Podcasting in Education

  I am one who will readily admit that podcasting has been one of my greatest interests and pastimes for a few years now.  Maybe a bit too much.  Initially, I didn't see the point, but after experiencing a variety of genres and formats, I've been persuaded.
  Part of this experience has given me an insight to the benefits of podcasting and especially how it can apply to education.  I'll lay out some education relevant information for podcasting.

Pros: 

• Podcasting is mobile, so it doesn't have to be done in front of a tv, radio, or chalkboard.
• The prevalence of podcasting means there is almost anything for anyone.
• Podcasting has been around for a while, so there are many people who are veterans trained with producing quality.
• Being recorded, you can revisit interesting content
• Like written literature, the speaker's personality can come out and be a compelling part of the production. 
• Most podcasts are free
• Audio editing is worlds easier than video editing.

Cons:

• It's necessarily recorded so you cannot interact.
• They tend to be audio (vodcasting is for video) and have difficulty conveying step by step processes that benefit highly from illustrations or written word to revisit

  For an occupation with so much work that goes into the everyday prep, it can be that much harder to provide ways to enrich student understanding or even provide another way for students to approach a topic.  Since podcasts are mobile, numerous, and free, you can have students listen to well-produced work and spice up the monotony of learning from only one person.  Since podcasts are not tailored specifically for your class (unless you make them), they can provide additional insight that you may not have covered yourself.
  Less abstractly, podcasting lets you bring amazing people to your students.  If you are talking about the stars, you can listen to people like Dr. Pamela Gay of Astronomy Cast or Neil Degrasse Tyson on Star Talk.  If you want to have your students know more about an author of a book, you can have them listen to an interview with them about their book on one of many, possibly NPR.  Especially for students who are having difficulty reading tone in script, hearing the passion of a speaker can help to convey interest and curiosity that may have been missed all along.
  Though its probably not good when trying to explain the quadratic equation or other procedures, podcasting is a great way to convey ideas and provides the opportunity of hearing in-depth discussions already had by others.  A podcast like the Titanium Physicists knows that it can't convey the mathematics behind the physics, and it instead provides an accessible approach to complex concepts and counter-intuitive ideas.  Sure, students can still ignore it or not listen at all, but podcasting provides another needed avenue to reach our students.

Podcasts mentioned:

1. http://www.astronomycast.com/
2. http://www.startalkradio.net/
3. http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/

Gaming in Education with EdGamer

EdGamer

            EdGamer is a podcast by two teachers who talk about how games – board, video, and otherwise – are used in schools.  In episode 101, they had the pleasure of having James Gee (the Gee-nius) talk with them about his latest book and about how we need to find ways to make smarter students.  Gee brought up the importance of intelligence in our uncertain future.  With big problems like global warming, alternative fuels, and a dropping economy, the world of our students will require them to be creative and capable of intelligently responding to information and their surroundings.

            There was a really cool segment about how we can engage problems with out students.  Since many teachers are not up on the latest technology and troubleshooting, there will always be issues that will take time and expertise to solve.  They brought up an issue with students trying to play minecraft on the school server.  They had to find a way for the kids to build their stuff without having kids from outside the servers coming in and destroying their work.  Rather than banning people, the kids found a way around the problem and solved it on their own.  This is the kind of intelligence and ingenuity that we’re hoping to enable in our students.  This kind of thing isn’t done by having us always solve the problems either.  I know I’ve learned more than a few things about computers after having to figure out a few workarounds on my own.  And it’s so much more rewarding.

            If you want to hear about some opinions about how games work with school, give it a listen.  It’s more of a news format, but the discussions with the interviewees are really engaging.

Learning How to Play

(Concerning class #4)

How Can Video Games Model Learning for Us?

            Video games do an amazing thing.  They can take us from our rooms or a busy arcade into a different world.  Like a storybook, they can engage our imagination and let us interact with a world of hypotheticals.  What if you were one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles and had to fight off bad guys?  What if you were in control of how a military base was controlled and strategy was enacted?  What if animals could manipulate the elements and animal fighting rings existed all over the country legally?  They can get us to imagine complex things, and they can do that by teaching us as we go.

