Vanguard Video Editing

Video edit of Vanguard Conference footage.
I am becoming more proficient at editing and the aesthetics of editing. Now i’d like to be a better filmer and know how to REALLY manipulate the camera. I have a photo background so it shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Let me know what you think of the filming, the editing and the video as a whole.

Introduction to iPad Apps

As part of our iPad rollout, educators at our school have the opportunity to take iPads home for the summer before we receive our pads and laptops for the upcoming school year. To help dispel some of the techno-paralysis; you know the “WTF do i do with this thing” look, I created a quick list to get people started with iOS and iPad apps that are useful and functional and good-looking. I wanted to give our new iPad adopters a little kickstart to their summer usage.

A lot of technology trainers and professional development people skip the part where people (especially self proclaimed ‘luddites’) have to use the technology as if it were theirs before they can even think about what to do with it for work. I have been emphasizing that point ad infinitum. I want them to take this iPad home and use it as if it were theirs, read books, look at dumb youtube videos, plan your vacation with the kayak app. All of these things will increase their familiarity, just do SOMETHING.

Of course i don’t call their youtube videos dumb, but c’mon lolcatz?

Check my list and see if there are any apps that you would reccomend or prefer for iOS/iPAd newbies.

Flashcards and Quizlet

I have been playing with the Flashcard Deluxe app on my ipad recently. It’s a cool and fairly intuitive app that lets you add up to 5 “sides” to a flashcard which is incredibly cool. I also like the fact that you can download sets of premade cards from quizlet.com. I am spending a couple hours really testing this out today because i think our students could benefit from a flashcard app especially with all of their anxiety about standardized tests. Using the pad and flashcards deluxe could relieve some of that anxiety. It looks like a robust program in conjunction with quizlets.

http://quizlet.com/2038879/scatter/embed/
http://quizlet.com/1877829/scatter/embed/
it provided the “embed” code” as if you could embed their games into your own website, the url even says embed. But i will leave these up here because i still like the games. The first is a link to spanish I vocabulary and the second is a game called “Scatter” where you match images with their descriptions regarding the French Renaissance.

Pretty Cool. I know we will be able to integrate this into our “educational ecosystem”and use them with the iPads. Comment and let me know how you would utilize this site or any other cool flashcard web applications.

The HP Slate Missed the Point.

HP Slate
The Slate is missing out.

The HP slate has been touted in front of consumers for a longer time than the iPad has even been announced. The very first HP slate photos are NO different than the shots we are seeing of the device now. The specs sound enticing, atom z processor, 2 gb of ram and an Ed card slot. The slate was starting to sound promising, 14 months ago. But now, with the iPad getting stronger by the day, it’s strong and growing selections of apps and now the impending 4.2 ios release is going to rocket the adoption of the iPad across business structures; from non profits to fortune 500′s.

One of the most disappointing aspects of the HP slate is the lack of any innovation regarding touch in the operating system. It seems as if the software developers relied on the meager touch features in windows 7; including the onscreen keyboard. It seems like it took hp a whole year to install windows 7 on the slate.

HP totally missed the direction in which tablets are going and how companies have to innovate. They should gave been taking cues from the google android operating system and it’s huge success as a free operating system, the success of the proliferation of app store services, and how controlling the app store is a huge cash cow. If you have ever bought an hp you already know they do not do software well, at all, ever. In the age of blockbuster tablets (a.k.a the very near future) interfaces have to be customized for the platform making the most of the small specialized processors and the touch interface. Hp completed neither of these objectives.

I can’t imagine who would shop in an app store full of hp bloat ware.

By no means an I saying verizon’s or AT&T’s developers are not overstepping the tasteful boundaries of modification to include abysmal amount of bloatware on their hardware platforms and locking you into their traditionally walled off content.

in short HP totally missed the boat this tablet is much more like the orignal mid 90′s tablets. I am hopeful the Samsung tab will be an open platform that is extensible and connects with lots of different peripherals. Providing a wide open platform like windows is perfectly fine but if you are not adding value through interface innovation and application development your are not taking place in the tablet revolution.

How Can We Focus Our Institutional Energies?

Right now at our school there is a scramble going on. Teachers are feeling pressure to get the technology in their classes and start using it. More than excitement and readiness to use cool, new tools i think there is a bit of appeasement going on. The head-of-school has asked teachers to present proposals to the dean of academics about their ideas. As far as i’m aware there have been two proposals that were sent to me for editing for viability and technology apropos. There are a few more projects that are not necessarily vying for the board of trustees money but still looking to push ahead with good ideas.

There seems to be forward movement but our institutional energies are not focused and we are wasting a lot of time scrambling instead of finding some real solutions.

How are we going to focus our energies to make some great progress towards a culture of technological integration? We need to come up with some great Pilot Programs; examples within each department selected by either subject matter or teacher, who want to work with the educational technology specialist to find projects and teaching techniques to introduce technology to.

