Cool Tool #1 - Staging It App by Shakespeare's Globe

Surprise, surprise.  I chose something related to Shakespeare for my first cool tool review.  Lest you think this is just an attempt to keep a gag going, this tool is amazing.

It is available to educators through the website for the rebuilt Globe Theatre in London.  It is part of a number of resources available to educators through their website.  The tool I am specifically examining is called the Staging It App.  

Users will be greeted with a screen like this

The idea is that students can use this app to direct their own short film version of a scene from Shakespeare play.  First, students select from five different scenes: 3 possible from Macbeth 1 from A Midsummer Night's Dream and 1 from Much Ado About Nothing.  Once a student selects a scene, they get to watch different clips of an actor or actors saying lines in different tones.  Each scene is broken into four subscenes.  For each subscene, a student can pick from one of four options for how the actor or actors deliver the lines.

The selection menu looks like this

In my example, I chose a scene from Macbeth.  You can see that I chose here that the actor should deliver this part of the subscene in a confident manner.  I chose this from options that included mastering courage, scared, confident or excited.  To help users in making an informed decision, the app provides students with copies of the script as well as additional background information such as mastering Shakespeare's verse.

Then, the student can download a video version of the four subscenes selected edited into a cohesive whole.  Here is what my final video looked like

This app has chosen Shakespearean plays most often taught in high schools like Macbeth and Midsummer Night's Dream.  Teachers could use this to support projects and readings around those plays.

The tool has many great uses for those who teach Shakespeare or drama in general.  To start, the tool demonstrates very well how the same line can be said multiple ways to give very different impressions.  In turn, those decisions about how a line is said add up over time to create the overall character that an actor and director create together.  Watching a fantastic Shakespearean actor helps demonstrate better how lines can vary with interpretation than just having students read aloud in class.

The tool would also be useful for classrooms because the final product contains shots of Shakespeare's Globe in London.  It would be a great way to discuss this unique space and how it mimics the performance space actually used.

Students should find the technology relatively easy to use.  Much of it is drag and drop technology which makes it easy to select an interpretation.  The hardest part would be finding a good way to share the final product video.  I had to download the video and post it to Youtube to be able to embed it in this blog.  I'm not sure that it would be easy to share this as an assignment in a classroom.  However, the extra step is really not that big of a deal.  I also think a challenge would be to find a way for students to see multiple videos (so they could understand varying interpretations) without getting bored by watching 25 videos of the same speech.  The teacher might consider breaking students into smaller groups.

Overall, I had a lot of fun working with this tool.

"Brush up your Shakespeare, Start Quoting Him Now."

Not quite a Shakespeare quote, but a Cole Porter quote about Shakespeare (from Kiss Me Kate).  Our presentation available through Springboard called those familiar with TPACK a triple threat.  The moniker reinforces  that those eloquent in TPACK have technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge.  I couldn't resist thinking about the acting triple threat: dancing, singing, and acting.  Hence, the link to Cole Porter.

I am still a bit nervous about using technology in a classroom.  As someone who is not always a technological expert, I am a bit nervous that things could go wrong.  However, Clare Kilbane's video put me more at ease.  She begins by explaining TPACK and reassuring teachers that they already have part of the Venn Diagram with pedagogy and content.  It is now just adding the interactivity of technology.  I also liked her metaphor of having the tools of technology in your bag.  You should use it when appropriate not just use it for the sake of using it.  Also, her concept of using TPACK as a plan for professional growth helped me see this as a process of continuous improvement.

When looking to use new content tools in the classroom, I think it is important to make sure that the technology supports the other pieces of good instruction (as evidenced in TPACK).  Just using technology for the sake of using it does not do much.  A boring lecture can easily become a boring podcast.  A poorly defined lesson will not improve because it is delivered through Google classroom.  In fact, TPACK itself can serve as an assessment tool to determine whether an activity is a good idea.  Is this a great PACKage where all the circles of TPACK meet?

The benefit of implementing such tools in the classroom is that we are doing our moral duty as teachers to prepare students for the future.  Though we are used to being in a print culture, Punya Mishra's video reminds us how we moved from an oral/aural culture to a print culture.  We are living in the midst of such change, again, and teachers need to be prepared to help students navigate this new world.

Even for those of us who are digital immigrants, we must keep seeing how technology can help us solve educational problems and not suffer from functional fixedness.  I also enjoy Mishra's observation that TPACK teaches educators how to be flexible and not search out easy solutions.  Finally, it is important that a teacher develop passion for technology. Indeed, even if I am not as comfortable with technology, TPACK through its guidelines reminds teachers that we must model good use of technology and building a sound online presence. Seeing the overarching importance of technology in good instruction, I will challenge myself as a future teacher to try to use it in places where it can support me.  We come back to Kilbane's toolkit as a great metaphor.

I think the biggest challenges to implementing TPACK will be overcoming my own technological difficulties and finding good ideas for how to use this in a classroom.  However, we, as a profession, have been struggling with how to improve education for many years through new ideas and technology.  I enjoyed how Nada Salem Abisamra anchored his arguments in quotations from John Dewey.  Further, using online tools such as blogging reinforces traditional pedagogical aims like literacy and higher order thinking skills.  Some sites have even taken this a step further demonstrating explicit skills and the technological tools that can support the instruction.  Then these new technological tools just become ways to reinforce what we have been doing in classrooms for years.  The Journal's article provides some great ideas for how to implement technology in a classroom.  1:1 environments provide a great space for students to use online collaborative tools that allow 24/7 access to resources such as Google documents.

