Day of the Dead, National Novel Writing Month, and Krashen's bibliography

Today is the Day of the Dead, and I would be remiss if I didn't post this.  It's a beautiful little story that illustrates effectively the sense of exuberance of many Day of the Dead celebrations, a concept that some Americans struggle to understand. 

It's also National Novel Writing Month, which means I'm going to take a swing at writing one of my novels again.  I wrote 576 words yesterday, and so far this morning, I've written another 406.  Both of these are pretty far off of the 1200 daily average one needs to hit the target 50,000 by the end of the month, but I'll make it!  I'm pretty sure I know where the story goes next. 

Stephen Krashen just posted a bibliography to the moreTPRS listserv.  It is a collection of a whole lot of studies done in the last 50 years, comparing the effectiveness of implicit language learning versus explicit language learning.  I post it here mostly so I can find it again.  If I ever end up getting a doctorate in language acquisition, this is probably where my reading will begin.

SKrashen: Evidence that "implicit learning" (subconscious language acquisition) results in L1-like brain processing.

Tech tools update

I looked at my calendar this morning, and found that it was the 23rd of July.  The start of school is right around the corner.  I haven't read a teacher tech blog in weeks, and those are normally among the highlights of the internet for me.  So I looked at some of my RSS feeds, and a lot of really intelligent people are doing a lot of really cool things.

Via iLearnTechnology, we have Automatoon, an online animator that uses HTML5, not Flash, as its basis.  This is important because Flash works badly on Macintosh computers, and not at all on iDevices.  (There are also some philosophical reasons for HTML5 over Flash, but I only barely understand them, and wouldn't deign to try to explain them.)  It's easy to use, and unlike other online animation features I've demonstrated here before (notably Go! Animate), with Automatoon it's relatively easy to start an animation from scratch, right down to the component pieces.  It requires a little more freehand computer drawing skill than I have, but I imagine most of my students are better at it than me.  This is a welcome addition to the world of visual learning tools and student-production-other-than-5-paragraph-papers tools.

Free Tech 4 Teachers points us in the direction of a QR code reader treasure hunt generator.  QR codes are those square bar code things that you see everywhere from magazine ads about perfume to, er, other magazine ads about perfume.  The idea behind a QR code, I guess, is that it's supposed to allow people with mobile camera devices to take a picture of the box and get a lot more information about whatever the code is attached to.  I saw them the other day on the tags in house plants in Lowe's.  Taking a picture of the code would take you to a website or something that gave you information on care and feeding of the plant, something that used to be printed on the tag.  I guess they had to get rid of that information to make room for the  QR code.  I don't really get QR codes; I don't know what they're really good for.  I feel like they're an answer looking for a question. 

That makes them a perfect fit for the QR code treasure hunt generator: students have to go looking for the questions.   *rimshot*  The idea is that students take their device, equipped with an appropriate QR code reader app (and the site provides some suggestions on where to find them), and go searching the school for QR codes.  They take a pic of the code with their device, the reader app reads it, and gives them a quiz-type question.  Students punch in the answer, and they're off to find the next question.  Setup seems easy enough: the teacher types the questions and answers (or copies and pastes them off of a text document) into the program provided, the program gives QR codes for each question, the teacher prints them off and hides them around the school.  S/he gives the students X minutes; the ones who come back with the most correct answers wins.

Again, this feels like an "almost there" technology.  I haven't fiddled with it yet, so maybe I'm missing something.  What I'd like to be able to do with this is an Amazing Race-type event: The answer to the question is the location of the next question.  Maybe it will work for that; I don't know.  I intend to give it a try, but I'm not certain I get the advantage over doing exactly the same thing, but having students take pictures of themselves at the appropriate locations.  If it's an excuse to turn short-answer quizzes into kinesthetic learning activities, I guess that's fine.  It feels like it could be more so, though.

Hmmm...maybe my students CAN use it.

I've long been excited by GoAnimate. I've posted all two of my animations in other blog posts. But I've encountered difficulties when students use it. These range from the standard technology issues ("Mr. Cosby! I broke the internet!" One time it was almost literally true.) to simple time-management issues. There were a lot of things about it that my students didn't understand the first time around, and would be able to do better after having some experience with it. there were also some issues sharing the resultant videos, strangely.

But now GoAnimate for Schools is live, and theoretically, it would solve the sharing problem. It also means that the limitations suffered by mere mortals--the character creation difficulties, for example--would also be overcome. 

As for my students breaking the Internet, well, I understand it's fragile anyway.

Sir Ken Robinson rocks the animation

The inimitable Sir Ken Robinson doing what he does best--blowing holes in the education world.



Hat tip Open Culture.

http://www.openculture.com/2010/10/sir_ken_robinson_a_creative_education.html

Animation test

I don't remember if I've already tested this, and I can't be bothered to search the archives to find out.  I should actually be working right now. 

Go!Animate is an online tool for creating flash animations with relative ease.  I say relative because it's still a fairly time-consuming process, and it isn't quite as intuitive as it likes to think it is.

I created this animation because in Spanish I, our most recent unit was about basic socializing.  The exam for the unit is a one-on-one conversation.  I have one student whom I know knows all the stuff, but I don't think I've ever heard her speak individually in class.  My thought was that, instead of having a straight-up conversation with her, she could help me do the voice-over work with this cartoon.  It turns out that you can't directly record voice-overs into the video--you have to use a different piece of software to record them, and then import them into the animation.  If your objective is creating videos, that's not a problem, but if your objective is getting reluctant students to speak, you add a whole layer of abstraction and hassle that you don't want.  So that idea isn't really going to work.

Anyway, without further ado, two methods of sharing the video:  the link,

http://goanimate.com/movie/0y_W4EyibzgY?utm_source=linkshare

and the video embedding:

GoAnimate.com: Las presentaciones by jcos

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Update:  You can sort of record your own voice.  You call a telephone number, and it will record you, and by some mechanism, it ends up attached to your video.  It's still not as good as just pressing a record button and talking to the computer, but it might be able to work.