The ironically titled site SmartTeaching.org” blogged a list claiming “100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers.“ Say it ain’t so. While there are some old favorites and familiar gems in the 100, there are also some terrible choices, videos that don’t serve teachers at all. Worse, old middle school teacher that I am, I am hard to offend, but there is a video in this list that manages it. Peruse the list. Find me wrong! If I pulled from the last five years of winners from the California Student Media Festival, I believe could find a better list. Not to mention the other great student and teacher media festivals around the country. What do you think? I’d love your opinion. Videos for teaching are still about curriculum, one way or another, hint hint. Or at least about project building.
Okay, if you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to see the brief post from a day or so, you know that the “Latest Webinar in the Known World” refers to a little webinar malfunction we had in the DEN series. It was a perfect conspiracy of time zone changes, a dead computer, and vanished codes. After sitting as a muted ‘participant’ on my own webinar for a very long time in every known browser, an emergency call to webmaster Dembo got all the necessary codes changed. We managed to get in some information about posting video clips and live feeds into blogs and Google Earth, and we talked a little about patching cellphones through Google Earth. But time was the enemy and there will be a lot more in the rescheduled event for that seminar: Ten Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with a Video Clip (and Two You Did). We are going to build avatars with Web. 2.0 sites, mixing them with DiscoveryEducationstreaming clips, punch video through Google Earth, convert video for portability, link the web through webphones, do chromakey (free) with MovieMaker, and lots more. More than we could do from the Fairfield Inn in Lakewood Ranch, Florida anyway. (Note: I love Manatee County, no dis intended or implied!).
Watch for the reschedule date! We should have that out in the day or so.
I had a great time at the Discovery Educator Network National Institutes. Mike Bryant did Google Earth for the Leadership Councils and I did it for the National Institute. The great “face of the globe” is from Mike’s presentation here. I’m hoping it’s his image, because I’m using it. I twitted I was doing this blog to add some missing audio components to the classroom use of media and Google Earth. Mike sent me the the link of his presentation to my cellphone. Really, how many ways do we connect with other! Thanks, Mike. The globe face really doesn’t hold a candle to the Bearded Lady outfit you wore last week, which remains a classic. The unanswered question in that costume: How did you know to refer to the shoes as “flats.” Only girls know that jargon…Anyway, I ran short of time doing the media integration of Google Earth. We cover image, DES media, flash, and live cellphone feeds into placemark boxes (see below). But there wasn’t time to include audio. There is great audio on the web and in the DES library and I always try to stick in examples. Here they are. The first is an example folder that takes a class from school around the world via animal sounds. It takes the form of a quiz. Open “A”, click on the link, and you will hear an animal sound. Try to hide the browser because kids might guess from the URL. After a class guesses what the animal is and where it might live, click on “B” for a photo of the animal (from DiscoveryEducationstreaming’s image library, naturally) by it’s geographic home. Then click on the next URL (in the “B” box). When guesses have been made, go to “C” and see if the guesses are correct! Repeat procedure until done! Bonus feature if you finish (”E”). Hint: Nutshell Math. If you haven’t logged into DES, do it first. Otherwise the links to the images and sounds will wait for your login. If you don’t have a DES account, this exercise may be a little lost on you. The folder and other files below will download as an kmz file. Click them and Google Earth should open. Lastly, two bonus files: One with a link to, um, a mystery man’s cellphone camera. And one to an NPR story on Canada geese in New Jersey. Big point: If you missed the National Institutes, for pete’s sake attend the Regionals!
LIVE from NECC! This post was initially made live during my presentation in the Lila Cockrell Theater. We did something in that session never done before (to my knowledge). We pasted a live feed from a cellphone (Mr. Steve Dembo’s) into Google Earth. Pretty fun. We also did it here, in the blog. That’s why it was here since NECC. Also, the code you see below was pasted “incorrectly” on purpose to show how pasting code in the visual mode instead of the code mode will not show the embedded video. The session was on code, needless to see. During the session, a Dr. Pepper basically blew up on the presenter. Also accidentally. :) If you want to see the session, it is supposedly by Kidz Online, but I can only find old or dead links. Sigh. The links and resources will be posted here as soon as I fix a couple of errors. was great! Many great teachers to hang with. More later on that!. - Hall
Writing from NECC in San Antonio, Texas,where this blog will be viewed live during my session on cellphones in education (which NECC accepted, causing happy shock and insomnia).
We’ll be checking out a live feed from a mystery guest during the session, which is at 3:30 PM Central Time onTuesday, July 1. The live feed is below. The image above is not a live feed of the empty 3,000 seats. Hopefully, there will people there. Hopefully, someone will have brought cattle to fill it up.
