Or, my experience at CUE Rock Star Teacher Camp.
I signed up for CUE’s Rock Star Lake Tahoe because I wanted to learn and have fun doing it. After attending this three day non-stop learning extravaganza, I have to say, “Be careful what you wish for.” Talk about your proverbial attempt to drink from a firehose. I had a fantastic time, met many wonderful educators, and learned more than I dared hope. Here are some of the highlights.
Each of the three days had a theme and each of the ten presenters ran a session relating to that day’s theme. The sessions were repeated twice, so you could attend the two that were most interesting to you. The sessions were two hours long in order to allow everyone to have hands-on time to create something. There were so many tempting options, it was difficult to choose. I tried to select things that I felt I could bring back to my teachers and use.
Day 1, Getting Googley: This day was about using Google Apps in the classroom and for student projects. In the morning, I attended Awesome Cross-Curricular Projects with Docs and Drive with John Stevens. During his session, I paired up with a 3rd grade teacher from Los Banos, Deborah Atkins, to work on a solar system project combining science, language arts, and math. It isn’t complete, but it is a good starting point, and I feel confident that I can bring it back to the teachers at my school and do something with it.
I was also happy that John provided us with many resources and the project template so we can continue creating these kinds of lessons as we go forward. Since cross-curricular activities are going to be key to succeeding with the new Common Core standards, that will be really helpful. John also introduced us to TouchCast, a free iPad app that allows you to start with a video similar to a newscast, and add video clips, websites, maps, Twitter streams, or even live polls to a video. The classroom applications are endless.
The afternoon session I chose was led by Jeanne Feeney and was called Research with Google Apps. With Jeanne’s guidance, I started a Google site for 4th grade to use in conjunction with their unit on California Missions. This something that I know I will use this year. The site was easy to build and will make the research process more engaging for students.
Some really great ideas from Jeanne included assigning the research topics randomly by creating QR codes with links to the various pages and then handing them out to the students. It adds excitement to the process as the students scan the QR codes and see the page with the information for their topic appear. She also suggested teaching digital literacy by giving the students links to good sites for their research and explaining why those sites were chosen. This can lead to a discussion on what makes a good project and gives you a chance to teach that everything you include in your project must move your message forward (in other words, just because you can add a flashing, spinning transition between two scenes in a video doesn’t mean you should).
When the projects are finished, there is an opportunity to teach criticism skills by reviewing the final projects as a class. Jeanne also recommended adding a project checkpoint partway through, perhaps with a Google form, and a reflection at the end, asking students to reflect on the problems they faced during the project, how they handled those problems, and what they would do differently next time.
Day 2, Lights, Camera, Learning: Day 2 was dedicated to the use of multimedia in the classroom. Kevin Brookhouser‘s session entitled Flip Your Classroom with Presentations, Screencasts, and Interactive YouTube Video seemed interesting, so that was what I chose for the morning. Let me tell you, I made the right choice. The main part of the session was a hands-on lesson on how to create interactive YouTube videos that can be used for instruction, review, or reteaching. I worked with two other attendees, Brandon Dorman and Melanie Ramsey, both 7th grade teachers, to create a video on adding unlike fractions. You can see it below (be sure to click on a wrong answer to see what happens). It isn’t perfect, but Kevin encouraged us to “accept imperfection.” Not only is it good for students to see that we are not perfect, it is a huge time saver. No more obsessing over getting everything exactly right. It’s a tall order for me, but I see the logic behind it.
Creating this video was not difficult, especially once we planned what we wanted to do. We actually created two videos, one for the correct response and one for the incorrect answer with the instruction. Here are Kevin’s directions on how to do it:
- Decide what you want to teach.
- Make some slides to create the visuals of the video.
- Make sure the slides feature at least one multiple choice question to test audience retention. The following slide should show the answer.
- Record your screen with your voice narrating. After introducing the questions, give at least three seconds pause before moving on to the next slide. The answer slide should congratulate the student for answering correctly.
