There are several reasons that I love working during the summers. Part of the appeal is that the weather is still nice and there is still plenty of daylight left when I go home, so that I can still enjoy outdoor activities. I also appreciate the pace of the day, especially when the bells are not ringing every 45 minutes, often denoting the need to change the task that I am doing. I am able to immerse and become engaged in flow if the mood strikes.
What I really enjoy is the conversations that I am able to have with teachers and administrators during this time of the year. Since there are no bell schedules, no distractions to all of the essential aspects of school, like meeting with students and other faculty, we are able to have the deep conversations which have a greater chance of affecting change than we are able to have during the course of the school year.
During the first two weeks of “summer vacation”, I have been able to:
Meet with our new eighth grade humanities team. After introductions and hearing what their goals for the use of technology in the classroom are, we were able to have conversations about new technologies and communications tools which may help them meet their goals. They will now have the summer to think, play, and create to determine whether they are the right tools to use.
Have a Technology Refresh with the Division Heads/Principals at our school. I was able to show them the tools we have been using in various projects and conduct interesting and deep conversations on how these tools can be used throughout the various grades/departments in school. While we were showing technology, we mainly talked about how to change teaching and learning practices in the upcoming year.
Meet with our 9th and 10th grade History teachers, who are looking to reshuffle the history curriculum in 2009-2010. We have been able to talk from the beginning about how the new tools can help students learn and I have been able to shift them in their examination and development of new essential questions by using the principles of Understanding by Design. It is been great to watch their shift in thinking.
There have been countless other smaller conversations which I have currently had, with new teachers, administrators, and current teachers. I am also scheduled to meet with other groups as the summer progresses and other teachers visit campus. There are new units on the election, using uStream and screencasts in the classroom, and ideas to implement tablet pcs that are still be had. And I look forward to each and every one.
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.