The session: It’s in Your Pocket: Teaching Spectacularly with Cell Phones. The live feed directly from a cellphone via qik.com. If you are viewing this before, you may see some strange tests
I’m working on my presentation for NECC on things you can do with code and tinkered a little with the work of Cindy Lane, Jen Dorman, and others nicely noted in Matt Monjan’s blog. The trick is doing chromakey (the “weatherperson effect”) where a video clip can play inside another clip through a color that is “keyed out”. Final Cut Express and Adobe Premiere Elements can do this masterfully but for $50 or so. What if you could do it in Windows MovieMaker? Turns out you can. You can also pick the color that gets keyed if you play with a little code–and by “play” I mean just cut and paste. You can create your own transitions in MovieMaker. One of these can replace the color of a clip and overlay it onto the preceding clip (details here). Turns out, the code that allows this can be manipulated. By adding a line, you can specify the color that goes away. Below, the blue line is added to the trick Matt reported. The red is the color that is replaced. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as typing in “yellow.” Computers don’t work that way. But you can find the code for the color you want and add it–that’s the red number, the HTML code. “000000” is code for black, so black disappears, letting you put a video of a student threatening, say a city, as in the images above. Or, have a student inserted into a DiscoveryEducationstreaming video or image. I like doing this with images. Below is the code that keys out black for the image above, which I believe came from the Ezedia iMovie chromakey plug-in (for Macs). Others here.
To do this, you have to know the color you want replaced. Shazam! There are eyedropper-driven code identifiers on the web. You can cheat and eyedrop the colors to replace with HTML Color Picker from Blue Chillies then select colors from here , which gives you the number HTML number to paste into the code. I have now several new Transitions in MovieMaker. It is not perfect and, yup, Final Cut Express and Adobe Premiere Elements are better. But this is fun, and it’s free. Enjoy! And, remember, that you don’t have to master this, but what a great thing to toss to your kids to build on. The code behind what works. A very good thing for them to know. It was bicycle mechanics that figured out flight. A look behind the curtain can go a long way! See you at NECC for this and more arcane (and entertaining!) tricks for K-12! And stick around for the cell phone session. Mmm, what can streaming video, cell phones, and students have in common….:).
Note: the images above are from the code for chromakey green, which I used to make my head (from a previous Google Earth post) float over DiscoveryEducationstreaming videos. The code is for green, not black. I build the slide in PowerPoint–truly cheap graphics!
Posted on June 16, 2008 in Web/Tech by Hall Davidson
Although some of you may be thinking that this is the most wonderful time of the year because the school year is ending, for me it is also the time of student media festivals and teacher awards. Slick Rock had theirs, and you may have had yours at the school, district, or state level. On Saturday, I had the priviledge of hosting the 42nd Annual California Student Media & Multimedia Festival,the nation’s oldest. You can start your own festival, of course! See the comment from Cynthia Ochoa from Nevada who started one from scratch using the CSMMF as a model (their motto: “stimulating students bit by bit,”). Yes, it can work! It is always inspirational to see student work on a big screen. One of my favorite moments was the interview afterwards with students from Val Verde Continuation High school with their fantastic teacher, Robert Del Campo (”DC” to the kids). It was an exceptional entry (see below). The student who did the music said he was dropping out until DC got him involved with video production. He composed an original score for the video. The lead character said he did drop out, but returned because he was compelled to tell the story in the project. The director, who pulled it all together, said video production pulled together all his skills. All three now have plans to continue their education. There are two microphones above because both little and tall students had their say in acceptance speeches. Behind the scenes stories were the best: the teacher who explained her kindergarten kids took three weeks to type in the captions to their PhotoStory (or was it iMovie?) entry. Speaking of behind the scenes, pictured right are are Brad Upshaw and Dennis Grice arranging the plaques. Their both left their classroom assignments for the weekend to help celebrate the work of the 50+ winners. Top prizes were $1,000. Of course, the video contest with the $50,000 prize is still open. Don’t let that one slide by! Two minutes maximum time for video entries…. Brad and I have done this for more than a dozen years, and this year we had a Men of Media snapshot. The purpose of the Festival is to spread the word about media content creation fo students and the spreading has already begun. At the National Training Institute at the Discovery Channel headquarters today (June 2), I showed some of the winners. One of the most fun was Santiago High Schools Hamlet movie “trailer” show entirely with sock puppets. Movie previews are called ‘trailers’ in the movie industry because originally they were cut while the movie was still being shot and brought to the set to watch in the trailers there. This week is also the Time Warner National Teachers and Principals of the Year Awards in Washington, DC. Scott Kinney and I will be there for that. I’ll get pictures of Scott. Wonder if he’s bringing the guinea pig this time, like FETC. Enjoy samples of the student media projects below for a taste of the great California Student Medai & Multimedia Festival. It was supported, with prizes and presence, by the DEN and Wells Fargo Bank.
Who Am I?
