For this to work:

• You should have a .xls Excel Spreadsheet (not the newer .xslx version)
• Student names should be down the first column
• Standards should be across the top row

I’ve included the ability to ignore certain row and column names (for example, “averages” and “totals”) as well as set your own threshold (below 75%, below 60%, etc).

Finally, here’s a video showing it in action:

Announcing: The Student Grouper is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. Announcing: Paragraphy
2. Differentiating Within A Gifted Classroom
3. Do I Have To Work In A Group?

This is a Zoetrope, basically a three dimensional version of an animated flip book. Watching it come to life was truly shocking, I watched it at least five times to try to wrap my mind around it. If you live in the area, definitely check it out in person (in the animation room at California Adventure) as a video simply doesn’t do it justice:

Classroom Application

Besides just sharing an amazing piece of art, you can use this as a hook to explore other concepts. Take one of these big ideas and ask students to find other examples that support the statement (a deductive reasoning activity):

• When our point of view changes, details converge to reveal new big ideas: when motionless, these sculptures form a very different image than when they begin spinning.
• Different patterns emerge when new details are introduced: adding tiny changes to each sculpture results in a different animation. 
  
• When one detail is missing, a convergence cannot occur: if the strobe light doesn’t come on, the amazing animation effect fails completely.
• Or explore Arthur C. Clarke’s quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Any other ideas for using this video in a classroom? Share in the comments

Inspiration: Zoetrope is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. PowerPoint Vs Gifted Students: Part II
2. Download Youtube Videos
3. Patterns In Writing I: Introduction

My wife and I watched this humorous and insightful TED talk about “manspaces,” the diverse rooms that men create for themselves (if you can’t watch the video below, it’s also available on the TED site):

I’m always looking for ways for my gifted students to interact with literature through different media, and realized that this video had applications as a literary response activity:

• Ask your students to design a room that reflects a character.
• Students can build a diorama, illustrate on paper, or design a 3d model in Google Sketchup.
• For stories that support it, have students show how characters have changed over time by creating a before and after room.
• Take photographs of students’ work, scan art, or save digital images and compile the various rooms onto a DVD for students to take home.
• For larger stories, build a home with several rooms – one for each character.

Happy New Year and I hope this sparks some meaningful enrichment activities for your students!

Manspaces and Analyzing Characters is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. A Deep, Complex Extension Menu For Character Analysis
2. Analyzing Great Speeches: Part I
3. Analyzing Great Speeches: Part II

I struggle with teaching my students how to answer “writing strategies” questions on their standardized tests. The questions typically ask students which sentence would go best between two other sentences within a paragraph. I understand that these questions are designed to test if students understand how a paragraph should flow. However, it is quite far removed from actually writing a paragraph and our curriculum doesn’t offer any materials to help teach this particular skill. As a result, my students’ scores in this area are always lower than their actual writing ability.

Thus, Paragraphy was born. This simple utility takes in a paragraph and outputs the sentences on separate lines, ordered randomly. In groups, I have my students attempt to put the sentences back in their original order. My hope is that this helps them develop an understanding of a well-written paragraph, but also helps do well on their tests.

Maybe you’ll find a use for this too

Announcing: Paragraphy is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. Oz, Paragraphy, and Writing Strategies
2. Announcing: The Student Grouper
3. Remixing Ideas With Gifted Students

Last time we looked at how PowerPoint frequently conflicts with the needs of our gifted students. Now, let’s walkthrough my recent attempt to improve a PowerPoint presentation by going beyond the default settings.

Case Study

Let’s examine some slides for a lesson on the Roman Republic’s government. The lesson’s goal is to communicate the checks, balances, and interrelations of the government’s three branches.

Original Slides

Organize the Information

This slide was also created with Keynote, but contains the same information as the previous four slides. By going beyond the defaults and using a simple graphic organizer, this slide more clearly communicates relationships between ideas. The concept of “checks and balances” is made far more explicit.

