Playing Along 2

For those still interested in playing along with my students’ efforts, here’s the task:  What can your search-fu tell you about this image below?

A smith (the smith-god?) at work at his forge

As before, the questions are…

1. What is it?
2. What is it made of?
3. Where is it from?
4. About when was it made?
5. Where (probably) was it made?
6. Where was it found, and when?
7. Where is it now?
8. What is its significance?

And actually, I’m going to raise the stakes a little on this one.  I’ll leave comments closed on this for a while, say for a week. And the best answer at the end of a week gets a guest blogging spot over the Christmas break.  It’s a chance to promote your own blog with a different audience than usual, reach out to a new community, and maybe touch a few new hearts.  Woohoo! I hear you cry. A research project that turns into more work! But more work to reach a new audience.  And what’s so bad about that?

To Play Along…

If you’d like to play along with my students, and learn what they’re learning about the ancient Greeks, here’s Image 1:

Achilles slays the Queen of the Amazons

So.  Here’s the challenge:

1. What is it? Don’t just tell me it’s a jar. Tell me what kind of jar.

2. What is it made of?

3. Where is it from?

4. When was it made?

5. Where was it (probably) made?

6. Where was it found and when?

7. Where is it now?

8. What do you think its significance is?

Once someone or several someones have correctly answered the question, I’ll provide a link to the source image, and give appropriate credit where credit is due.

Mycenaeans & Tech

It’s the winter term, and for me and my students, that means ancient Greece.

This year, there’s a twist.  I decided at the beginning of the year that we were going online, and all primary source, all the time.

So in the three weeks between now and Christmas break, we’re reading as much of the Iliad as we can get through.  We’ll be reading this translation by Ian Johnston of British Columbia, which is distinguished as the first online translation.

Oh, and the art files.  I went through the first five books of the Iliad, and loaded them in sections into our class wiki (because I can’t be certain that the translation will be accessible through our filter).  And then I dug into my digital slide-shows of Greek art history from the last few years, and pulled out seventeen images — everything from Minoan snake goddesses to the walls of Troy to Mycenaean daggers — and plugged them into relevant places in the first five books, as accompaniments to the text.

Each image links to a research project page… Six questions, the image itself, and an opportunity for an essay.  Before the end of the term, they’ll take an art history quiz based on ten of the images: tell me what, when, where, and why significant.   It’ll be great.

There’s one other part of this that I think is both vital and cool.  This past Monday, we had a faculty meeting where we actually talked to one another, and it emerged during the meeting that we believe our students actually learn best — in academic, social, and ethical ways — when they’re performing for an audience.  So they’ll perform for an audience of each other, first of all.  Their research of each image will inform how I grade the quiz at the end of the first marking period of the winter term, and at the end of the term.  They’ll have to rely on each other, or do extra work to make up for specific failures.  By the end of the term, as well, they’ll have a library of 68 images that they understand… and based on that library, they’ll be able to talk, think, and find their way around a classical art gallery in any museum in the world.

I’m excited about the potentials here.  I’ll keep you all updated with progress reports, too.

Labyrinth Video

It’s been the site of a number of classroom visits, but I figured you all might like to see the site of the labyrinth and the surrounding views.  As you can see, there are several big piles of dirt by the labyrinth, two of which were already there (and one of which was dumped on top of the southwest curve of the labyrinth).  Directly south is a storage shed which acts as the makeshift kitchen for our concessions stand at the ball field, and the ballfield is to the east.  North-north-west is the drainage pond and the home of our assistant headmaster.

Not a perfect place for archaeoastronomy, but not horrible, either.

Evolution Rap

I won’t be doing evolution until spring term with my revised curriculum.

But I need a placeholder in the meantime for this video:

Figuring how to teach evolution, and to what degree, is a challenge for me every year. Some parent objects to how I teach it; the science is in flux and my book is out of date; I’m constantly refining my thinking about the process and understanding it more clearly; while my students are usually starting at square zero.

But absolutely it should be taught.  I think I’ll use this video later this year, sometime around March.

Art of Memory

I read about this memory technique about eight years ago, and I’ve kept coming back to it.  It’s the Ars Memorativa, or the “Art of Memory” and there are hints and suggestions in ancient literature that Cicero, among others, used it.

