.

Had the kindergartners exported their iPhoto books in PDF format, they could easily have been distributed over the web or on CD, and displayed on any type of computer, with or without iPhoto. From the PDF file, the books could be printed at home, or read directly from the computer screen. In full color. Or emailed to grandma in Texas. PDF is compatible.

Had the faculty members submitted their grant application in PDF format, it would have been much less likely to become contaminated by subsequent reviewers, and much more likely to display exactly as desired no matter what kind of computer or printer was used by the reader. That's because PDF files are not alterable by most grant mangers or reviewers, as Word files are. PDF is consistent.

How to save in PDF

You may need to save your own publications in the PDF format. Here's how:

  • On Apple Macintosh, it's easy and built in. No matter which program you are using, choose from the menubar File --> Print. Then, in the Print dialog box, click the PDF button in the lower left corner. You'll get a choice of dispositions: Save as PDF, Compress PDF, and so forth. For the situations described above, Save or Compress would have been the best choices. This process creates a new file on your computer, in PDF format.
     
  • On Windows and Linux, you'll need to install a PDF-saving utility on your computer, and then follow its directions to convert your documents to the Portable Document Format. A search on PDF utilities for Windows will point you to several free and paid programs for this purpose.

Once saved in PDF format, these files can be distributed by all of the means at your digital disposal:

  • You can attach the PDF file to on email, and end it to your correspondents with the confidence that it's concise enough to pass the email file size censor, compatible enough to be read by all, in a consistent format.
     
  • You can copy the PDF file to a compact disc, or flash memory stick, and let your public copy them from there to their own computers with the same confidence.
You can post the PDF file to a web site, knowing at all web servers know how to send out this format, and all web browsers know how to send it to the PDF reader to display it. Just as you published it.




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