I attended the 2009 “Kicking It Up a Notch” session entitled “Film School for Video Podcasters.”  Matthew Needleman delivered the session.  He used the format well to tell a story as he taught some film basics for beginning VODcasters.  Points include how to use a storyboard more effectively, the Rule of Thirds, lighting and sound tips.  He also includes a link to his blog for further information on things such as video editing.  One of the essential questions asks how having students make their own videos promotes critical thinking.  That’s something I’m pretty excited about.  Teaching students to evaluate messages for logical fallacies/ propaganda is something I’m very interested in, and Needleman’s presentation offers a format for that.  He asserts that in constructing meaning in their own videos, students learn to deconstruct meaning in others’ media messages.  I can easily see this evolving into a Pre-AP project during my units on the world wars, which deal quite a bit with propaganda and its uses/ misuses.

I’m excited about the possibilities of online, on-demand professional development.  As new teachers graduate and go to work, we have more and more professionals whose CE requirements/ needs are high.  We will certainly “kick it up a notch” if we can learn to tap into this as a district, making on-demand CE available for credit. 

I’m excited about the possibilities for both learning and teaching.  What if I could make a VODcast review for a test?  Especially if it can be made humorous or fun, then embed it on my school web page?   What if I could make individualized VODcast lessons?  I could be in six places at once!  Too stinkin’ cool!

I went ahead and learned how to use Glogster because I’ve seen LJW use it with her kids to great advantage.  I think there’s a lot you can have kids do with this in a history classroom.  I’ve seen some really neat glogs in earlier assignments, so I had something to go on.  I want my kids to explore an event, including the 5W’s and H, one good question they still have about the event, causes and effects of the event and so forth.  It’s just a new and different way to do a poster that looks really, really cool!

After I went to another person’s wikispace and saw what they did with Wordle, I went and tried it out.  I really like it.  Its possibilities are a little limited, but it would be FANTASTIC for a concept development lesson, especially when dealing with abstracts.  I want to present a concept development in a lesson, then have the kids follow up by doing a Wordle that communicates their own perceptions about what the concept is and means–a more personalized view.

As I worked with Wordle, it led to all kinds of cool places, but that’s another story . . . .

The RSS experience has been such fun.  First, when I created my custom feed, I chose the Cold War.  I’ll be teaching world history next year, and I don’t have a lot of good resources on that, so thought maybe this would bring some to my door.  Little did I know that I’d be getting thousands of hits when a Russian spy ring was uncovered in the US.  That was interesting timing. 

I’ve got three top hits from my feeds.  The first is “Archaeologists Discover Ancient Tunnel in Egypt,” which includes a video of Dr. Zahi Hawass (Director of Antiquities in Egypt) actually showing the tunnel discovered in Seti I’s tomb.  It really creates a sense of the heyday of archaeology when Flinders Petrie and the Carter/ Caernarvon team battled tomb robbers to make incredible discoveries.  It gives the sense that maybe there are still things to be discovered.

The second hit was from the Free Technology for Teachers feed, and shares a new entry in the International Reading Association’s “Read, Write, Think” website.  It’s a software packet that helps students easily create and print their own flip books.

Finally, I found a BBC “Audio Slideshow” of the Korean War.  That was a result of my “Cold War” custom feed.  The site provides primary source photos with primary source audio from world leaders such as the US President and British Prime Minister.  They do have a few other slideshows, and hopefully will continue to expand.

Standing Stones of Orkney, c.2008, G. Raines, all rights reserved, used with permission

Okay, this is a really cool moment for me because–for the first time–I’ve actually thought of a way to use what I’ve learned to make something I ALREADY DO easier.  That’s when I feel as if technology is really earning its keep.  Bonus:  the kids are the ones who will use it, not me.    I’m going to let them use Creative Commons to help them with an alphabet book assignment.  By accident, I figured out that museums, such as the Upper Arlington History, post pictures like this one of a WW1 doughboy from , as well as the Library of Congress have put their images here for use.  Definitely look at this one from the Smithsonian ; it’s a really good (interesting? inviting? intriguing?) photo of an early airmail pilot.  Don’t ya just LOVE old pics?

