A Voice in the Wilderness – The Copenhagen Conference

 

 

Global warming will change the world we live in and love.

 

 

As the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference unfolds I wonder about my professional responsibility to translate the global importance of this event into concepts that my students will understand. Especially when I am not totally sure I understand the ramifications myself. I have been increasingly turning to the Manchester Guardian newspaper http://www.guardian.co.uk/ for information and unbiased clarification. The Manchester Guardian has long held a reputation for quality news reporting and a fair examination of the topics. It is also one of the few major newspapers that has a designated Environment section.

 

Copenhagen is about global warming and global warming is about the increase of CO2

in the atmosphere. A two degree increase over the next century would cause international disruption and dislocation. Four degrees would be disastrous. According to a number of peer reviewed studies http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/17/global-temperature-rise , if humanity remains on the present accelerated course of fossil fuel consumption we could see a six degree increase in earth’s temperature − devastating.

 

The stakes are high and the future possibly grim for this present generation of elementary students. So, what am I going to do as a teacher? Well, I certainly don’t want to traumatize ten year olds with a cataclysmic view of the future, although I will show them Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthefilm/ . This is a long video so I’ll abridge it. The film always stimulates interesting discussion. We will also watch a video created by local kids that describe the immediate impact of global warming on their lives http://teachertube.com/members/viewVideo.php?video_id=32896&title=Pine_Beetles_and_Global_Warming .

The concept of one’s carbon footprint is key to understanding the goals of the Copenhagen conference. This site http://www.dbcca.com/dbcca/EN/what-you-can-do/1245.jsp provides a calculator that kids can fill out to get a sense of how consumer decisions affect their personal footprint and therefore the health of the planet. Hopefully, this will lead to some positive discussion around the dinner table.

 

As for practical steps in the classroom we will be looking at ways to reduce our footprint by 10 %. This is both a realistic and meaningful goal based on the 10:10 Project. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/10-10 . And what if the whole climate change discussion is a hoax or a conspiracy? Well, we will be well on our way to cleaning up a badly polluted world and creating a sustainable civilization before we run out of oil. And that makes sense! Unless you don’t believe we are going to run out of oil.

Beyond the Bricks and Mortar

 

Cayoosh Kidz record an News episode.

 

 

I’ve taken a break from writing report cards. Why don’t the people that design report card writing software ever think to ask a classroom teacher what they need? It drives me crazy when software developers produce substandard products that are less useful and more time consuming than paper and pen. People, we have the technology, get it right. However, all is not darkness and doom.

 

An interesting product that has just come out is the Owle http://www.wantowle.com/Welcome.html . It is an adapter for the iPhone and markedly improves the video quality. While this product is designed for the iPhone, the principle could be applied to any smartphone. A smartphone can become a useful information gathering and sharing tool. With online video editing such as Movie Masher http://www.moviemasher.com/ you can take decent video clips, edit, and share them on the web, in minutes. If you want to brush up on your video skills try Video 101 http://www.video101course.com/Editing/e_50.html

 

Copyright is always a thorny issue when you are trying to illustrate a blog or some other work you want to share with a public audience. There is always creative commons which allows certain uses of images. Flickr  http://www.flickr.com/photos/grade5/ offers such a service. I recently found a site that claims no copyright and has a selection of excellent photos http://aksinya.wordpress.com/ .

 

The connected classroom project has started to use Moodle http://moodle.org/ . Moodle is the FaceBook of education. It is part of an emerging class of social media that has the potential to change the way children are educated.  Moodle offers a way to manage all the tasks that teachers and students need to accomplish in a totally digital format. Moodle is not perfect but it is functional. Colleagues at my school are beginning to transfer all their assignments onto Moodle. With Moodle, a Smartboard, Bridgit and Elluminate we can provide a powerful educational experience without paper and possibly without a bricks and mortar classroom.

 

Well I guess it is time to get back to the report cards. Writing the blog has reminded me of all the great technology available and has restored my faith in the web 2.0 future. Hopefully, by this time next year I can report that report card writing has left the dark ages behind.

Cayoosh Kidz at the Restoration Site

Learning by teaching others in a teaching train

This week Cayoosh Kidz walked down to the restoration site for a field day.  Part of the educational component was a teaching train – where two students at each station were taught something about local animals, plants or the restoration work done by the team.  They then in turn taught their classmates as they moved through the “train”.  It was fun and a great way for students to learn from each other.

Kim North and Odin Scholz along with the dedicated restoration team showed the kids what they did at the site and then taught them how they could help out too. Students volunteered to do a number of jobs including planting over 56 native shrub species.

It was rewarding to hear students saying “this was one of our best days yet!” as they laboured to restore the site.