            Video games model so many parts of effective learning – tutorials to introduce you to the basic mechanics, the benefit of repetition to get better or pass some tricky assessment, gradually developing/scaffolding knowledge for you as you need it, and drawing you in to identify as the character.

            Tutorials – Tutorials allow you to either refresh your skills or get your basic knowledge to a minimum level depending on your prior-knowledge of how the games work.  Whether it’s a refresher or extra help, our students need a way to bring their knowledge up to a certain mark or into working memory.  Even with just a warm-up at the beginning of class, we can get our students engaged and aware of the immediate skills that they will need to develop in the class.

            Repetition – One thing that video games have in spades is a way to make people invest so much time in straight repetition.  One way that they do it is by incremental rewards whether it’s gold, experience, or, for more strategy based games, better ability.  There comes a certain point where training is its own reward.  If you have ever seen a child replaying the same difficult level just to beat the boss, get the badge, or just grinding experience, you know how video games can generate the player’s own motivation.  Though it may be really difficult to implement some kind of achievement board in your classroom for the first time a student read Hamlet or got 100% on a test, simply playing practice review games like facts on the brain can get students having fun doing school in a more relaxed setting.

            Scaffolding – Games normally have different difficulty levels.  Beyond that, unless you are playing at game that shows that some folks can hate humanity like TMNT for the NES, games tend to begin simple to more complex as you go.  Whether it’s starting with minimal variety of enemies, ala tall grass in pokemon, or playing Starcraft where the possible units and enemies gradually become more complex as the game progresses, games give the players the chance and time to start running to catch up with the necessary skills needed in the near future.  Much like this, when we teach math, we ensure kids can recognize and draw letters before we get them to put them in words before we get them to put them in sentences and more complex thought.  A big difference between lesson plans and games is that games are given a thorough beta play-through before they are released to the paying public.  Sadly that requires more funding and time than most teachers get.

            Identity – Whether it’s becoming Cloud in FF7, a green frog in Battletoads, or being whoever you want to be in KOTOR, video games allow the player to put themselves in the shoes of their character.  Now, we can’t all pull a Ralph Phillips and violently subtract life and value from numbers, but it seems the aspect of playful identity is hard to capture.  Schools have been trying to make students see themselves as the protagonist (biologists, mathematicians, authors, etc), but it does make you wonder what more they could do.  Anecdotally at least, when students are required to post blogs or publicly publish, they are more careful and thorough, and this may be because they are aware that their audience could be more than just a teacher but anyone that visits the medium.  For writing, publicly showing yourself as an author seems to engender the identity and thus the attending joys and responsibilities.  I’m not saying that we should fear of social shame as student motivation, but maybe what students need is to know that their school work can matter outside of the building.

Can there be compromise?

            While we can’t make every part of class an eye-popping fun-fest, we should at least take note of what other media are doing well and borrow as applicable.  Much like how you can disagree with someone about Marmite toast, you can still agree that toast is brilliant and use it elsewhere.  Likewise, it’s important to recognize the purpose behind a medium like video games as different from education though there are commonalities.  Because the goals of education and gaming are different, their means will require at least some tweaking though they can still be cousins.

Doubt Even This

(Concerning class #3)

Dropping the Box

            Today, we presented different potential tools for use in and out of the classroom.  I personally would recommend DropBox as a way to sync your computers together and minimize the time spent loading flashdrives with particular files every morning.  It’s a handy way to make sure that you have access to the important files you use on a daily basis even if you have to borrow a friends laptop.  If you’re working at school, you could sync your account with the computer at work and have access to your lesson plans, notes, and printable handouts at a convenient requirement of internet access.  The downside is that if you’re out of internet access at work or home, you’re pretty much up a fecal crick in a rudderless toboggan.  Overall though, I’ve got to give it props.

Don’t Believe Half of What You Read But I’m Not Saying Which Half

            One of our major discussions was about how we can encourage critical thought when it comes to sources.  How can students know to trust an article in Nature over The Daily Mail?  Is that even a good example?  Because kids are told that they can trust their text books unless the teacher has to correct answers in the back or go on a diatribe about how George Washington and a cherry tree was apocryphal, students tend to start with complete trust of their written media.  This seems good until we need them to use outside sources for projects which results in the credulity that make stories like the tree octopus or the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest a riot.