Right now Kate Moore is working on a Pilot Project for the Charles Dickins unit in English I. Kate is working on an interactive narrative that explores the world that Dickins describes, a victorian england simultaneously wrought by an extreme socio-economic dichotomy. She will be using narrative to engage kids in (engaging, processing, lateral thought,) activities that reward research and lateral thought.

Another rewarding pilot program is the use of ning a platform that allows you to create your own social media website. Steve Henrikson, the history department head and one of THE most respected teachers on campus, came to me and wanted to see if he could incorporate social media into his class. Steve believes that allowing people to beg, borrow and steal ideas the conversation and thought in class will be much richer.

The third Pilot program we are doing is moving three teachers off of conferences and onto our new Branson web-portal, Branson Community Groups. BCG is a way for classes, groups, teams and any other school related group to share information, to participate in discussions, disseminate assignments and manage your group affiliations.

I’m very excited about these projects because they will be examples for other teachers to discover novel and visionary ways to communicate with our students. At Branson our technology initiative is not and should not be about putting more things in the class; more computers, more devices, more websites. I honestly believe that our technology initiative is about discovering new techniques in the classroom, new projects to bridge different types of learning so our teachers can feel comfortable pushing forward with what they think is most important for their teaching style.

Teachers Hold the Keys to Institutional Change

After the Board of Trustees retreat The Head-of-School sent out a list of questions for the faculty and staff in attendance to move forward with. He proposed we have an after work think tank about 2 weeks after the retreat. This is the moment many people have been waiting for to see what initiatives will take priority and immediacy.

The Questions are:

1)What professional development do we need?
2) Is there something each department/teacher could do better using technology?
3) What should we be doing to promote information literacy and best research practices?
4) Should we offer courses in technology and/or advanced digital media?
5) Are there several key projects/activities we could support ti enhance what we are doing to want to do using technology?
6) Are there any pilot projects we could support to answer key questions?

1) What Professional Development do we need?
Professional development is on the mind of The Head-of-School and the deans. They know we have a resistant staff in some cases, especially when it comes to giving up classroom time for P.D. and giving up summertime for P.D. I think the push is going to be for teachers to give up some summer for P.D. before we come back to school.

This week i contacted Brian Mull of November Learning to see about setting up some P.D. for next August based around his presentation on innovative and transformational tools to use in the classroom. The Head-Man is aware of it and will probably mention something about it in the meeting on monday. I agree with his philosophy of using summer time to do so. Because i have to work during summer so might as well make the most of my time there by assisting faculty members incorporate technology.

Brian has a good collection of tools that address a wide variety of needs and we can tailor that toolkit for our teachers and start providing training on those tools to teachers AND students. I think working with our students will help out teachers figure out a way to use these tools in a complimentary way rather than some artificial structure deemed “educational”. Profesional development can not happen if out teachers are using disparate sets of tools from the outset. It will be my job to design a “Teachers Toolkit”

2) Is there something each department or individual teacher could do better using technology?
I think we can focus on using the technology we already have more effectively such as the Wipple-Hill website and incorporating that as an online extension of our school community. Doing some professional development about what is possible will give teachers an idea of where they want to go. In each department we have forward thinking teachers who can and have acted as modelers of technology. The tech committee should be meeting to discuss the activities of these teachers and how they can be generalized.

3) What should we be doing to promote Information Literacy and best research practices?
Our librarian Lori has some great ideas and structure already set up to provide kids with basics, tailored for each grade level and subject. But we both do not think this is enough. Lori and I both want to work with faculty to integrate Information Literacy and Analysis into the subject matter of all of the school’s students. There is much room to create a culture of media literacy at our school and could even be part of their marketing, but it has to be part of the curriculum and not some extra mumbo jumbo on the side.

4) Should we offer courses in technology and/or advanced digital media?
I have very strong opinions about our digital media offerings. Right now the course is taught by a fine artists who teaches mainly from an “Art for art’s sake” perspective. Which is fine, but there are very few lessons about media savvy or analysis. 9th grade is a prime time to start educating kids about the visual-emotional mechanism that makes media so compelling. Asking kids “Why is this movie scene so emotional”, “How are these ads manipulating our emotions or expectations of a product?” and then having the m create compelling content with emotion and conflict and resolution etc. That aspect of the arts education is missing at our school.

In my opinion an introductory digital media class should first focus on the principles of design and story teling with are key to any medium. Secondarily the class should use tools to create audio, visual and film/moving media incorporating these principles. The course work for digital media should be topical be all encompassing giving kids time to create blogs, utilize photography, create video, podcasts and design objects for print and the web.

Branson does not have to be the most “technical” or technology oriented school but we can still prepare out kids for digital interests and careers in fields other than strictly programming.

An Advanced Digital Media course would focus on developing concepts and executing them in a more polished manner and using the principles of design in all fields to create compelling content. Advanced D.M should focus more on design work (creative print and web) and film (which incorporates audio) and spend more time crafting the concepts. Part of our Information Literacy curriculum should be led by the digital media department showing kids the value of creating and analyzing the media they encounter.

