Making Book Trailers Better: Legacy

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iMovie-2.0-for-iOS-app-icon-smallMany teachers have used the iMovie Trailer function to make book trailers. But what do we do with them? How do we make sure those trailers last? How do we make sure students, lots of students, see those trailers? How do we make sure students use those trailers to help them choose books they’ll like (because that’s really the point of a trailer)?

QR Codes!

Okay, first, I don’t love QR codes; I know some teachers adore them. I think they have limited use, but this is definitely one of them.

Book QR Code

Our first trailer. The student chose the color.

Once you make your trailer, put it in a public place on the web. We’re a Google Apps for Education (GAFE) district, so we put them in drive and then made them public to anyone with the link. Then create a QR code for the movie (we used the QRafter app and the QRStuff site). Then head to library and put that QR code on every copy of the book. Now, when students go to the library (we’re a 1:1 iPad district) they can scan the QR code and see a visual trailer for the book created by a student (in addition to the blurb on the back). If books are going to be displayed cover-out, put a copy of the QR code on the front too.

And (this is the best part), the movie file is stored in a stable place in the cloud. So as my elementary school students who created the trailers move through middle and high school the trailer will still be sitting in their Google Drive available for younger students to see it. Five or more years from now, students will be watching the trailers we created this year!

Our students do great work; make sure it isn’t lost when summer arrives. Help them create a legacy.

 

Note: I’ve written about iMovie trailers before. Here is a post with single-page, printable storyboards for all the trailer themes. Here is a post about using trailers as a way for students to introduce themselves to next year’s teacher. And here is a post about moving beyond trailers and getting into iMovie projects.

It’s Halloween – Are You Setting Your Students Up to Fail?

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origin_58392393It’s Halloween. It’s a Friday. Your students are already amped up the moment they walk through the door. They cling to the structure of the daily schedule to help them make it through the day…

And then we make it a day full of costumes and special activities, throwing all that routine out the window. And somehow we expect our students to behave? We’re surprised when they can’t hold it together? We ask ourselves, “why can’t they stay in control for special activities?”

Are your special activities for your students, or for you? I’m not advocating that we never do special activities outside the normal schedule, but if kids are going to have a tough day, let’s make sure we not causing it.

See also: Your Students Secretly Hate Vacation

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Elementary Homework, Is It Worth It?

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Nearly every teacher has some pretty firm thoughts on homework. Most of it is anecdotal though – something like, I had homework and I turned out okay so students today should have the same experience I did. That sounds all well and good (though one could argue that the world is different today so our students’ experience school should also be different), but what does the research say about homework?

origin_2194119780To the Research:

Whenever anyone talks about research on homework it always seems to come back to a meta-analysis done by Harris Cooper in 2006 (he also did one in 1989). If you don’t have practice reading scholarly articles, it’s always tempting to read the abstract in the beginning and call it a day. Harris notes in the abstract:

“…there was generally consistent evidence or a positive influences of homework on achievement.”

Its tempting to just stop there; homework is a good thing. Though in the abstract he also notes that there is “a stronger correlation existed (a) in Grades 7-12 than in K-6 and (b) when students rather than parents reported time on homework.” So, students do a better job of reporting time spent on homework; that makes sense since students are the ones doing the homework. And homework seems to be more effective with older kids.

Sill, we’re left with the impression that homework is good for everyone.

But, the story isn’t over.

If we dig way down into the paper we find correlations for sub-groups. So, with math homework, there is a statistically significant positive correlation; this means that averaged across all grade levels, math homework makes you better at math. With reading this is also true, though to a slightly lesser extent.

It still feels like homework is a good thing for everyone, right?

But, when you separate the data by grade level, things get interesting. For grades 7-12, there is a positive correlation between homework and academic achievement. But for grades K-6, it gets a little murky.

“A significant, though small, negative relationship was found for elementary school students, using fixed-error assumptions, but a non-significant position relationship was found using random-error assumptions.”

What does that mean? It means depending on how you run the data you either get:

  1. Homework correlates with slightly lower academic achievement (small, but big enough that it’s statistically significant), or
  2. Homework correlates with slightly higher academic achievement (but so slight, that it’s not statistically significant – so it doesn’t count).

Yep, I said it (well, Cooper did). Homework in elementary school doesn’t increase academic achievement and might actually decrease it.

origin_12918347633But I Want to Teach My Students Good Study Habits

If you want your students to get in the habit of bringing school-related stuff home every night and bringing it back, that’s fine. I’ve heard many teachers make that argument and in the past I’ve even made it myself. But if that’s your goal, why not send home a piece of paper for parents to date, initial, and send back. You’re still teaching the bring-it-home-and-bring-it-back skill.

But Why Doesn’t Homework Help in Elementary School ?

