The Teacher Toolbox

I once enquired of the Head of Curriculum of a school why she thought the Yr 5 & 6 cohort had no real understanding of what Division actually was. Her reply told me a fair bit.

‘You know how it is Adrian, by the time you do Addition in Term One, Subtraction in Term Two and Multiplication in Term Three those last 10 weeks of school just get too busy to do Division properly.’

I believe the modern term all the cool kiddies are using is WTF

That said, I’m trying to pull a friend’s child back from the abyss that is Math Anxiety. We’ve been ‘exploring’ & ‘playing’ with maths concepts.  We’ve done heaps with metacognition/self talk, error analysis, heaps of demonstrations with concrete materials & practise moving from concrete to symbolic representations then we put together the comic strip above.

I’m fond of ‘enforced creativity’ as a way of producing unique ideas. We took the PC version of Comic Life (yes one does exist) and a pretty random set of machinima images from my Dawn of War collection and dropped them into the program. We then started brainstorming ideas for how we could create a comic about Division. NB the last speech bubble is a little tongue in cheek as my student knows that beyond simple division most of us use a calculator

cheers

Adrian

Oh, & I’ll deal with this comment another day ‘Adrian, that’s all just ‘bells and whistles’. ‘Real’ teachers ‘don’t have time’ to do stuff like that. We have a ‘test’ to ‘cram’ for’.

My machinima interpretation of Macbeth is finally complete. It has taken a lot longer than I had anticipated but in the end I’m very pleased with the way it has turned out. I am also really pleased with the amount of problems I’ve overcome and skills I’ve learnt along the way.

Do have a look at the interpretation and forward it on to anyone you think can use it.

Thanks

Adrian

PS What personal project are you currently doing?

I’ve been playing Mini Ninjas with Mr 10 for about a week now. During this time we’ve been taking a few screen shots of the action using Fraps 99. Above is my first comic using Mini Ninjas as the machinima engine.

Thoughts welcome.

I once heard an interview with the Kiwi songwriter Neil Finn where he talked about how a ‘mistake’ can lead to a whole new song. As I tinker with new software I often find, when something is not quiet going the way I plan, I end up exploring a whole new tangent and produce something completely unexpected. I’m not saying that these tangets are worthwhile, but they are often ideas that would never have been produced without the initial mistake.

Recently my son and I have been experimenting with a plugin for the Steam games Half Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 called Garry’s Mod. The mod allows you to manipulate your objects and characters to create scenes independent of the gameplay. It is what the Machinima community use to make Half Life 2 movies like Civil Protection.

Initialy I found it really hard to pose this character in a chair and that sparked the idea for this single panel cartoon.

So where do we encourage our students to make mistakes and then to value them?

Love, Death, Rhetoric & Half Life – A Blog Post in Two Parts.

1. Why do it?

- …because we can and because it is very, very EASY!
- Exposing students to ‘real’ 3d animation is cost prohibitive and rather complex. This is cheap and readily available.
- So much of schooling is ‘about’ stuff. Kids are required to write about, ‘the explorers’, about ‘the planets’ & about ‘what they did in the holidays’. Where do we encourage them to create new stuff? Where do we encourage them to produce stuff that has never been produced before?
- In my experience, ‘I can’t draw’ gets in the way of adults and children cartooning so this form of digital story telling eliminates the excuse.

2. To Foster Creativity

- How might you adapt it to make your own creative product?
- What might this sort of experimentation lead to if this type of thinking and experimentation is encouraged and celebrated?
- Do new with the new and encourage our students to do the same.
- Think and Question -  Compare the lines from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with the Half Life context. How are they alike and different?
- Hypothsize the events before and after this graphic.
- Substitute other famous quotes for the dialogue in this comic. What new meanings can be created? eg ‘It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. It is a far, far better rest…’

So how did I come up with this idea? Bits of SCAMPER.

Combine – Half Life 2 screen shots, with Comic Life with a quote from a Tom Stoppard play.

Eliminate – I had heaps of other alternatives that I eliminated as they didn’t have the impact this idea had.

- So where does the thought to combine famous quotes come from? In my mind I seem to run very quickly through a heaps of possibilities and then I eliminate the ones of lesser worth or impact as I go. It is sort of like brainstorming without the butchers’ paper

For the people who aren’t into gaming or don’t know how to do screenshots I’ve put together a collection of images you can use for your own creative digital storytelling.

Enjoy

Adrian

I do so love playing with this technology with Samuel (Mr 10)!

Spore has a video capture function built into it so we just grabbed a heap of video shots of one of the characters and put them together in Movie Maker with his current favourite joke. Too easy!!!