Learning Curve

Just a friendly reminder that Discovery Education’s Back-to-School Webinars debuted yesterday with Scot McLeod’s Keynote: The Information Society is HERE–Are our schools up to the task?

The rest of the week’s webinars are listed below:

August 11th – Policies, Safety, and Social Networking

August 12th – Web2.0 for Administrators and Others: Schools, Tools, and the 21st Century

August 13th – Data Driven Decisions with Discovery Education Assessment

And, if you haven’t done so yet… check out what’s new for Discovery Streaming this year… and remember to check the DEN blog for archived Summer School sessions! (Thanks, Traci, for making this post so easy!)

Discovery Education
DE Back-to-School Webinars
Leadership
Educational Leadership
Social Networking
Turbo Tagger

Nothing beats attending a performance live, but is time, space, and conflicts create issues for you, then attending virtually is a great option. For our IP presentations, my colleague, friend, fellow STAR DEN, and now Instructional Coach (next year’s dream job) and IP partner for over a decade, Jen Brinson and I decided to run a backchannel for the presentations. I had run backchannels before at conferences, presentations, and most recently in my classroom for students who were absent and for review purposes. My go-to platform of choice has always been Ustream.tv, although I hold similar accounts in other Web 2.0 offerings as well. The idea was the easy part; executing two-camera channels was an llama of a different color. So, I went to my go-to student, William Kennington, a great example of Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital Net Generation. Kennington was convinced that Ustream.tv could handle multiple channels; I knew Mogulus (now Livestream, but more about that later) could, but had my doubts about the former. Trust William; Ustream could and did handle the two-channel set up, and he also found a way to use CFF Macs to pull in the individual teams’ home laptop videos. We were glad to go with Ustream, because the streaming resolution and end-output quality when archived have always been superior.

On May 27, 2009, when this year’s IP debuted, two students, Megan Heverly and Mark Attilio ran the backchannels, starting, ending, saving, and archiving each team’s two-channel streams for posterity. They were my link to the streams, since I was, as always, mutitasking. Brinson anchored the streaming the whole day, since she had formulated her defense questions for the teams in advance, and was our connection with our guest viewers, which included her family in NC and her Canadian colleagues in her online course with Discovery Education/Wilkes University, Salisbury Middle School history classes, and Mrs. Meholic’s math classes. At one point, Brinson said we had 21 site guests. Not bad at all for IPs maiden voyage into virtual productions.

The question that Brinson and I continue to be bombarded with is when will the presentation be posted. Here’s the timetable. William is giving the teams their stage footage to mix and edit with videos/slides tomorrow. Thursday is binder due date, and that includes a mixed final video. At that point, I will compress each video, render it, and upload it. Each video takes about a half a day from start to finish for embeddable code for online posting. At that point we will post to our blogs: Changing Connections, RJ Stangherlin SHS, Learning Curve, PA DEN, Education, Technology, and Fun blogs. I am guessing that a week from this Thursday you can start checking our blogs. If you are part of our social networks (Brinson’s and mine overlap to a point), you can follow our tweets. We’ll keep you posted for when the students amazing presentations can be virtually yours.
IP
Multimedia
Stage Presentation
Education
Technology
Integrated Project
Turbo Tagger

March Madness, aka the countdown to Integrated Project presentations in May, adds more than the usual stress to the AP US History and Honors English 11 students. At Assignment 6 due March 11 and only 2 assignments remaining until the work is a wrap, the pressure is on. In spite of everything, these truly gifted students managed in three days to showcase a commercial promoting their teams’ presentations, a culmination of year-long interdisciplinary research packaged in stage and film format.

My Phan, whose artistic talent and organizational ability is legend at SHS, designed, oversaw, and assembled the Administration Building’s showcase. But in fairness to all concerned, this extra credit activity was a team venture; these students are aces at collaboration. At the end of the month, the advertising moves to the high school, where interest in the forthcoming presentation runs high.

This year, the presentation venue will be different–an interactive documentary, with presentations on stage as well as in video segments. Although nothing has been finalized, we anticipate running one day of team presentations. We hope that you will join us in May, either in real or virtual time, to see What If There Was No News? What’s News?

IP
Integrated Project
factual history
counterfactual history
what if
365 Days
Turbo Tagger

What a great Web 2.0 tool xtranormal is. Not only is this site a learning and teaching solution for making learning fun, but it enables us to enter a video contest without the cameras we thought we needed. A special thanks to the Discovery Educator Network’s PETE&C PreConference event last Sunday, and in particular to Steve Dembo, for sharing his top ten ways to make digital storytelling FUN!

xtranormal
BrainyFlix
YouTube
SAT Vocabulary Contest
video
education
Turbo Tagger

Cross posted on RJ Stangherlin SHS and Changing Connections
On Saturday, November 22, 2008, Miss Brinson, 2 parents, and 22 students went to Philadephia on a field trip to explore historical sites and resources. Brandon Aversano captured the spirit of the city and the day.

education
field trip
Animoto
Philadelphia
Turbo Tagger