            It seems like learning to look at something critically requires a phase of frustration.  You could look at it like moving from global credulity to global cynicism to a more skeptical approach.  That’s a little to simplified, but you get the point.  Students need to learn to evaluate evidence and determine how independently replicated the information is.  If everyone is releasing the same verbatim press release, they should recognize that something sounds fishy.  Part of that feeling comes from learning about how media works and what to expect.  This comes from exposure and guidance during or after that exposure.  As teachers, we can facilitate these kinds of mentalities by requiring multiple, independent sources for project information.  This could be begun by having everyone find sources for a topic and comparing and contrasting the information.  This would give student experience gathering info on their own, but also practice in analyzing the sources in an open environment without much to lose.

            With so much information to wade through, we have to be critical since much of it is necessarily contradictory.  We can’t all become experts in every field; so we have to make concessions.  The key move is which concessions are ok.

Edutainment

Video Games as a Lesson Vehicle

            When it comes to video games, it's fairly easy to find one with a physics engine or foundation.  Whether it's playing something like Civiballs or Crush the Castle (That's right, Angry Birds), Many use a basic projectile motion as the means of completion.  Mix in a little momentum for pushing objects over and you have a solid fun time.  While everyone has had exposure to throwing rocks, understand how distance applies to certain forces is not quite so much.  That's why I think that some games can help to give students an awareness and intuitive sense about that with which they may not have any first hand experience.

            My preferred example is the game Magnetized by RockyBrickGames.  The goal of the game is to guide a steadily moving block through gradually more complex mazes by activating magnets to pull the block closer or redirect the path.  The truth of the matter is that this may give students the impression that monopoles exist, but that can be addressed as a mind-bending follow-up.  For now though, we can use this as a demonstration for monopoled forces like gravity or Electricity.

            The inverse squared law is the non-intuitive feature that students need to grasp.  To succeed, students have to grasp that the closer the block is to the "magnetized" point, the more force is exerted on it which results in a quicker turn time.  Additionally, if you are trying to course correct after release, you come to recognize how much the force drops off at a great distance, so great changes can't be made quickly at a distance.

How useful could it be?

            While there are other great games for teaching a similar method using gravity, I have not run across many for magnetism or electric charge.  I do not think that something like this could replace a lesson on the inverse square laws but could give students something more "concrete" to base their mental models on.  By giving this kind of "force sense" with these non-intuitive concepts, students should be better enabled to visualize and to check answers for intuitive senses of correctness. 

Outcasts and Xylem

How do we fit in?

            How we currently approach the ideas of school acceptance seem to have changed over the years.  Via a video in class, in the fifties people felt no shame telling students who felt different or estranged to go study what other children are doing or wearing and copy them.  This appears to be a basic sense of social awareness, but in our push for diversity it gives the appearance of denying personal identity.  I would argue that we have to sacrifice part of our identity (our language, our humor, our political leanings) to speak effectively with other people, but part of our decision is decided what is necessary to still communicate.  I am don't see the problems for communication as being that different from "fitting in."  Additionally, part of developing into socialites is a growing awareness that even though you currently "fit in," you should still be flexible to allow others in.

Where are emotions in learning?

            A quote that we discussed was when Dewey wrote:

                        I believe that to endeavor to stimulate or arouse the emotions apart from their corresponding activities, is to introduce an unhealthy and morbid state of mind.

How I understand this quote is best related by a story.  The daughter of a former teacher of mine came back from school one day singing a song.  "Xylem up, blow 'em down."  She had the song stuck in her head and seemed to be enjoying herself.  When her mother asked what it meant, she couldn't do much more than cock her head to the side.  Her daughter had become attached to a song of a concept without understand the concept itself, with not much more of an idea than that it had to do with trees.

