iMovie Reflection

Well, I'm going to try to carve out ten minutes to make a post here. I really need to be working on the unit plan thingy (I can't say what it really is called, because I have yet to look at it) which is due in that other Tuesday night class, but I need to say something about my iMovie.

It's done.

Yes, I just put the finishing touches on it and it is officially complete. It is also officially 17 minutes, 40 seconds in length. In addition, it is also officially a complete snooze-fest.

As Sarah said in her comment to Matt's post regarding his completed project, I am also stuck in the "report mentality" of open-ended projects. I am so trained to believe I need to do something "scholarly" that, even when I'm given carte blanche to do whatever I want, I still make a documentary that is sure to cure the insomnia of any classmate who views it. Such is a side effect of growing up in the types of learning environments I have, I suppose.

That being said, I need to work on that other snooze-fest I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Ahh, unit planning. I'll leave you with the links to Matt's and James' movies, which are both simply hysterical. I'm partial to James' in particular -- if you see only one film this year which features me playing two roles, make it this one!

Chaucer: Undead in the 'Burbs (Matt Fuentes)
We Could Use More Dave (James Beach)

(Oh, by the way, I'm also terrible with titles. You'd think someone with a professional writing degree would have some idea how to put a catchy title on something. That is clearly not the case with this particular fellow, though. My title? Geocaching: Hide and Seek with a Technology Twist. It's just as boring as the footage itself!)

Principal Suspended for Giving Kid a "Wedgie"

Best headline ever?

NYSEC 2006

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OK, it would appear I am the last one to get on the trolley and make a post regarding our attendance at the NYSEC Conference in Albany this past week. I blame it on the fact that I needed three days to recover from the whole thing.

I attended three workshops during the day. If anyone thinks any of the information below sounds interesting, get in touch with me and I'll share the handouts I received and/or notes I took:

1.) "Words of Hope: Words for Hope" with Carol Jago (keynote speaker)

This session wasn't about what I thought it was going to be about. It ended up being about how to handle the workload that comes with grading hundreds of essays. She gave a lot of specific advice on how to keep your sanity when you collect a mountain of student writing and need to grade it all and return it within a reasonable amount of time, but also need to give detailed responses to the students.

2.) "Becoming a Grammar Detective Part II" with Cynthia Woodhouse of Sewanhaka CSD

At this session, I received a lot of tips for teaching students how to spot nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, et cetera. After watching kids totally butcher Mad Libs in the classroom where I observe, I think this information was very useful. It was a lot of good stuff, but it led to an unfortunate incident at lunch where I argued (erroneously) with James about the usage of close versus closely.

3.) "Teaching Graphic Novels" with Jennifer Roy, Mandy Dwight, Gina Palmer and Tim Rifenburg of Wappingers CSD

This session talked mostly about the ways to deconstruct the graphic novel form in Persepolis, but they also briefly discussed Maus. They discussed how to read a graphic novel, how to interpret drawings, et cetera.

Then came our session. I was a little concerned about being referred to as "an expert" in my genre, since I am not any expert by any means. However, after giving my little blurb at the opening of the session, I felt more confident speaking about science fiction and knew what I was going to say in my little seminars and was ready to answer any and all questions. The practice of having given seminars in Dr. Stearns' YA Lit classes over the past two semesters paid off, and I found I had much more to say about science fiction than I thought I did. It felt good, yet strange, to be (for all intents and purposes) educating these long-time teachers. But it was a success, as all five of my colleagues have stated on their blogs. It was a good time all around.

Now for the extra-curriculur activity:

Yes, James, Matt and I crashed a wine convention. Matt gives a nice detailed account of it, without giving away too many secrets. I will add that one of the funniest things that happened to me at the convention was when a vendor (from whom I'd sampled four wines) said to me "you know, you can spit that out if you want." I just nodded. I didn't sneak into a wine convention to spit into a bucket!

Being the geek I am, I did bring my laptop with me and tried to hook it up in my hotel room. No service. So I spent a half hour on Wednesday night on the phone with technical support (I'm pretty sure the guy wasn't from Bangalore, though -- sorry, Thomas Friedman) and ended up getting a new Ethernet cord from the front desk. Nothing worked. So, I ended up sitting in the hotel's community computer station at 1:00 AM, checking e-mail and making the rest of my daily Internet rounds. Nerd.