Harris goes on to note that “younger children are less able … to ignore irrelevant information or stimulation in their environment” and “appear to have less effective study habits.” This shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s worked with young students; elementary students don’t have strong independent study skills when it comes to learning something new – that’s where good teachers come in.

Data Driven Decision Making

So why are we still doing this?

As schools focus more and more on data-driven decision-making (which is a good thing), why aren’t we looking at the data on homework?

 

Cooper, H., Robinson, C. R., Patel, E. A. “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003.” Review of Educational Research. Vol. 76, No. 1 (2006): pp. 1-62. Print.

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#Chromebook Keyboard Shortcuts

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I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts (the alt-tab was a game-changer for me), so when I stumbled across this in my Chromebook’s settings, my mouth dropped. It’s beautiful interactive visual of how the keyboard functionality changes with the shortcut keys.

If you hold down the Control (ctrl) key, these are the shortcuts (click to enlarge):

Screenshot 2014-09-19 at 10.54.56 AM

If you hold down the Control (ctrl) and the Shift key, these are the shortcuts (click to enlarge):

Screenshot 2014-09-19 at 10.55.36 AM

There’s an awful lot you can quickly access.

On a Chromebook, use the URL chrome://keyboardoverlay/ to access this.

Getting Pics From Drive to Blogger, on a Chromebook

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If you’ve ever tried to get pictures from your Google Drive to your (Google-owned) Blogger blog, you know that it can be a hassle. All the Google apps seem to play well together, except Blogger.

But on a Chromebook, it’s super-easy.

On the New/Edit Post page click the Insert Image icon.

photo 1

Then make sure you’re on Upload and click Choose Files.

photo 2

Make sure Google Drive is selected on the left, and you’ve got easy access to your entire Drive. You can even get to the Shared With Me (Incoming) and Recent sections.

photo 3

Find your picture, select it, click Open, select it after it loads, and click Add Selected.

With a Chromebook, it treats your Google Drive just like it’s your own hard drive. So anywhere online where you can upload a file/image, the Chromebook allows you to easily pull directly from your Google Drive.

Why We Teach

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It’s the little things.

She’s in fifth grade now. I had her in third grade. We piloted 1:1 iPads the year she was in my class.

As a fifth grader, she started her year with a Scholastic Extra, Extra, Read All About Me poster (as the fifth graders always do). Her teacher sent me this:

photo (1)

My hero is my 3rd grade teacher Mr. Schersten. He taught me to have fun but do your work at the same time. He also taught us how to sing to his guitar. He is an amazing runner and he is great with ipads. He is the best teacher ever.

To have fun and do your work at the same time. Yea, let’s do that.

It’s the little things.

Will Making Kids Read Instill a Love of Reading?

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origin_4351943418For years elementary teachers have been trying to sell the idea that if we assign nightly reading to students that it will make them learn to love reading. We tell our struggling readers, and their parents, if you read every night you’ll start to love reading.

Wait . . . really?

So if there’s a skill I don’t like and am not good at, practicing it will make me love it? I don’t buy it. Will practicing long division make me love long division? Will practicing doing the dishes make me love doing the dishes? Will practicing scrubbing bathrooms make me love scrubbing bathrooms? No, no, and no.

Will practicing a skill that I am not good at make me better at it? Of course it will. But we need to stop trying to sell the idea that practicing a skill will make kids love it. Given how much long division we make fourth graders do, you’d figure we’d see kids doing long division for fun in their free time – but we don’t. Because practicing a skill won’t make you love that skill.

Will practicing a difficult skill help you improve. Yes, of course. Will practicing a difficult skill make you love that skill? No, of course not. We need to stop telling people it will.

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Is Your School Year Winding Down or Winding Up?

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origin_1581482As we head into the final weeks of the school year things start to wind down. Projects are due, and new ones don’t start. We start doing those end-of-year assessments that take us away from our daily and weekly routines. Homework tapers off. We all look forward to the relaxation and routine changes that come with summer vacation. But is this wind down as relaxing for the students as it is for the teachers?

I’ve written before about how students secretly hate vacations, and this certainly applies to summer vacation. For some students, summer is a time of travel and seeing family. For others it mean uncertainty and all-day day care. We all have students who crave the safety and routine that schools provide.

Keep an extra eye on those kids as the year winds down. Those kids look forward to the routine of the Monday morning fluency test in math, the Wednesday reading journal, or the Friday afternoon spelling quiz. Changing your routines may wind those kids up more than anything else. So even if deep down you know your grades are done and that that last week of spelling won’t actually count, consider giving it anyway. That continued routine is exactly what some of your students want (need) in those final weeks. (And you don’t have to tell your students that quiz won’t actually make it into the gradebook.)

