When researching, there are two main types of information sources: primary and secondary sources. Understanding the difference between them and how to use them can help make your projects more thorough and accurate.
What it Teaches:
This video looks back at a big event in history: The Great Storm (England, 1703). It asks the question - how do we know what we know about this storm? This question is answered by explaining primary and secondary sources. It teaches:
Why sources matter in establishing facts and information
What represents a primary source and how to use them
Why primary sources may present an incomplete picture
What represents a secondary source
How primary and secondary sources may contribute to the best understanding
The Cut-out Library Now Contains over 1500 Cut-outs!
About the video: Literacy comes in many forms. As the adoption of computers, mobile devices and the Internet has grown, digital literacy has become more important than ever. This video will help your audience understand the potential of digital literacy in our societies. It teaches:
Why literacy matters
The basic ideas of digital literacy
Why digital literacy is becoming a requirement
How digital literacy impacts all parts of life
The potential of working towards digital literacy in societies
We’re quite fond of this video, partly because we are such big believers in the power of digital literacy. In fact, a big goal of our work is to increase digital literacy by explaining technology in an understandable way.
More From The Common Craft Blog
Lessons in Visualizing Complex Ideas - This post includes a video by the folks at TEDed who lay out the process many designers use to find ideas for turning complex subjects, like Big Data, into compelling visuals.
Actually, it's not just an idea, it's a whole session about how explanation skills (and technologies) can help educators be more awesome.
Here's the thing - it's not easy to become a speaker at SXSWedu. To do it, I need your VOTES.
You see, when the kind SXSWedu folks review all 700 proposals, they consider audience voting for 30% of their decision. So, this is my shameless attempt to encourage you to vote for my presentation.
Here's the description of my talk:
As an educator, you explain ideas every day. But have you ever considered what makes an explanation work or how to improve your explanations? What if you could help students and staff relate to and understand complex ideas by explaining them more effectively?
Explanation is a skill and in this session, you’ll learn how to package complex ideas into effective explanations that inspire and motivate your students using a few simple principles. You’ll also learn about the emerging, affordable technologies you can use to create, present and share meaningful explanations.
Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft and author of The Art of Explanation will show you how to intrigue and motivate others with remarkable explanations.
Thanks so much for the help and I hope to see you at SXSWedu!
Recently we saw Ira Glass, the host of the popular radio show and podcast This American Life, speak about "Reinventing Radio." One of his first points was about the seriousness of how news and events are usually covered. His show strives to be different - and look for ways to approach news from an original and remarkable perspective.
My first thought was to compare this to education and especially educational videos. So many of them are so very serious. I will teach you this...you are learning this...click here. No fun at all.
We need more fun. We need resources that entertain and educate. Lately I've seen a number of video explanations that use music to present ideas in a truly remarkable way, and that's the big idea in my mind - to make an explanation remarkable.
I wish I could have learned more subjects like this as a young person. I have a feeling we'll be seeing more in the future. Do you have examples? Share them in the comments...
Late last year I was invited to present at an event called Big Ideas Fest, which focuses on change and inspiration related to K-20 education. My presentation, entitled "Viral to Valuable" was about 15 minutes long and appeared during a track of the conference called "Scale and Spread", which related to scaling and spreading an idea. If you're interested in the Common Craft story and how we came to focus our business on video as a digital product, etc., I tell the story in this video:
To find more videos of presenters from the event, check out the Big Ideas Fest YouTube channel. To learn even more about the Common Craft story, see our About page.
One of our most suggested titles, this video is aimed at educators who are on the front lines of helping students of all ages understand and avoid plagiarism.
In researching this video it became clear that there are two types of plagiarism - intentional and unintentional. While we cover intentional plagiarism, we also highlight the situation where a person has positive intentions, but lacks information about what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it.
This video is currently available to Common Craft members with captions in English.
