My Teacher is on Clickademics.com; How do I Watch?

If you are a student of a Clickademics teacher, you can watch his or her lessons for free. Here is how:

1. Get the password from your teacher.

2. Go to www.clickademics.com and click on the "Teachers" tab.

3. Click on the button that reads "Click Here".

4. You will be asked for a password.

Enter the password that your teacher has given to you.

5. Create a User Name and enter an email address.

Be sure to let your folks know before entering personal information on any website.

6. Check your email. You will find your new log in information.

Click on the "Log In" button and enter the User Name and Password that we emailed to you.

7. You are now ready to review your teacher's lesson any time. Just click on the "Teachers" tab again to find a list of your teacher's lessons.

8. In the future when you want to watch,

click on the "Log In" button,

enter your Username and Password that was emailed to you,

click on the "Teachers" tab, and

click on the list of his or her lessons.

How Students Can Use Clickademics.com

The problem with school is that it happens at school.

In the old days, memorization was an important part of school. Students would be given lists of terms, names, dates, and other facts which they would commit to memory before the test. Now that technology has made fact retrieval instantaneous with the phone in your pocket, it is the skills that are most important. Students don't need to know facts, they need to know what to do with the facts.

The problem is that skills are harder to learn than facts. You can memorize a list of state capitals, but to know how to write an essay for history, you need to practice. And if you get stuck, you need someone to help.

However, when school happens at school, the best person to help is at school. Your teacher is not sitting next to you at 10:00 the night before your essay is due. Help with academics skills should be as easy to find as facts are.

We created Clickademics.com so that students could get help when they need it, not when the teacher schedules a lecture. We want to fill a number of needs:

• With more teachers providing project-based learning, students often need to use skills that that were covered in class weeks or months earlier. Students can brush up on the basics on our site when they need it.
• Every teacher has a teaching style, which is usually they way he or she learns best. This does not always match a student's learning style. Some students need to see a concept taught a couple of different ways before they can truly understand it. Hearing a lesson in class and following it with the same topic on our site from a different teacher can help.
• Standardized tests are not fair. They cover years' worth or material on one day. Students are tested on math that they have not studied in two or three years. Our site is a great place for Calculus and Trigonometry students to review Algebra and Geometry concepts that could be on exit exams and college entrance exams.
• Most people would rather watch online video than read textbooks
• Much of the video out there is poor quality and not easy to watch.

So let our experienced teachers help when and where you need it.

Classroom Lectures are so Twentieth Century

As I have said before and will definitly say again, our school system is stuck in the past; in the 1970s at best, in the 1950s at worst.

The idea of students sitting in straight rows while the teacher lectures was great when school was meant to create good soldiers and factory workers. However, while soldiers now need to be quick and adaptable, and factory jobs are rapidly going oversees, the schools are late catch up.

Everyone talks about how the twenty-first century classroom needs to be more authentic, more project-based, but few have found a good way to implement it. Yes, I want students to be good at problem solving since memorizing is pointless in this age of instant information retrieval. However, sometimes teachers just need to teach, and there are basic concepts that students need to learn. And many of these skills are difficult or impossible to learn through projects, discovery, or exploration.

Since there are not enough hours in the school year to do it all, I propose putting the lectures online - on my website for instance - and save the classroom for group projects and hands-on learning. A student can learn the quadratic formula alone just as well, if not better, than in a room full of students. If the teacher is going to speak uninterrupted for half an hour anyway, you might as well put it on film. Let the students watch it on their laptops or cell phones the way they want as many times as they need. Save the classroom for question and answer and true project-based learning.

A mid-project assessment (read: quiz) will reveal any students who did not grasp the content, and the teacher can direct them back to the online lesson and to an after-school help session. Even better, the database of online videos could be so broad that the struggling students could watch a couple of other teachers explaining the same concept but in a different style that might reach the student better.

