My head’s been all over the place over the last week. I’ll honestly say that I refrained from even opening up my dashboard page for fear that I would type more negative material. Yes, my last post was negative. I’m trying, I really am. I’ve had some great conversations with great friends to help me keep my focus on the true prize.

We had a great photostory 3 workshop on my campus Monday evening. Many thanks to Karen Seddon who is coming out every month. (Last month was Audacity, this month was Photostory 3). The good news is that 5 of my teachers showed up. The bad news was the amount of complaining from teachers that the workshop was so late in the day. Yes, it was after school. All five of the attendees were newer adapters, even going so far as saying they are true, green newbies. That’s okay. Baby Steps. I’d forgotten the importance of that little mantra.

We have a 5th Grade teacher on campus that has been doing research projects, the old fashioned way. Let’s research, and oh yea, let’s write about 4 pages about what you’ve researched. Notice, not what they’ve learned. I tasked her with finding a way to spice up her project outcome. For the most part, she obliged. Instead of a paper, she offered her students a choice of a powerpoint or a display board. Progress. YES! That’s not the end. Begging would be an appropriate way to say what I did. I begged her to come to the PD on Monday night. Happy to report that her project outcome has changed again, with a due date pushed back to the end of January. We’ve discussed dates/times to come in and teach the students how to use Photostory 3 to create their own stories.

As described by me in previous postings, her reply to the school based mantra of “there’s no time for such projects like this” was this: “I don’t care, these students NEED to learn how to research and create something.” I should also note that this is an educator that has been teaching for almost 15 years. Baby Steps!

I have another post brewing in my head. More on that later, don’t want to get them confused.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages.

Tom.

Technorati Tags: PD education technology edtech photostory3

Thursday marked the second year in a row that I presented digital storytelling at the FAME (Florida Association for Media in Education) Conference. Most, if not all, of the attendees for this conference were media specialists. I did see a spattering of teachers when I asked if there were any teachers in the hall. It was a pretty great turnout for my session. Had standing room only, and saw some sitting in the aisle just inside the door. Made me feel really good.

Now me being the procrastinator that I am, I waited until the last minute to complete my presentation slides. I know I know…I’m a tech guy, why am I using powerpoint to present??? Well, I learned my lesson last year with this conference. My goal last year was to run everything off of my wikipage. HA! I was dropped off REAALLY early to last year’s session, as my wife needed the use of the car that day. So I had a few hours to kill before my presentation. Lo and behold, as I’m setting up in the presenter’s room, I find there is no internet available that’s free. Just the paid 4.95/hr or 19.95/24 hour through the Disney Resort. Not having my credit card, and being cheap, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I paid for the hour to at least get the information that I wanted off of the wiki and put together a slide presentation. So I knew better for this year.

Last year’s presentation was more of a ‘how to’ begin digital storytelling and other video content into the curriculum. I took the approach this year of integration. I was very surprised at the number of media specialists in the room that have not used, nor even heard of digital storytelling. They took copious amounts of notes, and asked many great follow-up questions. What amazed me the most was learning that a school had the use of windows movie maker blocked as part of the group policy settings. Fortunately having backup plans like using Photostory3, slideshare, and voicethread are out there to allow educators to get around such roadblocks.

Being my second solo presentation, I had a great time doing it. I look forward to getting in front of groups again. Although, my wait won’t be that long. I am presenting on Audacity, Blogging and Online web 2.0 tools later this week at the FAACS conference at the Orange County Convention Center. I can get used to doing this pretty quickly! Unfortunately I got word 2 weeks ago that my proposal on blogging for teachers for FETC was denied. Oh well….I get to hang out with Anne T. who’s coming down then

Till Tomorrow…

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

Technorati Tags: FAME2007 digistory digitalstorytelling pd

Somewhere over this past week our National Florida Institute was called this, an academic excursion. I really came to like it, isn’t that what we as educators want our students to strive for? It seems a vague concept, how can academics and excursion go together for them? I’ve a saying that I picked up years ago, and believe it or not, came from the back of a Tshirt my wife had. It goes: “Life’s a Journey, Not a Guided Tour”. That fits into the concept of academic excursion. What we do as educators help our young and old students on their life’s excursion. Building them up into what we hope and pray to be successful adults.

Deep thoughts, eh? This was just something that I thought about all week as myself and 50ish other STAR DEN educators “embarked” on the Florida National Institute’s floating conference. I was very unlucky enough to not be able to get typepad to update for any blog posts during the whole week. I basically got tired of losing my posts, so, I decided to just hold off, write stuff down and formulate my thoughts after we returned.

