A Week of iWizards

We had lots of iWizard Activity this week which I have captured in iPhone photos.

Wednesday morning the iCreate team gathered to work on the two project sessions that they will offer to 7th and 8th graders.  At one end of the table the drawing/animation team is working and at the other the photo/video team is planning their lesson.

On Thursday morning before school we held a formal reception welcoming new iWizards into the group.  We had seventeen 9th graders apply!. Below is a photo of veteran and new members who were still in the Baggot Street Conference Room at the end of the the Reception.

Each year since we Mercy adopted the iPad, the iWizards have demonstrated how we use it for instruction at the Mercy Open House.  Here they are today, mesmerizing visitors with apps such as iAnnotate PDF and ArtRage.

iCreate Workshop

The Mercy iWizards have begun registration for iCreate -- an iPad workshop of 7th and 8th graders on January 17, 2015.  The two sessions will revolve around the following creative apps:

ArtRage

Animation Creator HD

Photogene

iMovie

How Teaching Is Changing, Educators Flooding Twiiter-sphere, and Must-Have Apps

How Teaching Is Changing

The Old: Delivering content shaped for universal consumption

The New: Modeling affection and curiosity

The Difference: Truly valuing how students think

http://tinyurl.com/k3z2q2r 

Twitter Exec Reports that Educators Dominate the Twitter-sphere

Educators like to tweet! Out of the 1/2 billion tweets that post every day, 4.2 million are related to education, according to Brett Baker, an account executive at Twitter.com. To put this in perspective, while you read this past sentence, over 3,000 edu-related tweets have flown across the Twitterverse.

http://tinyurl.com/nzte2sg

Stop talking tech: 3 tips for pedagogy-based coaching

Many tech coaches feel pressured to be the expert in the room, especially when it comes to technology. However, it’s often more effective to approach teachers as learning partners. By asking questions about specific learning activities and areas where a teacher might be interested in collaborating, coaches can provide a more personalized learning experience.

http://tinyurl.com/q72rbst

Top 10 Apps in an Established 1:1 iPad School

Showbie allows you to assign, collect and review student work. As a tool it meets a demand that used to be supplied by a school VLE. The difference here is the ability to ‘open in’ a multitude of apps to create content or provide feedback. A couple of taps sees a student assignment opened and annotated with audio feedback or viewed in the teachers app of choice. It is then just as simple to return the assignment to the student for immediate viewing. Showbie works very well with larger classes where the transfer of information is common and often.

http://tinyurl.com/otzmngu

How to turn your iPad into a desktop with these remote access apps

The following guide is intended for individuals that have a single desktop computer sitting at home that they personally use and wish to access from across the internet on their iPad.

http://tinyurl.com/nzpjkwp

10 Must-Have Free Math Apps

MyScript Calculator

Math vs Zombies for Fluency

Coordinate Grid for iPads

etc.

http://tinyurl.com/k436v3v

Drawn to the Bright Lights

This week I will repost my five favorite Drive-thru items from 2010.  This one appeared in February.  It's a favorite because I am so fond of these collaborations. 

I recently posted "Diary of a Country Priest Movie Review" to YouTube. As I indicated in my last post, I love making these little movie reviews. Sometimes they relate to my film class; other times just for my Film Favorites site. I have written original scripts and created the movies with iMovie. "Three Colors Blue" is a good example.

More often, for purposes of expedience, I use Photo To Movie because it is so darn easy to use (Thanks for the tip, Rick Strobl). And ....I often don't write original scripts. Instead I base them on the likes of great writers like Chris Koehn, Patrick Crogan, James Berardinelli, and David Church. In each case, I have contacted the writer or scholar and requested permission to use his text in my script. The permissions process has been quite gratifying.  The writers are enthusiastic and flattered.

My collaborator for the "Country Priest" is Gary Morris, the editor/publisher of the "Bright Lights Film Journal" -- a terrific film resource. Gary even threw out the possibility that someday in the near future he'll be redesigning his site and might even accommodate little movies like mine! A fun idea and a gratifying collaboration.

