History is the Dickens — or could be

June 26, 2007

Faithful readers here may note some long, substantive comments from another “Ed,” who is connected with the Open History Project, it turns out. I’ve linked to the OHP before, but not often enough. It really is a treasure trove.

For example, there is a page of links to computer/internet media works. Included there is a fascinating animation from the British site accompanying what was a PBS Masterpiece Theatre program in the U.S. from Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House. The animation, by a creative crew called Rufflebrothers (Mark and Tim Ruffle), covers the life of Charles Dickens. As a simple cartoon, it’s droll — notice Dickens’ siblings dropping dead in an early scene. As a piece of history pedagoguery, it’s brilliant. [It’s Flash animation, and I can’t copy it to paste a sample.]

(I can’t find this animation on the PBS website for Bleak House — but there is another, simpler timeline, covering Dickens and more authors.)

Watch the British animation of Dickens’ life, then go back and take it scene by scene. A pocket watch allows you to see what else was happening in history at that moment. Careful linking allows you to get much more detail — in the scene where his siblings are shown dying (as they did, in fact), the feature gives the details of each of Charles’ brothers and sisters, opening a door of new understanding for the inspiration of the characters in Dickens’ work (It was originally Tiny Fred? Really? After Dickens’ younger brother Frederick?).

Imagine such an animation for the life of George Washington, or for the life of Abraham Lincoln, or Henry Ford, Queen Victoria, Sam Houston, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, or Albert Einstein.

What in the world can we do to encourage BBC to do more like this? Who else can get in on the act?

What other treasures await you at the Open History Project?

2 Comments | Cartoons, Education, History video sources, Humor, Literature, On-line education, On-line learning, Pedagogy, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Video and film | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

In a world of electronics, why we still learn the map and compass

June 22, 2007

Why do we bother to teach map reading still, since “everyone” has a GPS?

Wholly apart from plotting the Sweet Tea Line, there is this: Batteries die. Wonderful post at the secret life of a teacher.

While you’re there, gander at his proposals for Alaska’s death-defying fishercrabmen, and a response, and a redirect. When I read it, I thought it had to be the result of a classroom exercise. What could your kids design, if you gave them a dangerous situation somewhere in the world affecting some culture, and asked them to come up with a solution?

2 Comments | Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Lesson plans, Student projects, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Draw this! See the future

June 21, 2007

Can’t draw?  Especially, you can’t draw faces?

Want to see how on-line and computer-based education might work best?

Go here, learn to draw faces well, in under ten minutes.  (Have some fun — at the entrance page, scroll over each person and read the thought bubbles.)

This piece has been out there for two years.  One might wonder what else this team has done, and where one might find it.

From the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.  Tip of the old scrub brush to Evangelical Outpost. 

Leave a Comment » | Education, On-line education, On-line learning, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

PowerPoint templates for students

June 18, 2007

I really don’t like assignments to “do a PowerPoint presentation” for kids who are not expert at all on their subjects — there is too much room for too much unintentional mischief when people who know little about a topic are to use a tool designed for people who know too much about a topic.

Among other things, kids who have never had to do a five-page report, nor an outline of a report, do not have the experience to stick to five bullets of less than five words per slide. And don’t get me going on “fireworks” animation of letters to explain things like the death of Medgar Evers, or the evils of child labor.

But if you want some ideas, the Paducah, Kentucky, school system offers some templates for student reports, and a few presentations teachers could use as foundations, here at “Connecting Teachers and Students.” There is advice, too. *

Use these as starting points, please. If you can’t improve on them, you’re not trying (no offense, Paducah — I hope).

A good exercise for you would be to spend an hour reading suggestions from Presentation Zen, and then edit a couple of those presentations from Paducah to make them more, um, zen reflective.

Remember, “template” is just a part of “contemplate.”

(I hope I don’t regret having pointed out that Paducah site to you.)

Update, November 24, 2007: Take a look at the video included in this post to see an effective use of a presentation tool like PowerPoint — though this one was done with Apple’s Keynote. Check the links in the post, too.
Update March 8, 2008:  Paducah’s school district archived the PowerPoint stuff.  I have changed the links above to link to the archive sites.  I replaced “www” with “old” in the URL.

