Convert and Download

Watch out for the Learning Curve!

I never knew there were so many applications, websites, combinations of downloads and converters for videos! I began with, what I thought, was the greatest tool: www.vconversion.com. What I liked about this tool was that I never had to leave the site, I simply put in my url, pressed convert and then download. My movie was downloaded as a .mov (standard media container for Quicktime), and I was done. As I was creating my screencast on the easy use of vconversion, I received a message saying I needed to wait 13 minutes before downloading again, or join for 49.95. This sent me on a search for a comparable download/converter.

Some hours later, I had a good understanding of flv, which is the name of the file format used to deliver video using Adobe Flash Player. Once the video you want to capture is converted to an flv file, it can be seen only if you have a player. I set forth and learned about real player and real player agent, leechvideo.com, youtubia, Savetube, isquint, and vlan. I learned about vlc media players. I kept searching. Keepvid was recommended as a great site, but suddenly (as of last night) it went away. When I googled for ideas of replacements for keepvid, the suggestion was made to use www.clipnabber.com.
Clipnabber is a keeper. I used it to capture the YouTube video on Kids using multimedia for this week’s project. It was free, easy to use, quick to download, and converts to both flv and mp4 files, depending on whether your platform is PC or Mac, respectively. It seemed like most converters were beginning to charge for their services. I would be happy to pay for a good converter service, like vconversion if I have to, but for now, I’ll take free.

To Blog or Not to Blog

As a child I loved to write, putting pencil to paper and then sharing these poems and stories with others. Mrs. Booth, my fourth grade Reading teacher posted my poems on the wall outside her classroom, and “published” them in a magazine put together with staples. Later, she set me up with a penpal, her own niece who lived in West Virginia on the Ohio River. Eventually, Mrs. Booth had me over to dinner at her house to meet face to face with her niece, and we exchanged little gifts.

I can only imagine what Mrs. Booth would have done with us if blogging had been around way back then. Maybe I’d still be in touch with Laura Hodges, the girl who could draw like no one else. She is probably waiting to be the illustrator of the book I’m trying to write. Linda, Mrs. Booth’s niece would probably have had a blog that I would have regularly made pings on, and we would have learned so much more about each other’s lives.

My daughter has a blog. In it she talks about her life, vacation, her friends, and her dog. She enjoys blogging because others read her writing and respond, or ping her writing. Her blog, however, is password protected. I thought about responding to Will Richardson’s column on blogging with the thought that there are a lot of kids out there blogging, but not showing up on web searches because they are password protected. I think the business of blogging is important for kids to have practice in, but the risk of putting themselves and their feelings into a public forum is a little scary. Recently, my daughter had a friend who was the subject of cyber-bullying. We were suddenly face-to-face with the down side of putting yourself out there, on the internet, at a such a young age.

I see the power that Laura, from the 25 Days to Make a Difference blog, has to change her world and the lives of others. Her Mom seems very protective of how much gets out about Laura herself, and she cautions others about posting with the help of parents if they are minors.

It is a delicate balance. In the classroom, password protected, kids need the opportunity to learn how to blog. They need to know the etiquette (I understand the Bloggers That Be are working on this) and become empowered with this tool that is changing the landscape of their horizon. It is our job to educate our kids so that when they are ready to change the world with their words, they will be informed consumers of the choices available.

Screencasting

Screencasting has its place in the educational world because of its visual mode of delivery, and its ability to teach using sequential directions. It is appropriate for adults and children as it is teaching that can be replicated in the learner’s own time schedule.

Administrators could create screencasts to explain procedures, such as navigating the online handbook to highlight an area that they want everyone to understand with a certain degree of clarity. A screencast of this type would allow teachers to revisit the site as often as needed if they are unsure of the material being presented.

Screencasts can be used by educators as an aid for substitute teachers; if a teacher wants to use a piece of technology, and they will be out of the classroom, a screencast is a perfect tool for illustrating step by step the intention of the absent teacher.

Students could create screencast tutorials by suggesting topics and storyboarding their intention. With the teacher’s help, they could use a screencapture of their screencast.

