Week 7 - Gliffy / Mind Mapping

Click here to go to my Gliffy
(It was too wide for the blog)

Uses in the classroom

Mind maps are an excellent process to help students organize ideas, form larger projects and can even be used as a form of formative assessment for a large culminating project. However, in this case I think there is considerable benefit to having the mind map BECOME the project. Products like Gliffy offer us a great way to create graphical, and great looking mind maps that can be used to basically explain any topic you can think of. For this assignment and history in particular these types of assignments can be used to show symbolic links between complex ideas and events. This becomes particularly useful when examining long drawn out events that can last for several years and often have many important components. In this fashion, the teacher can easily assess exactly where the students are and the correctness of their conceptual understanding of the concept. Take for instance a mind map about World War 2, if a student mistakenly creates a picture or block in the mind map for the Battle of Vimy Ridge, I can assess in seconds that they’re confusing World War 1 and World War 2.

Issues to Consider

One of the first issues to consider is that this content is not easily accessible. Yes, you can embed it into a web page and export it or show it on a projector, but it’s not the prettiest export in the world. When working through this project I found the software itself very easy to use, however I was craving more interaction. I wanted to embed a YouTube video or post the audio of the Gettysburg address into my Gliffy, and then create an interactive Gliffy my students could click through more easily. I think interaction is the key with any type of technology-enabled learning, the more you have the better. Gliffy is off to a great start, but for me it needs more.

Secondly, when completing my project I found it much easier to draw the mind map out on paper before trying to construct it with pictures. I found myself easily overwhelmed when trying to find good images, pay attention to the direction of the arrows, and analyze historical facts. It might be a good idea, particularly with students that have learning disabilities, to have a “facts sheet” handy or a rough outline of the big picture ideas for the mind map before the Gliffy software even starts.

Copyright

·      Giffy is the flagship product of the Gliffy corporation. All rights reserved.

·      Images pertaining to the US Government and some public record historical pictures were downloaded from the US Government Public Photo Library.

·      All pictures were located using the “Reuse with Modifications” search feature in Google Image Search.

Week 6 - Image Editiing

Uses in the classroom

Although there’s a tendency to think of the uses of Photoshop as a topic that only belongs in a computer graphics class (or worse, a computer science class) the learning outcomes that are inherent to a Photoshop like activity are applicable to many learning audiences of varying topic and age range. To illustrate this process, I’d like to talk about a two-part lesson on computer graphics for a typical 6^th grade English class.

Everyone hates poetry…especially when you’re young…I can hear the students groaning every time the word poetry comes up. Anyway, to make this daunting task of understanding classical poems more palatable, I’ve seen great success with letting the students act them out and film scenes using iMovie. An iPad is the perfect companion to this assignment because it allows the students to film, edit and make music on one device. However, before we start working with iMovie, a brief introduction assignment on animated gifs similar to the deliverable I’ve posted to my blog will teach the students how to modify moving pictures frame by frame, and pay close attention to small details in a very controlled setting. For this activity the students would individually create an animated GIF, in which a ball bounces around the screen or a rocket ship crashes into the ground, or something very small. This would allow the students to individually get some animation experience and to have a lesson on applying technical concepts before moving on to a larger task.

This type of activity is super easy to apply to Bloom, in that the lesson would discuss things like color, smoothness and attention to detail. The students would then go and create animated GIF’s themselves, needing to take all the components of the lesson into account. Finally, the animated GIF lesson itself would serve as a form of assessment and refinement, before the students started to make larger more ambitious movie or animation projects with iMovie, ultimately learning to understanding and finally evaluation would take place when they start to critique the movie editing efforts of their group members in the larger project having learned the concepts from their own animated GIF’s.

Issues to Consider

Two types of issues that need to be managed when completing an assignment like this need to be understood by the teacher. First, there are a certain number of students who will become perfectionists when completing any graphic activity. With a software program like Photoshop (THE professional tool used by everyone from Disney to elementary school students) the possibility exists to get beyond super detailed with your image editing. You can literally manipulate images pixel by pixel if you so desire. The drive to create the perfect image for an imaging assignment may be overwhelming to some students who “need” to get it 100%, those students will run out of time and become upset if things are not just right. The teacher can manage this, simply by being aware of the possibility and doing some simple student monitoring.

The second issue to consider is that of expense. Adobe products in particular are prohibitively expensive; although they often give educational discounts and have limited versions available for schools the fact that they’re expensive still remains. This can also be easily managed via a strong technology in education advocate team who can lobby for additional software funds.  Also, as Stacy discovered (kudos!) there are freeware alternatives to Photoshop such as GIMP that work amazingly well and could be used as an alterative to the costly adobe versions. Obviously, the teacher would not run the assignment if the software was not available, however it remains an issue to consider.

