Category: Kids and Learning

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The How vs. The Why

Towards the end of last year I received a request from a teaching colleague about providing a bit of technical assistance for one of her students with a video project. The student, whom I will simply refer to as Joanna, was studying the HSC Extension 2 English course and had set herself a fairly grandiose goal for a movie project. Ext2 English is a very demanding course, and Joanna had elected to create an elaborate video as part of the package of material she was submitting for assessment.

Joanna’s goals for the movie were considerable. She had a number of special effects in mind to help tell the story she wanted to tell, but she had very little actual experience in movie making. Some of the effects she was proposing were very sophisticated, with visions of a very dreamlike sequence and some unusual effects… effects that were far beyond those available in entry level video editing software. She came to me to ask for some advice about the best tools to use and how she could learn to use them, and I quickly worked out that Joanna would not be prepared to compromise or “dumb it down” to make it easier on herself. After a bit of discussion about what she was trying to create I recommended she think about using Sony Vegas. Vegas is a sophisticated non-linear video editing application with a fairly steep learning curve. Joanna took the task very seriously however, and was not daunted by the enormous job in front of her. She obtained a copy of the software, enrolled in a 2 day course in Sony Vegas, watched a couple of training DVDs, and asked me lots of questions. During the project she had numerous technical hurdles to overcome including a couple of major project rebuilds due to lost resource files, not to mention dealing with the logistical nightmare of a final working file of over 30 Gigabytes! After all the tears, sweat and love, the result of her work, a video piece called The Sounds of the Silent, earned her one of the highest marks in the state for the subject and contributed to an outstanding HSC result.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://au.youtube.com/v/Ox2FOd-BgEE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

What I find most fascinating about all of this is that Joanna’s desire to produce this video far outweighed her own technical knowledge about how to do it, as well as her teacher’s technical knowledge, and it certainly stretched my own technical knowledge as I tried to assist her through the hard parts of the project. The important lesson from this is that if you want something bad enough then you will figure out how to make it happen. Once you have the “want to” you eventually work out the “how to”.

That’s an important lesson for us as educators. We sometimes feel our students need to know all the information before they can proceed, or that acquiring the facts is the important part of learning. Not always true. Sometimes the acquisition of knowledge or facts is the least important factor in success… the really important factor is something much simpler – just a desire to create, to learn, to express oneself.

Perhaps we should be thinking about how best to create in our students this desire to find out the “how” by igniting their sense of “why”. If we continue to give our students a strong sense of why they need to learn things by giving them real-world tasks that they genuinely care about, the mechanics of how they learn would almost take care of themselves.

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The Hour of (no) Power

One of the new year’s resolutions that Linda and I made for 2008 is to try and be a little kinder to the planet; whether that be to walk and cycle more instead of driving, to buy products that are more environmentally friendly, or to make an effort to generate less waste… even small changes may help the planet. If we can encourage a few others to do the same, it may help even more.

There are plenty of great stories about the Power of One… the effect that one person can have if the ripples from their actions spread far enough to influence others. One of the great Power of One stories is that of Earth Hour.

Earth Day started in Sydney last year with an idea that if we simply turned our lights off for one hour the overall effects could be substantial. Of course, it was a symbolic gesture more than anything else, but on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. During this single hour, the collective effort of turning off the lights reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2%, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road. What started as a grassroots community idea quickly took hold among the corporate and government sectors, proving that a simple idea like turning the power off for an hour can gather enough momentum to make a noticable difference and raise awareness of the problems our planet faces.

In 2008, Sydney wants to spread the Earth Hour concept to the rest of the world, turning a symbolic event into a global movement. In 2008, other cities around the world will join Sydney – Copenhagen, Toronto, Christchurch, Tel Aviv, Chicago, and many others – and at 8pm on March 29 will turn off the lights for an hour.

Although I live here in Sydney, I don’t watch a lot of news so I never heard about Earth Hour last year until it was over. However, if it was being talked about in the blogosphere I probably would have known about it… so this year I want to put it out there, and ask you to pass it on. If you think it sounds like a good idea, tell others about it. Blog about it. Get your own city to do it. Do it yourself. But especially, tell your students about it.

This is a wonderful, simple idea to share with your students. It can make them feel part of a global movement, but more importantly it demonstrates that individuals CAN come up with simple, sharable ideas that make a difference.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/UcHz6Jv4l-g" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Building my Wild Self

Having taught high school for basically all of my teaching career, I’ve just started working with the little kids in a R-12 school. (The R stands for Reception, and is the grade before Kindergarten) It’s great working with the littlies, they are so cute!

I team taught with another teacher today for the Grade 2 computer lesson and although they only did some pretty basic word processing stuff today I was impressed with just how capable some of these young students are with technology. I even had one of the students, a delightful young lady all of about seven years old, solve a password problem that had me, the teacher and the IT Director stumped. She remembered the login name and an arcane 6 character password which had not been used since before the Christmas holidays – about seven weeks ago. Pretty clever I thought. (Don’t even get me started on why our kinder age kids are required to have a strong, secure password that changes every 90 days… they play Kidpix and games for goodness sake!) However, the students all eventually got logged in and spent the lesson doing some stuff in Word.

I’m keen to get the kids doing some more interesting work with some of the Web 2.0 apps, although I need to work with their classroom teachers to figure out exactly what that might be. Small steps to start with… my new school does not have much of a Web 2.0 mindset yet, but it a pleasure to be working with teachers who are really keen to learn and to try new things.  I know we will make good progress.

Eventually, these kids will need to have an online identity though, and usually that means they will need an avatar to represent themselves. As an adult, I usually just use a small photo of myself for an avatar, but I was interested to read a post by Silvia Tolisano over at the Langwitches blog about some of the options she uses for avatar-making with younger students. Obviously there are some really important issues to consider when working with the young students to maintain their privacy and security. First names only. No defining or identifying information. No photos.

In her post, Silvia mentions a rather fun little web app called Building my Wild Self, which enables kids to create a modular avatar out of bits and pieces… head, arms, legs, clothes, eyes, mouth, etc… just pick the parts you like, assemble them together, and it creates a cool looking “mini-me”. I’m sure the kids will have a lot of fun using it and I’m looking forward to getting them to try it out.

I’m especially interested in seeing how intuitive these little kids find the site. My first impression of these very young students is that they are very much at home in a digital environment, and I’m keen to extend upon that by introducing both the teachers and the students to some of the more engaging applications from the Web 2.0 world.

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