What matters most? - Activities for critical thinking about values and opinions (Part 1 of 3)

Here I am, as always, taking these games so seriously!

Back in March I compiled some resources for game that can be used as an activity for critical thinking. Now that I have had more experience with the game in the classroom and I have mined some other examples of its use, I am doing a three part segment on its potential for education in a variety of settings.

One article will list the fun, free activities based on the game.  The final segment highlights the most important lessons I have gleaned from playing it over the past decade.

But first I want to emphasize the value of this type of activity in school.

Thinking critically and continuing the conversation

When I first created What’s It To Ya? I was teaching math and it didn’t cross my mind to use the game in the classroom. Game design was my hobby and I often immersed myself in it as a break from education.

But one year I found myself teaching a course about life goals and success to high school seniors. I realized then that What’s It To Ya? made a great activity to kick off lessons about priorities. Since that time I have created many interactive classroom activities based on the game. I also have gathered feedback from others who have used its primary activity and the cards for more than just a party game. It has a unique potential to create meaningful discussion and reflection in a fun way.

In fact, the game meets a pressing need in education and it has become a mission for me to bring it to others. At a time when groups across society are at all extremes on questions of values and social policies, conversation is vital. In the classroom, though, I found my attempts to encourage any discussion (or even personal reflection) about important topics with many viewpoints would end almost immediately. I had a similar experience in my graduate courses as a student myself.

There was a resistance to open discussion on topics of religion, religious people, politics or morality even if the point of the discussion was merely to uncover facts (as opposed to changing anyone’s mind). The sense that it would be fruitless, too personal or too volatile won out. Most would say something along the lines of, “Everyone sees it differently,” and be done with it. If we are to get along as a society as a whole and if we value diversity as we say we do, I think we must do better at discussing our differences. When important questions are merely ignored and convictions cannot be articulated, emotional outbursts will win out over rational debate and we will only find ourselves more divided.

From personal experience and feedback from others, I am convinced this game and the activities based on it can provide useful skills and a common language for meaningful discussion between people who disagree strongly on important matters. This opens the door to an environment were vital problem solving can take place.

Please see the next posts in this series for a complete picture of how this game can be useful in education.

• Fun, free and flexible ways to get kids thinking
• What I learned playing What's It To Ya?

Real Life Problem Solving in School

When it comes to creative problem solving in school, nothing beats a project that goes beyond the school walls and actually helps other people.  Here's an inspiring story of a couple high school seniors who did just that.  Their senior project helped a teacher and students on the other side of the world to achieve their dream of getting connected to the internet.

Check out the introduction video below and these links:

• More videos on their YouTube channel
• The official website

This is a great example of how much learning can come out of a project rooted in a passion with a purpose to meet a genuine need.  One other takeaway:  In a world filled with need, the learning never stops.  See how they are continuing a second phase of their project long after the two students graduated.

What similar projects could we inspire student to pursue in the upcoming school year?  Beyond that, please consider supporting this project and spreading the word about the work as it continues.

Aviary App for Easy Photo Editing

This was originally posted in the summer of 2012, but I recently updated some information.

I was having fun with Instagram a couple months ago to quickly present photos in fun or more pleasing ways.  I discovered the free app from Aviary recently, though, and I haven't done anything with Instagram since.

Most of the features I use are all free, but there are some in-app purchases for more effect packs.  I bought the Grunge pack for $0.99.  (I still love taking pictures that I imagine will be the cover of my hit recording.)

Aviary uses the engine from the original Aviary image editing tools (which unfortunately are no longer available).  I have always been impressed with their free online applications.  The app version is a very slimmed down editing tool, but it has become my favorite tool for editing photos on the iPad.

Aviary allows me to share right to Twitter and Facebook.

You also get extra tools to add more control than Instagram allows (at least from the last time I looked at Instagram).  There are Paint, Text and other common editing tools.  I like the stickers if, for nothing else, I want to add some funny speech bubbles.  That alone makes it a good app to use in the classroom to edit pictures for comics.  The meme tool is a lot of fun too.

There are a few tools that automatically adjust color balance for different lighting situations, though I can't speak much to their effectiveness.  I usually just tweak the brightness and contrast, so I'm glad those tools are available.

