Art. Education. Technology.
This longer than normal ‘cast starts off as more or less a summary of my last blog post, but then I get into something entirely new – a new online education community!
Links Mentioned:
The following is a response to a recent email I received concerning a decision the higher-ups at the Discovery Educator Network recently made. I tried joining in the forum discussion for this very topic, but for some reason (perhaps their server is overworked at the moment?) I could not.
So instead, I’m posting it here. Be warned, this isn’t exactly a positive posting. Part of me is worried about what this could do to my permanent record, but then I think of how friends of mine are now unemployed and I continue.
Way to go, DEN! Let’s take people trained as teachers and have them try to find jobs halfway through the school year because at the drop of a hat you’ve decided the personal touch that the Field Managers provided (I wouldn’t even be in the DEN if it wasn’t for Rachel, and many of the more technophobic teachers need something more than a web site.) was no longer what you wanted.
Really. That’s a great way to show you care.
One forum posting mentioned that its now up to us to carry on, and I agree. It is our job to help out our colleagues when it comes to tech savvy stuff. My first action as a DEN member was to lead a workshop to get teachers blogging, so while I know I have more learning to do I’m far from being a novice.
And while we move to help our colleagues take little steps forward, DEN has taken a colossal step back.
I do feel the need to say that I don’t mean to belittle the website in any way. Steve has done an awesome job putting this site together and I know its been a big help to many. Its just that the activities and interactions planned by the Field Mangers were in many cases the necessary bridge that got non-members interested in being members and members interested in being active members.
Since promoting the DEN was a full time job for them, they had the time to promote it well. You know what? My classroom lessons take precedent to being a salesman for the DEN. My Art Club, wife, family, and friends come before that too. The DEN was important to me, but it is far from being a career for me. Saying “Now its your job to step up to the plate” makes me think instead about taking my ball and going home. That isn’t a response that you would get from a full time employee.
I understand that I might cool down after a while. Perhaps I might even see the wisdom in the direction the DEN is taking. (I’ve yet to see a worthwhile explanation, just some corporate lingo about shifts and moving forward.)
But I won’t be wearing my lab coat any time soon, I’m removing links to the DEN from my blogroll, the next batch of pictures I need for a lesson will come from Flickr’s Creative Commons section rather than unitedstreaming, and right now I’m watching the National Geographic Channel out of spite, if nothing else. I don’t even feel bad anymore about my county considering a switch to Safari Montage.
I don’t know if I can support an organization that can’t even support the very people who helped to make it something worth mentioning in the first place.
At least I had one good year.
[tags]den, Discovery Educator Network, Discovery, mistake[/tags]
I was on the radio today. Leo Laporte does, among other things, a weekend radio show about technology. I had a question, so I called in with Skype and asked away.
I’m thrilled that I got to talk to the Tech Guy himself. Steve Dembo may have inspired me to start podcasting, but I wouldn’t even know what a podcast was if it wasn’t for Leo’s radio show. I’m a fan boy, I admit it.
Mr. Laporte also netcasts all of his shows, which you can find in iTunes by doing a search for “Laporte.” You can also go to TWiT.tv to see his many, many netcasts.
You may not have noticed it, but lately I’ve made a bit of a switch. From the beginning I’ve used a Mac program called GarageBand to edit my podcasts, or netcasts, or whatever, and I’ve always been happy with it. I don’t have the latest version, but what I have has worked very well.
And yet I’ve started using Audacity instead. Why? Two reasons, really.
First, I think my friend Chris Craft has been rubbing off on me a bit. He’s seriously into open source software, and has been using a lot of it in his classroom. You can follow along with his adventures at opensourceclassroom.com, thinkingaboutteaching.com, christophercraft.com, and I’m sure he’ll eventually register ihavewaytoomanydomainnames.com.
… um, I’m pretty sure that last address is a joke. I think.
The other reason has to do with the presentations I gave last month.
More than once I recommended a free, open source program called Audacity to people who either didn’t have Macs or didn’t have Macs that were new enough to run GarageBand. That was all well and good, but those people still had a bit of a learning curve ahead of them. I had barely used the program myself, so anyone asking questions more advanced than “Where do I download it?” didn’t really learn much from my responses.