This photo I chose is one my Da took in Scotland a few years ago, and posted to Flickr.  I love the way the sun hits the stone, but it doesn’t show up here as it does in the original.  Please do click on the link to see the original.  This one just comes out too grainy.

It’s kind of interesting that these sites seem to mirror other, previous resources, notably databases & advanced search engines.  OER Commons reminds me of the ERIC databases.  I did a search on CC Search for “Napoleonic Wars.”   The results posted were accessed through a Google advanced search.

Creative Commons is great.  I don’t really share things on the web, though.  So many people seem to think that if it’s on the web, it’s theirs to take.  I noticed on the Creative Commons site that one contributor was very upset because somone used his photo, then someone else picked it up, and then another party picked it up after that.  By the second incarnation, the attribution he’d requested had . . . gotten “lost.”  Just as we warn our kids that once you’ve posted something to the web, it’s verrrrrry hard to get rid of it, we should probably keep that in mind, as well.  Don’t post anything you want to control credit and/ or rights for unless you’ve got it very well documented that you’re serious about your rights (or the rights of the person who allowed you to post).

I took a topic I got through the RSS feeds:  a Saxon princess named Eadgyth, whose remains were recently positively identified in Germany.  The article seems well-documented, and agrees with what I’ve found about this woman from other, reliable resources.  The discussion is interesting because it shows creation of a group called the WikiProject Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms group, which is dedicated to moderating/ improving the reliability/ validity of articles on Anglo-Saxon history within Wikipedia.  I like that, because it creates a community of people committed to improving a certain segment of articles.  When a community of “specialists” is established, I think it will tend to moderate and monitor its members, weeding out those who aren’t submitting good info.  The edits made on this page all tended to be clarifications of minor misunderstandings in word choice, with an update for recent news.  For example, one edit is the addition of a link to Michael Wood’s Guardian article on Eadgyth of June 17, 2010.

I’m impressed with and excited by the possibilities I’m seeing in wikis.  So far, this is the most exciting thing we’ve studied in this course–to me.  One of the most interesting wikis I visited in terms of what I think is exciting is the Discovery Utopia site.  He’s using the site to allow students to collaboratively develop the project itself, criteria for success and standards.  I thought that was a neat way of developing it.  The other two I visited kind of gave me an idea of how I might want to use this, particularly with a pre-AP class.  I visited “1001 Flat World Tales“  and “Greetings From the World.”  I like the idea of collaborating with students all over the world to tell stories about the history of the place you live, an idea that came out of “Greetings From the World.”  I’d like to work in some component of review/collaboration/ and/ or revision such as is included in “1001 Flat World Tales.”  I think that tends to take more advantage of the collaborative nature of wikis.  Sharing those stories could be a really cool way to make history more relevant in the classroom.  I went ahead and got my Wikispace, and I’m trying to use the “Discovery Utopia” materials to kind of help me think through how to do it.  I think the “Teacher’s First Wiki Walk-Through” has some really useful tips to help me do that, particularly the idea of setting up a wiki to direct teachers all over the world to the project.  I’ll have to work on that . . . !

c. 2010, G. Raines, used with permission

Okay, I was tickled to find, via my NYT feed, that both US President Obama and Russian President Medvedev have Twitters going.  I thought, “HOW COOL!”  The feeds were dumping so many posts into my reader, I had to delete them.  Both of these guys are spending WAAAAaaaay too much time on Twitter, which is really kinda scary if you think about it.  But, then again, politicians always do have lots to say, don’t they? 

Those who teach history know how important it is to teach about and with primary sources.  BBC does it again.  They’ve combined primary source photos from the Korean Conflict with primary source audio from U.S. President Harry Truman, the British Prime Minister and others.  In addition to this set, they also have a set from the ’72 Bloody Sunday incident in Ireland, the Hubble Space Telescope and others.  I like the Korean Conflict piece because it can be hard to find good resources on this topic.  I found it by creating a custom news feed off the phrase “Cold War.”