Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world.
This course as a 12-part series challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas. It could be a great resource in Religious Education and HSIE to engage students in bigger issues.
Dvolver creates creativity tools. Have you ever wanted to direct your own movie? No problem. Our MovieMaker helps you make a movie in a few simple steps. When your opus is complete send it to a friend. Or, post it to your website or myspace page.
TrueTube is a free, website which uses real-life stories and issues to encourage teenagers to explore and debate the world of morality, ethics, politics and religion.
Student Art Blog, a great example of using a blog to share student work and encourage positive feedback. Evaluation and thinking skills are also embedded in the process
One of our great challenges as teachers is encouraging students to use a wider range of presentation styles.
Movies can be a great way to bring a range of text types to life, making publishing and sharing student work much more accessable and increasing the access to and impact of their work.
Xtra Normal is a great example of a simple and powerful presentation tool that may be useful in your classroom. Students simply sign in, paste their product (text) into a text box and have it presented by a 3d avatar. Students can choose from a range of backgrounds, characters, speech styles, expressions and more. Best of all its free.
The movie below is an example of a social justice project where students were working on a short information report on a ways to reduce your eco-footprint.
Note :- A first time user took 10 minutes to take their written content and create their movie.
I am currently reading a great book John Hattie’s Visible Learning. The book aims to explore the influences on student learning and then review the evidence to support its impact.
Very interesting reading. I have just finished the section on “The Contributions from the Teacher” and made a summary of the top 4 elements from this chapter for those who are interested.
Micro Teaching – the process of preparing, delivering, getting evaluation/feedback and reflection on teaching is important. Teachers who micro teach have powerful effects on students. I believe this is due to the high level of evaluation involved in the practice. Video, peer evaluation and discussion can all lead to quality feedback and performance improvement.
Teacher Clarity – One of our DLFT elements Teacher Clarity or Explicit quality criteria is very important. There are significant positive impacts when the teacher communicates the intentions of the lesson and the notions of what success means for these intentions.
Teacher Student relationships – Person centred teachers make a large difference The affective outcomes that had the biggest impact were
1. Non directivity – A relationship that allows the individual to grow
2. Empathy
3. Warmth
4. Encouragement of higher order thinking
Professional Development – Professional Development is an effective way to improve job performance and satisfaction and has significant positive impact on the students.
I found this collection quite interesting, 4 contributions from the teacher that we can easily ensure become part of our teaching practice, confident that it will improve student outcomes. Why not give it a try?
With our focus on iMovie 09 today the issue of finding great footage raises its head. Of course if you can go and get that footage yourself that is wonderful however with many of the things that we study thats not possible. Antarctica for example is a visually stunning environment however quite difficult to visit and film.
Fortionately we have some great free options available. We can use these movies as stimulus, create a mashup from them, or modify them to suit our needs.
Welcome to the Archive’s Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.
ABC Fora brings you the most engaging and interesting speeches and debates from all over the world. It lists movies in the following catogories
Over 1,300 Australian film and television titles produced over the last 100 years, represented with clips, curators’ notes and other information. Browse titles.
neoK12 Free educational videos and lessons from around the world
There are many ways to download footage to your computer, my current favourite is
Download helper is a extension for firefox or flock. It will search a web page for movies, find each of the different versions, download them and even convert them to the file type that you desire.
Video Monkey is a free video encoding application exclusively for Mac. It is a quick and easy way to convert FLV’s to mp4 so that you can use the media elsewhere.
Sometimes in a classroom or even in a staffroom the easiest way is the best. Posterous has to be one of the easiest ways to publish online, if you can send an email you can create a Posterous blog!!
Email movies, documents, presentations, photos – Basically anything and Posterous will create a blog post out of them and publish it to your blog. A simple and effective way to open your classroom to the world.
The movie below guides you through the process of creating and using Posterous. (Warning the audio levels are low and Teachertube didnt process the start well, hence the grey at the start). Why not give it a try?
There have always been issues in schools surounding YouTube, both concerned with students accessing inappropriate YouTube movies and less often concerns with publishing student work to YouTube. I have typically recommended TeacherTube as an alternative and often that works well.
Having said that YouTube offers a much larger audience for student work, can be better quality, quicker and has some other interesting features. Some of our schools now have a YouTube Channel where parents, teachers and students can visit to view the movies created by students of the school. Other teachers are creating playlists for the students to view and are finding the massive variety of resources from around the world an excellent way to expand student thinking.
If you are frustrated by some of the limitations of TeacherTube or just interested in creating a YouTube account and channel the movie below will guide you through the process. If you have a google account you are already halfway there.
In many of our schools are publishing staff and student photos, photos of student products and artwork along with sporting photos. It can be a wonderful way to “open” your school to the community. Unfortionatly many schools find it difficult to maintain a current website and the photos are often the first thing to suffer.
A couple of our schools are now using Picasa web albums as a solution to this problem, creating a user acount in the school name and publishing straight to that account. The school webpage link then points to the Picasa web album.
The movie below will guide you through the process of creating an account in picasa and using the web albums uploader to publish your photos. Picasa can be found here
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