Video and textual training tools are different. Video tools seem to be well received by visual learners, and textual training tools, by those who find print the best way to learn. This has been true in our cohort’s response to different screencasts.

Jing and Camtasia are two excellent sources of screencast creation. I found Totaltraining.com to be an excellent source of already made screencasts. When designing a screencast for educators or students, it would be good to follow this advice:

1. Put in an introduction that is brief and states your purpose.
2. Write out a script, even if you don’t follow it word for word.
3. Be aware of cognitive load.
4. Make your screen larger than the screen you will be describing, so that the recording bars do not show.
5. Practice your screencast several times before recording.
6. Keep it short, under 5 minutes.

I think these tips will help your screencast to be memorable and lasting for your audience.

It's All Coming Down

That's right, it's all coming down. My webpage, that is. Yesterday, at the I3U Conference in Howard County, I had at least three people tell me how wonderful my website was. My answer? It's all coming down. After this week's readings on web authoring, I could not stand to have my technology webpage up a moment longer. There were so many things wrong with it.

But, people loved my web site. Why? They loved that each grade had their own page. They loved that each page showcased the work of kids in that grade during that quarter. Kids loved it because I would show them something cool and school related during class and then I would say look at it tonight-I'll put up a link. And they would. Kids from other grades would come in and say I showed my brother this link and he showed me one on his page. It promoted dialogue. It had about 500 hits. Podcasts, original drawings, imovies of digital photos taken on walking field trips, and help for parents who need some guidance about technology.

So why is it down now? Well, there is always a sense of cleaning the plate for a new school year. I couldn't possibly keep up an archive of fifth grade podcasts when those kids were off to middle school. My site was messy, not uniform, lots below the fold. Not age appropriate type for each of the different pages. No standardized boxes. I use iweb, and am now searching for a better template. One that is fun, but quieter. One that has boxes, but not too many. One that will allow my classes opportunities to grow as we showcase their work.

I learned a lot from that first web site. I captured all of the pages as PDF files and stored it away in my archives for ideas for the future. I am looking forward to creating my new website, still all about the kids and celebrating our school community's connection to technology. For now, the Gone Fishing Sign is up while I ponder usability issues. Hey-I many even make my own Fireworks banner. My daughter is learning Flash (through the free download), and maybe I'll try to put some of that in as well. Wish me well in this new adventure.
LJ

Will Power

This morning I had the opportunity to hear Will Richardson speak at the Summer Technology Institute in Howard County. He spoke about seeing things through the lens of his kids. I am right there with him. My lens is my daughter, who is quickly approaching 13. Right now she is planning her dream teen room. We have been on PB (Pottery barn) teen and put the dimensions in for her room. We have moved furniture without pulling my back out of whack. She has already started to lobby us for her Christmas present, a Black Apple laptop, which she knows will take some financial planning. She goes to school, and like Will's kids, I know her real day begins when she gets home and starts to interact with her media. Upon returning from sixth grade outdoor ed, she kissed the floor and said,"I love my technology world." She is my lens.

She picked up Fireworks in no time. You should see her new blog header, but it is password protected so I'll describe it. Green swishing background, Chinese characters on either side of her name and like Chase, in the link Lori C sent us earlier, her name is reflected and shadowed beneath. No problem following Chase's tutorial.

When she goes to eighth grade this Fall, I am hoping for the rare teacher who can reach into her world of design and technology. I am looking for the teacher who wants to engage thirteen year olds with others like themselves around the world. What an opportunity to connect this age group with a world of resources that is outside the walls of their school. Thin walls. That's my hope for the new school year.

