Why use stop-motion animation for classroom assignments?

Stop motion animation is an animation technique to make physical objects appear to move on their own. An object is moved in small increments and photographing it at each step.  This creates the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. 

One of my favorite lessons utilizing iPads is creating stop motion animation using the iPad and a few props to create unique mini film features.  Students can use action figures, plastic figurines, LEGO pieces, Kinex, paper cutouts, drawings, or Play-Doh to create scenes. Kids will have a blast creating movies. Your biggest problem might be dragging students out of their chairs at the end of the lesson


Examples of ways to use stop motion animations in class:

• re-create a historical event
• model a scientific process
• illustrate a scene from a book 
• an alternative to dioramas or posters

Ideas for implementing from the YouTubeverse

Apps to Create:

I have used primarily iMotion HD to create my stop motion animations but my students are using Stop Motion lately. Both apps are very easy to use and a lot of fun!

Check out some of my student videos!

Formative Assessments and a new tool to try

The whole formative assessment obsession was really sparked by Paul Black and Dylan William in 1998 when they did a review of educational research and came to the conclusion that formative assessment helps raise standardized test scores.  There was more that I find more valuable, but that is what most people focused on.  Yes I just ended my sentence in a preposition. 
Anyway long article really sort formative assessment is a whole bunch of things boils down to this:

Chappuis, J. (2009). Seven strategies of assessment for learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

 Helpful right?  I mean....duh.  Who is trying to utilize processes that don't lead to improved student learning.   The process isn't the important part.  If you read all of the Black and William articles from early on the aspect I found most important was the value of feedback.

In an ideal world there would be enough time and resources for every teacher to work one on one with every student on every assignment.   In that world we would know immediately when a student was struggling and could immediately re-mediate or address misconceptions.  In the real world there are heavy demands on our time and a lot of students.  Grading piles up, students don't always ask questions when then need help, when we do review or return graded assignments students may not review the concepts they missed.

There are dozens of ways to deal with this (exit tickets, Socrative, Thumbs Up/Down during discussions, etc.) but what do you do if you are in a class where students have choice in their daily assignments?  My physics class is based on a flipped mastery concept, kids choose the unit and assignments they want to work on daily.  Once they have mastered that concept they can move on.  Lectures are videos and during class we work on activities, labs, and calculation.

It is a lot of fun and utter chaos daily.

This week I discovered a new tool (thank you 3DGameLab Teacher Camp) called ASSISTments.  This is a free web based platform developed by Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  It lets me develop assessments (multiple choice, free response, numeric entry) that students can select themselves.  I don't have to assign them one at a time, this works out well in my class where I could have 23 kids working on 23 different activities in a day.

ASSISTments provides feedback along the way, so I can set up an assessment to provide hints when a question is answered incorrectly, or require students to answer a certain number of questions right before proceeding.   Obviously the students have immediate feedback,  and I as the instructor can see at a glance how students are doing on all assessments assigned without having to go through a bunch of steps to look at various different screens.  So far the interface is very easy to use.

Right now I am just playing with it and setting up assessments and looking at them with my student account to see how the whole thing works together but it does look promising.  It has an iPad app too!

Science Practice 2: Using Mathematics Appropriately

Science Practice 2: The student can use mathematics appropriately. 

Specifically the practice calls for AP science students to be able to:

• justify the selection of a mathematical routine to solve problems 
• apply mathematical routines to quantities that describe natural phenomena  
• estimate quantities that describe natural phenomena 

 

From Wikimedia Commons

  MATH!  I love math. I love arithmetic. I love graphing.  I love stats.  I hate multi variable calculus.  I am a bit ambivalent about differential equations even though I am terrible at them (the last two show the effects of a miserable professor and amazing professor respectively).  Regardless of my personal feelings on math there is no denying that math is deeply ingrained and intertwined in the sciences and any type of research.

In graduate school I once had a professor (in education not biology) force me write a research proposal that ultimately would produce only qualitative data.  I remember thinking, "What is the point of that?  Observations by themselves mean nothing unless you can identify trends."  How do we know if a trend is significant?  Statistics!  

So now the challenge is reinforcing the consistent use of stats in our daily labs and incorporating mathematical models of the natural world where they make sense (population growth, osmotic pressure, gene frequencies).  I like to introduce the mathematical models early on with a discussion of human population growth in the first couple weeks of the year.    I start this with a TED video by Hans Rosling showing the global trends in population growth. 

After the video students calculate population sizes for various countries 100 years from now based on current growth rates.  This moves into a discussion of human carrying capacity and identification of limiting resources.  While the topic is abstract, it has a direct tie in to students lives.  They can all related to overpopulation and limited natural resources.  It also provides a springbard to talking about the loss of biodiversity worldwide and concepts of keystone species and extinction spirals.   

Instructional Rounds Take 1

This week LHS embarks on our first set of instructional rounds.  This is something that the Campus Design Team has been working toward since last summer.  Instructional rounds consist of teachers visiting other teachers classes (3 teachers for about 10 minutes each for this first round) in order to just observe what is happening.  No names, no PDAS implications, just teachers walking other teachers rooms to see what is happening at LHS.

