Livescribe Pen Playing the Piano!

One of our students was in The Office yesterday and she just grabbed our Livescribe Pen and began experimenting with it. Here is a short little video of what she did with the pen:

Sixth Grade Mathcast #2

Our second "Mathcast" created by a team of sixth grade students at our school is embedded below. My wife is our new sixth grade teacher and I'm impressed with her willingness to deploy teaching strategies like this (and she also is using a variation of Darren Kuropatwa's student scribe post method).  Our first published mathcast from two weeks ago has over 200 views already on YouTube, proving once again, that the Internet is the most poweful publishing platform that our classrooms have ever seen (if this video was published on a DVD it would be luck to be played 10 times).

This is only the second mathcast and I can't wait to see the clever and creative strategies that the students use in the future for these videos! Kudos to our youth mathcasters!

Castilleja "PeaceTube" Project

From October 15, 2009-November 15, 2009 our school community is going to be engaging in a little project where we find videos on the topic of "Peace" over at YouTube. The idea is to collect relevant videos and then vote on our favorite videos during the first full week in December. The videos receiving the top 5 most votes will be played during our school's "Global Week" in early January of 2010. Below is the teaser video for this project. If you'd like to contribute any videos having to do with the theme of peace, please submit the links via a comment at this blog post and we'll be sure to include them in the voting in December (we'll credit you as well during the process).

Peace is our theme of our Global Week celebration in early January...please think of 'peace' as an extremely broadly defined concept as you surf YouTube...it could relate to environmental sustainability, inner peace, spiritual peace, historical peace movements, community building projects, etc.

Our First Student Mathcast!

I'm excited about the potential of students creating simple, short videos where they explain and teach concepts that they are exploring. I've always believed that the best way to learn something is to teach it and that we should use instructional design that puts students in the role of the teacher as much as possible. This is our very first screencast created by our sixth grade students and we think it will provide a nice launching base for other mathcasts in the future. This video is posted over YouTube and it is also posted at the class wiki, which is currently is only visible to the sixth grade students. A few students have already commented on the video-this is where things will get interesting as the students engage in collaborative knowledge building to help with their understanding.

A special thank you is in order to Eric Marcos and his sixth grade mathcasters at MathTrain.TV for their pioneering work in this area. We shared some of Mr. Macos' student mathcasts with our students to help inspire their thinking.

On the tech side, the three students authored their slides in the google docs presentation tool and we recorded and edited their 'cast using Screenflow.

MadV is back on YouTube with One World-HD!

I posted about MadV's original "One World" project as part of a larger stream of thinking on the topic of the Internet as a platform for peace, better cultural understanding, etc. I was visiting YouTube today when I noticed that MadV is remixing is "One World" project 2 years later, but this time in high definition. I'm eager to participate and I'm hopeful that some other members of our school community will consider doing so as well. How about you??

How can the Internet foster and build compasion, empathy, cultural awareness, and peace?

...it can't. But people like you and I can. We can use this incredibly powerful platform to do these things. You don't believe me? You say that the internet and its sub-networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace and the like are nothing more than a way to promote "Me" and "I?"

Well, then check out the work of MadV over on YouTube. This is simply one example of the countless ways that people like you and I are using the Internet to foster and build compassion and empathy (or in the opinion of the skeptic, this is cultivating nothing more than pure narcissism). MadV posted the 40 second video below titled, "One World." This video quickly became the most responded to video on YouTube. Eventually MadV took the various responses and remixed them to create the second video below (a special thanks to MadV for actually returning a message of mine on YouTube as I had difficulty finding the original One World piece).

MadV's original, "One World," Video:


MadV's Remix of the various responses to One World:



MadV also sparked another project titled, "The Humans Project" where he asked the simple question, "What does it mean to be human?" People submitted responses and then he compiled them all in final piece. See the two videos below:

The Humans Project:


Compilation of Responses to the Humans Project:


Empathy and compassion or narcissism?