            Whether it is teaching about xylem or energy, it is of prime importance that students understand the concept.  It is great to find a way to make them interested in a subject area to get them to learn more readily, but we can't stop there.  I believe what Dewey's problem was was this misguided idea that if children enjoy a song about a concept, they will enjoy that concept.  The lasting emotion is not in something that goes away when you learn that it was established by a song but in a concept that is understood concretely and is well established in the mind.  When students understand the use of an idea and can apply it themselves, that brings a power and an appreciation for where that power comes from.  

Thoughts on 2013/07/11

John Dewey Literature Thoughts

The writing in this post is based on the readings of John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed as well as John Dewey: A Significant Contributor to the Field of Educational Technology by Peter Rich and Thomas C. Reeves.

The Need for a Guide

John Dewey put a great focus on “learning by doing.”  Sometimes though, people forget or ignore that an expert or instructor should be alongside to guide.  If the instructor is gone, the students fumble about trying to reinvent everything for the first time again.  The instructor is there to guide the students in discovery and show how the wheel became invented without the years that it took to perfect it.  It seems like we can focus on technology that allows students to do everything on their own.  Even though technology can be very useful in bringing the experience to the student, we must not forget that there will need to be a guiding hand for productive learning to be accomplished while motivation still exists for most, at least until students are proficient enough to learn on their own.

            School is the community where we put students to develop their sense of wonder and goals.  Like a guide, the teacher knows a goal and a means for the lesson.  A child left with all of the technology of an expert is of no use unless they have some sort of goal in mind.  When students are older, we give them wire, batteries, and lightbulbs and ask them to figure it out.  Because they have a framework for setting their own goals (e.g. lighting the bulb), the students can puzzle out their own means through prior knowledge (e.g. electricity flows through wires, bulbs need electricity to light).  Even still, we have teachers there to provide guidance for those who have not discovered their own means yet and to facilitate the thought.that brings the discovery about.  For even younger students, doing the same task would likely result in broken glass.  As learners, we will flounder until we have a purpose for our technology, and a teacher is there to help the learners learn about purpose, starting by giving it to them, then weaning them off of their need for aid.

Concrete Foundations for Learning

            Dewey seems to express that we should not teach something to a student unless they have some exposure to it.  We should found every teaching on concrete experience.  Students who learn to read should experience the need of reading.  Students who study science should experience the oddities of this world and see what we are working with.  Students should be taught the use of knowledge before they are taught it.  As with current pedagogy, students must begin with concrete thinking before abstract thinking can be developed.  As technology is concerned, students should experience the importance of a subject and thus technology before we can teach them how to use the technology properly.  The student must experience, do, and learn in the process.

The importance of Context

            We have to introduce a concept so that students have an understanding of it before we define it with a “symbol.”  An example of this shoddy work is the word “energy.”  Many people use it, but few could define it in a way divorced from the ethereal nonsense it has become.  Students can learn a word and throw it around like an adult, but to use it effectively, the student must understand the meaning of the word.  We must be sure we are ready to explain the purpose of the concept and what it entails before we consider teaching students a new word.  If we don’t, all thunder and no lightning is what we can expect.

The Powers of Knowledge and Emotion

            Teachers should keep an eye open for interest because that is when students recognize their own powers.  When you can understand your world, manipulate it, and predict what it will do, you recognize the power of that knowledge and skill.  If we can help students find and keep that sense of power, we have a citizenry that is motivated to improve and learn.  A citizenry that is truly free.

            Even though he was not aware of psychological research into generating beliefs, Dewey believed that beliefs and feelings can be developed by actions first.  As teachers, we should facilitate students to do correctly and goodly, and students will value the actions as part of their identities.  From the identity, feeling and emotion come, and from them a passion for the right and good stays.

Difficulties and Confusion

            One of my greatest confusions is what Dewey means by “social life” and “science.”  Social life has become a phrase that encapsulates your relationships divorced from work and civic responsibility.  His idea seems to be an all encompassing concept that covers every way that our life is social.  This seems to be the same situation that I am in with his idea of science.  It seems to be more than the discipline and body of knowledge, but the very method of science itself.  Because of this different meaning, understanding Dewey can be difficult though rewarding task.