Monthly Archives: October 2007

Music History With Nana

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I’m beginning to review many of the old projects that my undergraduate students have produced for me in the past. Many of these are large video projects and I was hoping to share them online.

After looking at several video services, I’ve chosen Viddler to do this. Viddler has some nice features, produced average to above average video, has tagging and commenting features at any point in the video, allows for large uploads and doesn’t have the 10 minute limit that Youtube has.

Here is one of my favorite although lengthy student video projects:

Basically, the video is based on the adventures of Nana, and older woman who quests to find her Music History textbook. As she looks for it, you’re presented with a music history experience. Although it takes a few minutes to pick up, it’s enjoyable if not for the music alone. Simple but fun.

More Great Videos From the Digital Ethnography Group

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Professor Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Project, the group that brought us The Machine is Us/ing Us, have released two new excellent videos on Youtube.

Vision of Students Today:

This is a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Download higher quality wmv:
http://www.mediafire.com/?ajm0lzxh223


Information R/evolution:

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

These will be excellent videos to show my colleagues and my students.

Cyberbullying Video “Let’s Fight It Together”

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I just finished watching the “Let’s Fight It Together” cyberbullying video found at Digizen.org. The video is of great technical quality, and is well done. It demonstrates several ways that cyberbullying can occur (e.g., via text messaging, webpages, telephone, etc.) which is important information for students, parents, teachers and administrators.

However, the video leaves me with two (related) assumptions that I don’t entirely agree with, and I want to touch on these briefly.
1) Cyberbullying is simple to deal with.
2) Policing is a solution for cyberbullying.

The overall picture this video paints is a bit too rosy. A responsible parents acts, goes to school, talks to administrators and teachers, police are involved and then we assume that the bullies are dealt with, and other students are aware of the consequences of cyberbullying. In reality, even if these processes are put into place, cyberbullying may continue and the bullied student may become even more alienated. I’d like to see a video that places emphasis on creating a learning environment where cyberbullying is unlikely to happen, rather than focusing on what to do after the fact. Maybe I am just an idealist.

Encyclopedia of Life

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Why have I not seen this before? This looks like a terrific idea!

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

Does anyone know if this is still happening, if this is a live project?

Media Literacy/Awareness Wikis

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I’m putting together a couple of wikis for upcoming presentations. They’re related:

Media Representation: At this point, includes resources (articles, videos, other links) that help in understanding media representation and race, gender, ethnicity, culture, sexual, preference, etc.

Media Literacy/Awareness: A wiki focused on two major themes, media literacy and web awareness.

Both of these wikis are just beginning. I hope they are valuable to people out there, and I encourage any of my readers to give feedback or to contribute to these spaces.

FotoFlexer – Online Photo Editing

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I’ve been playing around with a couple of online photo editing tools. I’ve discovered Picnik and Phixr and these are both neat tools. Today TechCrunch covered FotoFlexer, another online photo-editing tool. FotoFlexer has recently integrated the much-hyped “seam carving” technology. Their implementation is called “smart resize”. Here’s a demo.

I like what FotoFlexer is capable of, and it’s an easy tool to use. However, I don’t know who their marketing department is, but c’mon, change the image on the front page of your website. I was 10 years old the last time I thought virtual breast augmentation was funny. If you ever want to break the education market, your page and product need a refocus.

Educon 2.0 – January 25-27/08, Philadelphia

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Educon 2.0 looks like a must-attend event, I really like the axioms/guiding principles of the event.

The Axioms / Guiding Principles of EduCon 2.0:
1) Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members.
2) Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
3) Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4) Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5) Learning can — and must — be networked.

Learn more and register at: http://educon20.wikispaces.com

More Great Mac Apps

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I recently wrote about some of the Mac Apps I use on a daily basis. Here’s another list, most of these apps are very useful to me, but I don’t use them quite as often.

Delicious Library: This is one of my favorite apps for keeping my personal library organized. I have hundreds of books in my office and I am lending out books quite often. With this application, I am able to inventory my books using an iSight webcam or a Bluetooth barcode scanner (I use the latter). You could also do it manually. Then, I am able to lend out books easily to people by dragging and dropping the book to the individual I lent it to. It even send notifications via email for those that keep my books way too long. :-) It’s one of the few apps I pay for, and it’s worth the money if you need this sort of thing. It also syncs well with LibraryThing.

Handbrake: Handbrake is a free, multi-platform, DVD to MPEG-4 converter. This will rip DVDs to a number of formats. But if you are looking for something just does DVD to iPod specifically, check out Instant Handbrake or iSquint.

Jing: I should have put this in my last list because I use it every single day. Jing is a screencast tool that makes screencasting incredibly easy, it’s fast, simple, uploads the produced videos for you automatically, and even copies the link to your clipboard. I use this daily to send quick “how-to’s” to teachers and students via email, any of my Ning groups or via instant messaging. It’s a new, free app, but it’s quickly become essential for me.

Skitch: Screen capture on the Mac has always been a weak feature. Skitch works very much like Jing, but works with still images. You can edit screen captures and they are kept online for you. This is another great free app.

Chicken of the VNC: To see my office Mac from home, I regularly use VNC (Virtual Network Control). This is a very useful app which is easy to use once set up. It’s free and open source.

SubEthaEdit: I haven’t used this as much lately, but it’s a great “text collaboration engine”, most suited for programming. It runs over the OS X “Bonjour” network. I just noticed that this is now software you have to pay for (it used to be free).

Flip4Mac: This free tool allows you to play Windows Media files via Quicktime.

