ET-IDP for Reece

Here is the 2 week IDP for Reece:
This is our current assessment. We need this in order to move on to both 2 and year goals
What are your strengths thus far?
--multimedia
--online publishing
--Web 2.0
What are some areas you are looking to improve
--presentation skills
--video editing
--networking

Attitude towards technology: open, positive, engaging, willing to embrace

Pedagogy/matters of curriculum instruction: use it to enrich curriculum and instruction. Never use technology just because it's there.

Practice: definitely use it to differentiate. Goal is to enrich experience. In other words, new ways of doing old things. Old things done old ways, old things done new ways. New things done old ways, new things done new ways. He prescribes to "old things done new ways, and new things done new ways."

The aforementioned is a summary of where we are at right now, 7.2.08.


Go-to person for Reece: network technician. He is Reece's team teacher, that if Reece has anything that stumps him, he can rely on him for help.
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2 Week Goals:
In the next 2 weeks, Reece wants to

How we're gonna shoot!

Here's the schedule for our group (me, David L, Sahngyoon): film everything Tuesday. Edit Tuesday and Wednesday. Be in Leigh's good graces and turn in on Thursday.

That's our plan. We're going to do 10 Things you didn't know about Blogs and Wikis. We still have to hammer out that part. That's my choice. They wanna go with 10 Things You Didn't Know About Blogs and Wikis in Asia. That could also work except that my three points/parts don't really have to deal with Asia. I just teach there. I'm easy like Sunday morning here, folks, so I'll do whatever they like.

David L is going to come up with 3 things tonight. Sahngyoon is going to come up with 3, and I have my 3.

They are:
1) Wikis are great for getting the quiet, shy wallflower students active and engaged in topics and projects. Tuesday after school I'll film me in our classroom quiet and meek and not saying anything. Then I'll film me at my dorm hooting and hollerin' as I pound away at my keyboard. It's simple, it gets the message across. I will also Camtasia screenshot a bit of my kids' wikis (WITH NAMES LEFT OFF THIS TIME SINCE THIS MAY BE SENT TO PUBLIC PLACES) and we'll edit that in the end of this one. Total time for this one should be about 20 seconds.
2) Wikis help students improve upon their voice and organization skills. Closeup shot of me with my fountain pen scribbling as I say the voiceover. Then I'll say "in a carefully conducted Teacher Inquiry Project this past year, I measured my 74 students' Voice and Organization scores as a part of the 6+1 writing traits. Their scores went up an average of .67 in Voice and .39 in Organization. Wikis work well to improve writing!" as I say all of this, I'll throw up a couple screenshots from my TIP
3) Technology knows no borders. I teach at a Dept. of Defense School in Japan. We have students from China, Korea, Philippeans, Guam, Japan, all 50 states, Canada and Mexico. They are very adept at using technology!" We began using wikis on January 30th, 2008. By Feb. 1st, almost every group had their wikis up and running! Don't know what video/graphics I'll have here.

That's my part. That leaves us with 9 things. We'll have to figure out the 10th one tomorrow (Tuesday).

Corporations trying to catch up

So this isn't about my iVideo or my iImage, but I wanted to document this because it reminded me of what that Jochaim dude said on TED the other day...open source, how content is being decided by the PEOPLE and the megalomaniacal corporations are now either playing catchup or taking cues from the little people. I thought this was a sad but kinda fun and tiny example. 

Two years ago I remember watching this fun website where folks got together to FREEZE. Im sure you've seen it too. They meet in a park and a guy comes on with a bullhorn and tells everyone to set watches together. Then at 11:05 you freeze. Then at 11:10 unfreeze, then at 11:15 you slow walk. Link is here:

http://improveverywhere.com/2006/08/19/slo-mo-home-depot/

It was funny, they've done a bunch more, more non-ImproveEverywhere people joined in. But it was still at the local level. Then just this morning I see this one. Watching it I got a little suspect because the camera angles were too good. Then at the end I realized it was a marketing campaign. So now corporations are trying to tap into this niche to make a viral campaign. Oh well. Like this COOL video done by PBS in 02, Merchants of Cool, freeze motion has now been adopted by The Man, so it's now no longer going to be cool. Shame. I really like the idea behind it!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VKlQqkjSw3g

Winding up!

