Day Four

Today started spectacularly.

We were given flip cameras. For free. Easy flash video cameras with three buttons. They have been the top sellers at Amazon since they were introduced last year.

Then we were sent filming each other for nursery rhymes. Which we would edit and make into a short film using whatever software came with our platform.

I wanted to do the preamble, but decided instead to have my team list the united states. My grand dream would be to switch off from one to the next to the next using an edit. But then it became the following:

me: alabama alaska
them: alabama alaska

And it became a bit tedious. Also, my voice preceded each of their lines, so I had to edit myself out. In retrospect, I should have simply done a nursery rhyme and been done in half an hour.

Unfortunately, I had to edit myself out and edit each speaker into an alphabetical list of all the states. To add insult to injury, I also had trouble with the rudimentary task of removing clips of film. So even though I selected the beginning and ending of each clip, I simply couldn't get the editing to do what I wanted. This turned to frustration.

And then I developed a work-around. I would "split" my video files each time I wanted to edit and then simply erase the part of the split that I no longer wanted. While this can't be the best way, it was the only way I could get this to work.

I had some time pressures and then I realized that I had some serious editing issues to do. Had I had more time, I would have explored MovieMaker in much more detail. I might even take the tutorial. I'm one of those people who RTFM as we used to say.

Day Three

It's Wednesday and the high today is supposed to be 101 degrees.

We watched a tech integration video from the SCCOE which was helpful and realistic, which is not something we deal with much here. The fact that we don't have computers for every student at our school. We have four run-down and slow labs. This video by Chris Walsh reminds us that the result is the most important, not how much tech you use.

We discussed our projects and looked at prior ones.

We then spent way too long on the program "Inspiration" which I've been exposed to for four years now and still don't believe that it is useful to me and I'm not confident that my students would find it useful either.

Day Two

The sessions included "systematic change" re using tech in a school that might not be ready for it. Also, a history of tech advances and how they were accepted or rejected in their time.

My review of this session: This was a 15 minute talk stretched into 90 minutes. We know if we're early adopters. We know that we may come up against resistance to our new tech ideas when we get back to our schools in the fall.

The other one was the start of the copyright project whereby we make a podcast about copyright law. This was informative and actually relates to our classrooms. We all use films that we might not be exactly "legal" for us to use. So getting a definite ruling on the law (or at least as much as it's been ruled upon) was a great and useful thing for us to do. We actually ran out of time while we were brainstorming podcast ideas. I liked this one much better.

First Post

First day of class. It is July 7th. It is 95 degrees outside. I am still tired from my trip to Michigan. Maybe I'm on Eastern time.

What I did today:

--set up almost an entire classroom website here