I am very invigorated to begin using TPACK as a way of integrating technology into our pedagogy.  However, I worry about finding good sites for advice and methods on how to do it.  For example, the Digital History Reader seems very strong.  However, there are limitations (only a few lessons available on Europe) as well as the question of whether this is better or worse than reading a textbook.  Is there a difference in how students perceive a large amount of text whether it is on a screen or in a book?  These are my questions.

All the World's a Stage

I couldn't resist one of the most famous quotations from As You Like It.  But, it gets me thinking.  "If all the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players," what characters are in our show and which are not?

Let me be a bit clearer.  I am beginning a self-directed research project around diversity in teaching social studies.  To go back to our Shakespeare metaphor, what characters currently populate our stage of social studies or history?  What characters are missing?  How do we start to restore some of the missing characters to textbooks and other materials?  What happens when those characters are not easily matched on to state standards?

The first step in my journey has been reading James Loewen's Teaching What Really Happened.  The first chapter has already got my wheels turning about why it is so important to reinvigorate social studies and the key role that history plays in our lives.

The second step has been collecting some resources that might destabilize traditional narratives of U.S. history.  They include:

• Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History
• Kim E. Nielsen's A Disability History of the United States
• Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States

Are there other recommendations you might have?

I have done a bit of online research and have not found the right resources yet.  Any recommendations in the digital world?

(P.S. - I couldn't think about missing characters in Shakespeare and not think about Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  A great riff on what happens to the minor roles in plays.)

Open Education - "Our Doubts are Traitors"

I couldn't resist this quote from Measure for Measure.  It encapsulates my relationship toward using the open online communities.  (See the photo below of a 19th century production.)

I am afraid of making a mistake or trying to cling to my hubris that I have the 'best' solution to a problem.  David Wiley calls this overcoming your inner two year old.  He goes further to encourage us so that we can light others' candles without getting rid of our own light.  Indeed, we will become better teachers by sharing.  However, we need to be aware of seeing this as a silver bullet.  Teachers need to be able to determine how good a teaching resource is that he or she finds.  A guide for this can come from history - the printing press and its history.  Better access to information means that we need better consumers who can sort.

We also need to demand change in the way courses are offered through online communities.  Why do course management systems not work like Facebook?  Why is information no longer accessible at the end of a semester.  The answer comes from a need to protect and that it is not in a company's best interest to save information over time.  We, as educators, need to figure something out to meet demand for access to education.  We continue to have one of the best educational systems and we need to figure out how to get more people of the world access to it.

Additionally, I need to get more comfortable with sharing and openness.  When I have a lesson that I think is particularly effective, I can share it.  Others can adapt it for their classroom and impact those beyond my own classroom with my good work.  The Open Education video shows this particularly well.  Open educational resources also help to provide quality education to the world.  I think we can start adding this to our own educational networks by sharing and using resources.  Already, I am in an instructional design course this semester.  As I was planning, I Googled and found some excellent online resources for teaching the Middle East.  I found some great resources including this one from the University of Arizona and this one from the University of Chicago.  I ended up 'borrowing' a few ideas from the University of Chicago's resources.  You can even find some news magazines online with excellent teaching resources.  Once I am finished with my lesson plans, I think I will share them on this blog so others can have access.

I also think an open access classroom build assignments that encourage students to publish and interact online in a safe way.  One might consider using blogging  instead of journaling or worksheets.

I have been having conversations with my adviser about the need to reform social studies classrooms to be more inclusive.  Students need to see themselves in the past so we can build a better future.  It seems that open educational resources could help with this.  Additionally, using open educational resources help fight the consumerist model of education.  This can even lead to better ways of organizing technologies, social movements, and many other things through open thinking.  However, I wonder if the existing governmental and funding structures we have encourage this type of collaboration.  As we have a school system built around funding through local taxes, isn't what taxpayers are buying is better resources and teachers?  Is this open resource system a way of fighting that?

As we look toward the future, who knows what lies ahead?  There are a number of entirely online schools being developed to offer K-12 education.  Will this mean the death of traditional schools?  I don't think so.  I still think there is value in the face to face interactions offered by brick and mortar schools.  However, I think that we are just at the beginnings of what that revolution will bring.  I do think we will see the eventual death of the textbook.  The costs of textbooks are better spent on providing technology.  Textbooks themselves take so long to print and acquire that they are almost out of date when they arrive.  Plus, as the article indicates, using outside readings increases engagement and allows for more diverse points of view.

Le Debut

So, I am starting on our Major Project for ITA 575.  As mentioned previously, I am hoping to spend some time learning the French language.  First, challenge of the day...how do you use accent marks in blogging?  Already, I have erred in not placing an accent mark about the e in debut in the title.

The first step was to join an online program called Duolingo.  It is free to join and has at least got me started on basic vocabulary and sentence structure.  The program also pronounces for you, so you have the opportunity to hear what it should sound like.  This is what my homepage looks like on that site:



It has many great features.  First, you can see that the vocabulary focuses on things you would likely encounter in day to day life: food, animals, phrases, etc.  It also has some great ways of tracking progress.  You can see that I am now 21% fluent and could post that to my Linked In.  (I'm slightly nervous because I would not call myself 21% proficient...I have only had a few lessons.)

The program also helps learners by tracking progress (with the cute borders around each vocabulary section) and time dedicated to the activity (in the right hand corner under the green owl, as you can see in the line graph below).



The tool also encourages accountability by having you add friends on Facebook and sending email reminders to keep up with daily practice.

So, without further ado...I don't want to get an angry email today, so I had best do my Duolingo work.

Until next time.