YES - A short but perfect educational philosophy

A one minute video takes a lot of time. It takes thinking time, scripting time, reflecting time, time to match the pictures, music, etc. with the audio. It also takes time to pare down… down…down from a wordy “document” to a one minute audio.

THINKING/EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

The thinking part was the easiest but took me the longest amount of time to work on. While my educational philosphy is perhaps not stated in "educationalese", there is no questions that I've known what my educational philosophy is for many years. It is so concise and to the point that our teachers can tell you what it is. When I introduced our new librarian to the faculty in the fall of 2006, I told the teachers that our mantra for running a school library is "Yes" and that would be the answer that they could expect when they come to us. I have overhead teachers telling others that you can always expect the answer to be “Yes” at the library. Teachers at AAS know that they will get both the help and resources they need to be the best teachers they can be.

THE VIDEO/THE TECHNICAL PART

OK - then came the hard part. The days passed and passed as I planned my one minute video. It all came to a crashing halt when one of the teachers asked our AV person about putting a video on YouTube with pictures of kids. Our school answer is not Yes. It is No or Nyet - unless you have written permission from each parent. That was the end of my idea for the video. It just seemed like a logistic nightmare to give permission slips to each student in the library who happened to be in a photo.

The technical part was easy and hard and required a lot of trial and error and a lot of paring down. We are an incredibly well resourced school. I manage a library with 10 employees including AV services. Our AV technician, Amerigo Tatel, is incredibly well versed in video and helps students and teachers with projects as part of his job. I certainly give credit to Amerigo for sitting down with me each step of the way and being my tutor. He helped me, guided me, and didn’t let me spend hours floundering - from the recording, to the audio editing, to showing me how to put the music in, etc. etc. etc. It was hard and I don't think that I could have done it all myself even though we have every video program known to man on our servers - and what we don't have we can get. He would say – “let’s do this with this picture to make it more interesting” or “the picture you picked isn’t good enough” or “record your message in segments”. Yes, this is my work and yes I had help. We should all be so fortunate to work in schools like mine. http://www.aas.ru/

TEACHER TUBE/BLOG

It took less than 2 minutes to set up the TeacherTube account. Uploading the video was equally easy. It took me a little more time to figure out the blog part! No, I haven't learned to imbed the link yet. That is my goal before the end of this week. I'm lucky that Russia is 12 hours ahead of Juneau!

Thus I have managed to reach December with one project done and one to go. I've learned a lot and look forward to continuing down the DST path. I will show my Educational Philosophy at the next all staff meeting and challenge my colleagues to share their educational philosophy.

Yes: My Project

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=b0a15cbfc3b1b8ae07d1

I'm curious. I'm illiterate.

She stands behind her table beneath the shadows of St. Andrew's church.

• The table is full of vintage rushnyky.
• Where does she get them?
• How did they end up on her table?
• Why are they not valued anymore?
• Why are they cheaper than a new towel of little interest?

The "towel" in her hand is a marriage towel - it has two birds and the date, 1965. 43 years have passed.

Are they still married? Are they dead? Why didn't their children want the ritual towel? Did they live near Kiev? What of the other towels on her table?

I collect. I buy.

Know you know me:  a curious and illiterate collector of odd things.  

What do you know about the "towel"?  

http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/ukisite/rushnyk/rushnyk1.htm

Grading the Future....

Grading digital stories
Begin with a DST rubric originally created or found on the Internet

Analyze the elements of the stories, be as objective as possible taking into account that creativity is difficult to grade

Digital projects include specialized components to assess:

• videography
  
• camera operation
• editing
• sound
  

How these interface with content can spell success - or not!

School Train: The message from School Train came across loud and clear but I could barely stand watching it for four minutes.

• jarring images
• blurry sound
• muddy colors
• frenetic activity

It made me wonder how much time they spent on the project and how much time it would have taken to learn about metaphor in a traditional way. What else did this class learn. How did they get to be so techie? How many students participated?

Fox Becomes a Better Person initially appears to be a traditional story that has been filmed. The use of the changing backdrops enhances Hannah's telling of the story. The immediate impact was that this was not only a story told by a child but a way to share the richness of Tlingit culture.

Perhaps I have been away from elementary school students too long to understand what is possible at various age levels. Perhaps I remember too well "growing up" with Pat Race at Juneau Douglas High School, now of Alaska Robotics. Pat was an early DST'er.

What grade would I give Fox or School Train? I don't know.
Perhaps by the end of the course, I'll be able to tell you.

epic2015: I loved epic2015. I loved it with the graphics and I loved it with the sound only. The rich voice made me remember how far we have come and how far we will go as technology plays a part in our lives.

I'm old! I remember the advent of television, transistor radios, and later bitnet as Jason sat in the basement of Harborview School and gave all of the Juneau School District librarians bitnet accounts so we could communicate with each other using our Apple 2e's. Along came

• FTP gopher
• e-mail
• www
• the web browser and 1994 with 30,000 websites

Fast Forward
Amazon, Google, Blogger, Podcasting, Satellite Maps, Images, gmail, social networking, digitizing, WiFi, iPhones, social recommendation engines.

We all became publishers on the World Wide Web. Then Podcasting made everyone a broadcasters of news, opinion, facts, gossip, music, weather and as epic2015 points out perhaps we will become the owners of our territory communicating with our neighbors.

YouTube made everyone a media publisher. The ultimate digital story: Frank Murkowski - A Tribute http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26yyxg73iFQ

Epic2015 fits perfecting into our library introduction to the history of the internet which we begin in 6th grade. Epic2015 is a thought piece.
how can we use their creativity in our projects?
where is technology going in schools?

And more down to earth how can we use podcasting in our own school environment on a day to day basis?
Do I belong here? What stands out from this piece is her passion for her community and
her message.... belonging
It is not the most polished of presentations but the most powerful.
Writing skills underpin the message, speaking skills add the passion.
Do I belong here? is a useful model for the international student, the
Third Culture Kid who often doesn't know where he or she belongs.
Her journey combines pictures, the written and spoken word, with feelings
that are expressed verbally.

I've asked more questions than I've answered but perhaps that is the nature of emerging technologies and their uses in schools, or at least in a school where we could make better use of the resources that we have.

My Blog is in Russian!

I came to work early today to add a photo to my blog. Everything looks great - all of the text/links/instructions are in Russian! When I log in I see English. Go figure!

Digital Storytelling from russia

September 3, 2008

Greetings from Russia ...

As you begin your day in Alaska, I am just ending mine. We are exactly 12 hours apart.  I am looking forward to this class, although I suspect that I will always be behind.