Show me, don’t tell me

“Teachers will not take up attractive-sounding ideas, albeit based on extensive research, if these are presented as general principles which leave entirely to them the task of translating them into everyday practice … what they need is a variety of living examples of implementation, by teachers with whom they can identify and from whom they can derive conviction and confidence that they can do better and see concrete examples of what doing better means in practice”
Black, P. and William,D. Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment, King’s College, London, England. 1998, 15-16

This quote reminds me to work harder at finding living examples of what best or better practice means. Last week I spent 2 days with teachers looking at Project Based Learning and how to embed it deeply into practice. Much of our discussion focused on a video used by our presenters showing a classroom and teacher in action. Discussions were rich and meaningful.  We’re working really hard to insure that professional development includes and is built around followup. In a month, we’ll be gathering virtually to share our progress and further our understandings. Sharing artifacts of learning is challenging at times. Finding time to write … Read the rest

Comparing little video cameras

I got a Flip today and was curious to see how it stood up to the Sony Net-Sharing Camera and my Canon SD750’s video mode.

The Flip is definitely the easiest to use. No doubt this is great feature. The quality is decent but my test shows the Canon SD750 as having a slightly better quality. I wasn’t surprised since I had read this a few weeks ago. So I took the three cameras out for a test. I did a simple pan across and zoom of the same area. Here are the results:

The bottom line is for schools/classrooms and many folks, the Flip will provide a great way to document events. All three operate like storage devices in terms of importing the video to your machine. The Sony definitely does not play nice with the Mac but having used it on the Windows machine it is a great solution as it does not need any installation to work. Our IT guys quite liked that feature. The Flip built in software looks okay as well but I didn’t really use it.
As I said in the video, I’m not much for instantly uploading. I think much like writing, editing, … Read the rest