If people are doing digital storytelling with their class and the school has Flash installed already, I suggest checking it out.  I just wish I could’ve shown you an example!  (Not that it was finished … or polished … actually it was pretty ridiculous.  But that was most of the fun of it really.)

Jing (free version) is convenient but I really missed the ability to edit the video before publishing.  I think I ended up re-recording my screencast somewhere around 5-6 times, once after my wife reviewed it with some feedback but mostly just fixing stupid time-wasting mistakes.

Jing’s time limit was strangely useful.  It really forced me to think about how much I wanted to say vs how much I *needed* to say.  In the end though, I wasted some time trying to fit my screencast into 5 min, which was way too rushed and failed to demonstrate a lot of the planning work I had done.

Reviewing and re-recording screencasts also gave me chances to see improvements I could make in my source material.  So it also had some value as forced reflection, I guess.  (I still think I could get the same effect by editing a screencast, cutting out bits I don’t like and just fixing those parts.)

Screencasting my presentation seemed to hold people’s attention better than if I was just talking.  This is kind of a guess, I can’t compare directly to anything but I was surprised at how well people paid attention and gave meaningful feedback / questions at the end (despite it being first thing in the morning on a groggy hot day, in a groggy hot week when sleep has been challenged).

Screencasting let me do all the speaking in a stress-free environment.  This makes a huge difference in how the spoken content is delivered!

a young adult novel set in a very-near-future San Francisco where high school students’ every move is tracked by censorware in their laptops and on the school network and surveillance devices in the hallways.

And then when the world goes Orwellian, it’s the teens who show the adults how to subvert the system and fight for their freedoms.

Doctorow has a unit plan concept he blogged about to help bring these ideas to the classroom.  It’s just a high level overview but very tempting to try.  Mind you, I don’t know how relevant it is for our schools; no clue how much censorware is going on where my placement happens, for example.  But after seeing this, I’ll be sure to find out.

Oh, did I mention the book is freely downloadable as well as being published traditionally?  Go grab a copy, I’m about to.

Oh, right, Wikipedia article.  I wrote about half of what I thought ought to be written to make it a great article, then I kind of ran out of steam and/or source material.  I have the original work in front of me that the article is drawn from, but don’t have the time to hunt down other 3rd party views, critiques, etc whatever.  Considering this was meant to be a group project and I did this one solo, however, I’m happy with what got accomplished.  You can see it at Banking education.  (I think I left some references in a partial-hack state; I will probably go clean that up in the near future.)

I’ve gotten myself hooked on Twitter enough that I feel confident in using it to cover things during class, but it wouldn’t be a good fit to try and cover everything via tweets that I’d normally put in notes.  I have other people outside the class following me on twitter, and I don’t want to spam them.  On the other hand, there’s often stuff that comes up during class that I find interesting that would be worth sharing outside of the classroom.  So rather than trying to map traditional notes into Twitter form, it’ll be more of a live supplement of highlights and stuff worth sharing.

I’m still unsure what I’m going to do with my final project – which isn’t great since there’s not a lot of time left.  It’s kind of ironic, but I think I might rather come up with a plan for integrating tech into the math curriculum rather than plan out an IT curriculum section.  Part of the motivation is that I’m 99% sure that the IT portion of my fall placement is with a teacher who has a really good set of curriculum already set up on a Moodle site and ready to roll, so I’ll have little or no prep that I have to do from scratch for his classes.  The math stuff is less certain, and feels like where I’ll be experimenting a bit more with teaching style, etc than what I’m used to seeing.  We’ll see.

I sat down and wanted to just finish this story finally.  I already have it completely recorded, but I wanted to throw it in Flash and do the movie part that way.  That way I could draw ridiculous stickman characters in between the actual photos that I’ve found.

I got partway through, but Flash (or my old version of it at least) doesn’t play the audio if you just preview one small section of the timeline halfway through.  This makes syncing the audio to the action kind of a pain.  At least it shows a visual of the sound file, so you can line it up with loud parts that hopefully match the words you think they do.