Scratch: I haven’t played with this much yet, but will be introducing it to my undergraduate students this semester. Scratch is free visual programming environment designed for kids. This has great potential for the classroom.

Senuti: Senuti (“iTunes” in reverse) is a free app that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer.

Well, that’s all I can think of right now. If there are others you know of that are worth noting, please comment!

I Think I Made A Difference … At Least A Little Bit

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My undergraduate students are starting to blog. In the first month, I suggested that they just blog about anything on their mind, their weekend, their family, anything … just to get into the flow of it, and learn the tool itself. Starting this month (October), we will focus on the edublogger community so many of you may see new fans out there. I’m sending them to your blogs.

Today I noticed a nice post from my student, Lacey. An excerpt:

Well it’s been a month of classes already. It is really hard to believe that the semester is going so fast. I am really enjoying the ECMP 355 class. It might have been last class but I completely agree with what Alec had said to the point that if we as teachers use computers everyday in our life that we will be more comfortable, and more likely to use technology in our classroom. I have found that in this month with all of the tools and programs that we have used I am starting to feel more at ease with them each day and even found myself exploring them on my own at home.

Now that I have grown slightly in my computer literacy I am starting to focus on my future classroom and am constantly building ideas that can help me become a better teacher. I now look at websites or programs in a way that I ask myself, “how could I use this in my classroom?” or “I wonder what i would like my students to work with?”. I can’t wait to start using and building my technological classroom.

One of the big things I have been pushing in my class is clearly described in this post. I believe that once teachers become familiar with the tools in their everyday life that they can then start thinking about using these tools as educational tools. I think I’ve got a winner here, and I hope the transformation is lasting for this student as she goes through the program and eventually finds her own classroom.

Freedom Sticks For The Classroom

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I’m working with teachers in a small-town Saskatchewan school. My role involves getting these volunteers to begin using current forms of technology in the classroom, to research the process and to begin a technology-related mentorship program. These teachers will eventually become mentors to others in the division. It’s important to note that these teachers are very new to technology in the classroom and are beginners in this area.

After some initial conferencing, I decided that blogging would be a great place to start. The following documents the process with the first teacher.

I thought I’d start at WordPress.com. It’s been really reliable, and although (philosophically) I prefer edublogs.org, it has been buggy for me and my students in the past. I found out quickly that WordPress.com was blocked by the school filter. So, we tried edublogs.org. It worked!

We started the sign-up process. Everything went well. But, when we went to check the authorization email that was to be sent from edublogs.org, we realized that the school mail filter rejected the message from edublogs.org. Uggh. We tried again, but first I had the teacher sign-up with a Gmail account. This worked, but we had to choose a new userid and URL for edublogs. But that’s OK, we’re getting there.

In edublogs.org, I had the teacher change the presentation (theme) and the temporary password. When we came to create our first post, I noticed something missing. The ONLY browser on the school computers was IE 6. For some reason, the visual editor in WordPress did not show up. This was another big issue, but at least we could post basic messages.

Next we tried attachments. We could upload files in IE6 in edublogs, but when you went to attach the file to the post, it would not work. Another IE 6.0 issue it seemed. Then we went to embed a Youtube video. Nope, YouTube blocked. Oh, we could get to TeacherTube … but, wow, no Flash player installed on these machines either.

So let’s go through the list of things of issues:

  • Filtering blocked some really important, educational sites.
  • No visual editor in WordPress because of IE 6 (it seems).
  • No ability to attach files to blogposts.
  • No Flash player.

Frustrating!

Solution:
I setup a wireless network (probably against board policy) in about 10 seconds using my Airport Express. I take this tool with me everywhere, to every classroom I work in, to every hotel I stay in and to every conference I present at. Setting up a wireless network is idiot-proof with this tool, and this is by far the best $100ish I have every spent.

While on the Wireless networked, I noticed that I could get to any site using Firefox on my MacBook Pro. As I had a few USB sticks with me, I thought I’d try installing Firefox Portable onto a stick and see if it would work on the school computers. If you don’t know much about portable apps, basically these applications run from a USB stick with no need to install on the local computer. In placing this USB stick into the school machine, I quickly realized that we were now able to do everything we wanted to do including bypassing the school filter. For some reason, the entire web proxy system was closely tied to IE, so when we used Firefox, we no longer had limits. Edublogs.org now worked perfectly on Portable Firefox. We now had the visual editor and could attach files. We were free!

I quickly realized that it would be useful for these teachers to have their own sticks. Thus I purchased 8 sticks (one for each teacher) and included the following apps, most of them available at portableapps.com.

  • 7-Zip Portable: Compression utility (WinZip equivalent).
  • AbiWord Portable: MS Word replacement.
  • Audacity Portable: Audio-editing utility.
  • FileZilla Portable: FTP utility.
  • Firefox Portable: Web browser.
  • GIMP Portable: Imaging editing app (Photoshop-like).
  • Open Office Portable: Includes Write, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw, Math (MS Office replacement plus).
  • VLC Portable: The best cross-platform video player (plays almost everything).
  • Opera USB: Another web-browser. I added this because it seems to have the Flash player built in the browser, Firefox Portable doesn’t.

There are a number of other portable apps which I did not include simply because I don’t think the teachers needed the apps (too techy), yet.

Distributing these USB sticks to teachers is done as an interim measure. For now, this will allow these teachers to get to many great resources and will allow them to use powerful Web 2.0 tools. Teachers will also be able to show their students the resources they choose and deem appropriate. I have dubbed these loaded USB devices “freedom sticks” as this was exactly what was gained from this experience.