Category Archives: Web 2.0

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Award Winning Students

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Tonight was the 7th annual Lumiere All School Film Fest here in Reno. My friend Paul McFarlane, an English teacher at Hug High in Reno, started and continues to make this superb festival happen (Yes, Hug High School, named for Procter R. Hug, a local judge).

My sixth graders from last year won for best science film for their movie about fossils. And my current fourth graders won for their “Inclusion” movie – (downloaded now over 50,000 times, but only viewed on YouTube about 14 times since I posted it there last week). Congrats class!

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Vidcasts of Grace Corrigan Visit And YouthBridges Skypecast

Here are the links to video of Grace Corrigan’s (Christa McAuliffe’s mom – the teacher in space’s) visit to our classroom. Well worth the time. You will see me occasionally intrude into the presentation because I put the laptop running the Skype feed in the best possible spot if I wanted it to be in the way. In my own defense It’s where it is when Celest joins us and it just didn’t occur to me I know dumb.

Full disclosure – I edited out the 5 minute plus – “school announcements” that overwhelm Grace’s presentation. I also cut it into 2 seemingly obvious chunks. The first is Grace’s presentation to the students – although I didn’t get the camera turned on right away so I missed the beginning – the 2nd part is the question answering part. I think you will agree that Grace connects well with the students.

Thanks again to Lee Baber and her students at YouthBridges who Skyped the event for us and added their questions. All in all a great experience. Enjoy!

The sound is not real loud (but not bad either) because the camera was in the back of the room. I boosted it as much as I could but depending on your speakers, you might need headphones.

Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s presentation: 13 + minutes
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Click the photo below to see the vidcast of Grace’s question and answer period: 24 + minutes

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Good News All Around

Celest was back today after an almost six week absence. She rang our Skype bell just as students were entering at nine and except for recess and lunchtime – and a short break to take a blood draw, she was with us all day. She got a chance to read the 28 comments left for her by her classmates, and many of you, on her blog (she read non-stop for over twenty minutes – she really enjoyed them – thanks). Mainly for her benefit we spent a little time brainstorming topics for future blog posts, she even started one.

Next, we got her started on our animal wiki pages project, a tie-in to the field trip we went on 2 weeks ago – she’s never been there : ( . We also did some multiplication facts practice and explored angles online. All-in-all a good day.

About 10:30 though Celest dropped a bombshell on us when she explained that she has been told that she will be able to attend “regular school” next year!!!! – we’re not sure where yet – maybe here, her area has been moved to another school’s attendance zone … so we’ll see.

There was one scary part of the day though – not long after Celest came on I noted a mark on her cheek about the size of a half-dollar. It was brownish-red and seemed like a sore. My vice-principal came through not much later and noticed it right away … we gave each other sad looks … and she left. All was well though … when Celest turned her head a few minutes later the “sore” turned out to be a press-on decal of a cat with a red bow. Whew! She let me take a picture of it –

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Fun And Motivation With FD’s Flickr Tools

Years ago I came up with an idea for a writing prompt that I felt was pretty “schema neutral“-  all kids would have experience enough to be able to write a story about this prompt. I call it “A Day As Your Shoes.” Several years ago Corbett Harrison, who among other things had the concept for and started the Writing Fix web site and still maintains it, put my prompt on the site. He made it an interactive prompt to mimic how I have students brainstorm their ideas. Since all students have experience with shoes (at least in this country) and going to school – they will all be able to bring schema for this story.

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This year to add to the motivation and creativity I had the students make the covers for their stories by taking pictures of their shoes and using Fd’s Flickr Tools – Magazine Cover to design their bookcover. We took pictures with a digital camera and downloaded into iPhoto on their laptops. Each student designed several covers so they could build at least some expertise with the software before putting together their final product pictured below.

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A Hit and a Miss

I finished the last of four  4 hour classes I taught on Flickr, blogs, wikis, writingfix.com, digital video, TeacherTube and Skype (and a few other things) last night. To demo Skype I made a connection with Chrissy in New Zealand. I had never met Chrissy or been to her blog, but she was the first to answer my request. What a way to make my point of how easy using Skype is. I typed in her Skype name, clicked on it and 10 seconds later there she was along with her class. She announce that she was from our future since it was 11:30 Wednesday for her and 4:30 Tuesday for us. She shared how she uses Skype with her students – making connections with other classes in other places and that was it. Just simply cool. I sent her a thank you email and expressed the hope that we could possibly have our students work on something together, especially since the time zones make that possible.