Florida was well represented at this week’s Institute, with myself, Ruth and Chris Paine, Carol Papuga, Janet Hallstrom, our Leader Chair Carole Gooden, Marie Colemen, and Melissa Lander. I’m hoping I can hit each of them up for a guest blogger spot here in the upcoming week so that they can share with everyone what an invaluable experience these National Institutes are. As for myself, it was great to reconnect with all of the Discovery Educator Network staff, as well as, some DEN members whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year at the summer institute in Silver Spring.

As for the events of the week, I will break down my thoughts on a day by day recap so as to not make this a super huge post:

Day 1 began with everyone converging on Port Canaveral. The embarkation process was pretty seamless and didn’t really take long once we got inside. Didn’t take long for me to find Marty Green from MI DEN so that we could get things rolling. Lunch on the ship, then it was time to get to learning. Joe Brennan shared some great tips for making movies. It was a real fast paced session, with barely enough time to get the notes I wanted typed/written up. He shared with us tips about types of shots, ways to set up a scene and to spark interest in the movie. We broke up into groups and worked on a 90second movie based on the concepts we just learned. Each of the groups did a wonderful job, with much joy and raucous laughter coming from everyone.

After all videos were shared, it was about 1030pm and we broke. The true networking then began as people who were strangers, having never met, or only through emails or Second Life, sparked immediate friendships and conversations.

Truly a networking delight!

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…(and to stop swaying)

Tom.

Technorati Tags: PD education DEN DiscoveryEducation edtech

Being the Social Studies teacher that I am…I went ahead and created one based loosely on the Three R’s (reduce, reuse and recycle). This is what I came up with: My ToonDoo. Very neat if you ask me, and it was a VERY easy interface to navigate and follow. The interface is Flash based. So enjoy!

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

As with most web 2.0 tools that I’ve come across, and I’m sure the same for you, a free registration is needed. I recommend doing it before you start dabbling with it for the first time. The practice video that I put together to check out the GUI was lost after I did the registration. All is not though as I did like the GUI that they have put together. It’s very easy to use and follow along. The first screen allows you to pick the music that you want to use. There is a WIDE variety of music to choose from, including some tracks from some named bands that are out there, Bare Naked Ladies included. Photos could be added from your local drive, Flickr, Photobucket or MySpace. Once the photos were added, all that was needing to be done to the video was adding effects to the pictures (transitions, panning, zooming).

Overall, it was very easy to use and I would recommend using it as an alternative to Microsoft’s PhotoStory 3 if you didn’t have it readily available on all of your machines (PC based labs only of course). Again, I’m saying this after not having tried out SlideShare yet. My one worry for application in the education field is this, there is no filtering about what content is on there it seems. I will take a deeper look, but just on the first page of videos I see a video entitled “Alcoholic Fun”, which I would deem very inappropriate for our students. It’s one saving grace is you have the ability to make your videos private, so student work could remain that way.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

Update: Wanted to update everyone. Thanks to Barbara from fliptrack for stopping by and leaving this message in the comments section of this post. I wanted to put it up here for those that don’t follow the conversations that go along.

Hi!

Thanks for checking out Fliptrack! Sorry to hear you had a problem with your video rendering. We were still enabling some of these elements this morning, and this is now all fully functional.

I just wanted to drop you a note regarding filtering. We are filtering for content, though we do tend to a pg/pg-13 filter we will screen or remove particularly offensive material. We have had student projects go up in the past, both as public and private videos – the only thing we are really lacking for these is spell check!

Again, we’re glad you stopped by.

Thanks Barbara for clarifying this. As with the YouTube craze, I can see this being blocked immediately by  school districts based on content, etc. Which I hope doesn’t happen, as I did like the tool.

Kay will be presenting this spring at the Technology & Learning Tech Forum in Orlando.  I’m trying to get my new principal to spring for the fee on it, but if need be I’m sure I can scrum up the funds for it. (Time to work some OT at the golf course where I moonlight at eh?) There’s a pretty nice line up with the keynote being given by David Warlick himself. Again, well worth the fee to go to it.

I had a VERY nice conversation with a 1st Grade Teacher yesterday afternoon. One that I’d been starving to have since I started. He noticed all of my Discovery Education/unitedstreaming  posters in my office. He then asked if I’ve ever heard of unitedstreaming. After stifling a chuckle, I of course started preaching the praises on the uses of classroom video on demand and how it helped change my teaching methods. Once we got through all of the obligatory head nods between each other it seemed like I was looking in the mirror, or listening to a broken record. Because the same things I was saying, he was repeating almost verbatim. There is hope for this school, next week is FCAT, then the gloves come off. Time to commence training. I know I keep saying the same thing…but this test has to hurry up and get here so we can be done with it already!

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

After a stressful situation where my partner became sick and could not attend, not having a LCD projector, my laptop not initiating to show on a borrowed projector I finally settled down and had a great presentation. Thank you to those who were there for your patience and understanding.

Make sure you check the wiki for the resources and the powerpoint if you were in need of them