Normally on my blog, I try to focus on topics which relate to my job as a Director of Academic Technology. These include my thoughts on the larger questions that many of us face, interesting books that I have read that I feel are important, and reflecting on the day to day grind, sharing both the success and obstacles that I face working with teachers, parents, and administrators. Today, I am going to beg your indulgence while I share a personal aspect of my life.
During this academic year, I have had many personal obstacles which I have had deal with. The most significant were the health issues that my eldest daughter dealt with from August 2007 through December 2007. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and I am please to share how proud I am of her that she has “survived” her sophomore year. It was a struggle for her to make up the work caused by her six week absence from school, but she finished her finals yesterday and seems to have achieved a reasonable level of academic success, hopefully maintaining a B average, while also participating in JV soccer in the spring. She downplays her achievement, but she is doing a phenomenal job of managing her illness.
The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation (CCFA) has a fundraising walk, Taking Steps, in various cities around the country. Our high school’s community service club and I are collaborating and have set up a fundraising team, Team North Shore, for this years edition of the walk. We are participating in the walk in downtown Chicago on Saturday, June 7th on the Great Lawn just east of Soldier Field. Registration for the walk is free and be done either online or in person from 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. The 3 mile walk kicks off at 7:00 p.m. and will feature entertainment and hopefully, a wonderful evening along the Chicago Lakefront.
This is the major fundraising event for the CCFA. CCFA provides a wonderful network of resources for all of the affected by the diseases. They provide forums for those who have been diagnosed with the disease and their families so that they can become educated and share resources on new treatments and news. They provide free teleconferences for the members of their network which are informative and helpful. I have been received the same benefits from my participation in the CCFA networks for the past six months as I have from the variety of education learning networks, blogs, nings, and twitter, I have immersed myself in over the past 20 months. Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are important elements of our lives which helps us interact with others that we may not have had access to before.
As all technology projects go, the 13 Days Project has not been without its bumps. The project is due tomorrow, Wednesday, May 28 at 10:00 a.m. This morning, we were having problems uploading the PhotoStory projects, created for playback in on a computer in .wmv format to upload into VoiceThread. Digging around the VoiceThread help (FAQs and forums), I could not find a solution.
So I turned to my del.icio.us network. Using the search terms “wmv” and “flv”, I found Media Convert, (word of caution - Media Convert is an ad supported network and several of the ads were of a questionable nature to view in a K-12 environment. For adult use only) a free online converter. Converting the projects from a .wmv to a .wmv format, I was then able to upload them into VoiceThread.
Embedded, you will see the current progress of the group, with about half of the projects turned in, converted, and uploaded. They are looking very good, for one week’s worth of work, especially when they have also been discussing the book that they have been reading, On Paradise Drive.
I enjoy the times when our AP US History Teacher, Kevin Randolph, and I sit down to talk about embedding new ways of learning and new tools to accomplish the learning goals he wants to achieve within his classroom. On Wednesday, asked him to help me brainstorm about what to present at our end of the year Upper School faculty meeting. I have been give the last time slot of the last meeting of the year, with a special luncheon right after my presentation. I have to make the presentation short, sweet, and to the point while planting seeds that hopefully germinate as my colleagues begin to unwind over the summer.
I know that I want to show some highlights of the 13 Days that Changed America project, because I feel that the process that we are all going through on this project, Kevin, the student, and I, is an excellent model of what we should be aiming for. This is a collaborative project, with individual elements, that allow the students to first begin to answer an excellent question, research the event, analyze the significance of the event, and presenting their findings to a global audience, so that they can get feedback from others. There are creative uses of new technologies (wikis, VoiceThread, and Digital Story Telling software) for them to craft their message. This is truly a collaboration, with teachers serving as guides and mentors to the students on this project, as equals, not as dispensers of knowledge.
Kevin suggested that in the faculty meeting, that a podcast consisting of the reflections of the students to this project would be a valuable and be a more authentic voice to share with the faculty. Agreeing with Kevin, I began to think about how we would go about and complete this. While thinking, I had an “aha” moment, why not use the tools and technology to enable this.
Enter Gabcast, a service that allows for someone to call into a phone (land line or cell phone) into a toll-free number, and with a channel number and PIN, record their message. I first found out about this service while “attending” a session at the K12 Online Conference last October and I have been seeking the right project to incorporate this. I shared this option with Kevin, who was very excited about allowing students to use their phones and cell phones as an experiment to record their reflections.
