Week Seven: Dr. Strangedean, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Chicken

Week Seven: Dr. Strangedean, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Chicken

In ICT class this week, we embarked on the production of a short video in which we developed our abilities and aptitude for making and editing video, while having a great deal of fun and including several fellow students and faculty. We decided early on to do something fun, rather than serious and thought that it would be an excellent idea to end with a rendition of the Harlem Shake, in which we would invite any faculty members willing to participate. We were pleasantly surprised when the Dean of Education, Dr. Cockerline was willing to not only dance in the scene at the end, but guest star as an angry principal.

Making the video was a lot of fun! We were lucky enough to get a selection of fun props and costumes from Mecca Productions, including a rather realistic-looking prop chicken, which I happily engaged in dancing around with at the end of the video. We discussed such things as appropriate angles and rotating of camera duties, while doing the shoot in two seperate sessions, one on Tuesday for the bulk of the video and on Wednesday afternoon for the Harlem Shake part at the end. While producing the video was the most fun part, editing in many ways is the really important work.

We had several ideas for music, including ragtime and a variety of pop songs, but chose to go with a relatively obtrusive backing track, so as to not distract too much from either the Harlem Shake at the end or the visual elements nearer the beginning. We used a single take of Stephanie's disapproval for several scenes, with the reasoning that it would be funnier if repeated. We deliberately left in a few jumpy cuts for humourous purposes, though I feel most of our transitions were reasonably smooth. We ended up with a video that was 3:43 long, but felt that cutting it further would result in the loss of valuable material (and comedy), so we didn't cut it any further.

Once we finished making the video, we uploaded it to YouTube, where as of this morning, our video has 272 hits, which indicates that it is being watched by at least a few people outside of our immediate circle! The process of making and editing a video was enormously fun, and I look forward to perhaps sharing the experience with a classroom in the future. I have considered the possibility of doing a video for my Grade 7 ELA class (or perhaps another class) and I think it would be a great deal of fun for students, as well as providing them with a lasting artifact of their hard work and creativity.

Week Six: Operation Multimedia

It is difficult to believe that I am doing a retrospective of the sixth week of our term already. Needless to say, that is more than a little intimidating to consider, as we begin the inevitable mad sprint to the finish of the term and the beginning of student teaching.

Our Week In Review: 
We spent much of this week discussing multimedia and worked to create a slide show featuring digital photographs, set to music. For my own show, I chose to do something related to my teaching plans for the term, a slideshow on Ethiopia, using pictures from the Wikimedia Commons. My desire would be to impress upon students that there is more to Ethiopia than what they usually hear about it, that is, of a country full of starving children. I chose images of the landscape, of the wildlife, of their culture and history to give a brief impression that of the rich heritage of one of the world's oldest nations.

Using Animoto to produce this was simplicity itself, with the selection and arrangement of the pictures being significantly more difficult than the other visual and auditory elements of it. While the video that was produced was ultimately serviceable, I was a little disappointed at the low quality of the images that were produced. I suppose that the paid service would give you options to have better sound quality, as well as longer videos. I think that a minute-long show with a greater number of images and higher quality would go a long way towards fulfilling the purpose I desire. Perhaps I should try Photostory to see how that compares.

In addition to making a slideshow, we also used photomanipulation programs in order to turn an ordinary image into something considerably more amusing. I used BeFunky to add an appropriate frame to a Shakespearan image as well as suitably knavish dialogue. I must say, it looked better on my screen than it did up at the front of class. In the future, I would have used speech balloons so as to make the text more visible than it was. This is something which I need to do some more experimenting with before I can feel confidant in my mastery.

Looking Forward: 
Next week, we're making a movie, which should be exciting. Our plan is to do it as a large group and then split into two groups in order to edit the film differently, which should make it interesting to compare the two edits together. I've never really participated in a project like this before, so it should be interesting to see how it all turns out ...

Week Five: Smart Boards And The Infinite Confusion

Smartboards: The Usefulness, The Frustration

I used a smartboard relatively frequently during my first placement, but it is safe to say that I never did more than absolutely scratch the surface of its functionality, using it primarily as a means of displaying computer programs on a screen for what amounts to a somewhat fancier version of a whiteboard, which are in and of themselves recent additions to classrooms. Exploring the functionality of a smartboard during class, I have to admit that I'm still less than expert in its use and expect that I'll be continuing to learn for some time how to use them properly.

I did, however, encounter some very useful little programs that could be valuable for either an Early Years or an early Middle Years placement, including programs that allowed you to place organs in their proper places on the body and an interesting interactive flash that allowed you to sample different parts of an orchestra, so you got a sense of how the different instruments contributed to a single piece. Certainly, there are no shortage of useful functions that one could accomplish with a smartboard given the prequesite skills and time to do so.

As a random aside, you know you're a hopeless nerd when you start playing around with dice rollers on the smartboard software and wish they had the full range of polyhedral dice, so you could basically play D&D on a smartboard ... which is neither here nor there as far as a classroom goes.

