"Gone in 60 Seconds", The Classroom Version

Forget high stakes, tire-screeching Nick Cage car theft films.

Instead, follow Jason Calacanis & Mahalo's lead with their recent speed-up of the did you watch it geek frenzy Steve Jobs recent WWDC Keynote address.  Their summation takes the entire 107 minute Keynote preso down to a very easy-to-swallow 60 second, giving us only the highlights.

Now, imagine if every one of our teacher/classroom lectures were stripped down to an easily digestible video snippet like this, too.  What impact would it have on our kiddos' ability to retain the lectured stuff that really matters?

Wait.  A thought...

We'd have to actually film and store videos of all our lectures to pull this off.

Shrug.

Too much work.

I'm just gonna make the kids take notes from the black/whiteboard.  Even the ones that are sick and miss lectures; even all those 'flat' classroom advocates' sons/daughters no matter how easy it'd be to hook up Skype for free.

It was good enough for me when I was their age -- up and downhill in snow -- and it's gonna continue to be good enough for them, too!

Comments

[Kern]

Ahh man I'm so psyched. I can't wait to walk into Mr. Long's room next year and get my Cliff Notes of Tale of Two Cities. No I forgot he's a Web 2.0 guy so he'll just link to the Spark Notes! And then we are going to watch the HBO Bunny's do Apocalypse Now in 3 minutes instead of reading that dumb Heart of Darkness book. The Horror.. Wait do you think he's kidding. I'm so confused I'm just going to go look up SDK in Wikipedia and see if it tells me what happened in the speech and why it was so ground breaking. (Saunters off stage left head down)

[A. Mercer]

I've done something like that, but in the other direction. I experimented with doing "micro-video" as an into to explaining concepts. Here was a 30 sec number I did to explain maps, and show 2nd graders their "place" in the world: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d5a7d90aa7eb49927e1b

I'd like to experiment with this some more next year. I kinda cribbed it from an idea that Hal Davidson had, but he was doing stuff for High School. The considerations on how to structure for the little kiddos are a little different.

For what you've shown, I don't know if it would replace the whole lesson, but it make a marvelous summary/review.