Ja I'm here in Plymouth. MAET stuff! I just realized I'm supposed to do a couple things on this here blog. So let's get to it, hopalong!

1. We are living in an increasingly small world thanks to the wonders of technology--specifically the CCTV.

2. I want to show motion of some kind. Some kinetic thing but one person is singled out.  I want the reader/viewer/watcher to feel almost like a voyeur. The other folks are blurred out, but one guy is sharp and focused.  I want the viewer to glance around when they're done on Friday. On their way back to dorms/cars/whatever, I'd like for people to glance up and around in a sick kind of homage to Alan Funt. Are we on camera? 

I guess I'd like to elicit some creepiness. Not a vomitous creepiness, but an unsettling creepiness. It's a fun thing to be safe. We should all be safe. But exactly where that lies is up to the viewer.

3. Using that one dude's ideas of flow and lines, I thought it would be best to border three sides with cameras. Each one forces your eyes into the middle. I WAS going to take pictures of 30 or 50 cameras out here in Plymouth but I decided against that. I only have a 50mm non zoom lense and some pictures would simply not work due to distance. Instead the flipping of images works just as well, I think.

No accident that I used google images for the tippy top two. I was trying to make you think of some kinda of eyeballs.

Let's get back to the first .8 seconds of viewing this. Your eyes are physically forced to the middle of the picture. But wait a tic, it's like an eye exam. Everything is blurry! The one person who isn't stands out. Looks almost cartoony (I didn't do anything special to Larson). So now the reader is asking why just one person is blurry. Don't CCTV cameras capture everyone? That's my point. It DOES capture everyone, but I want this to be individual. Guess what? YOU, YOU are one of the herd, one of the people being interviewed, dissected, and videotaped.

I'm gonna stop typing because I don't want to ruin my Monday reflection thing. Bye bye.

Winding Down

So I'm going to leave the wiki ON over spring break, and I'll do the final eval/questionairre the week after (two weeks from today). I want to see if the kids spend any time working on it over the break.

The wiki will continue until school ends, but for my purposes here in the MAET course, I'm done the 15th of April.

It has been everything I'd hoped and so much more. At a glance I'd reckon that at least half of the students check their wikis DAILY and about 85 percent of them have done some remarkable things with them.

I hope y'all have gone on and checked 'em out!

So this was bound to happen

Almost every wiki has a chatbox on their main page. I actually encourage students to create one because it's so immediate and it's there on the page. I just checked on the wikis tonight and I saw one student who was upset because someone left a mean message on their wikiciv. I saw the message and I posted a general notice to everyone to be respectful and helpful to everyone else. It took me a minute to figure out who it was, and I'll talk to the student when I see her again on Tuesday. I also made sure everyone knew just how easy it is for the offended party to find out who posted it (the chatbox has an option that allows the creator to check the name/ISP of anyone who posts...how deliciously diabolical!).

I told one and all that this is their only warning. I hope no one else decides to be immature and leave a "your page sux lol!!1!11!" message. If they do, they'll be banned from the wiki, receive a zero on the next assessment, and we all get to have a Corleone-style sitdown with me, the student, their parents, and our AP. These are honors kids so I really doubt I'll have a problem:)

John Henry was a Steel Drivin' Man

Today is wikiciv grading time.

I had them come up with a rubric, but it's just how to get a C-. I'm trying something new there. And I have looked at them and I've come up with my grade, but I am going to do something UBER different for this first one.

I'm going to give them the rubric and tell them to fill it out and tell me what they think they should get. I'll compare scores then.

I'm having a bigtime problem with grading these, because I've found that when I grade them it turns into something mechanical and cold and...robotic. It really takes the shine off of these wikis and it reduces them to one of those old timey copier things (the ones where you roll it and it prints out. And it smelled SO YUMMY).

That's really how it's making me feel and when I started to report to them their grades (I even had it classy and assessment FOR learning, I posted on their comment boards), I could literally feel the energy disappearing from their enthusiasm for wikis.

I have to grade them but the way I'm grading them is sucking the life out of it and reducing wikis to "THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TO HAVE TO GET AN A" instead of "LET'S TELL SOME FUN STORIES ABOUT MY CIVILIZATION"

I'll let you know how this turns out.