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One Space or Two?

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origin_2593463316In high school, when I learned to type, I was told that a period (or any punctuation) at the end of a sentence MUST be followed by exactly two spaces. Ten years later when I was writing curriculum units for publication I was told that a period (or any punctuation) at the end of a sentence MUST be followed by exactly one space. What happened?

The Abreviated Story:

First there were books…

Variable space typing has been part of printing for, well, basically forever. This meant that not all letters were the same width. A lower-case i didn’t take up as much space as a lower-case m, and making spaces of different sizes was easy. And at the end of a sentence a slightly longer space (though not as big as two spaces) was generally used.

Then came the typewriter…

origin_12149305295When most of us learned to type (or when our teachers learned to type) we learned on typewriters. Typerwriters are great, but they have an important limitation: every character has exactly the same width. Sentences look like this.  The i and the m were the same width. To add some extra clarity to the end of sentence, an extra space was added; so we all used two spaces.

Then came computers…

Then with affordable computers, the average person at home had access to variable space typing, letters and spaces of different widths; the computer took care of this automatically. Since then, the push for two spaces has been less common; many have gone back to one space. What do the style guides say now?

  • US Government Printing Office: One space between sentences.
  • Oxford Style Manual: One space between sentences.
  • Chicago Manual of Style: One space between sentences.
  • Modern Language Association (MLA): One space between sentences.
  • American Psychological Association (APA): Two spaces between sentences, for draft manuscripts. One space between sentences for published or final versions.
  • Style Manual for Political Science: One space between sentences.
  • Associated Press Stylebook: One space between sentences.

Oh, and now the Internet…

If you’re writing something that will end up on a webpage (like this blog post), it doesn’t matter what you do. HTML is programmed to ignore multiple spaces. No matter how many you put; one, two, three, four; it will be rendered as only one. Sorry. (That means in the “typewriter” text above I had to dig into the code to get the HTML to create a second space.)

What should we teach our students?

One space.

 

If you’re interested in longer versions of the history of sentence spacing you can find them here and here. For more specifics on what the style guides say about sentence spacing, that’s here.

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Embedding a PDF From Drive into a Blog

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Embedding PDFs in a blog can be a great way to share information, especially with parents and the community. These days Google Drive makes this easy: when you’re viewing a PDF you can easily get the embed code and drop it into you blog. But, the code includes a preview pane and no options for zooming, so it’s not idea. The default Google Drive PDF embed code ends up creating this:

Getting the embed code is easy, but the result is in no way ideal. In fact you’ll notice that most of the first page of the PDF you can’t even see. Fortunately, there’s a better way. It take a little code (really, just a little), but it’s very doable.

The embed code Drive gives you looks like this (it’s what I used above):

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/a/bpsk12.org/file/d/0B3xoQi_oa7_hU2J5S1RQbFdqS3c/preview" width="580" height="480"></iframe>

What we need to do though, is to use this code instead (it’s way better, for lots of reasons):

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?srcid=[put your file id here]&pid=explorer&efh=false&a=v&chrome=false&embedded=true" width="580px" height="480px"></iframe>

I know, the code looks a little intimidating, but most if it we can ignore.

There are only three things in the code we need to worry about:

  1. The file id.
  2. The height of the frame.
  3. The width of the frame.

The file ID for your PDF (one that is already in Google Drive) can be found in the PDFs web address. When you open a PDF, it’s the garbage-looking piece of the URL (it will be between forward-slashes, “/”).

The file ID is highlighted in yellow.

The file ID is highlighted in yellow.

In this case it’s the 0B3xoQi_oa7_hU2J5S1RQbFdqS3c

That id will need to be placed into the code in place of the “[insert your file id here]”. Make sure to get rid of the square brackets in the sample code.

Height and width are exactly that, height and width. You can change these numbers (they’re measured in pixels) to change the size of the frame that you’re PDF is enclosed in.

And what does it look like? If we take this code (notice that I’ve inserted my file ID)

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?srcid=0B3xoQi_oa7_hU2J5S1RQbFdqS3c&pid=explorer&efh=false&a=v&chrome=false&embedded=true" width="580px" height="480px"></iframe>

and put it into a blog (remember, when you’re embedding html code you have to use the HTML window of the editor, not the Compose window), you get this:

This is so much better. It zooms out so that the PDF is displayed page-width. There’s no preview pane. You can scroll down if there are multiple pages. There are zoom options if you want to zoom in. All the things we want when we embed a PDF.

A little code, and all the sudden that PDF becomes so much more user-friendly. But don’t forget, in Drive if you’re embedding a PDF you need to make the file public first, otherwise it won’t embed correctly. 

Note: I didn’t put this code together myself. I found it on a Google forum post here, from 2013, from user Yajeng.