I most appreciate the filters for a final touch to pictures.  Aviary calls them Effects and in the time since I originally posted this they improved them quite a bit.  The app allows you to add the effects and frames separately now, so with a little work you can really make some attractive final products.  

But in the end, it's free.  There's really no good reason not to add it to your device for the additional options.

Here are some examples, the first two being recent additions using the latest version of the app:

Quick fun while we helped some friends move to a new house.

One of the basic Effects.

This is my outdoor "office".  

We hit 100 degrees yesterday in Michigan, but this was taken quite early in the day.

Explain Everything - iPad app for flipped teaching

I have posted previously about some free iPad apps that can be used for flipped teaching.  I recently broke down and paid the $2.99 to buy Explain Everything.  I was told it is the ultimate app for video tutorials, supplying all the things that those free ones were lacking.

From what I've seen so far, that's been mostly accurate.  I really like the laser pointer feature and the entire app is intuitive and easy to use.  I am glad I purchased it and I'm sure I will use it more than I do the free ones as I get more comfortable working around the couple quirks.

Here are the pros and cons I see at this point:

Pros:

• Presentations can be shown live or narrated then exported as a video to the Camera Roll (or to other usual locations).
• Laser Pointer allows for pointing out areas of the screen during recording or presenting.
• Web browsers can display online content.  (I didn't use this much yet, but it looks like a great feature if it works even with complex websites.)
• Can import pictures or even entire presentations (PowerPoint is an option) from Dropbox or Evernote.  (I haven't experimented with importing from Evernote and see my note below about Dropbox.)

Cons:

• It's not free.
• I can't get it to import anything from Dropbox!  It might be me, but so far I can't even get one picture to import correctly.
• When re-sizing objects it is too easy to rotate them at the same time.  It would be good to have a snap feature at every 90 degrees for objects.  I simply gave up trying to straighten a couple rectangular images perfectly .
• Like all the free apps I mentioned previously, there's still no way (that I can see) to undo or edit part of the audio recording.  Since you can export to the Camera Roll, though, it's easy enough to edit the mistakes out in iMovie or another editor.  That's what I did in the sample below.
• Note on 9/4/12:  Noooo!  It did the same thing I ran into with other slide creation apps.  Today I put together four slides for a presentation.  Before I had a chance to record I had to do something else, but I left Explain Everything open.  When I came back to the iPad and turned it on I tried to edit it and the app shut down immediately.  I lost all my work.  Educreations used to do this to me and I made a note about it in that review.  It could be attributed to any number of factors beyond the app itself, but I wanted to pass it along.

Here's my first attempt at a video tutorial using the app. It explains how to use the Say Anything flipchart in the classroom. For purposes of this overview of Explain Everything, you'll see all the important features of this app in the first two or three slides.

Teach Creative Problem Solving or Nothing

It took me a year and a half to get this straight.  Everything in school from kindergarten to a doctorate degree should be phrased in terms of creative problem solving.

No matter what the content is, it fits somewhere in the process of problem solving:

• Finding new information to identify the problem
• Processing that information to create and test possible solutions
• Presenting the best solution in meaningful ways to the people who need to it

We know problem based learning is an engaging and effective teaching model when done correctly.  Yet somehow administrators and teachers get so focused on tests that they overlook its importance.  Or maybe they're afraid to let go and trust that successful problem solvers can also figure out standardized tests.

Regardless, this is my mission from here out.  If I'm talking to teachers or students, it will all be phrased in the context of creative problem solving.  If we ignore creativity and problem solving at the expense of right answers in content areas we miss the point.  

When I realized this, a few other things became clear:

• True problem solving and creativity are hard to measure on standardized tests, but that's exactly why they need our focus.  Computers would have a hard time scoring such tests.  Tip:  Being able to do what computers can't is a good thing.
• Any technology standards, attempts at technology integration or what are referred to as call 21st century learning skills are addressed perfectly in the context of creative problem solving.  Technology simply becomes the best tool to aid in the problem solving process.  
• We know students feel that what they're learning in high school is irrelevant.  If teachers would frame their lessons in light of real world problems that can be addressed across curriculum areas this would be less of an issue.  Remind them:  Every class is providing tools for solving problems.  It's an unpleasant fact of life that problems always show up.  Good skills to address problems at all levels will always be relevant.