Castilleja School YouTube Channel

This is just a reminder that our school has its own YouTube Channel that it will using to share videos from our school community. We foresee sharing talks by special guests, student projects, student speeches, etc. I am one of the designated video uploaders at Castilleja and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to post 1 video per week throughout the year. I recently posted Marissa Mayer's June 2009 Commencement address and the two parts to this talk are embedded below. Subscribe to our Channel if you'd like to notified when we post new videos.

Marissa Mayer Castilleja Commencement Address Part I (June 2009):


Marissa Mayer Castilleja Commencement Address Part II (June 2009):

"Facebook Top 20 Learning Applications"

Short video here on the many educational applications that can be installed and utilized within the Facebook platform. A shout out to Derek Baird for posting this in his Twitterstream.

You gotta see this...

This video has been passed around the Twitters in a viral manner this morning...if you haven't seen this video, take the 3+ minutes to do so now. This might be the most creative YouTube I've ever seen. What a beautiful piece of art!

Google Teacher Academy Application Video

Below you'll find the video that I created as a requirement of the application process for the Summer '09 Google Teacher Academy which is taking place in Boulder, CO in early August. Applicants for the GTA are required to submit a 60 second video either on the topic of "Motivation and Learning" or "Classroom Innovation." My video is on "Motivation and Learning." I really enjoyed the process of building up this piece and found it extraordinarily challenging to convey my message in this mixed media format in only 60 seconds of time. This has consumed my last couple of days...now it is time to step away from the computer and go into full summer teacher-bum-mode ;-) Project notes on how this video was created are included at the end of this post.



-All images used in this project are licensed in the Creative Commons and posted at flickr (a great big thank you to everyone who posts their content in the Creative Commons)

-The audio track is from an artist that goes by "Tryad" over at jamendo. This is the same audio track that was used in Michael Wesch's viral "A Vision of Students Today" video. Thank you for posting this song with a Creative Commons license, Tryad. Teacher geeks like me truly appreciate this.

-The slides were all assembed in the Google Docs Presentation tool. This is a web based slide authoring tool that I've really come to appreciate. I love how this platform faciliates collaboration and sharing. The Google Docs slides are posted online over here if you'd like to see them.

-After the slides were assembled, I started doing a few screen recordings with Jing Pro and then posting to YouTube. I probably posted 3-4 rough cuts in this manner. I struggled, though, with editing and timing of the video so ultimately I switched over to Screenflow. After recording in screenflow I adjusted the duration for the various slides and dropped in the audio track. This video was extremely helpful in optimizing the settings out of screenflow for posting in YouTube's HD format.

-The word cloud at the beginning of the video was created with wordle.

-There were many, many pieces and ideas that I had to leave out of this video. For example, I wanted to do a series of slides on, "What if...students could connect and collaborate with other students around the world...to solve complex probles, improve cultural sensitivity/awareness, etc." I'll have to save this for "What If 2.0" I guess!

Castilleja Faculty - "A Vision of Learning Today"

Upon completion of an intense, week-long professional development experience on all things relating to "Learning 2.0" and digital learning, we created this short video response to Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today." Be sure to watch Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today" if you haven't seen it yet.

Enjoy!

I Love this Video!

Amazing piece here from the choral director and his students from PS22 in NYC. After 6 days of being on the web, it already has 150K + views! Go PS22 students!!!

This I Believe

I'm working with a colleague and a small team of students next Tuesday on a project very much inspired by the NPR "This I Believe" series. Tuesday is a community service day at our school and students chose this project from several different options.

The idea is for the students to articulate their own personal/philosophical beliefs in a way that ties into their beliefs about community service. Their end artifact will be some type of mixed media piece that they post at YouTube and then embed in a forum over at our moodle community for this project. Overall the group was positive on this and I think we're going to see some stellar samples.

Below is my sample and the artifact from my colleague Christy. I'm a big believer that we, as teachers, should take the risk and try these types of projects right along with the students as a way to not only model, but also as a means to develop our own skills with conveying a message via mixed media.

are you ready?