I tried to talk James and Jack into visiting Fairy Houses with me before we got back on the Thruway to head home. No dice.

Fairy houses or no, though, I had an excellent time. Who knew you could enjoy yourself at an English teacher conference? What a strange world!

White & Nerdy

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I just watched the video for Weird Al's new song, "White & Nerdy" (a parody of the hip-hop song "Ridin' Dirty"), and I knew it had to be shared on my blog. It's just too ENG506! There are lyrics like "When my friends need code, who do they call?/I do HTML for 'em all." But this is the clincher for me:

"I edit Wikipedia!"

Watch the video. I have a feeling many of us will relate on some level. Now, for your enjoyment, see just how "white & nerdy" I am.

And, talk about white and nerdy, I actually found this on the Wikipedia entry for the song:

The Wikipedia article Yankovic vandalizes (by typing "YOU SUCK!" in big letters) is the article about Atlantic Records, referring to Yankovic's not receiving permission from the company to include "You're Pitiful", a parody of James Blunt's song "You're Beautiful", on Straight Outta Lynwood. Yankovic uses huge letters to make it clear to viewers what he is doing, although this is not actually possible in the current version of MediaWiki.

Leave it to Wikipedia users to spoil the fun. And I love 'em to death for it.

If Only I Had Time to Play It

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I don't even have time to blog (*gasp*), let alone to play computer games. However, last night I was reading USA Today Sports Weekly and I discovered a game review about "Ultimate Baseball Online" (UBO), which is, get this, the first MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) sports game. There have been MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) for a long time, but more often than not those have involved wizards and magic and dragons and things like that, so I haven't been interested. UBO is a baseball game! In theory, while you're playing, the pitcher is another person, your baserunners are other people, the outfielders and other people, and so on and so forth. How awesome is that? I mean, if you're playing MLB '06 at home, and you strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth to blow that game, that's not cool. But if you're playing UBO and you do the same, you've not only blown the game for yourself, you've blown it for (potentially) eight other people. You may even ruin someone's "career," as each custom-designed player represents its respective gamer's "life" in the game. D'oh!

As the USA Today Sports Weekly article pointed out, think about the number of kids today who'd rather get eight friends together virtually to play UBO than get eight friends together to go to the sandlot to play a real game of baseball. While that may seem scary, I don't think we need to be worried about the future of organized sports. I just think this seems like a lot of fun, and I hope I don't get addicted to it after I do my quick test-run on it (download in progress) -- I have too much other stuff to do!

Instant Podcasts!

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OK, I discovered that Will Richardson's blog now has instant podcasts for every post. I am trying to figure out how to embed them within each of my posts automatically. I have figured out how to do it manually, but I don't want to have to do that every time.

Ehh, what the heck. It's not too hard to do it manually. I'll just do it that way, because I've spent way too long trying to figure out how to do it the "easy" way.

You can now RSS this blog to your podcast aggregator, such as iTunes, if you so desire. Just click on the Talkr "chiclet" in the left column. Awesome, huh?!?

For Your Enjoyment: Sample iMovie

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When my host teacher for observation found out we are learning about iMovie, he shared with me his enjoyment the program, as well as a few sample movies he has created. Here's one he created during his classes' silent reading day, "Silent Reading Action Movie!":

http://www.cortlandschools.org/buildings/jshs/team4/mlevy/ssr.mov

The footage was taken on some sort of spirit/costume day at the school, which would explain (for example) the fact that there is a Twinkee walking around at random points in the movie.

Anyway, pretty cool, huh? He didn't tell me how long it took him to edit the footage into the movie, but I don't think it took him too overly long. As for tips, he shared with me a couple basic ones:

-the montage is always a cool effect (the books closing at the tone of the bell)
-have a visual effect which recurs intermittently during the story (in this video, the zooming in on some of the faces; in a more personal family movie he showed me, shots of his baby interspersed within the main story)

He said more, but it escapes me at this time. Dang it. Hope you enjoyed the Silent Reading Action Movie, and wish me luck as I begin working on my own this weekend!

iMovie Project

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Well, it's official. After a brief talk with Dr. Stearns this afternoon, I will be doing my iMovie project on geocaching. I have secured a video camera already (thanks, library staff!) and will be taking it with me to a geocaching event this weekend ("Letchworth Fall Gathering V" at Letchworth State Park, southwest of Rochester).