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Screen shot of PhotoToMovie "Review- Diary of a Country Priest" project

Fear and Loathing in Las Videos

Less than two years ago, I made it a personal goal to bring video into my teaching. While I am not exactly a whiz, I can shoot, edit, and post with simple tools like my Flip Mino and iMovie. I also require student created video in all three of my courses.

For the most part, this is all cool. But sometimes, I feel kind of out there alone, floundering around. Since students are used to Skyping, chatting, or creating quick video messages for Facebook with their computer cameras, they don't necessarily arrive to class with high production values for their assignments. As I posted recently, our school has no universal standards for video, so I sort of make them up on the fly.

Colleagues present a different type of frustration. Thanks to the mandate by our administration, each academic department will make a short presentation about their curriculum to the entire staff. Thus, both of my departments have approached me for technical help, so that we can look hip and with it (There is considerable irony in this, since both groups have been slow to embrace techie stuff). Well, I recently made a suggestion to one department and posted in to our ning:

I propose that we include a 4-5 minute video that features the projects we do. . . . .The video would be composed of 40-50 still photographs and a voice-over narration. Each member would identify a cool project he or she does and collect some digital photographs that capture it.. . . . I am willing to edit the video but would like someone else to quilt the narrative pieces together into a whole script. I can then work on cutting down the photos or narration to fit the project.

I suggested we get started immediately. Well, you can still file this one under Procrastination.

Finally, since so many staff members are unfamiliar with actually creating videos themselves they have an anything-is-wonderful level of discernment for student creations. This semester, I have attended two all-school assemblies where student created videos were projected for the entire student body (at the request of adults, I'm sure). They were awful. In one case the editing was sloppy; in another case the sound was dreadful. The problems were so basic that the productions would never have been approved in other mediums. But since they were videos, it was assumed that something sort of YouTubish would communicate to our student body.

All things tech seem to evolve at a glacial pace in education, including minimal expectations.

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"with fear in my eyes . . ." Flickr Creative Commons photo by ifranz

Procrastination

Having taught at one school for 35 years, I don't have a broad perspective on the subject of procrastination. But I observe that procrastinating has become a deeply embedded part of my school's culture-- students and adults are rather notorious for waiting until the last minute.

Why blog about such a mundane subject at the Drive-thru? Because multimedia and procrastination are a very bad mix.

I'm thinking of a student group that had all sorts of interesting ideas for expressing information about "equality under the law" on a wiki. They started plans for doing interviews with experts and creating a dramatic enactments on video. None of these came to fruition. They severely underestimated the logistics for achieving their best ideas. Appointments were postponed, technical complications were unanticipated.

Now, before you chalk this up to immaturity, consider this. I've had two academic departments at school approach me about the possibility of helping with video presentation. Cool. I'm glad they see that video can be an attention grabber. But I don't think they appreciate the logistics of making something good. Anyone can turn on a camera. But certainly they don't want to ad lib information about their departments. Who's going to story board this? How may takes will they need? I'm willing to edit their best takes, but not the night before the presentation. As I've warned them, editing is time intensive if you care about production standards.

I'm guessing that at least one of these adult groups goes belly-up with the multimedia. Likely cause of death? Procrastination.

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"07072007012" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by petemaskreplica

Drawn to the Bright Lights

I recently posted "Diary of a Country Priest Movie Review" to YouTube. As I indicated in my last post, I love making these little movie reviews. Sometimes they relate to my film class; other times just for my Film Favorites site. I have written original scripts and created the movies with iMovie. "Three Colors Blue" is a good example.

More often, for purposes of expedience, I use Photo To Movie because it is so darn easy to use (Thanks for the tip, Rick Strobl). And ....I often don't write original scripts. Instead I base them on the likes of great writers like Chris Koehn, Patrick Crogan, James Berardinelli, and David Church. In each case, I have contacted the writer or scholar and requested permission to use his text in my script. The permissions process has been quite gratifying. The writers are enthusiastic and flattered.