The Power House Restoration Project is a partnership between BC Hydro’s Bridge Coastal Restoration Program, the Lillooet Naturalist Society and Cayoosh Creek Band.

If you would like to see a short video of the day’s activities go to www.cayooshkidz.net and select video, then click on “Foreshore Restoration Day”.

The Connected Classroom Project Continues

Week four of the Connected Classroom has passed. We connected with our first video conference in the second week and took delivery of the net books shortly after that. The Kidz were over the moon with excitement at having their own net book. These aren’t dinky little play things. They come with almost a GB of RAM and a 1.6 MHz processor. You can even do video editing with them! The Smart Board is being integrated into daily lesson plans. With Bridgit software the Smart Board will reach across the internet into other Connected Classrooms. The virtual conferencing software program Elluminate is being used for peer to peer student conversations. Its video ability is a great attraction for the students.  With a bit more practice we will integrate Elluminate in a wide range of  educational interactions. We have done some multimedia work too. The Cayoosh Kidz vlog has been updated and new pictures are on Flickr. The students wrote about their summer on the netbooks, saved to their flash drives and then printed the stories in the computer lab. They have created posters, business cards and Wordle art and a host of other digital content. We finished a video on the forest fire above Lillooet this summer and have started planning our first news cast. This is an exciting project!

A Summer Dance With Technology

Tide Pools

I am beginning to feel a little obsessed about technology. Every morning I have a quick look at the international news before turning to the excellent technology section of the New York Times. Once appraised of the latest in digital trends and gadgets I move on to check Twitter and Facebook for interesting updates and recommendations. I usually make a stop at RuralSchools to scan for comments and then check my Tag Surfer for what’s come in over the past 24 hours. Housekeeping complete I usually spend the rest of the morning reading, writing or as a last choice doing chores around the house.

After a summer lunch from the garden, I settle down to study Final Cut Pro (FCP). There is always a danger when you decide to try to learn a software package that is smarter than you are. I think FCP might be my match. I have several textbooks on FCP and am slowly working through the exercises. This is going to be a multi year project to achieve competency, but hopefully I will be churning our some basic videos by the end of the summer. I have to admit that my FCP experience hasn’t been as psychologically crushing as when I naively embraced the challenge of learning Adobe Photoshop Pro a couple of years ago. Given my minimal computing skills, saying that it was a steep learning curve would be a gross understatement; that learning curve was more like a brick wall that I slammed into. After hundreds of hours of study and practice I am able to use the program, but it still feels like a dark mystery every time I delve into its depth.

My evenings are reserved for more relaxing activities. Often web surfing occupies pleasant hours. Lately I have been researching the new crop of 3G cell phones looking for potential educational uses. And after staying on an isolated (no wi-fi) farm for a week without internet access the data handling abilities of these devices has an increased appeal.

So last night, content with the day’s digital activities I was about to retire to bed when I noticed that I had somehow twice loaded a large batch of pictures onto my iPod Touch.  No problem I thought. I will delete them. Wrong thought! A frustrating hour later and I still wasn’t any closer to obliterating the offending pixels. But with a new day and a few more hours I managed to track down a solution to the picture problem. It did make me wonder how I will every find time to continue my technology obsession once the school year begins, but I will try.

JVC GY-HM 100u and Final Cut Pro and the Basics

Camera with lavaliere receiver for remote recording.

There are many possible tools and techniques to create multimedia. First the simple stuff that is cheap but often overlooked.

Probably the most important tool one should use is a tripod. Nobody appreciates images bouncing sickeningly around a screen. A steady image is key to keeping your audience.

While not a tool, you need to have the light source to your back. Videography like photography is painting with light. Full light makes your subject look sharp and the colors rich. Evening and dawn give the best light and like the sun over your shoulder it is free.

Once you have dealt with light the next issue is sound. Sound is at least half of the video. While an image is lineally acquired, sound is omnidirectional. It is problematic. You need to either get close or get technical. Close is cheap, but not very dramatic or interesting. By moving away from the subject you can capture a wide range of effects, angles, and moods. Technology can simplify both the production and post production process. Sound technology costs, but to improve the quality of your video it is one of the most important things you can invest in.

After creating a number of videos it felt like time to move to a prosumer level. The heart of the system that I use is the JVC GY-HM 100u video camera. It records to the native Final Cut Pro (FCP) codex. Final Cut Pro is the industry standard for video editing. The JVC also records onto cheap SD cards which means that your files can be simply dragged into FCP to be edited without any rendering. This tapeless system is the way of the future.

The JVC accepts XLR equipped microphones. I use two types of microphones. A very unidirectional microphone that cancels out extraneous noise and a remote lavaliere body microphone that I can wire the talent with and transmit to a receiver attached to the camera.