This will be the sixth geocaching event I've attended in the past eight months, so I hope to see a lot of people there whom I have already met and who will be willing to discuss geocaching on tape for me. I'm kind of worried about getting enough tape at the event, since I know from experience that the batteries on these school-issued cameras are only good for like 45 minutes, maybe an hour tops. So I guess I need to have the questions I want to ask lined up and ready to go, so I can get maximum usable footage in minimum time. Here comes the brainstorming:

1.) "How many caches have you found?"
2.) "How far have you travelled to be here?"
3.) "Can I see your GPS device?" (hmm, a nice montage showing people with different GPSrs would be pretty cool...)
4.) "How much did you pay for your device?"
5.) "What do you like most about caching?"

I'm also hoping to catch up with some people who use geocaching as a learning device, either in the classroom or in Scouts or somewhere else, and let them talk about how they do it. That might be hard to do on short notice, though.

And then, of course, after I get home and charge up the battery, I can get some footage of myself doing some cache-related activities, including finding some hides! Ooh, ooh... maybe if I find out if there are some caches hidden near our hotel in Albany, some of my classmates might venture out with me after the NYSEC conference next Thursday?

Anyway, that's it. Sound pretty interesting? Lilke something you might watch? Like something that might be a hit on current.tv and make me some bucks?

By Popular Request:

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Here's the quotation of the night from... umm... that other class I go to on Tuesday nights. By the way, let me clarify that this occurred while we were learning about something called "interactive lecture."

Professor (paraphrased): "A good lesson features a strong lecture: teachers talk, and kids listen. You might allow one or two questions during the lesson, but for the most part, you want the kids to sit there and be quiet while you talk."
Me: "Umm... I would think that this would make the kids... umm..."
Fellow student: "...fall asleep?!?"
Professor (and I swear this is a direct quotation): "If the kids fall asleep, that's their problem."

I know there are people who, if they aren't afraid to step up, will back me up on this. This was not taken out of context in any way. This is what was said.

In the mind of this educator, an "interactive" lesson involves blah-blah-blahing at the front of the class for twenty minutes, and allowing (maybe) one or two questions from interested students. As for the disinterested students, well, forget about them. Their inability to learn from your lecture is their problem.

I don't even know what to say about this exactly. I was speechless. Incredulous. I hope, hope, that this educator was being facetious. But there was no "no, seriously..." after the "that's their problem" comment. There was just more talk about how great lecture is.

There is a time and a place for lecture, don't get me wrong. However, I would say that, even during an important lecture, there is room to accept any and all relevant questions students may have. Answering those questions might not only help the students asking them, but could very well help all the other students in the class better understand the lecture as well.

Come to think of it, I'm sure she wasn't being facetious, as I've seen this same activity going on in our class. She'll be giving a lecture on something, someone will raise his/her hand for a question, and she'll tell him/her to not ask questions, because she's lecturing. That question might have helped me; let it be asked!

Anyway... yeah. Another post unrealted to technology in the classroom. Welcome to Dave's Land of the Off-Topic.

Time for the Anticipated (and Becoming Cliche) "I'm A Bad Student" Post

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I'm a bad student. I say it all the time, and yet, for some reason, people never believe me. I suppose the confusion may come from my choice of adjective: I'm not a bad student, I'm a terrible student. I honestly hope that some how, through witchcraft or voodoo or some other sort of black magic, I will be able to lead my future students down the path of goodstudentry, despite my complete and utter lack of example.

What has led me to this conclusion... for the 7,483rd time?

I try to do things like readings for class, but I just can't. Honestly. Maybe I'm just stubborn, but I have no patience to read about what other scholarly people have had to say about what makes a good teacher, and how to motivate students, and so on and so forth. And I'm not saying I'd rather figure it out for myself, either. I would just rather listen in during class, take some high points from the conversation I hear other students having about the readings, and look into it from there. I realize that, were everyone to take my approach, there would be no conversation in class whatsoever. Therefore, by definition, my approach is the wrong approach, and therefore makes me a terrible student, right?

Well, I'm beginning to think otherwise. I might just be trying to shake responsibility here, but I think it is entirely possible that I'm just a different type of learner than others. I'm not going to learn from reading articles. I can testify to this from my job as a reader for a visually-impaired linguistics professor here at the college: I've read dozens of journal articles to her dealing with first- and second-language acquisition, and had discussions with her about the issues raises, and yet I couldn't tell you thing one about them. It all goes in one ear and out the other. Now, you might argue that this is simply because I don't care about linguistics, but that's not entirely true. I find some of the topics I read to her very interesting at the time -- but they're all lost within five minutes after I turn the page.