Hamlet Trailer
Posted on June 2, 2008 in Web/Tech by Hall Davidson
They opened the NASA film vaults and built the biggest winner since Planet Earth. The Discovery Channel premiered “When We Left the Earth” in Beverly Hills for an audience of science celebrities–and teachers. The DEN was in full force at the Paley Center for Media where they were wined and dined and shown what turned out to be a great program that went beyond images from space. The American public in the space race days was more innocent and more obsessed with sky than dirt. The spirit of the times shows through every frame of Discovery’s new series. The cars, the clothes, the crewcuts, all were reflect an era was would end soon enough. Bill Paley, the broadcast pioneer at CBS who basically invented networks, would have loved the program in the center named for him. Bill Nye and Buzz Aldrin were there, and Buzz was generous with his time with the DEN. It was quite a special evening. There was even a special drink, The LiftOff, although neither ex-pilot Buzz nor any teacher had one (I swear!). Too far to drive and school in the morning for everyone (but the picture is for you, Mark Bantle). A great moment was when the representative from Discovery thanked Buzz for his inspiring a generation. And then thanked the teachers in the room for the same thing. Nice feeling in the room! The premiere gives me the excuse to share some very cool space media for your desktops– some brand new and some you have read about here before. Microsoft just released the World Wide Telescope. Tiz cool. Visit the site and wait out the eternal load–it’s worth for the pretty, pretty, pictures. Video introduction below. Free. Don’t forget the Stellarium, also free. And our older friend, Google Sky. And a newcomer to me, Celestia. Yep, free. Some educational support here (the CelestiaMotherLoad). As the year winds down, drawn the blinds, bring out the LCD and let kids compare the sites! They talk a lot about storytelling at World Wide Telescope. It’s a beginning. Enjoy the videos below from Ted.com. Most interesting talk videos since the Academy of Achievement and the Infinite Thinking Machine. End the school year with some stimulation! See you at the summer institutes. And don’t forget to take two minutes and enter the YoungScientistChallenge for teachers and students ($50k prize for a media-making.) Video supplement 1: Ray Gould, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Astophysics gives the first public demo of the World Wide Telescope: Ray Gould: The World Wide Telescope.
Video 2: Bill Stone discussed mining lunar ice for space fuel and studying Europa: Bill Stone
I haven’t been able to describe what I do since I left the classroom. “I teach math” was easy, and nothing in the twenty years since has been that simple to summarize. But since the last post, by way of apology, here is where I’ve been: Saturday (4/12), San Francisco (Leadership 3.0), Sunday, Orange Co. CA (DEN event), Sat (4/19), Fontana (DEN), Sat (4/26), Charlotte, NC (Day of Discovery), Sunday, St. Michaels, MD, Fri/Sat (5/3), New York (BOCES), Baltimore (CTE), Washington (Congress on Content), and Long Beach (TechForum) (5/9). The Tech Saturday for the Gifted Association was moved to next Saturday in LA. Lots of travel and people. Of course, I love it. I got to speak to more than a thousand educators. Here’s what I learned: Oovoo.com: Site for 6-way live video chat. Free download (thanks, Bob!). Schools can get Direct TV for free..(thanks Paul!). Piclens.com is a great Google image display resource (thanks, Brian). Jott lets you Twit from your cellphone, and translates word to text! (thanks, Alan). And I found Alan’s twit on tweetscan.com. Yes, you can search for your own name. Some fun!
Posted on May 13, 2008 in Web/Tech by Hall Davidson
Forgive the quick post, but we are getting lots of requests for the PowerPoints used in the webinars for the Discovery/3M Young Scientist Challenge. They are posted below. Students and DEN teachers each have their own category so each have their own PowerPoint. Student Challenge PowerPoint Teacher Challenge PowerPoint
We have recorded the webinars and as soon as we can clean them up and convert them to media files, they will pop up here. Early next week at the latest! Don’t forget there are two more teacher orientations coming up. April 30 , 8 PM Eastern, and May 6, 6 PM Eastern. Reminder: This Challenge consists of making a two-minute video about a preset (short) list of science concepts. If you are not deep into science, your explanation probably will be more to the point than someone who knows too much! Give this a shot! (Pun intended.)
Posted on April 24, 2008 in Web/Tech by Hall Davidson
Via RSS
teacher that I am, I am hard to offend, but there is a video in this list that manages it. Peruse the list. Find me wrong! If I pulled from the last five years of winners from the 
California Student Media Festival, I believe could find a better list. Not to mention the other great student and teacher media festivals around the country. What do you think? I’d love your opinion. Videos for teaching are still about curriculum, one way or another, hint hint. Or at least about project building.
professors from Central Connecticut State University concluded that students who read while text messaging read more slowly (no kidding!) but did not suffer any loss of comprehension. Check Education WeekAug. 15, for the story. Cellphones, multitasking, and the future—maybe at your school soon. The APA also did a press release stating “Playing Video Games Offers Learning Across Life Span…Skills Transfer to Classroom, Surgical Procedures, Scientific Thinking.” Keep watching the scientists for insights and data on what we suspected all along.
