Thank you for participating in today's session. Below is an embedded slideshare of the presentation.

Thanks to my wonderful sophomore students, I had an opportunity to present, discuss, and solicit feedback regarding my take on Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Because in the future I am only allotted 50 minutes to present and respond to questions, I've taken my students' feedback and eliminated about 1/3 of the slides. Below appears the unabridged slide deck, including the 2 videos I played when I presented. Enjoy.

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1. "An American Studies": co-authored with John S. O'Connor, my English teaching partner. It features links to all (40+) of our students' individual blogs.
2. "Modern World History": a class I taught in the past which used a different blogging platform called Posthaven, somewhat similar to Tumblr. It allows you to post just about anything via email.
3. "US History": a class I currently teach in an experimental classroom, it also uses the Posthaven platform instead of Blogger, my traditional favorite.

• Fair Use Music Videos
• Fair Use Case Studies
• Even more resources at the Media Education Lab, including a link to Renee Hobb's book, Copyright Clarity.

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There's nothing quite so intimidating to students as delivering an oral presentation in front of their peers. And unfortunately, many students use the opportunity to turn their slides into text-heavy TelePrompTer screens. This might be due to the fact that the students are merely imitating what they see daily in the classroom: how many of us have subjected our classes to bullet point after bullet point, in an attempt to convey as much content as possible in the shortest period of time?

What I have tried to do is provide my students with training on how to communicate effectively, both orally and visually. But I also want to lower their performance anxiety. This is accomplished by sharing the presentation duties: one slide, one student, in a co-created Google Docs presentation. An added bonus was that the students could see each other's work during the creation process, thus upping the overall quality.

Finally, my greatest hope was that they would critically examine the choices they  made, in what and how they communicated. Ron Ritchhart, in his Intellectual Character, emphasizes the need for "Routines for Discussing and Exploring Ideas" in establishing an intellectual environment (94). One example is "The Why Routine". In the assignment featured below, students were asked to provide the following for a historical mock trial (on the subject of the Boston Massacre):

1. Find an image that you believe represents your witness or their testimony in some way. You should be creative here as long as YOU can explain why you think it is representative of your witness.
2. Choose ONE quote that either helps or hurts the Defendant, depending on whether your witness is on the side of the Prosecution or the Defense. Why is it the best quote?
   

Although the above finished product lacks student voices, the key to this activity was the oral presentation itself. Each time a student presented their individual slide, I asked them WHY they made the particular choices. It was illuminating as they were "making thinking visible": everyone else in the classroom understood the importance of providing a rationale for choices of images and quotes. As you can see, some ideas worked better than others!

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When the financial crisis first hit, I found myself grappling as much as my students were with the complexities of our economic system. Though I am a homeowner and realized that many of the problems stemmed from so-called "mortgage-backed securities", I honestly could not figure out my own place in this meltdown.

That was until I heard the economic terms contextualized in narrative form on a public radio program, This American Life, entitled, "The Giant Pool of Money". I'm sure some of it is oversimplified, but what I enjoyed about the show (in free podcast form) was that the hosts never took for granted that the audience understood what those "creative" financial instruments like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation) were!

Knowing that my American Studies students could benefit from this explanation in the midst of a unit called "Stories and Histories", my teaching partner, John O'Connor, and I designed an activity which harnessed the power of our 42 students to our collective advantage.

We assigned each student a portion of the radio transcript to visually represent as a single slide. In order to make this a truly collaborative effort, we dropped the students into 2 adjacent computer labs, and had them all simultaneously edit a shared presentation via Google Docs.

It was an amazing endeavor to observe, as students got up from their computer terminals in order to negotiate with their peers the transitions and shared metaphors from slide to slide. Check it out:

In terms of copyright and fair use considerations, each student was required to cite and link back to every image they re-purposed in the shared presentation. Once the project was completed by the students, I organized the slides and then matched it to the original radio audio on another website, SlideShare.

I wanted to model permission-seeking to my students by making a formal request to National Public Radio. Unfortunately, after a few friendly emails back and forth, This American Life refused my request. Therefore what you see above is somewhat limited in that it lacks the soundtrack. I'm still pursuing other avenues as I post this. What do you think? Was our class project an example of "fair use" or did we take it too far by wanting to share it with a wider audience?