Still Not Optimal

While colors within templates can be changed, such change takes time and is somewhat difficult to do. Furthermore, creating unique templates is more difficult than using those provided by the software, and presenters tend to be discouraged from doing so very often.
Yates and Orlikowski
The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries

Although clearly an improvement, this slide is still inferior to a whiteboard or overhead transparency for three reasons:

1. Time This slide was quite a chore to create. Using a whiteboard or overhead, I could have whipped this same organizer up in a fraction of the time it took me to build this slide.
2. Flexibility This slide must be fully prepared in advance. There is no room for student input or on-the-fly modifications. With low-tech materials, this slide could easily be created in front of students with the option to add their ideas.
3. Space PowerPoint’s physical constraints limit the information that will fit on a slide, resulting in choppy phrasing and simplified content. Gifted learners need content that is deep and complex. PowerPoint inherently limits the amount of information teachers can display.

An Information-Rich Image

Created by Anihl

Now this image truly represents the inner-workings of the Roman Government. Imagine slowly building this on a bulletin board over the course of a unit. The combination of visual cues and detailed writing gives a deep, complex understanding of “checks and balances.” However, a PowerPoint slide could never support this much information.

So Is PowerPoint Ever The Right Medium?

An Expert In Action

Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) is an expert presenter. In his introduction of the iPhone, he inadvertently demonstrates how presentation software can be appropriate for gifted classrooms (I also show this video to my students).

Slides Are Supplementary

Jobs is clearly the one running the presentation, not his slides. As teachers, we should be in control of our lesson.

Generalizations

Jobs uses titles to highlight big ideas while he communicates the details. This is an excellent strategy that capitalizes on gifted students’ whole-to-part thinking.

Details Support Big Ideas

When Jobs does display a list of details, they are clearly supporting a larger idea. For example, he doesn’t read off everything OSX can do. That isn’t the point. The point is that the iPhone is as powerful as a desktop computer. Jobs keeps the details connected to this larger idea.

Imagery

Jobs uses imagery just as good teachers do. Why describe the iPhone when a picture does the job quicker and more effectively? Jobs utilizes his technology to go beyond a static picture, visually highlighting key components of the product.

Animation & Prior Knowledge

Jobs even utilizes the software’s often overused animation abilities to clearly communicate information: it is easy to update the iPhone (just drop it into the dock). He also uses animation to connect to the audience’s prior knowledge of the iPod.

Using Appropriate Technology

Later in the talk, when he demonstrates the phone’s use, Jobs switches to an actual phone rather than attempting to mock up the phone in a slide. Jobs doesn’t attempt to shoehorn his slides into a job they are not suited for.

To put it simply, Steve Jobs chooses the best method to communicate information. We should do the same when planning our use of any technology.

Next Time: Back To The Classroom

So how can we apply Jobs’ expert use of presentation software to our classroom? We’ll conclude the series next time, but I’ll leave you with this quote:

The right question is, “How can I distill my complex information into a visual form that will help me communicate more effectively?”
Cliff Atkinson
Bullet Points Kill (Effective Communication)

References

• The PowerPoint Presentation And Its Collaries
• Bullet Points Kill (Effective Communication)

PowerPoint Vs Gifted Students: Part II is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. PowerPoint Vs Gifted Students: Part I
2. The Beatles, Houghton Mifflin, and Gifted Students
3. Remixing Ideas With Gifted Students

Power corrupts.
PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Edward Tufte
PowerPoint Is Evil

While I don’t share Edward Tufte’s view completely anti-PowerPoint stance, I have been seriously reconsidering my use of PowerPoint in a gifted classroom. As a computer science major and technology nut, I’ve always been eager to utilize PowerPoint for my students’ benefit. But until I started reading some research, I never actually considered what those benefits were. This series is a public version of an inner conflict I’ve been wrestling with.

Default Powerpointing

If you’re like me, you approach PowerPoint in the way that PowerPoint likes to be approached. That is, you accept the default settings and pick common templates. Because of the program’s default templates, you create slides that look like these:

• Bulleted lists
• Short phrases
• Outline of topics
• Little content (compared to an overhead transparency)

When you present, it might look like this:

• Lights are off
• Slides go in sequential order
• Speaker reads out what is on the slide
• Audience watches with little interaction

Characteristics of Gifted Learners

With the idea of a typical PowerPoint presentation in your mind, consider some common characteristics of a gifted learner:

• Bored with predictability
• Intuitively understand ideas
• Thrives on complexity
• Manipulates information easily
• Interconnects ideas

Typical PowerPoint use does not meet the needs of gifted students!

