The Joys of You Tube in the Classroom

For Issue 2 my group decided to have students create a news broadcast; the kicker is that it is the past. Students in groups of three choose an era in history that was covered this school year, and then, they produce a news broadcast concerning that era. The format of a nightly-news broadcast could be a fun way to get students excited about learning about a period in history.

In addition, the news broadcast is an excellent format for:

• reviewing content taught;
• creating a culminating activity to a unit of study; and
• building the "core teaching" unit for any period in history.

The project might be approached in any number of ways. For example, small groups of students might work together to create a nightly-news broadcast for an "average" day during the Civil War or some other period in history. The broadcast will include both hard news and feature reports that present facts and interesting information about the period. All groups might work to create a news broadcasts from the same historic period, or each group might work on a broadcast from a different period such as the Revolutionary War, the Roaring Twenties or the Vietnam War.

With the creation of this lesson plan, I started to research some completed historical videos on You Tube. I also found a video site for teachers, called Teacher Tube. However, the streaming server is a little slow and the videos aren't as smooth to watch.

Below is a simple, but powerful, video about the May 4th Shooting at KSU during the Vietnam War. What a great way for students to learn about our history while creating an educational video for thousands of others to view. This assignment is a great example of cross-discipline collaboration - history and technology.

Constructivism in the Classroom

What kind of teacher are you in the classroom? Is your way of teaching student-centered or teacher-centered? Do you lecture or opt for group collaboration on solving an issue? As we begin to explore different learning theories (cognitive, behaviorist and constructivism approaches to learning) in this course, it makes you reflect on your ideas of how students learn best.

Since I only teach adults in higher education (18 years and up) I have students in the classroom with a foundation of prior knowledge. These students can read, write and understand basic math concepts (or so I hope :-) I find that with non-traditional students (ages 24+) they learn best using the constructivism approach to learning. They bring to the table many life experiences and enjoy group collaboration. I encourage group discussion/projects because it allows students to use problem-solving skills. In the class I am currently teaching, the answers to the questions posed don't always have right or wrong answers, therefore this approach to learning works very well in the classroom.

After conducting a little research on the web, I found that Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher born in the late 1800s, helped to shape (some say pioneer) the constructivism approach. He is pictured above.

Piaget's photo was taken from: http://hagar.up.ac.za/catts/learner/2000/scheepers_md/projects/loo/theory/construct.html

Fourth Week cont.

Ockham's Razor asserts that simplicity is preferred to complexity in design. This principle, named after William of Ockham, a 14th Century Franciscan friar and logician, and described on page 142 in Lidwell, can be applied to almost any design. And while I do agree that simple designs work best in many instances, including web and print design, I do gravitate toward aniques, flowers and plants and other items to decorate my home.

I never really was a fan of the "minimalist" home. Sure, everyone likes clean, straight lines and neutral colors, but who wants to live in a cold, untouched, boring and sterile environment?

Minimalist home

I appreciate houses that are a little more rustic and have lots of character; ones that are decorated with pillows and soft fabric, contain lots of greenery, and showcase built-in bookshelves and small, cozy rooms. A cottage on the lake with a porch sounds ideal.

My 'pretend' second home in Florida

Fourth Week

The storytelling topic on page 186 of Lidwell struck a cord with me this week. In the last few months I have been addicted to the "digitally storytelling" of This American Life, a Chicago Public radio podcast. The themed stories each week "are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all."

Read more about This American Life.

Social Engineering was the the most recent This American Life podcast I listened to. The episode unfolds with Daniel Canada and Gregory Deloatch (above), two homeless poets in NYC.

Third Week cont.

In Lidwell's text it discusses Baby-Faced Bias, a tendency to see people and things with baby-faced features as more naive, helpless and honest than those with mature faces. I never really considered this idea, but it does hold some truth.

I have two red-haired women posted below. Obviously one is older than the other, but they do have distinct features - one resembles a baby face with round features and the later one has a more mature face with a stronger bone structure and a less rounded face.

Baby Face (conveys innocence, honest, helplessness)

Mature Face (conveys expertise and authority)

In Lidwell's text, it also discusses Waist-to-Hip Ratio, a preference for a particular ratio of waist size to hip size in men and women. Studies show that people favored males with a .90 waist-to-hip ratio and women with a .70 ratio. I took the test on page 207 and I agreed with the male rendering, but I didn't choose the most popular female rendering based on the waist-to-hip ratio theory.

I did a little more research on the subject and found even more encouraging news for curvier women, considering I have a .73 waist-to-hip ratio. We are smarter, too.

Are Curvier Women Smarter?

Third Week: Fun with Monotone and Duotone Colors

For most of my adult career I have worked in education or non-profit industries. (I guess you could say that education is non-profit.) And because each field had little financial resources, I needed to be creative when designing brochures and other print materials. The companies I worked for didn't have the money to print glossy, four-color informational pieces. Instead, black and white and two- and three-colored images were used often.

As stated in chapter 7 of Williams, you don't always have to create pieces using all of the colors of the rainbow. You can use monocromatic colors - a color composed of one hue with any other of its cooresponding shades or tints.

I have created my own examples to show the differences of applying one and two colors to a black and white photograph.

Black & White Photograph (one color used - black)

Monochromatic Colored Photograph (one color -brown; R=153, G=102, B=0)

Duotone Colored Photograph (two colors - black and red; Red was R=200, G=0, B=0)

Second Week cont.

Enhancing the usability of design was the category of study this week in Lidwell's book. The title that caught my attention was "Inverted Pyramid." It brought a smile to my face because I am constantly preaching to my public relations students how important is it to write in the inverted pyramid style. Up to this point in most college student's lives, they are writing research papers or opinion pieces -- long paragraphs, citations, 25 pages in length, etc. GET TO THE POINT!

At work and when I teach public relations I focus on including the most important information about the story in the first paragraph. This includes the who, what, where, when, why and how. In my job I am mostly writing for the web or writing press releases to pitch stories to the media. The name of the game is to be short, concise and express the most important information at the beggining of the story because you don't have much time to grab the reader's attention. As our lives become more and more hectic, we sometimes only have a minute or two to scan headlines or the first paragraph of an article. Sad, but true.

Inverted Pyramid