Copyright

·      Adobe and Photoshop are trademarks of the Adobe Corporation

·      GIMP is a GNU project and the term is licensed under the Open Source Licensing.

·      iPad and iMovie are trademarks of the Apple Corporation.

·      Bouncingball.gif was an original creation by Ian Thomson using Adobe Photoshop CS5.5

Week 5 - InfoGraphics

Uses in the Classroom
Info graphics are fun, hip, trendy and seem to be taking the internet by storm. It’s a logical continuation of the Google approach to mass information dissemination and allows our students to quickly and easily assimilate large amounts of information without a lot of sifting through complex reading, or enormous statistics databases. They function as effective reminders and can be used to help facilitate learning goals by reminding students about the important points of each topic or lesson. Teachers can use info graphics to relay important information on a visual level, which can really help students with learning disabilities conceptualize information easier. Many students in today’s classrooms struggle with literacy, and understanding new information can be challenging. Info graphics can help students with literacy problems understand the concepts of a course like history or math easily and visually insuring they don’t fall further and further behind because of difficulty reading.
Info graphics give us a really great way to help our students understand visual information and can be useful by teachers. However, I think having students create their own info graphics and present them to the class can be an equally effective teaching tool. Students can use traditional methods of gathering information to research topics, but present them to the classroom in a fun new way. There’s no need to force students to sit through ANOTHER 30 PowerPoint presentations when all they need to do is focus on creating a visually appealing and fun info graphic to explain their topic…group projects may never be the same.


Issues to Consider
Like all research, info graphics are only as useful as the content that goes into them. If the research is gathered from less than creditable sources then the info graphic itself becomes meaningless. This is an awesome learning experience for teachers to show their classes the importance of good research though. Because of the small compressed “cut to the chase” focus in info graphics teachers can ask questions like “where did you get that statistic” or “1 in 10 seems a little high, how did you find that information?” and correct student behavior quickly and to the point. How many times have we all entered into a rubric that sources used were less than creditable? I have many times, however that doesn’t mean anything to the student because they can’t relate that back to their work here and now. If we’re not careful about how we and our students gather information when working with info graphics we could be encouraging bad research habits and incorrect information.

Copyright / References:

·         United States Department of Justice, Internet Crime Reporting Center. (2012). Ic3 internet crime center - 2013 anual report. Retrieved from website: http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2012_IC3Report.pdf

·         Hackmageddon. (n.d.). 2012 cyber attacks statistics. Retrieved from http://hackmageddon.com/2012-cyber-attacks-statistics-master-index/

·         All images sourced in this document were provided by Piktochart v3 (http://www/piktochart.com)

Week 4 - Video Lessons

Uses in the Classroom
Instructional videos are extremely useful and will play an important role in the flipped classroom. In this instance, the student can view the lecture like material from anywhere, any time and as many times as they wish while leaving the class time to work through problems with the teacher’s assistance. This has huge implications for students that may be having trouble or wish to review lecture content many times for better understanding or review. No longer do students need to worry about missing a class or a concept, and the teachers can focus on helping students work through assignments and creating high quality content with the class time they have rather then worrying about filling time lecturing to students.

This type of video could also be used as a remedial lesson for students who are having difficulty. I envision this being particularly useful in math class where students might have to listen to a lecture like topic several times in order to understand a concept. Instead of assigning more questions and problems to a student in difficulty – which they may or may not be able to do, certainly causing frustration – the teacher can simply say, “watch this video at home tonight if you’re having trouble doing the homework”.

Issues to Consider

Although this seems like the Holy Grail for getting students to use class time to the benefit of their learning, this type of process puts huge time demands on the teacher. They must invest in not only learning to use the (admiralty simple software) but take time out of the day to produce and record the actual videos themselves. For people with attention to detail or even borderline OCD this can take a seriously long amount of time while they try to produce every little detail of the recording.

I think there’s some value in the flipped classroom and using class time more effectively, but it’s a new idea and one that has to be worked with cautiously. It’s not right for every subject and every student, but I think when used carefully as a follow up tool or a surgical tool to help with a specific concept it can really enhance student learning.

Copyright: All images in this presentation / video were gathered using the open access search feature in Google Image Search. Image of Trench Foot was used with permission from http://www.gwpda.org/photos/ One image of the recruiting poster was used with permission from the Government of Canada Military History Library.