PowerPoint & Gifted Students’ Needs

The bullet-point heavy style of PowerPoint’s default templates leads to presentations focused on details but lacking in relationships between ideas. There is an undeniable draw to list fact after fact.

But this is not how gifted learners learn best!

Gifted students understand concepts in a whole-to-part manner. This is why we create generalizations, big ideas, and themes.

Gifted learners are intuitive and thrive on patterns and generalizing. These needs are not being met by slides after of bullet points.

PowerPoint’s Problems

Too Sequential

PowerPoint makes it difficult to access slides out of order when requested by the audience. Consider how responsive you can be when teaching using an overhead compared with PowerPoint. Being able to jump around encourages discussion and an active audience. PowerPoint, when used in its default manner, creates a lecture-like atmosphere.

This factor may contribute to a tendency to defer questions to the end of the presentation rather than to jump to another slide to respond to a question in the middle, thus reducing the speaker’s responsiveness to the audience.

Yates and Orlikowski
The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries

Too Constrained

PowerPoint causes us to break up our lessons into chunks based on the size of a slide, rather than what’s best for learning. Information becomes isolated, not interconnected. The big picture becomes lost. And so may our gifted students.

The software makes us think and speak in isolated blocks, instead of in coherent context, totalities, narratives or linear reasoning.
[PowerPoint] encourages us to squeeze all information into fixed formats and templates and present it in relentless sequence.
Jens E. Kjeldsen
The Rhetoric of PowerPoint

Too Fast

When everything is pre-typed, there is a tendency to fly through information. While this may ease the tension for nervous presenters, it encourages teachers to simply present information rather than teach in the way that is easiest to comprehend.

Students are easily overwhelmed with information that they may falsely assume is being digested.
W.R. Klemm,
Computer Slideshows: A Trap For Bad Teaching

Result: A Lesson Designed Around PowerPoint?

When using PowerPoint, slides are designed around PowerPoint, presentations are designed around PowerPoint, and the environment is designed to work around PowerPoint.

This leads to a problem in relation to good communication and teaching because the rhetorical and pedagogical choices the speaker ought to make in the concrete situation have already been made automatically by the software.
Jens E. Kjeldsen
The Rhetoric of PowerPoint (emphasis mine)

Next Time: Beyond The Defaults

Is PowerPoint all bad? Should we shove it aside and work solely with “old-fashioned” technology? Absolutely not. But let’s make sure we’re not letting software make our teaching choices for us. Next time, we’ll at going beyond PowerPoint’s defaults to better meet the needs of our gifted students.

References

• The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries
• The Rhetoric of PowerPoint
• PowerPoint Is Evil
• Computer Slideshows: A Trap For Bad Teaching

PowerPoint Vs Gifted Students: Part I is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. PowerPoint Vs Gifted Students: Part II
2. Remixing Ideas With Gifted Students
3. Differentiating Math Lessons For Gifted Students

After writing an earlier article about differentiating objectives for gifted learners, I decided to create a system that would help me keep track of all my options.

And so, The Differentiator was born!

Here’s a video to demonstrate what it does. It’s only been tested on my laptop, so please leave me feedback in the comments or on Twitter.

Photo by DeskHiker

The Differentiator! is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. Four Ways to Differentiate Objectives
2. Differentiating Math Lessons For Gifted Students
3. Offer Choice With Extension Menus

Vixy.net Screenshot

Does your network block Youtube at school? While this keeps your students safe, it often gets in the way of the use of video in the classroom. Further, Youtube offers no way to download and save videos from home. The website vixy.net picks up the slack by offering a simple way to take a Youtube video and download it to any format you need.

Steps

1. Copy the web address of the Youtube video you want to save. This always looks something like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cwYpefWD3Y.
2. Go to vixy.net and paste the web address in.
3. Select the format you need (mov for Mac, avi for PC).
4. Click start and wait as the file is converted and downloaded.
5. Now you’ve got a file you can put on a flash drive and take to school or email to yourself.

Download Youtube Videos is a post from: Byrdseed Gifted

Related posts:

1. Analyzing Great Speeches: Part II
2. Inspiration: Zoetrope
3. Manspaces and Analyzing Characters