My collaborator for the "Country Priest" is Gary Morris, the editor/publisher of the "Bright Lights Film Journal" -- a terrific film resource. Gary even threw out the possibility that someday in the near future he'll be redesigning his site and might even accommodate little movies like mine! A fun idea and a gratifying collaboration.

------------------------------------------
Screen shot of PhotoToMovie "Review- Diary of a Country Priest" project

The Old Guy Goes Multimedia

For want of the correct adaptor, I was prevented from showing my Keynote presentation on "Apple Solutions for the 21st Century" at Madonna U. last week. Instead, I improvised, going directly to the Web for a "show & tell" of some online concoctions I've whipped up for my high school courses. I took a more or less chronological approach. It made me realize how I had evolved over the past 18 months. My progression is outlined here:

It all started with podcasts by phone. I made mp3 lectures with Gabcast for my Government class, and I began to require my students to report by podcast as well.

About 14 months ago, I began to integrate hyperlinks into my film study guides, illustrating concepts with photos and YouTube examples.

Exactly a year ago, I began using the Flip Mino I received for my birthday. I turned the camera on myself and started to record video directions for absent students. More significantly, I loaned the camera out to my AP Government students, so that they could vlog opinion pieces. Then their classmates blogged about these vlogs. The blogging feature of iWeb was perfect for this little enterprise.

In November, '08, I began to edit video movies with iMovie. I was very intimidated by this great software, but once again Atomic Learning helped me out.

In February, 2009, I taught my sophomores how to use wikis so that they could host their own multimedia resources. Many groups conducted interesting interviews and created short video pieces. Using iWeb I began creating exhibition pages for my students' multimedia work. I then shared the link with the editor of the school bulletin, The Mercy Memo.

I began podcasting with GarageBand. What an upgrade over Gabcast! ( Thanks for the tip, Andy Mann). And thank you, Rick Strobl for suggesting at Schuste's retirement party that I animate jpegs with PhotoToMovie. This was the best $50 I ever spent on software. Combining GarageBand mp3s with jpegs and turning them into movies has been a fun summer pastime.

Discovering that I could search for Library of Congress public domain photos on Flickr, further enhanced my ability to animate jpegs for instructional purposes.

I finally learned how to use Keynote. I had no idea that what I took to be slide show software could present so many multimedia options. This is my July and August preoccupation-- making moves using GarageBand (for soundtrack) and Keynote.

While I can't prove that my students are learning more after being fed with this stew of media, I know that I have, and I believe that I am modeling communication skills that they will need in their careers.

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"Multimedia Message" (The cover of the May/June Communication Arts Magazine). Flickr Creative Commons photo by mwilke.

Summer Play with Jpegs

Jpeg Joy
I've kicked off my summer vacation with a flurry of jpeg activity. Before I begin my show 'n tell, I should remark that I received lots of classroom compliments for the iPhoto calendar I whipped up for S-7. This creation came in the wake of the "Ann Arbor" Images book that I described in My Friend, Flickr. Also I am pleased to report that I have now converted all my Lit into Film guides into hyperlink format (See Hyperlink Heaven).

Recent Developments!

For the past two weeks I have been dropping jpegs into movies. My first effort was a film review of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. I enjoyed dropping the jpegs into iMovie so much I have the notion of adding a "Five Star Review" to my web site each month. When I told fellow Web Warrior, Rick Strobl, what I had been up to, he tipped me off on an application that sent me off on a bender. I've completed my last two jpeg movies with PhototoMovie (Check out the free trial). In an afternoon I completed an eight minute movie for my film class on documentaries. Basically it's a podcast with jpeg illustrations. Obviously, for a film class, this has tremendous advantages. But I also wish to try it with my government classes and will check back in next week after I am done raiding the public domain jpegs at the Library of Congress!