On the other hand, I was supposed to join the WOW2 usual Tuesday night chat to demo how that works by having Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Sharon Peters, & Vicki Davis respond to a question or two. I entered the chat just fine but every time I tried to listen in I was knocked off their site … I’ve been on before … from home, no problem. I was running late and didn’t have time to problem solve for long – so I apologize if I disrupted things there : ( – Dang and my track record was doing so well too.

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A Grace – Full Visit

Update: 4/29/07
Find a link to the podcast below (my first ever podcast btw).
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Friday, Grace Corrigan “graced” our classroom with a visit, and that might seem like just a cute play-on-words, but if you had been there you would agree. Grace is Christa McAuliffe’s Mom (Teacher in Space tragically lost on the Space Shuttle Challenger debacle). I was told to expect her about fifteen minutes after school started and she appeared about fifteen minutes before school started, so much for my, “We’ll get the students in and settled first” plan. But it didn’t matter. They came in and found their seats, some said hello – I had explained to them the day before that because we were Skyping her visit and trying to record it and video tape it, that I would be busy and they would have to monitor themselves and each other – they did a great job!
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Lee Baber and I (mainly Lee) got the Skype connection to work – we had planned on meeting over Skype the day before to check the connection and discuss what to expect etc. –  but both of us were so busy that that never happened. We did manage to connect about an hour before, after I managed to interrupt another Skype session her students were doing.

We had a bit of a tentative start, I intro-ed from my end and then one of Lee’s students did an intro for the podcast they were doing – and Grace was off – well for a few minutes anyhow. Right as Grace was engaging the students, our school’s morning announcements began. But that didn’t stop Grace, she just kept on going right through – today’s lunch menu, Thought-for-the-Day, and a scolding for leaving too much trash outside after, “outside lunch” the day before. I noticed at this point that Lee had sent me a text message on Skype, “Brian, we seem to be picking up some kind of noise; what is that? “Just morning announcements,” I texted back. “Oh,” replied Lee, who I’m sure was really impressed at this point at the professional manner in which the presentation was going. And that impression was reinforced a few minutes later when the office called me over the loudspeaker to tell me to do my attendance (even though it was done). You have to understand that we complain all the time how loud things come across our PA system, but there is no way to adjust it or turn it off.

Anyhow, undeterred Grace continued – she showed them a short film about Christa and continued on her theme of  “Reach For The Stars!” She took questions for about 25 minutes, took a photo with the class, shook hands with any student that wanted to, autographed a picture of Christa for us, and was gone. I scanned the picture and printed out a color copy for every student in my class. 18 of my students were able to ask her a question, and at least half that number of the YouthBridges students asked a question too.

I want to thank Grace Corrigan, Lee Baber and her students and Paul McFarlane a high school English teacher that started and runs the Lumiere Film Festival – and he teaches our school district’s Digital Video Class with me – he chose my class as the one for Grace to visit.
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My class began blog posts about the experience and their field trip the day before to Animal Ark. Lee emailed me that she thinks the recording went well – thanks to her and her students. All-in-all a super experience for all involved. As soon as the podcast is edited I’ll put a link to it here. Once I get a chance to edit the video, and if it is any good I’ll post it. I just wish Celest could have been a part – a few students mentioned that too.

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Podcast – Click here for podcast of Grace’s visit.

Recorded 4/27/07 Length: 31:51

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Inclusion Update 4-25-07

I’m afraid this week’s update is not good news. Celest has been sick from her Chemo for weeks and that has developed into an infection that has progressed to the point that she was airlifted to a San Francisco Bay Area Children’s Hospital that specializes in treating leukemia last week. Now we hear that she will probably be there for a month … at least. This is a potentially life threatening infection. She has had this happen before and come out OK. Please keep her in your prayers.

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Microsoft Windows XP, Office, Live Mail All For Only $3 – Legally!