7 Comments | Accuracy, Classroom technology, Editing, Pedagogy, Presentations, Student projects, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

For-profit Educate, Inc., goes private (Sylvan Learning, Hooked-on-Phonics)

June 15, 2007

Educate, Inc., the parent company of Sylvan Learning Centers, traded for the last time on the NASDAQ exchange yesterday.

No, the company didn’t go out of business. It was taken private by its management, after being a public company for three years. From the Baltimore Sun morning e-mail:

Educate becomes a private company

Educate Inc. has completed its transition into a private company, ending its three-year run on public markets.

Best known for its Sylvan tutoring centers, the Baltimore company, which was purchased in a management-led buyout, traded for the last time on the Nasdaq yesterday.

The investor group that purchased the company is led by chief executive officer R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric, other executives and affiliates of Sterling Capital Partners and Citigroup Private Equity. They paid $8 a share for the company in the deal valued at $535 million.

The company announced this week that more than 75 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which came as the firm has struggled with poor product sales.

Internal reorganization was swift.  The company’s website carried this note this morning:

On June 13, 2007, through a merger transaction, Edge Acquisition, LLC became the owner of Educate, Inc. In a related series of simultaneous transactions, the companies which were part of Educate, Inc. have been split into the following independent companies:

  • Educate Services, which includes Sylvan Learning, Catapult Learning, and Schulerhilfe;
  • Hooked on Phonics, Inc., which includes Hooked on Phonics, Reading Rainbow, and GPN;
  • Educate Online, Inc., which includes Catapult Online and eSylvan;
  • Progressus, Inc.; and
  • Educate Corporate Centers Holdings, Inc., which is a franchisee of various Sylvan Learning and owner of Sylvan Learning Centers.

The companies are now operating independently to better serve students, families and schools across the country. To learn more about the merger and related transactions, click here.

Making a profit delivering education is rare.  Milton Friedman notwithstanding, free market rules do not apply to educational enterprises in the same way they do to other services.  This is one more example, or set of examples, that should give pause to any rational person considering making public schools “compete” for money to improve education for any child, especially any group of children.  Sylvan Learning Centers are considered to be the top of the heap in their niche; Hooked-on-Phonics is a cliché success story.  And they “struggle with poor product sales.”

I hope the company finds the education answers, the magic bullets, and can retail them at affordable prices.

The answer, by the way, probably is not 42.

1 Comment | Brain learning, Business, Business Ethics, Education, Education quality, Education spending, Education success, Free market economics, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

“Mister! Let’s watch a movie!”

June 13, 2007

Especially near the end of the school year, every teacher gets requests to “show a movie.” My collection of videos on specific history events is not what they have in mind. Short subjects related to the course don’t qualify, either.

The kids want an escape from classwork. I just can’t justify it.

But there have been times that I wondered whether a movie wouldn’t be appropriate to explain some part of history or economics. For example, in one economics class, the entire group was stumped by the concept of a “run on the bank,” of the sort that prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to declare the “bank holiday” in March 1933. I wished at that moment that I had a copy of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to show both the economic conditions that prevailed in much of America at the time, and to show what a run on a bank looks like.

Then I started wondering about all the other stuff that movie could illustrate.

I’ve never used it.

But I stumbled on this site, Teach with Movies, which features a set of lesson plans and other material to use with “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The site claims to have lesson plans for 270 movies. There is a membership charge, but it’s a charge clearly aimed at encouraging teachers to buy: $11.99.

I had a principal who complained about showing videos — which struck me as very odd — and his complaints escalated until he passed out copies of copyright rules. In discussion, it finally became clear to me that he was opposed to running Hollywood, entertainment movies in classes. He didn’t bother to distinguish between my showing of the life of Theodore Roosevelt from PBS from “Beverly Hills Cop” — but he’s gone. I find I share his general revulsion for just slapping in a Hollywood movie to keep the kids quiet.

In the last year I’ve been asked to step in to show “Hitch” in a business communication class, and “The Money Pit” in a Spanish class. “Iron Monkey” could be related to world geography. These exercises generally are wastes of time, and of course, money.

But I also was asked to monitor a showing of “Charley” for a psychology class, and “Napoleon” for a world history class. The psychology class had several questions to pursue closely related to the course; the kids were generally lulled to sleep by Napoleon.

But why not, with careful groundwork, show “It’s a Wonderful Life” in economics, as supplement to the units on banking, the depression, the creation of the Fed, and general history?