Still, once I figure out where to put keyframes, the ability to pick up my tablet and quickly add ridiculous stickman nonsense to the story gives it a whole new dimension for me.  If I could find a better solution for the audio sync issue while creating, I’d totally recommend this for students to do as well.  I’ll see if I can put a bit more time into this over the week and get it done and uploaded somewhere.  If not I can at least showcase to people what I’ve got so far when we meet in class again.

Diving into regular tweeting is shifting my idea for using Twitter to do my class scribing.  Being aware that anything I tweet will get pushed to other friends and colleagues outside of class, I want to use it in a way that’s generally relevant, or at least interesting.  This probably means that I wouldn’t want to tweet administrivia sorts of things, but rather pick out interesting statements, links, and ideas to share.  This ought to still be a good resource for the rest of the class too, but it’ll definitely mean that I’ll want to keep a more complete and structured set of notes at the same time.  (No big deal; I’ll dump stuff to the wiki and tweet bits and pieces that stand out as we go.)

I’m looking forward to the online class session tomorrow night.  My online course experience has seen two extremes; one good experience with an informal, non-academic class that did a good job of community building, and an academic distance-ed course that did nothing at all.  I need more data points than that to figure out how this stuff can work well, and whether to use the tech and ideas in a blended model.

Especially after the reading a bit ago (Transformative Learning chapter) which conflated components of online learning with stuff that was just good pedagogy in general, and then acted as though face-to-face classrooms couldn’t (or never do) apply the same principles.  Setting up a strawman of f2f learning to make online learning sound fantastic just made it harder for me to focus on the actual advantages that online learning has.  (It had good stuff too, I’m kind of over-critiquing, but yeah.)  So, right, more direct experience sounds like a good thing.

Anyway, I’ve made a new account with my actual name on it, and I’m settling in to using it the way it was intended: quick sharing of URLs, ideas, and random talking about whatever I’m doing.  I got a desktop client installed instead of just using the website: DestroyTwitter.  I saw my brother was using it, and with a name like that I couldn’t resist trying it.  Plus it’s multiplatform so I can use the same setup on my Windows desktop and my Linux netbook.

Now I’m trying to sort out who to start following.  Right now it’s just my brother, who lives a few provinces away so it’s nice to have that extra layer of contact.  I’m hesitant to start adding a ton of friends – that sort of thing happened in Facebook, and the result was I felt there was just too much noise coming at me to want to read any of it.  Plus, do I want this to be primarily a professional tool?  I could start following other educators, bloggers, etc.  We’ll see.  I’m not going to rush this just yet.

If any of you want to follow me leading up to my note-taking experiment, my username is joshgiesbrecht.

I keep stumbling across more references to using Twitter in education.  So far the most compelling case has been networking with other educators – similar to what I find appealing about blogging as a teacher.  I’m transitioning right now from my old messing-around account to an actual something-I’ll-put-my-name-on account.  If nothing else, right now it feels like I need to dive “down the rabbit hole” enough with Twitter that I feel comfortable with it and understand its limitations and advantages.  Then I’ll decide if it’s a keeper or not.

Still mulling over Wolfram|Alpha; looks like I’ll probably present it to my Designs for Learning: Secondary Math class tomorrow morning, just super-briefly.  Although I thought I was being super-brief when I prepped for our class, and somehow I went over half an hour?  Sheesh.  It’s a fact, I ramble when I’m on a topic I’m passionate about.  Hopefully people had enough hands-on time that it didn’t just feel like me talking.

Reminder to self, I really need to work on my digital storytelling assignment at home.  I tried recording for the assignment in class last week, and I just couldn’t get comfortable doing the voice work.  The story I came up with is pretty much a cute kids story and I’m too self-conscious in a room full of adults to do a proper kids story voice.  Maybe I’ll have to record myself talking to my 10-month-old or something.