Developing Creativity with Glogster

Over the past two weeks I have been using Glogster to develop an online poster (a Glog) as an introduction to a Physics 30 project. My poster is titled Nuclear Energy Dialectic Poster Project. In this project, students will develop a Nuclear Energy Dialectic Glog which explains the support and opposition of using nuclear energy from another country’s perspective. At the end of the project, students will comment on each other’s Glogs and then evaluate their work. My glog provides links to further assignment and evaluation resources for students to access. For students who have not used Glogster it is helpful to have them see my glog as an example.

I think Glogster is very easy to use and a very visual method of communicating material. A developer can easily add media (text, audio, images or video) to their online poster. I think Glogster is a great tool for younger students and those wanting an easy method of sharing ideas visually. Glogster allows the user to be visually creative in choosing an image related to a textbox and place this in any manner on their online poster. Text and images can be hyperlink to other websites. This non-linear method of getting information from a clickable glog is more interactive and gains better retention of information.

In general, I like to encourage all my high school students to create material that looks professional and has effective: visual balance, layout, typography, use of space, images, audio, animation and video. I think Glogster’s strength is that is it easy to create a visually interesting online webpage that is rich with multimedia. I would love to see more professional looking tools in their Magnet Toolbox. I generally find in the senior high school students want more control of where their text is placed and how it looks on a page. For students who already know how to create a webpage with widgets, gadgets, embedded code or hyperlinking, Glogster may limit their creativity. For those students developing these technical and artistic skills, Glogster is a fabulous tool for unleashing creativity, exploring the wonderfully creative world of multimedia and hyperlinking.

Hooray for Voicethread!

Voicethread is an online Web 2.0 tool that allows users do two things: to share multimedia productions online and to comment on other Voicethread multimedia productions. A basic Voicethread account is free and provides an impressive number of options.

Voicethread has a strong following in both K-12 educational setting and post-secondary. Although Voicethread can be used to have a group of people send a Happy Birthday message to a friend, I suspect it is most commonly in an education presentation setting.

The presentation tool allows the user to upload video, a slideshow or images into their Voicethread. The video features works well for sharing student projects. For example, my students submitted their animation class projects and then I posted the group of projects on a single Voicethread for the whole class to view and comment on individually. It is a very effective method of sharing a set of video file projects.

If the Voicethread is intended to be a single presentation, the user can upload slides or graphics to Voicethread and then narrate each slide using their microphone. It is very easy to edit, delete and rearrange slides and narrations. User can also overlay text on a Voicethread page and add hyperlinks. The next step is to publish the Voicethread. A user can: download the Voicethread, publish to a group of Voicethread users, share the URL with others or use the Voicethread embed code and insert this into a blog, wiki or other website.

There are a few options for how to comment on a Voicethread. A user can comment on a single page within a Voicethread by using a microphone a recording audio comment, texting a comment, or phoning in a comment. Another feature is a Doodle feature which allows a commenter to draw on the Voicethread page an add narration at the same time. This can also be used on a video clip which is useful for visual communicating comments.

Voicethread is one of the best tools I have used for the sharing student work and seeking feedback easily.

Using Fantastic Contraption to Develop a Creating Mind

My Physics students love creating machines with the online flash game, Fantastic Contraption.

This game requires users to have the aspiring creator’s characteristics which Howard Gardner describes “a generous supply of intelligence, skill and discipline”. Fantastic Contraption is easy to use; there is no account required however students may choose to become more involved online by signing up for a free account and participating in the Fantastic Contraption forum, chat or wiki development.

To play the game, students must create crazy contraptions with the moving rods and wheels. To be successful, the contraption must guide the pink object to the final destination. Students use their imagination and knowledge in physics to create a solution for each level. This game encourages the development of discipline; as with most online games, players fail frequently and are motivated to learn from it and try again. Students apply their knowledge of physics and get to tinker like their five years old again, which according to Howard Gardner is “the height of creative powers”.


Reference

Gardner, Howard. (2007). Five minds for the future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Using Media Infused Learning to Develop a Disciplined and Synthesizing Mind

Research done by Richard Mayer is commonly cited to show that learning from multimedia results in better and longer learning retention rates.  I believe that retention is the key to developing a successful disciplined and synthesizing mind.  Students are able assimilate new information with old information and develop a deeper synthesis if they have retained the information. Students are able to better able to process and evaluate the content when they have better retention of the content.

