Present me is very very happy with past me

Last year, I designed a project.  I turned my school into a small city, gave each of my student a map to exactly half of the city, and had them talk on their cell phones to give each other directions to points unknown.

It was HARD.  I had a print copy of the school's emergency exit map, but nobody seems to have a digital copy.  So I had to manually create that.  I had to assign street names to the hallways and store names to all the classrooms (the easy part).  I had to secure permission from the administration, the custodial staff, and all of the individual teachers whose rooms I would be turning into churches and ice cream stores and municipal government buildings.  (Not a problem, everyone said.  Go for it.)  I had to find a system for keeping all of those papers organized as I was hanging them up.  That was the hard part.  Last year I was one step away at all times from dropping an armload of papers all over the place and ruining everything.  But I got it all up in time for the project, and from my perspective, it went very very well.

Flash forward to this year.  It took me about 45 minutes--one planning period--to set the entire project up.  And this year I'm doing it with three classes. 

As I was agonizing last year over how to do all of these things, I made a lot of good decisions for longevity of the project.  I made all of my materials reusable.  I kept them uncharacteristically well organized.  I made the project's outcomes align with what I wanted the learners to know and be able to do.  We're going to call this one a lesson design win.

Google continues to take over the world

...and I for one welcome our new lizard overlords.

Bill Ferriter talks about using Google Docs to pre-package digital materials, so students can use them in their digital projects.  The main advantage, of course, is that they can spend more time working on the project, and less time looking for the perfect picture.  (Always tremendously frustrating.)  He also goes on to extol the virtues of collaboration, ease of use, and finding materials licenced for re-use (instead of downloading a picture, video, or sound bite that somebody else owns).  In all, an excellent idea.  Now if only I could convince my school to create Google accounts for my students....

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers points out that the Google Art Project, which had a huge scope to begin with, is now enormous.  With Google Art Project, you can see works of art from museums all over the world.  I've already used it a little bit in my Spanish classes, to show works by Picasso and Dali and Varo.  Mr. Byrne points out something execllent: If you sign in using a Google account, you can create your own galleries and collections.  Not only does this mean I can create galleries, so I don't have to go searching for the same 10 paintings all the time, but also that I can have my students create their own galleries based on themes.  For my Spanish students: "Find me 10 pictures by Velazquez.  Find me 10 art works created in the Romantic style.  Find me 10 works about (or at least arguably about) the Spanish Civil War.  Find me 10 works of people doing household tasks, and describe in detail what they're doing."  For my English students: "Find me 10 works that have the same tone as the book we're reading.  Find me 10 works on the topic of unrequited love / family / loneliness.  Find me a work that you find stunning/beautiful/ghastly/confusing and write a page describing what it looks like, what you think/feel about it, what the artist was trying to conveigh; use descriptive adjectives/averbial phrases that express time/complex sentences."  Now, if only I could convince my school to create Google accounts for my students....

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.