Movie Clips in the Classroom

The start of a new semester is always inspiring.  What will you do to tweak your class this spring?  I'm going to add a few movie clips to my lectures, just to spice things up a bit. 

There are a number of ways to get movie clips.  One way is to buy the DVD and then play the clip you have found.  Another way is to use your Netflix account and pull up the movie, if available, via online streaming.  You might also use movie trailers, available on many websites.  I recently discovered an even easier way to find and use movie clips, and that's through the website movieclips.com.

The good folks at Movieclips have dissected over 1700 movies and have provided over 12,000 clips.  Going through the clips would be a daunting tast, but because Movieclips has attached categories to each clip, it's a breeze to find the one that would work in your classroom.  You can search the movie clips by movie, mood, theme, actor, director, or 25 other categories.  Once you find the movie clip you want to use in class, you can embed it into your PowerPoint or Prezi presentation, or share the clip through e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.  As with many cool online sites, this one is helpful, but can be a time-waster! 

Here's a good one for the start of the teaching semester, even though it's related more to high school than college.  Click on the link, and move the curser at the bottom of the video to :45 seconds into the clip to start the feel-good video of the day.   I am a Teacher!  (Note:  The movie clip isn't embedded here because it's now allowed by Blogger.)

Movieclips provides a great service, but with any use of movie clips in the classroom, you need to follow a few general guidelines.  Make sure the movie clip is introduced properly.  It should be closely tied into the class topic.  Test the clips prior to class to make sure they will work properly when you need them to work!  Finally, don't overuse movie clips; they lose their effectiveness if used too often.

Questions? Comments?  Please comment below or e-mail me a jrudnick@epcc.edu.  See you next week!

Yes! Text in Class!

  If you have teenagers at home, you know that their cell phones are used as watches and as texting devices. Occasionally, they're used as  phones, if they have to talk to you, the parent!  In that respect, our college students are not much different than younger teens.  There are few students who do not have cell phones in class, and they use them to text.  If you want to read more about cell phone use at every age, you might want to read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, called  Y U Luv Text, H8 Calls, by Katherine Rosman.  Obviously, texting is here to stay, at least for now, so, let's join the party!

  One way to put the cell phones to good use in the classroom is to use Poll Everywhere. As the name implies, Poll Everywhere is a polling system that can be used for quick interactions.   Poll Everywhere is free for a group up to 30 people, and can involve your students and let them use their cell phones at the same time.  Poll Everywhere can be at as a quick substitute for Clickers, which have become more popular in our classes. 

  Once students have texted their answers, either from their cell phones or computers, you can show the results live via the Internet or a PowerPoint slide.  An Internet connection is necessary for this, of course.  The following video gives you an overview of how easy it is to use Poll Everywhere.



There are a couple of limitations to Poll Everywhere.  It seems that you can create just one question at a time, but you can quickly move from one question to another.  Also, students must have access to a cell phone or computer connected to the Internet to participate. 

Poll Everywhere is something I think would be a good ice-breaker at the beginning of class or a quick wake-them-up activity after 20 minutes or so of lecturing.  Students could also create test questions for the their classmates to answer.

Once you've tried Poll Everywhere, comment on the blog so we can learn from your experiences.

Have a great week.

Stumble

In my Internet travels, I run across many websites.  Some provide me with research, some inspire me, and some are just for fun.  I often choose to use one of my favorite websites, StumbleUpon, to find things I may not have found using more traditional search engines like Google.  I've checked boxes on the website to show StumbleUpon what type of things I'm looking for.  According to the StumbleUpon website, there are almost 500 topics from which to choose.  The topics range from the serious to the ridiculous.  I have selected educational topics to my list of hobby and humor topics to justify my surfing existence. 

You can stumble in two ways.  The first way is to search from the website.   The second way is to download the toolbar.  You can't do this at work, (of it you can, it's frowned upon), but feel free to do it on your home computer.  You do have to sign up so that your topics can be remembered, but it's free. Once you're registered and have decided on your topics, start clicking on the "StumbleUpon" button. 

You'll notice a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" on the site.  If you like the page you're visiting, you can save it by clicking  "I like it!."  Likewise, if you don't like the content of a specific webpage, you can click "thumbs down," so that site is no longer in your mix of searched websites.

StumbleUpon is unique because it is a social website.  According to doshdosh.com, "Users can also use the Stumble Upon toolbar as a form of social bookmarking. By surfing the web and tagging or submitting specific websites, each user can keep track of which websites they like and share it with others."  If you find a website that isn't already part of StumbleUpon, you can click "I Like It!" and it will become part of the network of websites that others will be able to view.

Although it seems like it might be a total time-waster, depending on what you choose as your topics, Stumbleupon can produce very interesting results.  By using this toolbar, I have found great recipes, topics for classes, and I've also had some fun along the way. 

Give StumbleUpon a try.  I'll warn you, however, it's like candy corn.  You'll want "just one more," and may end up clicking the night away.

See you next week!