CUE Rockstar Tahoe: What I Learned on Day 2

Today was another great day at the CUE Rockstar Conference.  I am exhausted!  And a little afraid....  Today is only day two of a full ten straight days of PD!  What was I thinking?  I just couldn't turn down CUE Rockstar, then the GAFE Summit at Sequoia HS (in my district), a presummit workshop, and three days at the Academy of Sciences learning about NGSS.  I have been looking forward to these workshops all summer.  But I know I will definitely need a break afterwards. 

Song Parodies
The first session I chose today was Diane Main's GarageBand Karaoke:  Song and Video Parodies to Spice Up Your Teaching.  I have always been pretty shy, am not comfortable in front of a crowd, and have a terrible fear of singing.  So you are probably wondering why on Earth I would choose this workshop.  I assign a project each December where my students create "Biology Carols" to review for their final exams.  Students choose a holiday song and re-write the lyrics to teach one of the different standards we have gone over that semester.  I collect all the songs and put them in a song book for my students.  This is a homework assignment, but in class, on one of our review days, students read through each of the songs.  They must fix any errors in the content and add any extra information in the margins that was not included.  It is a fun way for the students to review and gets them in the holiday spirit.  I have offered extra credit to any students who record the song.  I have never had any way for the students to do this before in my class.  Now that I have a class set of iPads, my students can actually record their biology carols.  I wanted to learn how to use Garage Band and how to actually create the parody.  

Diane has some great instructions on her webpage and some fun examples.  We went over all the steps to creating a parody, from choosing a song and topic, writing the parody, to recording it in GarageBand, to adding in a "video" to go with the song.  There were four people in the class and we chose to work together to create one song.  Mary Berelson, a 1st grade teacher, wanted to teach her students about bees.  It was fun coming up with a song and lyrics - we chose the John Denver song Annie's Song.  When writing our lyrics, we used a website called Word Hippo to help us find words that rhyme, are similar, opposite, etc.  Thanks Jen Roberts for sharing this cool website with the class.

Here is our final song     

and our lyrics:

Update 7/11/13:  Mary created a powerpoint to go with the song to make it a music video. I have added it here.  Thanks Mary!

The class was a lot of fun, I enjoyed the process.  I'm still not a fan of singing... but I learned how to go through the whole process and use Garage Band.  My next step is to compare the iOS version of Garage Band to the Mac Version which we used in class.  I also need to see how to get the karaoke background songs onto the iPads, when the students aren't able to purchase songs on the school's iPads.  I am excited to have a tool to allow my students to record their Biology Carols.

Interactive Flip Videos
For my second workshop, I went to Kevin Brookhouser's Flip Your Classroom with Presentations, Screencasts, and Interactive You Tube Videos.  I have been flipping my classroom for a year and was very intrigued on how to make the videos interactive.  I had watched the sample videos on the session's webpage and knew I had to learn how to do this.

Kevin showed us a bunch of examples of interactive flipped You Tube videos and then led us through making an example.  (English teachers, you will love his grammar videos!)  There were two ways we could do this  - the video could include the teaching of content and then there would be a quiz at the end OR the video could start with a question and if a student answers it incorrectly, they would get a review of the content   We chose to start out with the question first.  We created two google presentations, the first included the question and the correct answer.  The second presentation included the wrong answer, an explanation of the content, and then try again.  We quickly recorded two screencasts, one for each presentation, using quicktime and uploaded both of them to You Tube.  We then added in annotations.  We used the spotlight to box in our answer choices where the student would click, and linked it to the right spot in the right video.

I worked with Karen Wessel and we created a video quizzing students about mitochondria and chloroplasts.  We plan to use this as a fun review after we teach our students about cell organelles.  Here is our video:

**Note:  YouTube was being a little uncooperative today - hopefully all the spotlight links are working correctly now.  They were a little "jumpy" this afternoon.

I love how the YouTube annotations allows the flipped videos to really be interactive. The students had to really think during the videos and couldn't just passively watch them.   I definitely want to use this in my class this year.  One small problem... when these annotated videos are viewed on an iPad, the annotations don't work. :(  Since I am planning on having my students watch these videos during class time, as I am flipping using the asynchronous flip mastery model, my students won't be able to watch these interactive videos on the iPads.    Hopefully YouTube will make some changes so that the annotations will work on mobile devices.  

Dinner
Not officially a session... but I was able to have dinner with three great educators - Josh Harris, Scott McMillan, and Lisa McMillan.  We talked about what we have learned in our different sessions, shared technology we used in our classes, and just had a great time getting to know each other.  I have learned a lot from not just the presenters, but from conversations with all the participants in the sessions, people sitting at the same table at lunch, and from people walking through the hall.  Thank you everyone for being so willing to share.  I love going to conferences where the educators truly want to be there and share the same views on education as I do - where student learning comes first.