In shorthand, the way it works is that the user spends 2-10 minutes a day building up an image in their mind of a specific room, usually a library, with 10-15 places or locations within it, which can be visited in a specific order.  For convenience, they’re usually numbered 1-15.  Then, when they need to memorize something, like the points in an outline or a a series of quotations to use on an essay, there’s a framework in the mind where those quotations can be placed and called up in a specific order.  I use a pretty elaborate library for this exercise, myself, because I speak quite frequently to the whole school, and I like to have an outline in my head of what I’ll be saying, but I don’t want what I say to sound forced or read-from-a-page.

Several students complained after yesterday’s timed essay that they had had difficulty remembering their outlines and quotations from study time on Monday and Tuesday to Wednesday morning. I told them that’s because they don’t train their memory banks to hold information, and we talked about this technique.

The first step in ancient and Renaissance times was to write a description of the library, and then use that as a guide to visualizing it in your brain.  I assigned that last night for homework.

Today, I grabbed one of the kids’ homework assignments at random, and built it using Google SketchUp on the whiteboard with a projector.  The girl whose assignment it was, was thrilled.

The memory palace

I then demonstrated the technique to them; we created a list of several items from the grocery store that I might need to buy, and I spoke them out loud and ’stored’ them in the image on the screen: “The milk goes on the red table, and the eggs go on the blue table.  The toilet paper goes on the yellow table by the bookcases.  The gold bond goes on the left side of the bookshelf. The IcyHot goes on the middle shelf, and on the right side holds the deodorant. The green desk with the computer has a bar of soap.  The computer screen is showing an Axe bodyspray advertisement.  The butter goes on the pink lectern in front of the door.”

At the end of class, before the bell rang, I pointed to the image of Rachel’s memory palace on the screen, and had them test me.  I remembered the items on their list perfectly, and in order.  I was able to repeat it again three periods later after the fire-drill for the other class, and I’m still able to do it now, several hours later, as I type this blog entry.

Not everyone was excited by the technique of the Ars Memorativa, or the Memory Palace.  But it had a double purpose, of course.  The ones that weren’t excited about the Ars Memorativa were excited about learning to use a software tool like Google SketchUp, and everyone got a demo of how to use a powerful study skill, as well as a new software tool.

The trick, of course, is that you have to spend a couple of minutes every day imagining yourself walking through the room, and re-familiarizing yourself with the space, so that you can work with it quickly and successfully.  Once you have the location more or less memorized, you can place individual items in your list in specific locations so you can find them again easily. And your lists can get longer, and longer, and more complex… this room of Rachel’s has space for… oh, probably a list of a few hundred items in it with enough care and practice. And the beautiful thing is, you don’t carry the list with you always; it drops out of the Palace of Memory the moment you don’t ‘need’ it any more, though you can usually call it back any number of months later if it’s important enough.

I do think it’s interesting that a (2500?)500-year-old technique first developed for Renaissance spies and speechifying Roman senators has been so long neglected in schools, but that half-a-dozen kids saw an instant use for it.

Update: I’m reminded that this is not a particularly fastidious explanation of the Ars Memorativa or its origins. Those wanting to read more should consider this article and this one.  No, I’m not a member of AODA, but this is the best online explanation of the art I know.

Google Translate & Julius Caesar

I wanted my students to read Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil Wars for homework.

It was too hard for some of the students, and they faded out. They had no interest in reading it because they didn’t understand it at all.

Thanks to Google Translate, we’ve gone around the problem of the English being too difficult for the international students in our school.  The original text is a public-domain text from the English version of Project Gutenberg.  We stripped the carriage returns, and loaded it into a wiki page.   Then we ran blocks of text through Google Translate.  That produced our text in four languages now, and we’re working on a fifth — Simplified Chinese, Korean, Spanish and English (with Japanese on the way). I’m even thinking that by next year, I want to have a parallel Latin translation.

Nor are the English-speaking students left out. We’re building a dictionary, too.  Every kid has a few paragraphs to review, and any unfamiliar words (or words that their classmates are likely to have problems with), are getting links to definition pages.  And we’re creating a mini-wikipedia of short biographies of the major characters in the book.

