Do you have a PC computer with Windows Movie Maker? Did you know that you can make Claymation-type animations using your digital camera and Movie Maker that can help your students explore plot and sequencing? I wrote about this idea way back in the fall, and Michelle Levy and I spent some time creating a sample movie, worksheet, and tutorial. You can even download the photos if you don’t want to stage the movie yourself but just want to explore the technology.

While stop-motion/stop-action animation can help support student understanding in language arts, here’s a science spin on things: get an old digital camera (you know you’ve got some of those old floppy-disk cameras lurking in the Corner of Shame in your storage room) and mount it near your students’ plant experiments. Make sure you tape it in place so it can’t shift over time. Take a photo either once a day or once an hour over the course of the science experiment.

Then import those images into Movie Maker. (In Step 9, you might want to play with the default time length for each photo — maybe make it one second per image? — so that students have time to see each change.) Follow the rest of the instructions, and you’ll have the coolest science artifact around.

iMovie can create something quite similar. Though I haven’t been a Mac user in a while, it looks like iMovie even has a feature to speed up your video, which would give a more fluid result.

Follow these links to learn more.

Download the tutorial, with step-by-step instructions.

See the sample that Michelle and I made. Watch.

Plan your own animation using this worksheet.

Want to try to make the movie that we made? Download the photos here. **Warning - you will be downloading a huge — 20MB — zip file!**

For more on the history and stiles of stop-motion animation, the Wikipedia has a pretty nice entry on it.

And if you make a stop-motion or time-lapse video and post it online (or already have made one), will you leave us the URL in the comments below? (Comments are moderated, but it doesn’t take long for your comment to appear.)

I have to preface this post by admitting that I was lucky to be a strong student who brought home great grades. My parents set high expectations that I met, so I needed very little home support to be successful at school. So I’m not sure why this New York Times article on online grading systems isn’t sitting well with me.

I like the idea of students being able to track their progress, and I think it lowers parental anxiety to be able to check in and get a snapshot of their children’s progress. So what is bothering me? Maybe it’s just the prominently-featured parent in the article:

ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.

But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?

Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.

When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.

“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.

Maybe what bothers me is that the conversation is so focused on the micro level of grades, not on the overall learning experience, that the question is, “Tell me about these grades,” not, “What did you learn today?” And the article’s words, “He will be braced for a punishment,” stopped me in my tracks. Now I don’t know Mrs. Dobbins’ child, so I don’ t know whether a low grade is an indication of an atypical struggle, an ongoing lack of motivation, a sign that special services interventions would be helpful, or something else. And I don’t know the context of Mrs. Dobbins’ interview to know if she was accurately portrayed.

But if it’s the online tool that is making low grades into a punishment, is that a sign of progressive education?

I think it’s a sign that we’ve got a missing piece in online grade reporting systems: helping parents to make sense of a data set that is far more specific than anything they have seen before.

In an effort to keep parents informed (a legitimate and often-articulated need, especially in middle school), is it possible to have too much information? That online grading programs could accidentally shift the focus away from the way we used to look at parent knowledge of student progress (the laissez-faire approach of, “Don’t ask, don’t tell;” “We’ll let you know if there’s a problem;” “Assume that if you don’t hear from us that everything is OK”) to giving parents an almost hyper-anxious level of detail.

“Knowledge is power,” the saying goes, but the article hints that too much knowledge is stressful.

How can we as educators keep the communication lines open with parents without accidentally providing anxiety-ramping data?

I remember back when I was a classroom teacher that I handed back a bad test to a sweet, kind girl. I was sure she would be upset that her test grade was much lower than her past work, and I prepared for her disappointment and dismay. To my surprise, it was she who reassured me. “That’s OK, Ms. F,” she said. “My parents say I can have a clunker every marking period.”

Wow. Those parents got it. Giving a great kid permission to fail didn’t make her fail. It made her cope with failure and recognize it for the anomaly it was. Sure enough, she was right back at her normal range on the next assessment.

Glory, glory! Sometimes, I read stuff and am amazed with how it resonates with what I’ve been thinking about.  That’s how I felt reading David Brooks’ op-ed piece in Friday’s New York Times. He argues that we need to be talking about the cognitive age, the thinking processes that ultimately drive decisions.  He talks about how politicians are spinning globalization and its impacts as a campaign issue.  He sees it globalization differently:

We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

It’s not that globalization and the skills revolution are contradictory processes. But which paradigm you embrace determines which facts and remedies you emphasize. Politicians, especially Democratic ones, have fallen in love with the globalization paradigm. It’s time to move beyond it.

Isn’t this what librarians have been claiming for years? Aren’t you glad you’re in a profession who put forth such visionary new standards that address this perspective so well?  Here are our new AASLfour guiding standards:

1. inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge;
2. draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge;
3. share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society;
4. pursue personal and aesthetic growth.

I love it when we’re ahead of the curve. Now if only I could get my classroom colleagues to tell jokes based on Dewey numbers.  Did you hear the one where the 636.7 met the 636.8 in a dark alley?  It was no 398.2, let me tell you.  But it was one for the 031’s.   Ouch.  Maybe not.