Teach with Movies? Great idea. Have you used this site? Anybody know how well it works?

2 Comments | Economics, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History video sources, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Stranger maps: Flights of fancy

June 12, 2007

How could you use these maps in your classroom?

Aaron Kobin maps documentation

Image and film from Aaron Koblin Design|Media Arts, UCLA; “Flightpatterns”

Remember the old World Book maps of states that featured oil drilling derricks and cows in Texas, and shocks of wheat in Kansas? This is just that kind of map, updated for commerce connected with air travel, showing commerce density and direction hour by hour.

I’m thinking, one quiz would be to name the sites of most action. Another would be to calculate how many people are in the air at any given time (notice the count of the number of airplanes; you’ll have to assume about 100 people per aircraft, or more if you can find figures; notice there are no fewer than 4,000 aircraft in the air at any time over the U.S. — ponder that figure for a while, considering an average cost of more than $10 million per aircraft, the miles covered, and compare it to the maps showing the voyages of European explorers to America . . .)

What other maps can your kids make? Water flows of rivers? Train commerce? Highway commerce? Food transportation?

Geography should be an awfully fun topic to teach, and even more fun topic to learn, no?

Check out Koblin’s other work — see the crystals dissolve, science teachers?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Stranger Fruit, via Pharyngula.

3 Comments | Business, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Maps, Pedagogy, Science, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Another nail in the coffin for geology and geography texts, in print

June 11, 2007

The Physical Environment offers a text for geophysical classes, on-line. It sorta looks like it’s free. In any case, check it out.

Then look at the supporting blog.

Is there any inherent reason you can’t do that in your classroom? You could start by using this “book,” The Physical Environment.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Geography - Physical, Natural history, On-line education, On-line learning, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Explore ancient Rome, from your computer, in 3-D

June 11, 2007

Can you figure out some way to make this work in a classroom?

Science Daily reports that a team at UCLA working with a lot of others completed an 11-year project to map out Rome as it appeared when it was the commercial and political capital of the western world, three centuries into the first millennium:

“Rome Reborn 1.0″ shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

“Rome Reborn 1.0” is a true 3D model that runs in real time. Users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can enter important public buildings such as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city’s largest place of worship.

As new discoveries are made, “Rome Reborn 1.0” can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the “Rome Reborn” project will include other phases in the evolution of the city from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D. Video clips and still images of “Rome Reborn 1.0” can be viewed at http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu.

Now we need to wonder: Will it be available for classroom use?

More below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, History video sources, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Internet search tips from Google, on posters

June 6, 2007

Have you tried out Google for Educators?

Google is a powerful search tool that is way under-utilized by most of us. Working with students, I constantly find they have difficulty using Google or any other search engine to cut out worthless material and focus on specific items they need for their research.

Google for Educators has several posters offering tips on searching to help out.  Click here for .pdf version of Book Search, from GoogleBook Search poster, from Google for Educators

You can download the posters as .pdf files in a format suited to 8.5 X 11 inch pages, or for 17 X 22 inch pages. The larger size can be printed on the color “blueprint” printers your school’s drafting classes have (This is a good opportunity to go make friends with the drafting instructor — you can use those machines for great maps, too.).  If your school lacks such printers, you’ll find commercial copy centers will reproduce them (we have Kinko’s here) — though my experience is it can sometimes be cheaper to have them treated as photos and processed at a local photo center (Ritz/Wolf’s/Inkley’s, etc.)

I particularly like the “Better Searches, Better Results” poster.

The Texas teacher evaluation forms encourage evaluation on stuff hanging on the walls fo the classroom — if you lack stuff to hang, especially stuff that helps students in times of need, Google offers several posters.  Make the most of it.

[Has anyone else noticed that, as important as visual displays are supposed to be, very few schools make arrangements for easy display of materials?]

Leave a Comment » | Libraries, Maps, On-line education, On-line learning, Plagiarism, Public libraries, Student projects, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Typewriter of the Moment: Legal clip art for the classroom

June 5, 2007

Royal Typewriter, from legal clip art

Visit Clipart ETC for a great collection of clipart for students and teachers.