5) Are there several key projects or activities we could support to enhance what we are doing or want to do using technology?
I see the role of our Tech Committee being vital in identifying teachers who are using technology in new and progressive ways and generalizing those uses out to other teachers in the department or to those with similar class structures.

Also with the new acquisition of Community features to our website we can engage students, parents and alum while driving more activity and content to our website making it a portal for the school community. Along wit hthat the use of the podcast format to deliver information through our community portal. Departments like college counseling, the academic deans and the registrar can use podcasts to spread frequently asked questions and update the community about coming events

6) Are there any pilot projects we could support to answer key questions?
The Tech Committee has been going through a bit of an identity crisis, trying to figure out where they fit in, in the technology scheme; where their influence lies and their general purpose for being. I am of the opinion that the Tech Committee should be coming up with innovative solutions and finding teachers that are wiling to try them and providing feedback.

I would like to see the Tech Committee help teachers pilot digital textbooks using the California Learning Resource Network list of free digital textbooks. The job of the tech committee should be to evaluate the usefulness of resources like these and ways to bring them to the classroom. As a committee we need to be selecting teachers to pilot ideas if not piloting them ourselves, collecting data about these projects and using our collective resources and experiences to propose effective iterations.

These are my direct responses to the questions at hand.

Other Issues?
Our network admin and myself were also talking about setting up a film and audio studio where we can do advanced digital media and utilize it for classes who wanted to incorporate a media aspect to any projects or curriculum. The studio is already used for filming and we can enhance this space with some film and audio tools and have a great corner stone for our technology and digital media initiatives. It is also a shining star we can show our parents and prospective parents and students. I would like to propose the digital film and audio studio to our Head-of-School and own the project including teaching the intro or advanced digital media classes and providing professional development to our teachers regarding it’s use.

Weekly Wrap-up

The week is winding down and here i am enjoying the last 75 minutes or so of the work week. I wanted to recap some things i made progress on this week. Every Monday the Academic Dean and myself sit down and we talk about what i accomplished the week before, a justify your paycheck kind of meeting except with laughs and smiles.

On Monday, Karen started talking about visiting schools with 1:1 laptop programs to talk to the administrators about their implementation, roadblocks and opportunities. She had in my two school, Sacred Heart in Atherton, CA and Castilleja in Palo Alto, CA. Unfortunately i didn’t create as much time as i should have earlier in the week, so i called Friday afternoon a little after lunch time, of course no one was there.

Boss-Lady also wanted me to contact the speaker from November Learning, an organization that sent Brian Mull to speak to our Board of Trustees and Department Heads about technology. I did a little stalking of Mr. Mull on linkedin as well as the NL social media site. I sent an e-mail explaining that we would like him to come in during the summer time and do some professional development regarding the tools he showed us and some others. I forwarded the proposal to Karen and Woody and that may be something we talk about on monday (i’ll tell you about monday subsequently)

Karen had a VERY ambitious idea about a professional development where teachers and students work together to learn different tools that we can use for school. It seemed like a pretty huge undertaking. I know it’s possible but getting the faculty to agree on the purpose and usefulness is going to be the daunting part. For the sake of my long term efficacy i know i can’t get scared that people won’t agree to give up their class time or whatever time easily, but it would be so much easier if they did.

I decided to call the event, Teaching Teachers Day and i came up with some survey questions to address and assess the student’s thoughts about what would be useful. My main assignment for this week was to create some kind of orienting questions for students to answer and give us some hints about where to move forward. Teaching Teachers will be a challenge.

Karen also really liked the first video/screencast i did about how to deal with out bluetooth pens for the digital whiteboards. She wanted me to start making weekly broadcasts for the students and faculty. We deemed this offie’s tech tips and the first installment can be seen here. It’s pretty basic. i think i will have different people doing the voice overs each time. She also thinks a weekly podcast with branson events and happenings would be something that super engaging to parents because they could hear kids voices and learn about what they are doing in the classroom, during clubs and on the field. But i have to get Samantha on board and that might be kind of slow in the going. We’ll see.

Other random things i accomplished this week…
i subbed for Rich’s statistics class, we talked about searching for data using google, clean vs crappy data and how to formulate questions based around data me collect

I also helped Kathy’s A block Marine Biology class create presentations, some students chose to use google earth/ocean for their whole presentations, which is going to look really cool, i want to stop in and see some of their presentations, especially the google ocean group.

Last but not the least pain in my ass, err joy of my life, is rolling out the new initiative of “One Pen, One Computer, One Teacher” . We are creating a 1:1 bluetooth whiteboard pen environment, ahaha. But yes, going from one whiteboard pen per class to one per person has begun and it’s my duty to see it through, yippee.

Also, i helped History Dept chain Steve, one of the most senior members of the faculty to start a ning social media site for his second term ethics class. That is really exciting, because Steve is a really smart and engaging teacher and person, being the object of his attention is a special treat of itself. But working with Steve and the ning site was exciting. Other teachers want to start social sites and i hope even MORE do after we get the Ethics ning site up and rolling.

And i got paid yesterday, happy day.
Is this what your week looks like an an Ed.Tech.Specialist?