So what does this mean? For me, it means something important. It means that all the years I've been beating myself up for being a bad student might have been filled with misguided anger. I'm just finally opening up my ideas to the potential that maybe, just maybe, I'm simply differently-abled when it comes to learning. And I think that's a valuable understanding for me to have as I enter into a career as an educator.

My host teacher for observation said something similar to me last week. We were talking about how some kids are just plain "good kids" and, even though they might not do every shred of homework or participate in classroom discussion, it is possible that they are acquiring knowledge in their own ways. A teacher needs to be observant of these things, and make sure he/she makes connections with every student, regardless of whether or not the student appear to be with it. A personal touch to learning might be all that student needs.

Well, I went off on some tangents there, but the point is that, for the first time I can remember, this particular "I'm a bad student" post, unlike all the others I've made in my life, has been made with the caveat that "bad student" is a highly relative term. I might look like a bad student compared to some others, but if I simply look within myself (where I should be looking, after all) I can see that I am learning indeed, even if it isn't in the traditional sense.

My First Enhanced Podcast

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Self-assessment time. I completed my first enhanced podcast for ENG506 recently, and I must say I don't think I completely grasped the concept. I was thinking more along the lines of an iMovie: I put more importance on the pictures in my podcast and less on the audio. Proportionally speaking, I would say I spent 3/4 of the time I worked on the podcast tracking down pictures and making sure they synched up properly, and only about 1/4 of the time on the actual audio.

Somewhere in the transfer between my home computer and the computer at school, I lost one of my audio tracks ("Learning is a lifelong process... now more than ever.") However, the picture I had placed at that point in the podcast had the words Learning is a Lifelong Process on it, so I thought "no big deal." In hindsight, I realized that someone who was simply listening to the podcast would not have access to the picture and would just be hearing dead space... just like he/she would for the other portions of the podcast where I had no audio. But that "Learning is a Lifelong Process" slide was one of the key parts of my entire project, so having no audio there was devastating.

All in all, I don't think I did a horrible job on the project, but I think I could have done a much, much better job had I completely comprehended that this was, in fact, a podcast, not a slideshow.

Book Review: Again, Not Really 506-Related (Censorship-Related... Sorta)

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I just finished (earlier today) reading The Sledding Hill by Chris Crutcher, and I went through a range of thoughts about it. First, I was confused (what is the POV in this novel?), but then I figured it out. Then I was confused for a different reason (this isn't your typical Crutcher novel), but then I got over it and let it ride. Then I hit the twist, and I got mad (you can't do this, Chris Crutcher!), and I had to put the book down for awhile. Then I was amused (so self-deprecating and yet also so self-promoting), and, eventually, I just plain realized that I thought this book was really clever and I liked it a lot.

Let me explain:

Confusion about POV: Two main characters in the novel, including the narrator, die withi chapter one. In chapter two, the narrative is resumed by the dead kid. However, he is explaining things as he sees them through the mind of his friend, who is still alive. Got that?

Confusion about format: I've read several Chris Crutcher novels in my time. They are always full of naughty language and themes, and the protagonists always have a multitude of problems. None of these things occur in this novel. I thought old Chris had gone soft on me.

The twist: The main plot of the book, which doesn't crop up until about halfway through, is the challenging of a Chris Crutcher book at a high school. Talk about a metanarrative! This is where I got upset for a little while. Who does Crutcher think he is, inserting himself into the novel in order to work his agenda? Can you do that? It all seems a little heavyhanded, right?

Amusement: Crutcher's self-deprecation amused me. He shows the challengers perusing his website, commenting about his lack of education and his admitted high-school disdain for reading. Even the characters who defend his novel refer to his as "relatively obscure" and say things about his (fictional) novel-within-the-novel like "I've read better." There also was shameless self-promotion within the deprecation, as characters peruse chriscrutcher.com and talk about all the "boring pictures" of Crutcher's personal appearances. Funny stuff.