Heading into Fireworks

I used the tool, Adobe Fireworks, to create the header for my blog. Mostly, I just played with it to figure things out, but I did get one important tip from an online tutorial: After you open an image that you want to use in Fireworks, take a screen shot of it. Then, in Preview, choose edit>copy. Back in Fireworks, select the "page" you want the image to go on. Choose edit>paste. In Fireworks, the designer works with pages and layers. I took a photo of my dog, and put it on a "page". Next, I downloaded an image of a computer keyboard and copied it to another "page" in Fireworks. Using the select tool, I moved the image around so that only the part I wanted showed in the box. I used the scale tool to elongate the image to make the keys look stretched out. I went back to the page the dog picture was on and, using the eraser tool, I erased everything but the part of the picture I wanted. This made the keyboard on the next page show through. Next, I added a text box, chose a font, color, and typed bloggiedoggie. I used a live filter of "inset embossed" on the type. The live filters are found in the properties box. Under assets in the Pages box, I chose a thinking bubble, and dragged it to the image. I manipulated the curvature, the distance, and the direction of the bubbles from the dog's head. In the properties box, I gave the bubble a fill color, an outline color, and added text. The last element I added was the pawprints. I imported that image into a layer of one of the pages, and I'm not sure how I did it, but I was able to set that layer to dissolve through so the pawprints showed on top of the other pages. I was then able to grab the pawprints, and move them around to where I wanted them. I ended up feeling that there is a high learning curve in using Fireworks.

To find the number of pixels needed for my blog header, I noticed, quite by accident, that the pixel width 730 showed, when a new picture was uploading into blogspot. To figure out the height, I measured it in inches. In Fireworks, you can set the picture size in pixels, inches or centimeters.

Enjoy my customized header!

Walk in the Woods

Ryan led us through the woods last night with his flashlight. He is four, so a walk in the dark woods was both scary and exciting. There were all kinds of people pouring through the woods to the place where the fireworks could best be viewed. People were laughing and talking. Hawkers were selling hotdogs and glow-in-the-dark necklaces. The biker ladies had little flashlights. Everything was electric as we approached the clearing. Then the floodlights went out, the hush over the crowd, and the beautiful fireworks, worthy of any great town. An adventure for all of us, but when seen through the eyes of my nephew, it was momentous. Watching him trying to keep up with his Grandpa as we went through the woods, shining that flashlight and determined to light our way, was one of the great treasures of the night.
Life hands us moments like these once in a while. The courage it takes to go through the woods at night; the triumph of return to home with the glow in the dark necklace around our heads like an Olympic wreath. The knowledge that we go through the dark places to come to a place where people celebrate with us, and we return home through the dark places to contemplate and rest alone from our adventures. This morning, the fourth of July, I remember our founding fathers signing their declaration, and I think about them riding out by horse to read it aloud to people all over the countryside. Going through dark places to celebrate with others, just as we did last night. What a journey those who walk this land have been given. Such bravery and independence starts with a light, and a walk in the woods.
Happy Fourth to you all.

Mrs. Booth and Desk Top Publishing

Are we on the brink of a new way of communicating our thoughts to one another? Absolutely. I have no doubt that the elementary kids of today will have a different way of presenting information to their students, if they choose the teaching profession. The future will be about inviting into schools the outcast cell phone, and kids having access to their own personal computers at younger and younger ages.

My graduation gift from high school was a typewriter. I was thrilled that I could type my papers and did not have to hand-write them all. I could not have predicted kids today would have to bring their own computer to college. We live in the “Nano” world with everything getting smaller. I am sure my daughter will be taking some kind of communication device with her in six years when she goes to college. I do not think it will even be the laptop. I imagine it will be something much smaller, or that each dorm room will have a built in laptop and all she will need will be a back-up and transfer device, like a key. On the other hand, maybe it will be a way of communicating that only Ted.com knows about right now.

The question of whether or not a low-tech publishing tool will be used in the future is a good one. I find myself reminiscing about Mrs. Booth’s after school poetry club. I was in fourth grade when Mrs. Booth created a poetry magazine. I still have my bundle of pages stapled together, copied on a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that smudged a little if you weren’t careful. Oh, but how we loved seeing our work in print. It is no different today; our kids love creating brochures and magazines. There is something very touching about not only seeing your written word in a form that others can enjoy, but also, in being able to hold it up high and wave it at somebody else with a shout, “Hey, did you see what I wrote?” This time honored tradition of linking pride and celebration with the publication of our thoughts and ideas will, I predict, keep alive and well the desktop publishing low-tech products that we have used for so long. The delivery mode (tablet, printing press, typewriter, laptop/printer) may change up in years to come, but I am convinced there is something innately human about holding one’s writing in one’s own hand. We are people living in a changing time, but as the world gets smaller, or flatter, we are also people with a longing to connect with one another and to tell our stories. As people in the present, we will continue to use desktop publishing tools in our schools for the near future.