UPDATE (5/22/09): I've decided that I will publish the completed presentation on the web after all. After a school year of sharing this project with private audiences, I posted my dilemma to a wiki dedicated to ending copyright confusion. Here is a portion of the response I received from Renee Hobbs of Temple University:

What a creative way to incorporate media literacy into the social studies curriculum! As I look at the piece, it seems that your students have demonstrated their understanding of the content by transforming the "This American Life" segment into a new work through their imaginative multimedia slides. The educational value of this assignment is based, in fact, on the careful relationship between the audio and the images....[W]here you have asked permission and been refused, your decision about distribution rests completely on your comfort level about whether this use indeed a fair use....I think it's a great example of how, sometimes, we use a whole piece of media in our work with students -- and for the specific learning objective, we need to use the whole piece.

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Designing a new presentation? Need raw material for student research? For a treasure trove of (mostly unpublished) images, try the new Life Photo Archive hosted by Google. LIFE magazine's catalogued images number in the millions and easily reach all the way back to the 1750s.

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This past summer at the Google Teacher Academy, I learned of an efficient way to collect student info or even create quick surveys. It's all via Google Docs, specifically the Spreadsheet function. My own knowledge of spreadsheets is woefully inadequate, since I am math-challenged. But this is just populating lists and cells, which I actually do understand! Here's how to create a web-based form from a spreadsheet:

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Because it's an election year, the web is alive with innovative ways of keeping people up to date on the latest political news, including what the candidates say in their speeches. But if we rely solely on what the traditional media outlets (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) report, we as teachers know how much selection and bias really come in to play.

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>Image via WikipediaI attended two sessions dealing with the relative lack of spatial thinking across the curriculum and throughout the K-12 years. Bob Kolvoord specifically addressed the recent marginalization of both geography and earth science, while Dr. Terence Cavanaugh demonstrated the potential for infusing maps into the English curriculum.

Kolvoord, using a SmartBoard, whizzed through a demo of Google Earth, using only his fingers! But with considerably less flash, he showed how another free tool, ArcExplorer-Java Edition for Education (AEJEE: pronounced “aay-jee”) could be utilized to analyze data on energy consumption, natural disasters, and even election results.

Later, Cavanaugh showed how using the many new tools available for free on the web, both teachers and their students have the ability to construct custom maps related to course content. For example, after reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, an American Studies class might track and recreate Chris McCandless’ journey using Google Maps. Or, if a teacher didn't have a lot of time, Google’s computers have already created maps for several works of literature, including Around the World in 80 Days, War and Peace, and (surprisingly, below) the 9/11 Commission Report. Click on the map below for greater detail. Search for these and more at http://books.google.com.

Lastly, an exceptional Google Certified Teacher named Jerome Burg has created at least 23 “Lit Trips”, organized by grade level, using Google Earth. His site includes The Kite Runner, The Aeneid, and The Grapes of Wrath, among many other works.

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Yesterday, I was fortunate to be one of 50 educators worldwide picked to attend the Google Teacher Academy (GTA). After an almost 12-hour workshop on June 25th, including a tour of the famed Googleplex (in Mountainview, CA), I took away the following:

1. Look at the educational applications for Google Earth. Try out the "layers" function. By the time you read this, you will be able to embed these earth maps on webpages as easily as Google Maps.
2. Try out the newest features of Google Maps, eg., measuring distances and areas.
3. Use the comment feature of Google Docs, and these annotations, helpful to students and colleagues, won't be seen when printed.
4. Try the "fixed-width page view" (to show the borders of a Google Doc page).
5. Look at some curriculum-specific applications of these tools by grade level.

I could honestly add much more to this list, but five items seem enough for now. Throughout the rest of this school year I will act as a Google Certified Teacher, so feel free to pick my brain on other uses for you and your students.

If you're interested, here is the 1-minute video I created (featuring the work of my 2007-2008 American Studies students) that supported my application to the GTA.



UPDATE (August 2008): The Google Teacher Academy is now accepting applications for GTA Chicago! Deadline is August 24 for the September 24th conference.

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