Students need spaced repetition to truly learn, but there is not enough time in the school day for all of that to take part in the classroom. Put it on the web and let a database track who is watching their lessons.

Why principals should watch Harry Potter

Ask most Elementary or Jr. High students if they would like to attend Hogwarts, and you will likely get an excited "yes". Of course, their primary reason would be to learn magic - learn invisibility so that they could spy on their friends and shoplift - but it is also because it is a good school.

I have been watching some of the early Harry Potter movies on television lately since the new film is in theaters. I have noticed that the school does not just mirror traditional British schools, but it also can be a model for change for our schools. Here are some ways how American schools should be more like Hogwarts Academy.

1. Hands-on, project-based learning. Though the teachers still lecture, it is always to prepare the students for practicing spells themselves. The classroom scenes always show the teacher explaining the task, modeling it, and providing guided practice. In this way there is a high risk/high reward environment with enough support to ensure success.
2. Learning that is applicable to real life. The skills that the students learn usually, and sometimes too conveniently, pay off later in the adventure. It is not perfect since the students still groan about essays and exams, but students are motivated by the fact that their lessons will pay off in the real world.
3. A sense of belonging. By dividing the students into the four houses, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin, the school gives every student a place where they are on the inside. Adolescents have a need find their identity, and that is usually done by fitting in with a group. It also means that many are left on the outside. Even the way that the teachers reward and punish the house for the actions of individuals solidifies the tight knit group.
4. Uniforms
5. Rigorous but caring faculty. it is something that students do not realize until long after school; they love challenging teachers. Not just difficult teachers. Ones that push students to do their best by asking a little bit more than the student thinks he or she can do. Almost all of the teachers at Hogwarts have high expectations, eliciting love and loyalty from the students. One of the few exceptions, Professor Gilderoy Lockhart played by Kenneth Branagh, is easy yet incompetent, and the students hate him.

So maybe schools should not look down at Rowlings's books and view them as a model for their schools instead.

New Format

I have not written in this blog for a couple of months because it was simply turning into a place where I documented some of my experiences building the Clickademics site, but a blog is not the place for that. Thus, I neglected it.

However, I was reading the Occam's Razor blog of Avanash Kaushik, and he made an interesting point. A blog should be written more like a book than a diary. No one wants to read journal about work, but book written in installments would be worth reading.

After fourteen years of teaching, I have some definite thoughts about the education system and why it needs to change. My time would be much better spent writing about how school could be much more effective, especially if online video sites like mine are part of that.

April 24, 2009

I finally feel like I am gaining some momentum in my project.

During Spring Break, I finally filmed some other teachers. Filming my own lectures is fine, but I needed to get other teachers on board to see if this is going to work.

First, our friend Lizzie was in town an filmed a math lecture with me. She has won awards for her teaching and is really committed to helping her students. I edited her first lesson on multiplying fractions and posted it on the site. Unfortunately, I unknowingly lost a piece of a video file that threw off the beginning of the lesson. Worse still, someone else caught it, but at least I was able to fix it.

Second, a friend of a friend recommended a science teacher in Santa Barbara. I drove up on April 18th and filmed three chemistry lessons. It went really well, and I think that he would like to film more in the future.

I have a few other teachers who are busy now but say that they would like to film later, probably summer. Hopefully, I can line up a few teachers before the summer so that I can film like crazy while the teachers have time.

Now I just have to edit all of the footage. 

March 26, 2009

Things are progressing nicely. Since the beginning of the year, I have been searching for contributing teachers, and I am finally getting some positive results.

I realized in February that the email blast to strangers was not going to work. I have emailed about 100 teachers: two have replied with no commitment, and a third says he is interested after finals.

However, approaching friends (and friends of friends) is working nicely. I have dates in the calendar for a math teacher and a chemistry teacher. I have a four English and two Math teachers who would like to contribute when they have more time.

I suspect that summer and vacations will be very busty times for me since that is when teachers can film most easily. The rest of the year will be spent on the site and on marketing.