So now I’m playing with Audacity for all my audio recordings. My last two Academic Aesthetic netcasts were recorded and edited in Audacity, and my new Art Club netcast is edited in Audacity as well. The students use an old Creative MP3 player to record their audio, so I can’t give Audacity all the credit for that one.
I still use iTunes to convert the whole thing into an MP3 at the end, since I’ve already plugged my presets into it and I like the results, but the rest is done with a marvel of open source ingenuity.
[tags]Leo Laporte, Chris Craft, podcast, netcast, KFI, KFI640, Audacity, GarageBand[/tags]
You’ll notice that this edition of the Academic Aesthetic is not part two of the workshop I recorded a couple of weeks ago. The truth is that I have a few topics I would like to discuss, so I’m postponing the rest of the 3 hour workshop until whenever, or until people start asking for it. If I keep uploading recordings from the same workshop I think I’ll start to get lazy(er), and nobody wants that, right?
I’ve noticed a lot of time shifting trends lately, and by time shifting I mean people getting media earlier and later than usual. I know more than one person who’s decided to get rid of cable TV, since if they wait they can get boxed sets of just their favorite episodes for less than paying for the hundred or so channels they never watched in the first place.
(That won’t be me, since my wife pays for the cable and she wants that next episode of Mythbusters as soon as it airs. To be honest, I can’t say I blame her.)
I’ve also seen people who just can’t wait. I could name a few individuals (You might know them already…) who downloaded bootleg copies of Star Wars Episode III before it came out in the theaters. They still went and saw it on the big screen, but it was worth it to them to see the low quality version first – like reading the last page of a good novel, I guess.
(I wouldn’t know if it was worth it myself – I still haven’t seen any copy Episode III, legal or otherwise. I liked Episodes IV, V, and VI much better than I and II, but I digress.)
A lot of technological innovations are allowing us to see things earlier or later, depending on the quality we desire. I think its rather neat, but unfortunately we don’t see a lot of this in an educational environment.
I mean, sure, there are some teachers who podcast their lectures for posterity, or put their handouts online, but those educators are few and far between, and the know-how they need to get started can seem very daunting to them, even if it isn’t to us.
Case in point: A little more than a week ago I attended a very cool conference that was hosted by my employer. I had fun and got a lot out of it, but according to Technorati I seem to be the only person who even mentioned it in a blog. With several presenters, including myself and the Keynote Speaker talking about blogs, you would think at least one more person would have their own blog and mention it at least in passing.
OK this is getting depressing, so let’s turn the floor over to you, shall we? I can tell from my stats that I have a decent amount of listeners, so here’s what I’d like you to do. Go to my web site at AcademicAesthetic.com and find the show notes for episode 117. (It should be near the top, unless you’re time shifting a lot.) I’d like everyone to add one of two types of comments:
And if you want it to be an audio comment instead of a text comment, you can click on the link right below the image on the main page that says “Leave an Audio Comment!” or prerecord it and email it to me at TheArtGuy (at) gmail.com.
Part 1 of a presentation on blogging that I gave last week. It was a 3 hour workshop, so there’s no way I’m uploading the whole thing.
If you listen carefully, you can hear my wife making a cameo. And a silly voice.
Now if I can be forgiven for the rather lame title, I have two new blogs.
The first is hosted by Vox. I decided to check out this social blogging service and it’s not bad, although there aren’t enough teachers using it. I’ve had it for a while now and I think it just might replace Furl as the main place for me to post interesting links.
The second is on my own server, and is dedicated to my Art Club. You can go there to hear what my students are up to.
I’m sitting on my couch and enjoying the marvelous encrypted wi-fi filling my apartment. I’ve yet to go through and spiffy up my previous posts, but I have some chores to do first and then I’ll get right to it. (And yes, this post counts as procrastination.)
In my opinion I’d say that the Powering Up With Technology conference was a huge success. I think we had an even bigger turnout than last year, and while I haven’t looked at my evaluation forms I had several people come up to me to say I’d done a good job.
We’ll see how good a job I’ve really done when I actually read through the anonymous evaluation forms that were returned to me.
[tags]puwt06, puwt, home, evaluation[/tags]
I decided to peek in on Rachel Amstutz’s presentation on unitedstreaming and the DEN. There wasn’t too much new information for me, but it was still good to get a refresher course and show my support. Rachel’s done some good stuff for teachers throughout Maryland, DC, and even other countries, so it was nice o see what she had to say.