I'm helping plan out a mini-conference day here at Castilleja for our faculty on March 9th, 2009. Here is the little video trailer that we created and sent out today to help get folks fired up about the day:



We could've sent this message via a typical all-faculty email, but the mixed media created a buzz in a way that is not possible via textual media alone. I think we're starting to understand the importance of being able to effectively convey a message via mixed media in the same way that it was important to know how to create a compelling point via a five paragraph essay when I was of school age (not even so sure this last sentence makes sense, but you get the drift).

Keeping it Digital-Publishing Options for Students and Teachers

Instead of printing assignments out and turing them in, what about considering some of the following online publishing options? In addition to saving paper, digital publishing allows students the opportunity to share their work with a broader community for review and feedback. We know that authentic audience is an extremely motivating factor for students when creating and sharing work. Spaces like the ones below can provide students with these authentic audiences.

Moodle Forum Posts - This is a great way to share/publish writing, photos, audio clips, and even videos that are posted at YouTube. By giving students the Moodle Forum as a publishing option, their work is further opened up to the learning community for review and feedback. Moodle forums are not accessible to the outside world, so they're a great space to publish work that might involve privacy issues.

YouTube, Blip.TV and other video hosting services - these are great spaces to post student created videos. Privacy and copyright both need to be considered prior to making a decision to post to these sites, but they are wonderful options for many student projects such as this Civil Rights video created by students that I worked with two years ago (the video has over 10,000 views!)

Blog posts for writing samples - Using moodle blogs, students may publish their writing so that it is visible only to others who have Castilleja moodle accounts, or they may make their work visible on the open web. The downside of the standard moodle blogging tool is that it does not allow commenting (the next major moodle revision will include commenting--hooray!) We actually have a second blogging option in our moodle network called, "OU Blogs," and this does allow others within the network to leave comments. OU Blogs also allows "Class Blogs," which is a single blog for a class that all members may post to and comment on. Depending on the age of the students, they could create blogs at sites like edublogs.org or blogger.com as well.

Google Sites within Castilleja's Google Apps network - Google Sites are essentially wikis, and all students and faculty who have a Casti Google apps network account have access to easily creating Google Sites. Just like with a wiki, you can give others access to your wiki so they can edit the pages and contribute content to the site. Here is a google site created by our 8th grade science teacher for the recent bridge project challenge that students were participating in.

Mahara ePortfolios - this is yet another publishing options for students. Imagine a space where students could showcase their work from across subject areas over the course of the entire year (or years). See my sample portfolio online here. Their work could then be reviewed by members of the learning community. Mahara allows the user full control over the visibility of the portfolio. Older students who are college bound may want to publish their portfolios on the open web, while younger students may elect to keep their portfolios only visible inside of the network. It is a very powerful and flexible open source social portfolio space and it also plays very well with Moodle (in moodle 2.0 it will have more full featured integration than it has now).

This is why students should post their content online...

Chuck Taft, one of the best teachers I've ever had the privilege of working with, and I have been planning out our presentation for this coming Friday at NCSS (National Social Studies Teachers) conference in Houston, TX. As we were preparing the other night for the presentation, we discussed some of the student samples that we'll be sharing. Two years ago we had students create a first person account from an event that took place during the US Civil Righs movement in the 1960s. All of these videos were posted online at youtube. I distinctly recall some of the students at the time saying, "Why are we posting these on YouTube, nobody will ever watch them." Well, here is a video that has over 7500 views on YouTube. If this was only burned to a DVD or if this project was a three panel poster board, it might have been lucky to have been viewed by 50 people. These students made a difference by creating and publishing a media sample that has had (and will continue to have) an impact.

The content that our students create and publish online has value. It means something and makes a difference. Enjoy:



Chuck Taft and the American History Rules Channel on YouTube

Snow Day!

We're experiencing a pretty huge snow storm as we speak here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA). Of course this means that we don't have school today! I've lived in the "upper mid-west" region of the USA my entire life and this might be one of the craziest storms I've ever experienced. We'll probably end up receiving 15-20 inches of snowfall, but right now the wind is blowing pretty hard so I don't know how that will officially be measured. Below is a short video clip from a few hours ago after shoveling/snowblowing: