My Tweets 
Salem witches
Originally uploaded by BornToRunND00
In honor of Halloween, I am posting this pic taken in Salem 2 weeks ago on a junior class field trip. We watched a reenactment of a witch trial, and walked around the streets and shops just before the rain broke out. Salem is a beautiful little town with a not so lovely history of injustice!
I successfully uploaded my podcamp day 1 video to my Blip.tv space AND tagged it correctly in order to get it included in the Podcamp Boston aggregate, which is cool. Baby steps, folks, baby steps. BUT I am now emailing with “Justin” from Wordpress to help me cross-post onto THIS blog. There are some “problems”…ARGH.
In other news, as I nail down the HOW TO in the next few days, I am recruiting students for the podcast class here. I hate to use the term “class” cuz it really won’t be run in that traditional sense. I simply want students who want to broadcast their stories through media in an effort to connect our own classrooms, with the greater community of the neighborhood, the school system, the city, and even the world.
My students will also join a global discussion forum which will include our school, a school from Japan, and a third school from Yorkshire. I think we can get some cool trans-atlantic projects going! That’s what new media is all about – sharing in and building a collective and collaborative knowledge base with and through multiple forms of communication. And my goal is to get teen voices heard among all the twitter!
Oh here’s my extreme close-up (DORK!) on Steve Garfield’s excellent video blog.
While the PATS were practicing against the Redskins today, I snapped a photo of the family dog, Teddy, sneaking away with my Red Sox Teddy Bear. Depending on the gameday, Teddy can be known as Teddy Williams, Teddy Bruschi, or Teddy Hesburgh. GO SOX! I submitted this photo to Boston.com’s gallery of photoshop fun for fans. (I did clone stamp my mom’s hand out of the pic!) Besides, he is just so darn cute!
Turns out that the 5 easy steps to video podcasting are not so “easy” after all!
I reflected on my first day at Podcamp by video taping a session from my camera. I figured I already have a Google Video account and a blog, so I can edit it a bit in MovieMaker, and upload it before I go out to watch the Sox game. Um. Google Video does not have the option to post directly to your blog after you upload it to your account…MovieMaker is compressing the thing SO small that the result is the above file…I tried 4 different formats so far…the wordpress plugin for video play also is changing the quality of the video…and I thought Blip.tv would answer this all but no, I need my wordpress api url or whatever and yet that doesn’t solve the cross-blogging posting (according to wordpress support forums). SO I just spent the last hour on this when I should now be on my way into the city. And all you get is the above poor quality video!! The sound is awful! I am so disappointed.
Help? Plus, this isn’t even actually syndicate-able, is it, since I uploaded it from my computer? (I just made that word up)
You KNOW I will repost this tomorrow once I figure it all out, but, I gotta go get a life right now!
Oh, and that special appearance of a Sox fan at the end is Teddy. Depending on the sports team, he can be Teddy Bruschi, Teddy Hesburgh, or Teddy Williams. “High Five! Go Sox!”
Originally uploaded by msradden
These ladies from my Media Seminar class listen intently (well, not while posing for a photo opp, maybe!) to their voiceovers for the “I AM” identity animation in Flash. They are inserting text and images at keyframes during the animation to help viewers understand who they are, where they are from, and where they want to go!
Originally uploaded by msradden
It’s a great time to be a sports fan in Boston these days…The Sox play game 2 tonight of the ALCS, the undefeated PATS take on the Cowboys tomorrow, and there’s even some hope for the Celtics…So I’ve posted this retouched photo made by one of my media students in honor of one of my favorite Sox, David Ortiz!
Students in Media Seminar used industry standard retouching techniques in Photoshop to create “realistic” photos of themselves in a future job or place that connects with their social, academic, and professional goals. These images are part of a larger animated identity piece in which students reflect on where they are from, who they are, and where they are going, incorporating voice overs and imagery to reflect their identity.
Additionally, we studied the ethics of retouching images and the kinds of messages that manipulated media send. As part of a reflection on this project, the students were asked how to identify manipulated imagery based on a reading I provided, and reflected on when it is acceptable to manipulate imagery and when it is not. We had some great discussions in class, and hopefully after the reflections are posted in the class blog, we can have some online discussions as well.
Oh about that class blog…BPS blocks Blogger.com inconsistently, so my original collaborative blog on blogspot.com won’t work. Plus the school’s email server blocks the invitation emails to the students. Kids need a GMAIL account to even post. I have since figured I need to install a word press blog on my own or the school’s server. I did correspond with a BPS OIIT member who was unsure what teachers were using across the board. He did recommend edublogs.org which I will check out too. Bottom line is, once again, a great online tool is “banned” from usage in the classroom, and teachers like me who see the educational value in it, have to find a workaround. Like using shareware to grab FLVs off of youtube to show in school since Youtube is blocked as well!