For all the power and functionality of the smartboard, however, there are some drawbacks. It is frustrating that the light markers can only be operated one at a time, and that the colours shift seemingly arbitrarily if you break that rule. There's no denying that it's easier to write on a whiteboard than a smartboard. I also worry about it being the best investment of preparation time as it often takes quite awhile to assemble instruction-worthy material on a smartboard, even at a limited level of functionality. Additionally, there is a frequent and disturbing trend to simply reduce already-precious whiteboard space for the smartboard's addition.

A Few Thoughts on Multimedia: 

When I was introduced to the concept of multimedia in the 1990s, it was primarily as something you viewed, something you watched or listened to that already existed, within a computer program or increasingly as the 90s drew to a close, on the Internet as well. Somewhere around the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, however, that began to change, marked by the emergence of YouTube in 2005 and continuing onwards into the present. Rather than simply being something that you watched, an experience that you took in passively, multimedia is now something you yourself can create, without specialized skills or expensive software.

This has had vast implications for our society, ones that are still making themselves felt as literally everyone in the world with an Internet connection can now become a creator and an artist. Thousands of people who previously had no means of sharing their creativity with the world can not only share their artistry, but also make a living from their art. In the year 2000, only a tiny few webcomics existed, and now there are countless thousands of them, with dozens of creators who are capable of supporting themselves on their art.

One of the most popular webcomics on the Internet, Homestuck, on www.mspainatadventures.com, is emblematic of the changing nature of artistic creation and expression on the Internet. Fuelled as much by Internet memes and its own fandom (about a million people read it daily) as by any traditional considerations of plot, it seamlessly weaves together images, animations, music and even short computer games into an epic that defies all simple categorizations of genre or even medium. Starting in 2008, the insane, brilliant mash of forms and mediums that constitutes this comic would have been inconceivable even five years before it went online.

The world of media creation is one that I haven't even dabbled in substantially. There are perhaps a dozen photographs of me that exist on the Internet, all of which were taken by other people. I don't own a scanner, nor have I ever used the camera feature on my phone. All of which would have marked me as pretty normal even a few years ago, but these days, smacks of Luddism that I don't really believe in. Hopefully by the time I am finished this course, I'll be empowered to branch out a little more into the world of multimedia and integrate both original and found content into the classroom.

Week Four: Google Docs and Wikis and Weebly, Oh My!

It's startling to think that the course of the term is about half over already. It feels like it just began, but we're already finished Week Four. The work begins to pile on as projects become more and more engrossing and assignment due dates, once seemingly so distant, become too close for comfort ...

Making a Website via Weebly: 

For the most part, Weebly seems to be a very simple, yet powerful tool for making a website that is both attractive and functional, especially for someone with little experience in making a website. It's a delight to be able to pull down simply elements from the top bar in order to create individual pages, as well as an intuitive interface for making and ordering websites. I'll be using Weebly for my e-portfolio and, through the magic of an alternate email address, will actually be using it in my personal life to power a website for a tabletop roleplaying campaign that I run.

There are, however, a few criticisms that I would make about Weebly. It does not seem particularly easy to make a good-looking table in the website, though it's possible that I just haven't discovered the "trick". To me, tables seem like they could be a discrete element. Also, there are some issues with formatting and spacing that, while I was able to resolve them, caused minor headaches. Overall, however, I was able to make a far more attractive and functional website in a far shorter time using Weebly than I would have imagined possible only a short time ago. Literally anyone with basic Internet navigation skills can learn to make a website on Weebly that would serve their purposes.

It is a tool that I intend to be using in my classroom, not just for myself, but for my students. I see no reason why a Grade Four student, or group of students couldn't make a simple website using the tools offered on Weebly, and it would be simplicity itself for tech-savvy Middle or Senior Years students (in which case, the content would be more important than simple construction). Though I chose to make a topical rather than a personal website, one of my intended projects in the near future is to create a personal website to use as a portal until I get a job at a school division (and then replicate, as best I can, the website on their space).

Google Docs vs. Wikis: 

Now that we have experience making both Google Docs and wikis, I can compare the two in terms of their usefulness for collaborative work and speculate on their proper use, both in general and in the classroom.

For the purposes of a short-term collaborative project in which people are likely to be working simultaneously, there is no question whatsoever that Google Docs are superior. Our group ran into several headaches with wikis regarding updating, and while we eventually nominated Kristin to be the primary editor and publishier of group-sourced content, this created new headaches. Meanwhile, doing the same manner of project with a Google Doc was not only far easier, but actually fun. The medium seems to lend itself to a fairly lighthearted atmosphere and I think a class group would have a lot of fun working on projects together using a Google Doc.

The primary advantage of a wiki, I believe, is in its permanance and online status- a Google Doc can be made open, but is not typically so and it functions primarily as an online equivalent of Microsoft Office. While I don't have a lot of experience with wikis yet, I would speculate that they are probably more powerful than Google Docs in terms of being able to construct a large and durable webportal. The difficulties with collaborative work on a wiki disappear if the people who are collaborating are distant from each other and not typically working at the same time.

While I certainly had an easier time with Google Docs, I do not want to dismiss wikis, nor do I want to put up my hands and refuse to learn more about using them. After all, one of the most popular and useful websites in in the world, Wikipedia, is a wiki.