In the book, Critical Connections: Communication for our Future, by the US Office of Technology Assessment, it speaks to the cost efficiency of desk top publishing, and also of the self-esteem and self-confidence levels that arise from dtp. This is a time for cutting costs, and definitely a time to increase the self-esteem and self-confidence of our students. Mrs. Booth was on to something back in the late seventies. I will always be grateful.

In Flight Reading

Tonight, while waiting for my flight to arrive in Islip, I perused the shelves of the travel mart and walked away with two finds. One was The Atlantic, this month with a headline of, "Is Google making us Stoopid?" by Nicholas Carr, who wrote The Big Switch: Rewiring the Word from Edison to Google. The magazine was a must buy and the article takes a good look at how our brains are being rewired (perhaps) to read shorter pieces, to skim the War and Peace novels we may have once read. The other purchase was My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D. Cohort members will remember her as the effective presenter who used the real human brain in the Garr Reynolds presentation. I was very impressed with Jill, and having a daughter who has a brain injury, and family members who have experienced stroke, I am very interested in how she says she healed her brain in the eight years since her stroke. There was one more book that I had my eye on. It was Deirdre Breakenridge's new book: PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences. Her website is: http://www.deirdrebreakenridge.com/. She has a lot to say that ties in with our class. Winding down now from the big New York weekend where my twin great-nieces were Christened. Thank goodness for delays and airport travel marts.

Zen Dad

Listening to Garr's presentation, I couldn't help but think of my Dad. Dad is a regular on Ted.com, and sends me links from time to time when he sees something he thinks I'll like. About two years ago, he sent me a link from Ted.com that showed a presenter using an infra-red projected keyboard and a display that could be moved around with your fingers-a whole lot of touching going on. A few months later out came the ipod touch. I remember looking at the Ted presentation and thinking, "What in the world will they use that application for?" I also thought it would definitely make its way into the educational field, as kids are so tactile. That is one of the things I hate about the laptops I use with my students, they want to touch the screens, and I have to be after them the whole time to "not touch the screens." I predict that will change in the near future. Kids need to touch things to own them.

Another connection to Garr's presentation is that I gave Dad a copy of A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink, for Father's Day. I am also reading this book that so many people have recommended, and so we are going to talk about it together when we are done reading it.

Dad started out as a two-way radio repair guy, and then worked up to owning his own 2 way shop. Now, he sells cell phones and the repair part is very minimal. Disposable world.

I feel so lucky to have grown up with a person like Dad, who organized a lot of white space around whatever he did. His basement shop with little drawers filled with transisters and screws was organized based on his grand-father's saying that, "You should be able to walk into your shop and find anything with the lights turned off." Dad kept things simple, found time to explain things in ways I could understand, and was and is a great storyteller. So, in light of our work this week, I am keeping in mind my Dad, and the great example of simple, direct presentation he has given me for forty-five years.

Germane Load

How do you think we might work with teachers to explain and optimize the germane load? This is such a great question, Demetri, and thank you for the excellent article at http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/chipperfield/index.htm .

