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.
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.
Another of the things I love about machinima is the irreverent humour. Feel free to make humourous suggestions for the dialogue of this comic
Plus, I think I mentioned it before, I love leaving these sorts of things on display in classes for a week and having the students think about what should be added to the language bubbles. Mulling it over for a while tends to produce great results.
In the coming weeks I’m flying off to Mackay to run a whole day Gifted & Talented workshop on machinima.
I’ve been working on ideas for this workshop for the last few months and am just about to launch an online image bank that will not be blocked by school filters. (If you know what I mean hehehe).
I’ve already completed a collection of Dawn of War, Second Life and, thanks to JoKay, World of Warcraft images. I anticipate that these collections will go live in the next few days.
Call for Help - If you can help out with PG rated images from your favourite video game feel free to email them to me so anyone can have a go at this type of story telling.
Over the last few years I have found myself more and more in tune with the concept of ‘slow knowing’. I tend to take a long time to make up my mind about some things. I find I might experiment with an idea for a week and then think about it on and off for a few months and in some cases, even years.
Machinima (machine cinema) is one of those concepts. When @mizminh I were working together in Byron Bay five years ago we started our initial experiments with the genre. We started discussing and exploring the emerging artform with the kids. We also started looking into some of the tools that were around at the time but found our hardware sadly lacking the power to use the software effectively.
In the last month or so I’ve discovered Fraps99. It’s a piece of software that allows you to take screenshots and video captures from within video games. Fraps is free to download and use but if you want added features you can upgrade for a fee. So far I’m very happy with the free version.
So now when Mr 10 and I are playing our latest favourite RTS game we take captures while gaming. When we are finished the game we crop the images in Paint.Net and then drop them into Photostory 3 or Comic Life to see what creative storytelling options we can come up with.
Over lunch yesterday a second year uni student asked me why I’d want to do this ‘stuff’ with students. Instantly a heap of half formed ideas came flooding forth…
1. Attitude development – It is worthwhile to tinker. It is worthwhile to experiment with using things in new and different ways. How do we celebrate creativity, innovation and alternate forms of thinking?
2. Forced Creativity – by supplying alternative stimulus different narratives will be created i.e. moving beyond ponies, rainbows and what I did on the weekend
3. Demonstrating how to rise above the defaults of software?
4. Educational outcomes are the floor not the ceiling. Do we really need to continue being apologist when it comes to exploring the possibilities of ICTs?
5. Teaching organisational strategies and problem solving – How can we get more captures to work with? Where can we store these captures so everyone can access them? Many real problems will need to be solved and this is worthwhile.
6. ICTs can be integrated but often the rigid insistence on integration is stifling on so many levels. Insistence on integration often eliminates the possibilities of celebrating advances in technologies.
7. The tools for making the stories are free (or cheap) and the students already have the games at home.
8. Transference of skills – cliche I know, but the software people will use in five years doesn’t exist yet. Activities such as this teach how to view software in new ways & celebrate innovation.
9. Get the students to narrate a video trailer with the voice of that guy that does the cinema previews. They know the guy and they love it. Use a very deep voice and pause in all the wrong places to make the trailer sound like you must see this film.
10. I like the notion of irreverent humour that is often added to machinima films eg narrate the above film from the point of view of forgetting to put out the bin or spacesuits that do not have adequate zippers
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.