Like many DEN presentations, this was run in the form of a game show using some hardware from einstruction.com. I know little about the back end, but it really helped to keep everyone’s attention since we all wanted to “win.”
[tags]puwt06, puwt, unitedstreaming, DEN, Discovery, Rachel Amstutz, education[/tags]
I’m blogging from the conference, so forgive any format problems. (You may notice that I skipped sessions 2 and 3. That’s because I was a presenter for those.)
Digital Camera Basics for the Innovator Educator
Shiliey Upchurch
I walked in a little late because I was answering questions at my own session on blogging and podcasting, but it seems she was showing an example of how she used her own digital photographs in a classroom setting.
Hm, she was on a budget, so she bought most of her cameras from Ebay. A good idea for me? Maybe. I’ve been burned by Ebay before.
Now she’s showing everything that comes with a camera and different photo albums. I’m a little disappointed that she’s not talking about the different photography websites, but I’m glad she’s showing all of the other things you can do besides throwing them online.
Ok, now we’re getting into a slideshow made by a student using PowerPoint. Not bad, since I first thought it had been created using Photostory.
Now I want to go through all of my permission slips again. It seems she accidentally took a picture of a student that the parents didn’t want photographed. Fortunately it only led to lots of paperwork, but that in itself is enough to be extra careful.
[tags]puwt06, puwt, photography, photos, digital, workshop[/tags]
Blogging from the conference right now. I’ll add the links later.
Keynote Speaker: Susan Brooks-Young
Web-Based Tools of the Trade: What Does Web 2.0 Offer Educators?
All her notes are online! Woohoo!
Most kids are using technology more than most teachers. Except for interactive whiteboards, but those mirror tech that we’re used to.
She’s equating tech use with driving. We teach students how to drive, but are we showing them how to use the web? How to IM safely? I’m glad she’s talking about this.
We’re going basic here: Web 2.0 is the collection of online resources that allow you to be interactive – she’s including software and hardware.
She’s starting right off with blogs, yay! (I hope she doesn’t steal all of my thunder… I’m presenting on blogs in the third session.)
Schools in Hunterton New Jersey have abandoned their traditional web sites in favor of blogs.
Plug for Mr. Kuropatwa!
Plug for Will Richardson!
This is good – I can skip over this information and get more into the nitty gritty during my own presentation.
Flickr Account: sjbrooks-young … but she doesn’t have any public photos …
She’s covering Creative Commons now (at least as far as it relates to Flickr…). There goes a portion of my PowerPoint presentation.
We have YouTube blocked, but students in China, one of the most restrictive countries in the world, are using it in the classroom. Wow.
Here comes the podcasting info!
Wired Magazine recently rated edu-podcasts, interesting.
Plug for Odeo. I still like Podserve for my own hosting, though.
Social Bookmarking:
Plug for del.icio.us
Bloglines plug – there goes my secret weapon for my blog presentation! Looks like she’s picking apart my presentations bit by bit. I can’t complain too much, though – these are things I think people should know about and she’s reaching a much wider audience.
I’m glad I left the option in my own presentations to stand there and answer questions. I may have to do just that.
Plugs for Skype and Wesley Fryer (of Moving at the Speed of Creativity fame).
AirSet – never heard of this site. It has a blog, a calendar, and a bunch of other tools. It’s password protected so it can be a safe way for groups to interact online.
She has a pbwiki!
Nice, she just singled me out because I kept raising my hand every time she asked “How many of you do this…?” My ego knows no bounds. :-D
Plug for Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I’ve yet to use this program, but only because I haven’t had a need to do so. I’m such a bandwagon jumper though, so now I’m trying to think of what I could do.
gliffy – not quite Inspiration, but it’s free.
Create A Graph – takes data from spreadsheets and creates graphs.
zotero – research organization tool. I like the features in Furl.net, I think there’s some crossover here.
Plug for Second Life. I was bitten by the 2nd Life bug once, but I’m not so sure it’s the best resource.
[tags]puwt06, puwt, web2.0, resources, links, keynote, conference, Susan Brooks-Young[/tags]