Decision based learning, such as a non-linear learning centre, allows student to make their own decisions and learn from these.  They can go through the content at their own pace, and synthesize the content based on the decisions they have made, not based on the order or the decisions the teacher makes.  Not everyone is able to synthesis and make relations in the same way.  Allowing students to develops learning connections through their decisions results in stronger synthesis.

One of the highest level skills of a synthesizing mind, is the ability to create connections between different disciplines. I do not believe that media-infused learning always leads to an interdisciplinary approach. If the text, audio, visual, or video is artistically polished, presenting these media pieces to students, is sharing an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the content. If the method of using the media requires technical skills, such as a video game, website or Web 2.0 tools, this can also present an interdisciplinary learning opportunity for students and require them to develop these skills.

In using multimodal approach, (text, audio, visual, and video with audio) students are able to access both, a verbal working memory, and a visual working memory. Consequently, students are better equipped to think, integrate, organize, analyze, and develop schema with the content. These are skills that students to develop their disciplined and synthesizing mind.

Using Guitars to Teach Algebra and Physics

Years ago, I used to teach high school math courses. Using an interdisciplinary approach with the course content aided students in synthesizing the material and getting a deeper understanding of its purpose, especially abstract mathematics.

One of my interdisciplinary lessons was on the topic of calculating the Harmonic Mean. Many students have a distaste for using fractions, especially reciprocals. Students showed much more interest in this topic by using a story and relating the content to history, religion and music. I brought a guitar to class and began the lesson by telling them about Pythagorus of Samos and his clan of friends, the Pythagoreans who lived on the Greek island of Samos. They created a type of cult or religion whose foundation was relating music to math, more specifically ratios. Some historians claim that the Pythagoreans believed that if one could truly understand the meaning of "wholeness" they would be immortal. After telling this story, I took out a guitar and often had one of my students show to find harmonics on a guitar string. Another student would get a metre stick and we would measure ratios of notes on a single string and record harmonics.

I enjoyed this lesson so much in my math classes it is now adapted it for my grade 11 Physics course. It fits well with the Sound unit, when we cover the topics of harmonics and tones. This lesson truly gets students to see how mathematics and physics relate to music. I have taken this lesson one step further in my Physics class. Students use the computer program Audacity to create an audio project with separate labeled audio tracks that clearly depict different sound waves (loud notes, quiet notes, high notes, low notes, tone and harmonics). Students narrate additional tracks to explain what the sine waves mean. Once identical twins were in my class. They recorded themselves saying the same phrases in the same way. Even I was surprised with how closely their resulting sines waves appeared.

Using Video to Meet Instructional Goals

The Introduction to Physics segment of the Greatest Discoveries with Bill Nye: Physics video would be very useful to use in my physics classes. This video could be used to meet one of the physics course goals: having students demonstrate an understanding of paradigm shifts .

There are a number of ways this video could be used to meet this goal:

1. I could ask my online students to find graphics or videos online that depicts an example of a paradigm shift. My e-students would share their graphic on the whiteboard or share their video URL in the chatbox with their classmates. After we discuss their examples; I would share this video as my example and explain that this video focuses on the key paradigm shifts in physics which always makes for a good unit test question. Students would be advised to take notes.

2. While watching the video, students could create 3 challenging questions, related to the paradigm shift examples, which the video answers; students also need to make sure they know the answers. After watching the video, each student would quiz the rest of the class with their questions. This could be in teams or this could be done with students quizzing each other in small groups.

3. While watching the video students could create 2 challenging questions, related to the paradigm shift examples in the video, which the video does not answer. These questions could be discussed as a group after the video and the key specific questions that, after discussion, continued to be unanswered could be assigned and homework questions.

4. Student could watch the video and then write an analysis of the paradigm shifts that were shown in the video.

5. Students could be assigned to use this video to create a multimedia project of their own that demonstrates their understanding of the concept of paradigm shifts. They could chop up this video and just use the video section, inserting their own audio track. They could use a green screen and use this video as a backdrop. This could be used as part of a newscast multimedia project. They could use this to create a multimedia trivia game on the topic of paradigm shifts. Alternatively, student could propose their own project.