Originally uploaded by msradden
The Facing History and Ourselves office in Brookline were shown the four student-produced films from the DLP summer pilot program for the first time! WOW! I was soooo impressed all over again! And super proud to have been a part of it. As I watched the films I relived the suggestions I made for the storyline, or the edits I contributed to the narrative, and the “how do I…?” teaching moments with Premiere. I recalled the jokes, the A-HA! moments, the shared personal stories, and the “how did you DO that?” moments when I sat down and they taught ME a thing or two in Premiere! It was a truly collaborative teaching and learning experience that I will never forget! And tonight, seeing some of “the cornbread crew” again and the final pieces after so long, I think I was just as proud as the students were to see my own name in the credits! ( You can read more about the program in the blog )
Afterwards, Arva, Sophia, Jessica and Sevon fielded questions from the audience. They ranged from “what was the most challenging part of the project?” to which a collective groan was given about logging and the lack of A/C, to the “heavy” question of whether after all of this any of them wanted to be an activist. Arva explained the “cornbread” theory in her reply. Mel King never thought of himself as an “activist” in the sense that he was more important than anyone else during the civil rights movement in Boston. He said the woman who baked the cornbread for the meeting each week was just as important to the movement as the one who lead the meeting. As a result of this anecdote and the humility of the interviewees across the board when asked a similar question about their leadership, none of the students felt they could plainly say that they wanted to be an “activist.” Yet as Jessica pointed out, “I know how to be a leader, but I am not afraid of being a follower either. Being a follower is just as important as being a leader.”
The audience gained a perspective of the amount of work and literal sweat (it WAS hot in there!) that was put into this pilot program by the planning team, the teaching crew, the DLP staff, and the students. And what was clearly apparent was the pride and accomplishment each student felt about not only their piece, but the process they went through to produce it. And in fact their films will be used, for the first time ever, as actual curriculum assets within the 10th grade History of Civil Rights curriculum for Facing History and the Boston Public Schools. WOW!!
Sometimes teaching is so tiring and discouraging and you can feel like you are not making an impact because you just can’t reach them ALL that day. But then you have days like this, when you realize that you DO make an impact, one kid at a time, in small and big ways.
Kinda like making the cornbread…
OK so I am still in the process of separating myself from my old blog, the Dope, on blogger.com ( I have been importing and exporting and updating Flickr and installing new widgets…SIGH! Who even reads this thing?! ). At the blogger brunch, we had a brief discussion about the separation of the professional self with the personal self online – is it necessary to create 2 separate identities for work and for play, or can the two be blurred in the Web 2.0 world? For Jeremiah, web marketer and analyst, well, its his job to use the web tools out there, so he feels his personal life and professional are one on the net. Len from EMC, on the other hand, didn’t hire someone who was well-qualified on paper, after googling and finding her rather suspect Facebook postings.
I have struggled over the last few months as to whether to continue posting publicly about personal events and opinions. For the most part, the students I teach are interested in my personal life…they ask me about my culture, my family, what high school was like for me, college life, and if I have a boyfriend and if not why not, and where do I shop, and just normal getting-to-know-you kinds of questions. But it just takes that one student who for whatever reason, even as a harmless joke, finds the goofy picture of their teacher, or pulls a quote from her blog out of context and…front page news?! Am I saying that I really have that exciting of a life that I would make front page news?! Ah these days, especially, not so much. But I knew I was posting with caution before, and at times that kindof took the fun out it.
SO for the followers from blogspot, the Dope does indeed live on, albeit repurposed and refocused. No more commentary on Britney’s bad behavior, or weak attempts at explaining away the IRISH’s pathetic record on Gamedays this season, or especially the hopeless single scene in Boston…There is much more hope in education – especially with technology! And the Boss. OK that’s a stretch BUT since the theme of hope prevails here, I can not NOT post about him, as he is the inspiration behind it. Especially since I just caught the live feed of 3 songs from his “Radio Nowhere” concert in New Jersey. I’ll be attending in November in Boston. Both nights. Very excited.
So welcome back!
The group at Henrietta’s Table
Originally uploaded by AlleyesonJenny
In the midst of Octoberfest in Harvard Square on Sunday, 6 bloggers, including yours truly, met up for brunch at Henrietta’s Table in the Charles Hotel. Many thanks to John Wall of the M Show for arranging it! In my quest for new endeavors and new ideas in education and technology, it was the perfect launching pad. I indeed did pass out my new business cards, and while doing so made the humble “I’m in the process of updating my sites…(grumble, grumble)” comment, and promptly went home with lists of links to check out (LinkedIn, Twitter), new blogs to read (Jeremiah, C.C., Len), events to attend (Blogtoberfest, PodCamp), and old friends to reconnect with (Big Red Blog, All Eyes on Jenny, Ronin Marketeer). There’s a great group picture on Jenny’s blog!
Great conversation over eggs benedict and fresh fruit beats text messagin any day, I say!
I finally got the webcam up and running through my hotmail account! I have connected overseas with a teacher in Yorkshire, who visited my school last year with some of his students. We have since been slowly trying to establish a virtual connection and build a project that bridges our students. The physics department at my school apparently had a box of 10 webcams given to them by the city in 2004, and quite UNsurprisingly and luckily for me, had never been touched! Another case of technology given to teachers with no support for ongoing integration resulted in a money-saver for me and my curriculum! I intend to install the drivers on my 10 lab stations and get my currently unpopulated “Podcasting” class to use them. I think I will penpal them each with a Yorkshire student. The time difference is obviously a factor, but the Prof ensures me he can get his kids to stay after school for the sessions. So we may in fact be good to go…oh wait, I need students on my roster first! The course title is not set in stone either…I am thinking more about “social media seminar”…I am getting excited about it. I am also happy that I have hooked 2 students up after school with some fun projects : 3D Animation Masters and Proramming in Alice. More on that later, and on my f2f networking brunch on Sunday…must head to sleep now…I have a much longer commute starting tomorrow! Sigh.