It took me a while to read the article, as it was new information for me, but so well written and profound. In light of the article, I think that we could show teachers an animated, audio-enhanced movie, or slide-show, that would provide examples of the principles of design as laid out by Mayer and Moreno (2002). We should show examples of what we are trying to teach them about germane load. "Learning, changing a novice to an expert and the formation of new schema adds to the load on working memory. Working memory must process this new information into advanced and more complex schema...this is called germane load" (Chipperfield, 2004). Teachers should be taught, as all learners, in a way that reduces their extrinsic load (all of the external distractors). The staff development piece should be held in an environment with as little distraction as possible. Staff should be made comfortable with some ground rules, such as paying attention to adult learners needs for using the facilities and turning off cell phones. The environment should be discussed at the beginning of the presentation in order to set the learner's minds at rest, and allow the brain to focus on creating schema and integrating the schema into long-term memory. Paper and pencil, or computers should be made available for those students who are gaining more than seven new ideas from the presentation. This way, the working memory is not overburdened, and there is a place to spill over into a "holding place" until the brain processes the initial seven pieces of information. That is one strategy I applied when reading this article; I took notes on a Word doc to read at a later time, because the information was dense. I wanted to move from novice to expert in the use of the language about germane load, so I took notes and pulled out the important bits that I thought were relevant to Demetri's question.

Acknowledging that each person's intrinsic load is what they bring to the table, the germane load is the area which we can effectively affect through the design of multimedia. Teachers would need to see examples of slides, much as we made in week one's assignment, side-by-side that show the effectiveness of Mayer and Moreno's principles. Teachers should be given time to create their own examples to demonstrate a model and then the problem to be solved. This feels key to the learner's aquisition of new knowledge, which, as teachers, should be our ultimate goal.

I will take what we have discussed this week and share it with my classroom teachers in my study group this Fall. I will share it in small pieces, first showing them an overloaded slideshow, and then asking them to find what is wrong with it. Most will deduce that the slideshow has too much information in it. I think if they see this, they will begin to understand what cognitive load is all about. I will also share with my learners/staff members my personal story of learning to work with cognitive load during the last three years. I think the personal story sometimes is long remembered and humanizes the facilitator. I believe it will be well-received.

Cognitive Load

Cognitive Load
I have hesitated in writing about cognitive load, because it is a topic that has been very much a part of my life for the past three years. Three years ago, my daughter was hit by a car while riding her bike, and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Following her stint in the ICU (11 days in coma), I accompanied her to a locked ward at National Rehabilitation Hospital in DC where I first heard about cognitive load.

I know that is a little heavy for a blog post, but there you have it. Real life. It happens.

So, cognitive load became a part of my vocabulary. Not overwhelming the brain while it was healing. Chunking ideas and words together as she rebuilt her engine. We say she had a restart, the way computers do. She had to put little things back into the system like learning to brush her teeth, and learning to sit, and stand and walk.

Cognitive load is something we still have to watch three years later. She is particularly sensitive to cognitive fatigue, and this is caused by having too much information in her working memory at one time. This causes her to be more tired than your average kid. Recently she had three exams on the same day. She did not do well on any of them, even though she studied and knew the material. We know this is due to cognitive load.

Stress is also a factor in cognitive load. When we have more stress than usual, we tend to slow down, and need more time to process new information. For my part, I developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, and so when I am overwhelmed with a week like this one where I am packing up a room to move elsewhere in the school, and dealing with a crashing computer, AND starting a new class, I tend to slow down and chunk things into little pieces like getting things done on the day they are due.

When we are presenting teachers with new information, we need to be sensitive to the load they are already under, and also, to remind them that their students are not a one size fits all group of kids. Chunking is good for all kids. Accessing prior knowledge is good for all kids. Presenting one concept at a time and building on it is good for all kids.

There is always a silver lining. The lessons we learned in restarting our daughter have made me a better teacher, because I look at each child, and each adult learner as an individual who wants to learn, but who comes with their own ways of accessing the information.

Wow! I am finding it easier to create in an air-conditioned room. At first, I thought I'd go with a tried and true tool, and use my .mac account to create a blog, but it was not working in class. So, now, in the comfort of my little home, with my little doggie by my side, I am ready to tackle tonight's challenge. I may move a little slower than some, but I get it in the long run.

I know the article about cognitive load is for our meeting on Thursday, but tonight I was living the load. Too much in too little time for this overloaded brain, coupled with the heat in that room of ours! Anyway, I think I'll be able to catch up in the very near future.

DoggieBloggie