You might ask why we’re duplicating all this effort on the school’s website, behind our firewall, when it’s probably been done (and done better, likely) at places like Project Perseus.  The answer is, they need to learn how to use the tools.  And we’re finding that there are all sorts of parallel projects that can be done — providing audio of the different sections of the text, and including photographs and maps.

Speaking of which — does anyone know of a place where you can produce close-in digital maps of various parts of the world?  Yes, I know that Google Earth gives you the ability to zoom-in and look at satellite photos, but that’s not what I mean.  I want to produce maps that show Caesar’s line of march, and places where battles were fought, and so on, that don’t look like crudely-drawn and scanned maps.  I want digital maps.

Anyone know where we can go?

The Labyrinth

What with one thing and another, only one of my classes has had a chance to go out to the Labyrinth. These visits are my contribution to Paperless Friday sponsored by Shelly Blake-Plock of TeachPaperless.

Today, though, my other class went out to the Labyrinth.

And curiously enough, they knew something about it.  The students in this class weren’t yet able to explain it, but the students in the other class had told them about its existence. This new class didn’t get all the details right; they didn’t understand its significance yet. But they had talked to people in the other class, and the other class had told them about the labyrinth and its

Which means that knowledge was transmitted by a route other than my mouth to their ears. The other class fulfilled their duty, and passed on the information, as little as they’d yet gained, and the other class had begun to learn.

In this way does an ancient mode of transmission of information come alive again in their minds. And one of the goals of my Paperless Friday plans is fulfilled.

1to1 vs. borrowed laptops

I’m teaching two classes this year in ancient history.

One class has kids with a variety of learning disabilities, but all have their own laptops.  The  other class has kids where some have their own laptops and others don’t.

The class where they all have their own understand much more clearly that their laptops are tools designed to boost their learning and communications skills.  Their parents bought them laptops specifically as leanring tools, and they treat them as such.  That’s not to say they don’t play games, or surf the net, or look for porn, but they think of their machines as learning tools and communication tools, rather than toys.

In the other class, about 60% have their own laptops.  Here there is much more of an attitude that these are toys rather than learning machines.  The use of games is much higher.  The number of occasions when they go ‘off-task’ to search for funny videos, or start playing music in class, is much higher.  The students that borrow laptops from the school in this class treat them as learning tools, and appear to be grateful to have them.  The students with their own machines seem to be much less aware of them as learning tools.

Has anyone else noticed a similar dichotomy?  How do you teach kids with computers who think of them as toys, to see them as learning machines?

Wiki & the Conversation

Today in my history classes, I had my students close their laptops for a few minutes, and we talked about what they were learning.

We did not talk about ancient Rome much.

We did talk about the nature of learning via wiki.  They mentioned that they were hunting through Wikipedia a lot more carefully, looking for answers and photographs that answered the questions I posed to them.  They were looking at their classmates’ work more frequently.  They were adding definitions to words they didn’t know.

They mentioned how happy they were that their work was lighter — to carry their computers room-to-room, instead of a massive textbook.  They liked reading primary sources, with Wikipedia as a backup, and the work of their classmates, instead of a bad textbook.

BUT.

Tonight’s assignment was to add 10 definitions to our classroom wiki, to correct ten grammatical errors, and to add ten links.  I’m able to monitor the wiki from home, and I can see that no one has added anything tonight.  I find this dismaying.

AND…

In class today, a group of students discovered that YouTube was unblocked, and were watching funny videos instead of working on our class projects.  On the one hand, I understand you can’t focus on classwork all the time.  You do need some time to relax and re-focus.

But this amounts to a lot of wasted energy.  And I wonder how to bring us back on track.  I know my school’s metrics-and-assessment administrator, and he’ll not be pleased if he thinks my class is goofing off.  I have to get these guys back on track.

At the same time, I feel like a new kind of learning is going on, and I don’t know how to describe it or assess it yet.  I know I’ve done a lot less lecturing.  I know I’ve done a lot more mini-lessons — how to edit HTML code, how to add a wiki link, how to add a picture, how to search the wiki for a specific page.  These mini-lessons are adding up, and a lot of kids are now teaching each other to use these new tools.  I’m the leaven in their dough, or I was; now they’re teaching each other.

When does this hit critical mass?  How do I accelerate it?