- Upload that video to YouTube.
- Create another YouTube video that tells them that they are wrong. Give them a slide that says, “Click here to review and try again.”
- Go to the “add annotation” screen.
- Add an annotation for each of the possible answers in your question. The annotation belongs in the BEGINNING of the three seconds of silence.
- Each annotation should be a “link.”
- The “correct” annotation should link to the same video, but at the END of the three seconds of silence.
- The “incorrect” annotations should link to your “WRONG” video.
- The wrong video should have an annotation at the end of it that links back to the instruction in the first video.
The iPad class entitled “Create on Your iOS Device” led by Alice Chen was my choice for the second afternoon. I hoped I would get some ideas to use with the iPads we will be using at school in the fall, and I wasn’t disappointed. Alice showed us how to use Zoodle Comics, Haiku Deck, and PhotoStory to support multiple areas of the curriculum. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an iPad with me so I was unable to create any samples to add to this blog, but my new friend Melanie, who also worked with me in Kevin’s class, let me share hers so I could see how the apps worked. What I really liked about Alice’s session was that as we worked, we added to a shared document where we brainstormed ideas on how to use these apps in the classroom. I plan on using it when I get back to school, and I will be adding to it if I come up with any ideas that aren’t already on it.
Day 3, Liberate the Contraband: The final day of Rock Star Tahoe was dedicated to mobile devices in the classroom. I couldn’t resist Jeanne Feeney’s session on stop motion video. Stop motion is something I have always wanted to learn and Jeanne had brought toys. How could I resist? Anyway, the Lego Movie Maker app she showed us makes it really easy to create a quality video. Just combine it with iMovie and you, too, can be a stop motion star. Inspired by Jennifer Kloczko, who was running a session on book trailers that I reluctantly decided not to attend, my partners, Louise Craig and Susan Christiano, and I decided to make a book trailer for Jon Scieszka’s wonderful book, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. We didn’t have any pigs or a wolf, but I think you will agree that the aliens and dog we did have work just fine. It also shows the students that you can make do with what is available. All it takes is a little creativity. I can’t wait to use this with students.
For my last session, I attended Joe Wood‘s class on smartphone photography. Joe showed us several basic things about using your iPhone to take pictures that I didn’t know. The best tip was that the iPhone doesn’t take the picture when you press the button on the screen; it takes it when you let go. Wow. No more shaky pictures.
We talked a lot about different ways to use smartphone pictures in the classroom (how about an Instagram scavenger hunt?), but what impressed me was Joe’s suggestion that we upload our pictures to Flickr and license any that we don’t want to keep private under a Creative Commons license so they can be used by others. He believes that since we send our students to Flickr to search for Creative Commons licensed images, by licensing our own, we are giving back to the community. I agree. I am passionate about respecting copyright rules and Flickr provides us with an excellent alternative to Google image search, even the advanced search with a license filter, because on Flickr we can easily check the license for any picture we find. Joe also very generously shared quite a few smartphone photography resources with us. You can find them on his session page.
Even though my phone is very old and doesn’t have as powerful a camera as the newer phones, I was able to take some fairly good pictures when we went outside to practice. Here is one of them. After I took the picture, I used one of the filters to blur the background a bit and make the flowers stand out. I’m very pleased with it.
Other cool stuff: Some of the best things that happened at this camp happened outside the classrooms. At lunch, we had impromptu lessons on Twitter, iPhone photography, Google forms, and Minecraft. The lunches were two hours long, which is basically an eternity in Teacher World, and there was ice cream every day. I met so many wonderful people. Some of them I had already talked to on Twitter and it was exciting finally to put a face to a name (or Twitter handle); others I met for the first time. It was exciting and inspiring just to be with these educators who were so passionate about teaching and learning. At the end of the day, we got together to relax and get to know each other.
This experience was illuminating, exhilarating, and exhausting. I can’t wait to do it again in Solana Beach ten days from now.