With these techniques and tools it is possible to create a professional product at a relatively modest cost.

A Refugee from Fire

It is summer and there is time to regroup technologically. Through a series of happy coincidences I now have a Macbook Pro, iPod Touch, JVC 100u and a the Final Cut Studio Three to explore. It is enough to make my head spin. Learning how to use Final Pro will take years. Hopefully the creative output will be worth the time and expense.

My learning has been interrupted because the town where I live, Lillooet, has been evacuated. Wild fire threatens from three sides and we have all been forced to leave. Our family is fortunate to have accommodating family to stay with, others are not so lucky. For all of us there is a disquieting sense of being refugees.

Global warming may be playing a contributing role in our community’s drama. We are seeing unprecedented drought combined with high temperatures. The forests are littered with dead pine trees caused by winters too warm to kill the pine beetles infesting them. Our glaciers around Lillooet are disappearing at an alarming rate. Access to clean drinking water is a hot topic in many communities, including my own. Supplies dwindle as issues of access and cost loom larger. We live in interesting times.

What does this have to do with the bundle of new technology that I have to learn? Well it is about purpose. Social sustainability, environmental integrity and Web 2.0’s ability to promote these issues are what I intend to focus on over the coming months, both in creative productions and blogging. In the mean time when I wait hopefully to return to a home still intact I will explore mobile computing.

Music of the Movies

Podcast

It is hard to find good Creative Commons music that is free and can be used for school projects. For this blog I have created a podcast using the free Apple program Garage Band. As with most things Apple the program worked well, but I will let you judge the quality. The music used in the podcast comes from the following sites and can also be heard in videos that the class has produced at www.cayooshkidz.net . If you have trouble finding a specific piece of music or have any questions please leave a comment.

http://www.jamendo.com/en/creativecommons

http://mashable.com/2008/06/30/free-legal-music-sites/

http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

http://podsafeaudio.com/

Migrating to Mac

Visiting Friends in Alberta

It’s been a week now since the School District kindly provided me with a Mac laptop to facilitate creating and sharing multimedia in the classroom. While relatively pricy there really isn’t anything in the PC world to match the MacBook Pro.

I was on holidays in Alberta and purchased the computer at the University of Alberta’s Book Store. It was a pleasant and painless experience especially considering that someone else was paying the tab. With the computer I also bought the iWorks bundle of programs. Next I was off to Starbucks to set the thing up. I suppose if I had read the instructions and watched the tutorials it might have been a little faster to get up to speed, but the setup was so intuitive that just about everything worked flawlessly. And hey, what can I say, I’m a guy.

On a side note having a Mac really makes working with my iPod touch a lot easier. The integration between the two is really slick. I look forward to exploring the educational possibilities of the Mac-iPod combination.

Email, pictures and sound files were all easy to create and and share. I am waiting for the video editing program Final Cut Pro to arrive, but in the meantime I was pleasantly surprised with the free iMovie program that came with the Mac. I used it to edit a video about an end of year event that we had at school – Nature Day.

The only task that I have been procrastinating about is wrestling my address book off of my PC. Who knows, maybe it will prove to be as easy as everything else with the Mac.

A Creativity Jag

Sunset

 

 

Sometimes I wonder what creativity is and where it comes from. When we ask kids to produce a video, or any content for that matter, we ask them to engage in a creative process.

 Given even a moderately supportive environment, kids usually jump at the chance to express themselves. But where does that creative spark come from and what is it? Is there something innate that compels us to make content? And is that followed by a drive to learn better techniques to make the content more expressive and beautiful?

The creative process obviously takes many forms. A story can be placed in the color, form and texture of a weaver’s rug, a medium that suggests rather than tells. It can be in the grainy image of a photograph, which provides only half a story, forcing us to complete the narrative. Or, it can be a video, more explicit, but still only a rippled reflection of reality.
 
The learning of techniques, the study of content, the artful presentation and finally a mystical spark that breathes life into our efforts is as close as I can come to a description of the creative process.

 And what got me started on this ‘creativity jag’ you might ask? Well I just finished a book titled Unleash Your Creativity by Rob Bevan and Tim Wright. There were 52 chapters full of suggestions. Some of them seemed to be worth a try. Here is a list of ones that I want to have a go at.

•  Build a file of inspirational resources
• Create arbitrary rules to work by and then break them
• Write a slogan
• Restrict your choice of materials (painters might only use blue)
• Look at things from another perspective (haul out the step ladder)
• Copy the very best in your field
• Network with other creative types
• Seek out specific criticism (Tell me one thing that works for you.)
• Make mistakes faster and you will learn more.

 And if you are still hungry for more creative fare try: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html