Expanding Our Boundaries - Saturday 2pm

We're all looking forward to this weekend's Expanding Our Boundaries conference with Will Richardson. Tim Hawes has me slotted to mini-present on Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and has asked that we post a little blurb about what we'll be talking about.

Topic: Web 2.0 - Staff Support Tool
What is it?: Video Screencast
Website: Screencast.ca
Feed: http://screencast.ca/atom.xml
Impact: I was getting a number of requests both during staff inservices and after the sessions for "how to" documents from session participants. For years we have offered the paper and "screen grab" step by step tutorials. We still offer those but now we offer "visual tutorials" as well. When requested, I just flip the particular screencast to the participant via an e-mail link and they can choose whether to watch the cast by itself or subscribe to others.
How: I use TechSmith's Camtasia 5.0 - educational version [it is up to v6 now] to record the casts and export the original in .avi format. Then I use Handbrake to compress and re-encode to h.264 - ipod - hi resolution.
Hosting: I have [for now] ftp access to our district's servers so everything is hosted in-house.
Vehicle: I use Blogger because it is easy to use and I didn't want to take a lot of time during the process.
Obstacles: Although the casts are encoded for the video ipod, the screen is perhaps a little too small for this type of tutorial. Great for a netbook though. Also, since there is no "flash" version of the casts, I usually have to give a quick lesson on subscribing to the cast and using Quicktime or iTunes to view them. Oh, one more: it takes about 30 to 45 minutes from start to finish to create, re-encode and post a cast and I create them in my "spare time".
Next Steps: Have started to incorporate best practices on projects from classrooms where I work with the students and teachers. The most recent being a 4 Part Captain Canuck - Fiction Writing Unit we did in Grade 5 just before Christmas. Folks seem to be appreciating the curriculum connections.

O.K. that's it.

See you on the weekend...
looking forward to meeting everyone.

Magazine Covers - Photoshop Elements 5

Look real? You may not be able to tell the difference.

The sample to the left was designed by an 8th grader, yesterday. Amazing isn't it?

What's more amazing is the quality of the 24 other magazine covers from the class. The classroom teacher and I spent the morning working on this task which was a culminating graphics/media literacy assignment for the magazine articles they had written in cooperative groups. What better than to produce a professional looking cover to bound their written material.

We started by having the students find and cite a creative commons photo that matched the content and theme of their articles. Then, the classroom teacher [an accomplished photoshop - er btw] and I, assisted the students to create their masterpiece. All in all a very creative morning.

At the end of the session I showed them how to make a quick magazine cover in a minute or less. There wasn't one complaint about having to spend the morning working on their covers after they saw the "quick way". The students [at least in my observation] were proud of the work they had to put into their covers to get it ... just right.

Jeffrey Wilhelm

The highlight of the Reading for the Love of it conference for me has to be Jeffrey Wilhelm's talk on boys writing on Friday afternoon. He spoke about a study he did with a number of boys and related the information to the audience by telling stories.

Great stuff.

Boys Literacy - Peg Tyre

Peg Tyre's book arrived today.

I've been skimming through Chapter 11, Boys and Literacy and have come across Peg's list of outstanding researchers on boys and literacy. Here it is:

Thomas Newkirk - University of New Hampshire
William Brozo - University of South Carolina
Jeffrey Wilhelm - Boise State University
Michael Smith - Rutgers University

I'll be attending Jeffrey Wilhelm's presentations tomorrow and Friday at Toronto's Reading for the Love of It conference.