In five minutes, we came up with the following questions we are asking the students to share their thoughts about this project. They are:
Did the elements of the project(research, analysis, collaborative learning) reflect the nature of the course?
How is the creation of a digital movie an effective way to present an argument as opposed to writing a paper?
What is the benefit of working collaboratively as opposed to working independently on a project such as this?
Was this an effective wrap up project for this AP US History course?
What are the benefit of using new technologies (PhotoStory, VoiceThread, Gabcast) on a project such as this?
How you change the project?
I am anxious to hear their thoughts and will mash up them up in a podcast that I will share via this space. Now, I have to finish up my segment, which I will try to share my reflections on the process over the weekend.
Let’s face it, I have been busy over the last few weeks. I have been working with multiple student groups on a variety of different projects, doing a variety of household projects, both inside and outside, and finishing going through my mother’s and father’s possessions. Over the weekend, I saw all kinds of traffic about the new video, Learning to Change. Knowing I had some down time on Tuesday morning, I set it aside.
When I went back to view it, I found out that it had been taken down. I wonder why? I couldn’t find an explanation. I had been hoping to assess whether or not it would be appropriate for the end of the year professional development experiences we have scheduled.
In our high school, I have a 60 minute slot to fill near the end of the meetings for the year. I am trying to come up with something fun and also will stretch thinking. So back to the drawing board.
Today was the start of each of us started working on creating their 4-5 minute story about the day we selected or were assigned. The class spent the first part of the class trying to determine what standards were needed for consistency and how to organize the days, either chronologically, relative importance, or thematic group. The group seemed disinterested in some of these details, wanting to dig into their own project. I had other items to attend to so I did not find out what the final decision was. I know that I will find out when I need to know.
My segment - the process
Wanting to deliver a project worthy of the work that they students will create, I spent 35 minutes this afternoon and about an hour this evening working on my segment, the woman’s suffrage movement. Unlike the students, who are fresh off their examination of the subject area, it has been thirty years since I have found myself in a United States History classroom and when I was in school, our examination ended at the Civil War and Reconstruction. I think that we may have covered the World Wars in seven days at the end of the year, but I really don’t remember it at all.
My knowledge of the woman’s suffrage movement is limited. Yes, I remember from my constitution exam all those years ago that it wasn’t until the 19th Amendment that women got the right to vote and that the first election that they were granted these privileges was the 1920 election. I know that Susan B. Anthony was involved, since she was selected to be minted on the one dollar coin. I know that there were a few Chicagoans, Jane Adams and Ida B. Wells who may have been involved in the movement. So I needed to delve into the subject and research the subject.
Starting with Wikipedia, to get an overview, I began to gather a set of facts. I started finding out the many different women and men who were involved in the process. I read about the Seneca Falls Convention and the other progressive movements. I found out other prominent Chicagoans, including Francis Willard, who was involved in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was involved in the process. I choose Wikipedia as the first pass because it was easy to find and begin to spread out and web through the subject. But being a good researcher, I need to find more primary source information. This led me to the American Treasures Collection at the Library of Congress. Not only did they have a number of primary sources, they were images which I could use to create my digital story. They Library of Congress also has other digital resources available in their collections which will be of use.
So I think that I am set in terms of having the details of the events and artifacts, portraits, pictures, cartoons that will be necessary to create the digital story.
My current dilemma - How to make my segment sticky?
It is one thing to collect a number of facts, pictures, and background music to create a digital story. It is an entirely different process to assemble the various pieces in such a way as to make it sticky, to make it so that others will remember it. How does one create a story which will be memorable?
A variety of storytellers do it in different ways. Ken Burns and others who have followed, choose to tell the story via personal narrative. This is an extremely powerful way to tell the story, through the eyes and words of someone involved. This is a tact I am going to try to take, using the biographies and resources I found at the National Women’s History Museum and at the Library of Congress. I am hopeful that I will be able to find the words from various primary sources, notes, letters, annotations on bibles, to construct this piece. I do know that I am going to open with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro. The ability for these women to run for the Presidency and Vice Presidency is a direct outcome of women gaining political power. I know that I want to somehow wrap Title IX, which opened educational opportunities without regard to gender into the story near the end.
But, I know that several of you have some great ideas and feedback that you may want to share. Please do so, I would appreciate it.