Enjoyment: The book comes to a feverish finish, at a BOE meeting, with a lot to say (obviously) about both sides of the censorship issue. Crutcher himself even makes an appearance, "in the flesh," at the end. But Crutcher never comes out and says book-banners are bad people, though. In fact, through his omniscient (dead) narrator, he reads their minds "objectively" and discovers "Those are all good guys. They want good things. The principle characters here are mad at one another because of what they believe, so maybe the fact that they look good or bad to one another can take the place of good and evil in this story..." (135). Pretty good stuff. There's also good stuff about how, if people with opposing viewpoints could just sit down and talk about things civilly, compromises would be made and everyone would get along. But, according to our heavenly narrator, that's impossible in the "Earthgame".

Oh, and if you've read Crutcher's autobiography/memoir, King of the Mild Frontier, you will see that many of the things which happen to the protagonist in this novel are things which Crutcher claims occurred to him in his childhood. So now, taking that into consideration, this book becomes modern Crutcher speaking to all the young Crutcheresque students of the world. This all just makes me head spin.

Anyway, great book. Not your typical Crutcher, like I said, but very entertaining nonetheless and with a great message of tolerance, both from "them" and from "us". That's something I know I, for one, have a hard time remembering sometimes -- I need to be tolerant of others just as much as they need to be tolerant of me. I'm not sure Crutcher would say that was the precise message of his book, but it's what I got from it. And I'm sure he'd be happy I got something meaningful from it. :)

Grammar Sticklers Rejoice!

This is not exactly technology-in-the-classroom-related, but I felt the need to share this anyway:

Software revises Armstrong's moon quote

Mr Armstrong has long insisted that he meant to say “one small step for a man . . .” — which would have been a more meaningful and grammatically correct version, free of tautology. But even the astronaut himself could not be sure.

“Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the Moon, didn’t I?” he is reported to have asked officials later, amid uncertainty as to whether he had blown the moment or simply been drowned out by static interference as his words were relayed 250,000 miles back to Earth.

Now, after almost four decades, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert has rediscovered the missing “a” in Mr Armstrong’s famous quote. Peter Shann Ford ran the Nasa recording through sound-editing software and clearly picked up an acoustic wave from the word “a”, finding that Mr Armstrong spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds — ten times too fast for it to be audible.

Mr Ford’s findings have been presented to Nasa officials in Washington and to a relieved Mr Armstrong, who issued a statement saying: “I find the technology interesting and useful. I also find his conclusion persuasive.”

How are astronomy classes surviving? First, the number of planets in the solar system is reduced from nine to eight, and now this.

Is it not interesting that, using fancy new technology, we can say that Neil Armstrong said a word that was "ten times too fast for it to be audible"? I'm using that excuse next time I say something stupid. "Oh, you misunderstood... you're only listening to the words I'm saying slowly enough to make them audible."

NCAAHazing.com

Here's more on the power of blogs in the flat world: the headline on the front page of the Syracuse Post-Standard Saturday morning was "How one man with a Web site in Oregon exposed hazing at dozens of NCAA schools." The article is about the blog NCAAHazing.com, created by one man, a former assistant athletic director at SUNY Albany, who has gone on a crusade to stop hazing at colleges across the nation. He's even flagged our fair college, specifically the women's softball and lacrosse teams.

How does he do it? Well, thanks to the Internet, it's quite simple:

Many of the photos [blogger William] Schut found were on online photo albums sites, such as www.webshots.com. Those photos, among millions of others, would have likely remained under the radar, except students added captions such as "rookie night" and "initiation" and included the name of their college and sports team.

"It takes five minutes to get on the Internet and find them," Schut said.

Yet again, this underscores the importance to teach kids about how connected the flat world is and how they must always keep in mind that anything they post online is there for anyone to see. Even with these photo hosting sites such as Facebook, which require "friend" status in order to see photos, it only takes one person on the friend list who decides he/she wants to put an end to illegal behavior to blow everything in to the authorities.

The fact is, college sports teams have been getting in trouble for posting hazing photos on the Web for years. Those convictions seemed to be relatively few and far between, though. Now, there is one blogger who has become a watchdog, tracking down these photos and exposing them in one easy-to-view location which is quickly earning respectability. Schut has already nailed 30 colleges and universities on his website. And the sad thing is, college athletes don't seem to learn from the mistakes of others. They all think they're invincible.

Can we, as educators, help kids learn at younger ages that their behavior online needs to parallel their behavior in other social situations? The Web has been regarded as the final frontier of the law for years. With blog crusaders like William Schut, though, the long arm of the law is reaching into WebShots, Facebook, and other previous safegrounds for posting incriminating photos.