After walking classrooms teachers debrief and identify patterns and contrasts that were seen in all classes.  Ultimately we will identify a "problem of practice" for LHS, which is just pedagogy talk for a goal to work on as a faculty and campus.  What makes this different from every other set of walkthroughs?  This is teachers walking, teachers observing, teachers identifying trends, teachers choosing a goal, and teachers planning to achieve that goal.  Rather than relying on data handed to us by outside consultants, we are taking responsibility for our own community and deciding how we want to proceed.  Hopefully this will lead to some really productive discussions and teachers taking ownership for implementing positive changes.

On a personal note I am excited about getting to walk through and see some of the fantastic things that other teachers are doing.  We all tend to get comfortable in the activities that we do and not branch out or push ourselves.  Instructional rounds give me time to gain some new ideas and steal them for my classroom.

To learn more about instructional rounds check out the article by Elizabeth City in Educational Leadership, or you can just email me and I will send you in the right direction!

M^3 Wrap Up

Maybe I should buy a ladder and with an iPad boom

So after two days of watching protoadults play with beads, the final products have been submitted.  I haven't graded all of them yet but I have watched a few of them.

They seem to be a bit more correct and for the most part well done.   Right now it seems like there is a better understanding of independent assortment and recombination.  Now the question is can they take that knowledge out of the context of the model and apply it in new contexts.

Modeling Meiosis - AKA My Least Favorite Activity All Year

Back in the old days before the AP Biology rewrite there was a lab on Mitosis and Meiosis.  It involved a section on modeling the phases of meiosis.  Most teachers used a kit that included pop beads and magnets that students used to demonstrate and then draw the phases of meiosis (I am oversimplifying, there are questions that go with it too).

Seems easy enough right?  Except that even after sitting with students and demonstrating meiosis they still couldn't really explain the differences between homologous pairs and sister chromatids.   Metaphase I almost always looked wrong even after they copied it out of a book or off the web.  Crossing over?  That was frequently a lost cause leading to another 2 days cutting and taping paper chromosomes to teach crossing over and how it leads to genetic diversity.

Several years ago I made the decision that instead of having students draw the phases of meiosis they needed to video themselves moving the bead chromosomes through each phase while they described them.  While that made it very easy for me to identify exactly where students were confused, it didn't really help them think through the process in depth that I had hoped.  Rather than identify gaps in their personal understanding and ask questions, they just made videos with misconceptions.

When the redesign was announced I was pretty excited about the possibility of a more student centered, inquiry type approach to the dreaded Meiosis Modelling Madness (M^3).  Alas, the new student lab manual still includes M^3, in a modified format, but still there.

This year students are using the same beads and magnets to create videos that demonstrate all of the steps of meiosis one by one.  Instead of them just skipping from Prophase I to Metaphase I they have to show and explain (in captions, labels, or with audio) how the homologous pairs form, how crossing over occurs, and how the homologous pairs migrate to the center of the cell.

The order has become important.  They are paying more attention.  "Do I need spindle fibers yet?"  "Does crossing over occur between sister chromatids?"  I am getting good questions.  Yes they are questions about learning the steps of a process, but they are owning that process and starting to see that the machinery for Meiosis evolved out of Mitosis.    They are starting to understand that crossing over and independent assortment lead to genetic diversity, and thus phenotypic variation in populations. 

Writing on and sitting on the lab benches

Taking pictures for the animations requires being a few feet away.

The floor was a viable option to write on but they really like the
neon expo markers on the black tables

Check out the engineering on their "tripod."  That is a ring stand, iron ring
a paper towel roll (to keep it from tipping over), and a squashed cardboard paper towel
insert (to get the angle of the iPad camera just right). 

I don't know if they are engaged because they are interested in the process or if they are just motivated to produce a good video.  The grade isn't valuable enough for most of them to put in the effort I am seeing.  Regardless they are engaged and I am enjoying watching them work on something that I normally dread.

Anybody have any other ideas on modeling meiosis?  I am open to suggestions for next year!

Student Created Models in AP Biology

There are many different types of models available to AP Biology students, ranging from online lab simulations, to cellular animations, and highly detailed drawings and molecular imaging. One of the problems with a model is that they rarely fully engage my students.  They see them as just pictures, or movies, or games, even when they use the models to answer questions or test hypotheses that can't be tested in the classroom, there is always a disconnect.  

What I have seen work successfully to engage students intellectually and personally is the CREATION of models.  The old adage "when I do I understand" really seems to be applicable.  

I try to include at lease one modelling activity in each AP Bio unit, frequently having the students model a cellular, or molecular process.   Since my students all have iPads and access to MacBooks, a lot of these activities incorporate various iPad apps.  The activity that seems to be the most popular with students (to create, and to study from later), is the stop motion animation. 

Here are a couple examples of student products from the past year.   I give minimal guidelines on these projects, typically a list of things that must be modeled and some technology requirement that forces the students to expand their current skill set and keeps the project fresh.

Dehydration Synthesis - Jimmy 2013

Competitive Inhibition in Enzymes - Leslie 2013

Diffusion - Daniela 2013

 

Transcription & Translation - Yash 2013 

There are literally dozens of free apps for making stop motion animations using pictures.  I am most familiar with iMotion HD, though my students have started switching to Stop Motion Studio recently.  Many of my students also use iMovie on their iPad (not free), or the classroom MacBooks.