A new semester has started and, in addition to my Social Studies courses, I get to teach a bunch of computer stuff. I”m always amazed at this point in the semester just how keen the kids are. I’m showing them a few new things that are old hat to me (blogs, wikis, Audacity) but are new to the kids. Because these things are new to the students, they embrace them with enthusiasm.

It’s a good wake up call for me as a teacher. What we can do with computers is practically limitless when compared with what we had when I was my students’ age (I still adore my 64!) and when I see them react excitedly, I wake up one more time and see just a few of the things that can be done.

I’m trying to spill this enthusiasm over into my Social Studies class. To start off this year I’m having the kids write and record songs about all 22 Prime Ministers. Goofy? Yes, but it gets the kids interested and excited because, frankly, I’m the only teacher just odd enough to try something like this.

The new, the different, and the unusual can create excite. Looking at the familiar through fresh eyes can make us better teachers and better learners, too.

I’ve been busy the last few weeks and haven’t blogged much at all, much to my embarassment, but I’ve still been up to interesting things in class.

I’ve spent much of the past few hours on this prep day trying to dream up and put together an assignment for my Grade 9s for later this week or early next week. Though I teach them Social Studies, I still think knowing some basic history (which isn’t necessarily part of Social Studies) is pretty important.

I’d like it if all of my students would at least be able to recognize the names of all 22 Canadian prime ministers. To that end, I’m going to tell them a little bit about each, and then have them get together in small groups and write songs about the PMs. Music seems to be a great learning tool, so I figure that if I can get the kids to write a song summarizing all 22 of the prime ministers, then it will help them keep track of them.

We’re not looking for brilliance in the writing (though we have a strong music program at this school, so I may be surprised). All I really want is a bit of rhythm and rhyme sung to a recognizable tune whether that’s something complex and funky, or something simple like Frere Jacques. (I guess we can’t use Happy Birthday to You since that’s under copyright.)

I hope to record the songs using Audacity and then play them back for the class.  It should be an interesting experience. I hope it works.

Over the last few months, I’ve been exposed to a lot of people who, in one way or another, are using photos in their classroom. When I see other folks doing something cool, I start to wonder if I could do something similar myself.

I finally had an idea. My students have been looking at human rights issues for their Social Studies course, things like women’s suffrage, the Japanese Internment, and the Chinese Head Tax. What I did was challenge my students to reduce one of these issues to six key moments. Then they’re to act out these six key moments, and take pictures of them.

They have to select the best shot of each moment, cropping, brightening, and otherwise editing the photos as necessary. From there they have to log on to Big Huge Labs. (Big Huge Labs has an educator option where you register and then generate IDs for your students. They don’t need e-mail addresses to log on, and you get to see their projects as they work on them, if you choose.) Big Huge Labs’ Mosaic Maker lets the kids upload the photos and set them up in a nice 3 by 2 grid (which is just the right proportions to print off as a 4 by 6 print).

Once the kids save their mosaic on my flash drive (I keep a separate drive for just these sorts of occasions. I ‘m not getting my important school stuff accidentally ruined by one careless student), I’ll get them developped. Hopefully, we’ll have neat pictorial summaries of the particular human rights incident each group did brought together in a postcard like format.

This is the theory. In the next few days I’ll see how it turns out.

I was catching up on my Twitter reading this morning as I prepared some notes for my students about the evolution of human rights legislation in Canada. (Okay, I know the topic isn’t exciting, but if we do it quick we can keep them awake.)

As educators, we’re always told to warn our students to be cautious about what personal information we post on the web. We need to be careful about even giving away our real name, which is why most of us have handles or pseudonyms that we post under.

Yet the Twitter posts I was reading today and on other occasions give away an awful lot of information. Presenters at conferences tell when they’re getting on their plane. Basically they’re advertising that their home is empty and available to anyone who might want to take advantage of their situtation.

Other people will tell you what school they work at, and then they’ll complain about a conflict with the their principal, colleague or student.  If the offending party ever reads that tweet, I imagine the consequences will be quite unpleasant.

From still others I’ve learned the gender and approximate age of all their kids. That’s exactly the sort of information we warn our students not to let out because there are creepy people who will take advantage of that knowledege.

Administrators are often nervous to the point of paranoia about letting students online, and this is inspite of assurances by teachers that their kids will conduct themselves safely and properly while online. I can’t help but see the principals’ point of view, given some of the tweets I’ve seen educators post on Twitter lately.

As teachers, we’re giving away a LOT of personal information to an audience we don’t know. If we give away information that we probably shouldn’t, how much can we be trusted to keep our students’ information safe while online?

Common Craft’s latest video is Cloud Computing in Plain English.  Like all their previous video’s, this one is a masterpiece of simplification. They make something complex like cloud computing simple to understand. The only down side to this video is that, unlike many of their previous efforts, it’s not posted on YouTube (and is only on their site) meaning you can’t embed it in one of your own webpages. Even so, it’s quite cool.