The Blog and Shrapnel

Brennan Daugstrup (The Blog) and Shawn Sherburn (Shrapnel) make me feel great in this episode. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then classify me as flattered to the hilt. These wonderful young guys are highly complimentary of my flipped lectures. Here’s a brief example. But what really frosted my educational gourd, was being informed by my two young friends that when prompted to make videos, they use mine as a template. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I treasure their endorsement of my teaching style. Additionally, they teach me about some cool platforms, one of which I’m determined to utilize. Their ingenuity and creativity are why I labeled them technocrats.

Before I delve into specific directives about student video production, here’s their fascinating video. The platform the Blog and Shrapnel employed was Adobe Premier. They had access to this pay-platform because it was part of their Multi-Media class. Wonderful student video production, however, can be done with free platforms such as Apple Keynote, which is my favorite, or Google Slides paired with Screencastify. My young men also mentioned utilizing Discord which is like Skype for gamers. Apparently, players can talk to one another inside a game. And finally, they promote Incompetech. This is a resource where kids can get free background music, something I highly suggest.

The Blog and Shrapnel were also highly complimentary of Edpuzzle. I featured this cool interactive platform in Episode 42 of the Hacking Engagment Podcast. Please go back and give a listen if you’re interested. Perhaps, kids could embed some interactive and provacative prompts in their video creations and assign them to classmates.

Episode Template

The Problem:

Students who are gifted technocrats need more creative freedom.

The Solution:

Prompt your kids to produce short videos and challenge them to explore and perhaps utilize different platforms.

What you can do Tomorrow:

• Assign a video prompt and limit students to productions between 1 and 2 minutes in length.
• Assign roughly 4 or 5 topics. If you have a class of 25, that means 5 students will be doing the same topic. That’s okay because perhaps they could help one another. Regardless, they’ll only be presenting to small groups, so students won’t be overwhelmed with reruns.
• Demand that your student’s videos be image or action-rich and text poor.
• Challenge kids to include background music
• Discourage students from pedestrian humor, such as comic violence. Instructive humor, however, is highly encouraged.
• Regardless of the platform, once kids have a video file, they should upload it to YouTube.
• Investigate challenging students to embed prompts and then assign their videos to classmates via Edpuzzle.
• Create small presentation groups via a class landing pad, which will be a Google Doc in CAN EDIT MODE. Place all of your student’s names on this doc and organize them into their small presentation groups. Once kids have their YouTube link, they should copy the URL and then apply it to their names on the landing pad. That way, if a student is missing on presentation day, they may have already applied their link and students in their group could watch anyway. Or, if a student did not do the assignment, members of their group can watch another student’s video in a different group.

Don’t box-in tech-savvy kids. Permitting more creative freedom just might unleash your own classroom technocracy.

Listen to “James Sturtevant Hacking Engagement” on Spreaker.