There you go: Legal clip art, properly attributed (though not necessarily properly footnoted — that’s another topic). How can you get more licensed clip art? See below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | Business Ethics, Classroom technology, Education, Ethics, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Law, Leadership, Libraries, Maps, On-line education, Plagiarism, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Playing with maps

May 30, 2007

Okay, geography teachers — you’ve got a whole summer to figure out how to make geography fun and the most rewarding class your kids will take next year.

By then, Delta and Dawn the whales will be out of the Sacramento River (heck, they’re probably under the Golden Gate as I write this), so this map from the Sacramento Bee won’t be anything of great interest.  I found it via Google Maps Mania, though — and that site promises to provide a barrage of wonderful and bizarre maps.  Surely there will be other maps.  How about this post about street views of major cities?  If you have a live internet connection and a projector, you can show this stuff in real time.

Or, if you’re studying global warming, you can use this map to show what disappears if the ocean rises 1 meter, or 14 meters (from the post, “50 Things You Can Do With Google Maps“) Especially if your city is near the ocean, you can have your kids print these maps out and write a story about what it’s like to watch the ocean take back the land they grew up with.  (I wish the map would allow one to drop the level of the ocean, too — a lot more what ifs, and a lot more opportunities to discuss things like the migration of humans to America 37,000 years ago . . .)

I really liked this one:  What’s on the other side of the world?  In my childhood, more than once we set out to dig a hole to China.  Of course, had we gone straight through the Earth, we’d probably have found the Indian Ocean.   It’s a silly application — just the sort of thing that gets a class talking about and playing with maps, looking at the globe, and making the associations that qualify as “critical thinking” at test time.

If you can’t make a warmup, discussion or project out of the materials you find at that site, you need a Margarita (if you’re in Texas; perhaps a beer if you’re in Ontario, Canada).

Go have fun.

1 Comment | Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Lesson plans, On-line education, On-line learning, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Girls and technology: Girl Scouts on the ‘net

May 26, 2007

Here, try this brain teaser.

Girl Scouts of America can be found on the web; some of the stuff at this “Go Tech” site could be useful in the classroom. The design appears to encourage girls to pursue the use of technology, and to open them up to possibilities for careers where women are badly needed, but too seldom go. That becomes clear with this .pdf, 14-page guide for parents, It’s Her Future: Encourage a Girl in Math, Science and Technology.

I wish more organizations would put up sites for kids to use to learn. I’d love to see some interactive sites with great depth on several topics: Geography map skills, navigation, European explorers in the 15th through 20th centuries, market fluctuations for commodities and securities (for economics), Native Americans from 1500 through the 21st century, westward expansion of European colonists in America, time lines of history, great battles, etc., etc. etc.

We are missing the boat when it comes to using computers as tools for learning. Like unicorns and centaurs standing on the dock as Noah sailed away, education as a whole institution and educators individually are missing the boat (with a few notable exceptions — pitifully few).

Where is the Boy Scout site with games and material for the boys?

Leave a Comment » | Boy Scouts of America, Brain development, Brain learning, Girl Scouts, Pedagogy, Science, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Carny barking today: Education, git yer education here!

May 23, 2007

Another of my favorite blogs, I Thought A Think, hosts the 120th Carnival of Education this week. Graciously, ITAT included Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub — part of the sideshow or part of the midway, I’m not sure. But I’m grateful. The link is to my post on the Internet Archive features on tobacco, and the Flintstones promoting Winston cigarettes.

Interesting that the Carnival of Education cites the post on tobacco in the Internet Archive, and not the post on education reform in the same archive.

Sketch of Flintstone School, Flintstone, Maryland

Sketch of the Flintstone Elementary School, Flintstone, Maryland (Allegany County Public Schools)

Leave a Comment » | Education, Education blogs, Education reform, Education spending, History video sources, Technology in the classroom, Video and film, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The Bathtub is famous!

May 23, 2007

One Blog a Day features Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub today.

One Blog a Day logoOne Blog a Day probably qualifies as a sort of internet navel gazing — each day it highlights one blog of some interest. Generally it just points the way, but on a couple of occasions it has generated controversies, or at least discussions, in the comments (see the 726-comment entanglement on the original posting of Pharyngula’s feature).

Where else do you see history, exotic travel, biology and cream puffs clumped together like that?  Eclecticism has its place, and One Blog a Day appears to be it.

Tip of the old scrub brush and thanks to One Blog a Day.

1 Comment | Technology, Technology in the classroom, Travel, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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