The Indian Express Newspapers today announced in an article titled “Microsoft to sell govts $3 software package” that Microsoft:

“will sell a $3 package of Windows, Office and educational programmes to governments that want to load the software onto personal computers for students. The package, called the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite, will include the Windows XP Starter Edition operating system, Microsoft Office and Live Mail email software, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said in a speech at a conference for government leaders in Beijing on Thursady.”(sic)

Obviously the thought of a billion or two potential customers being introduced to computers running Linux and open source software have them scared:

“…The company (Microsoft) also wants to ensure that countries that offer free or cheap personal computers (PC) to students will choose Windows instead of the freely distributed Linux operating system. Microsoft will start selling the $3 software package in the second half of 2007, it said.”

Interesting …  very interesting.

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Send Celest A “Cyber Get Well Card”

Celest has not been feeling well for weeks now. The doctors have changed her chemo and apparently it is not sitting well with her. Thusly we have not had her “join” us via Skype on a very consistent basis lately : (

We decided today to send Celest a kind of “Cyber” get well card – so most of the class managed to post a “feel better” comment to her lone blog post. They think it would be helpful if as many people as possible would also leave comments – so if you can leave her a short “get well” comment and/or a word of encouragement and tell her where you are commenting from It would be appreciated. You can read the comments her classmates left her so far also.

We have been blogging and commenting quite a bit this week also, so check out some of the other students’ posts as well if you have the time.

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Youthbridges Audio Skype Interview Experience Podcast

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Ten days ago we had the opportunity to link up for an interview with the 8th grade students in Lee Baber’s class at YouthBridges in Virginia. The participants included Lee’s class, my class in Sparks, Nevada – Elderbob Brannan in Texas, and Celest (a student in my class that has leukemia and attends class via video Skype) from her house. We were scheduled to begin at 9:30am Pacific time, but everytime we all got on … the Skype call dropped. Lee finally figured out that it happened every time Celest Skyped in – so she just Skype called her – I got her Celest’s phone number and Lee called it using Skype – problem solved. This was not terribly interesting for my students – but was a great lesson for them how things don’t work and you problem solve (or at least try) and just maybe you get things to work. Elderbob has posted the interview as a podcast if you’d like to hear it.

Update: Lee Baber has posted the podcast at YouthBridges too.
Lee’s students had written questions and sent them to us days before the interview so that my students could consider answers beforehand. This should have worked well, and it did, just not in the way I expected. Most of my students are second language learners and one of the things we have REALLY been working on is understanding a question before you try to answer it – ask about what you don’t understand. My students did not do a good job of this and they realized this after the interview when we de-briefed about it. They felt the questions were hard to understand – and I asked them why they didn’t notice that beforehand … they finally realized it was because they didn’t think about the questions deeply enough when we went over them in class and it wasn’t obvious to them until afterwards when they knew they had had difficulties answering them.

This is true “Messy” learning. Now I can remind them and “beat them over the head” with what happened and they will have the schema to know what I am referring to and hopefully become better thinkers – and this is just about as important a skill as I can think of – being aware of what I know and don’t know which is such a common issue with elementary students and even more so with kids of poverty and second language learners like my students. They will also be able to notice themselves that they have improved and that awareness is key. Lee and I have already talked about another possible Skype discussion and I hope we really mange to follow through so my students (and hers) can use what they learned from this experience.

Elderbob’s audio recording will be something we can go back to as a benchmark – what was good and what wasn’t. We already have reaped the benefits of this experience. We have been working for quite awhile on stories about being our shoes for an entire day. This week we read them aloud to the class and we reminded ourselves about how much easier it is to listen and enjoy an oral presentation when it is read with feeling. They did a great job.

We’d like to thank Lee and her students at Hillyard Middle School and Elederbob Brannan for getting us together.

I am posting below the debrief notes my class recorded immediately after the interview:

What was hard?

Set-up took a long time – tech issues. Made it boring at first.

Hard to hear.

We were just sitting and listening.

Not that many questions and the questions were hard to understand.

Too long between questions – dead air

What went well?

The Youthbridges students got it to work!Lots of students got to say something.

New way to use Skype – more than one person.

Got to talk about something good we have done.

We got to learn about other people in other states.

The experience of getting to talk to people we don’t know.

Felt like people were interested in something we had to say.

What could we do to improve the experience?

Work on giving more detailed answers, more articulate – explain more. People will find that more interesting to listen to.

Be more willing to answer – just try.

Speak-up – talk louder.

Think more about the questions and ask about what we don’t understand – ask for clarification. Give more thoughtful answers. This would make it less boring – be active thinkers/learners.

Have a better way to get students to the microphone more quickly.