A Way Around the Law?

Photograph of a VHS cassette and a metric rule...Image via WikipediaAt least at our school, one of the teacher tools that was prohibited last year was the extracting of short DVD clips for classroom use. I think we all know what advantages this process offers, especially within the confines of the 40-minute period (or, as I like to refer to it, "the 40-minute fury"!). Excerpting clips instead of fumbling with the menus and previews of an actual DVD was the fulfillment of the early promises of DVD technology. Instead, I see teachers running around with old and degraded VHS tapes, laboriously cued and re-cued up to the scene they wish to use in class.


Although the DVD clipping process is clearly illegal according to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), we now have an opportunity to apply for an exemption to the law. The Librarian of Congress (LOC) is about to revisit the law for the first time since 2006 and could grant us the same rights given to film studies professors at the post-secondary level.

If you are at all interested in crafting a "comment" (petition) to the LOC, please let me know. Just to give you some perspective: in 2006, nationwide, only 74 petitions were posted. These were made by various organizations as well as by private citizens. Each and every request was reviewed and ruled upon by the LOC. A successful "comment" by New Trier would certainly be consistent with our "Lighthouse District" reputation, and might also be a relevant tie-in to our ECGC initiatives. If you are from another school and wish to join me in this effort, please contact me here. The due date is December 2, 2008.




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Free Video Creation from ANIMOTO

Image representing Animoto as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBaseHave you or your students ever created slideshows with music? Usually, we are limited to computer-based programs like iMovie, iPhoto, Windows Movie Maker or Photo Story. But now there is an amazing online creation tool called ANIMOTO, which is Japanese for "ANIMOTO". It completely automates the process and syncs the images to the structure and sound of the music provided either by you or the website. You can even embed the finished video in another web page. And best of all, it's FREE.

The free version is limited to 30 seconds and doesn't allow any videos to be downloaded. BUT, if you are a teacher, you can request an educational account for you and your students as long as you promise to share what your classes are doing with the tool. The educational version is UNLIMITED and allows you and your students to DOWNLOAD the videos to a computer.

Here's a "get-to-know me" video I created for my students. All of the images came from my online Picasa account. You can also get images from your computer or websites like facebook, flickr, or photobucket.




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A Googley Way to Collect Info

This past summer at the Google Teacher Academy, I learned of an efficient way to collect student info or even create quick surveys. It's all via Google Docs, specifically the Spreadsheet function. My own knowledge of spreadsheets is woefully inadequate, since I am math-challenged. But this is just populating lists and cells, which I actually do understand! Here's how to create a web-based form from a spreadsheet:



So here's how I use a Google Docs form in my classroom. At the beginning of the year, I need the following information from my students:
  • Name (i.e., what they prefer to be called, NOT what the computer spits out)
  • Email address (i.e., an email address they actually prefer to use to contact a teacher)
  • Blog address (because each one of my students has his/her own Blogger weblog)
The beauty of this form is that because it is online, any link in an individual cell becomes "live", meaning, I can click on the web address next to my student's name and it will take me to the student's blog.

And here's what my form looks like (scroll to see the input fields):




Managing All of Those Bookmarks

Organizing Favorites in Internet Explorer 6>Image via WikipediaAs a classroom teacher and a person who's logged on to many different computers in the course of one day, access to my browser's bookmarks had become a challenging mess. For various reasons, I might not have my laptop with me and instead be forced to use the classroom desktop computer. Or, at home, I might be working on an entirely different computer, perhaps a Mac. What if I needed access to a video or online newspaper article that I found at home and wanted to share with my students or colleagues?

How can a teacher keep all of his/her bookmarks organized and in a centralized place? One of my colleagues just emails links to himself. But he receives so many emails on a daily basis that it becomes difficult to locate the original email in his inbox! Others lose all of their precious bookmarks every year when the IT staff re-clones computers. For me, the solution I've found is something called "social bookmarking".



Social bookmarking, at its most basic, is just a website that stores all of your bookmarks online. It can also organize those bookmarks by "tags" which are named by you. Notice my tags on the left side of this page? So, for example, I teach a sociology course. I found a great New York Times web graphic on social class, which I bookmarked using two "tags" of my choice: "sociology" and "class". In the future, whenever and wherever I am, I can access all of my bookmarks, click on the "class" tag and my bookmarks are instantly reorganized by that category. I actually did this once in my American Studies class while discussing The Great Gatsby: I wanted to give the students a visual of current American social stratification for a comparison to the the 1920s.

The social bookmarking website I use is called Delicious, though there are many others. If you look to the right side of this page, you can see the latest websites I have saved (under "Recently Bookmarked"). That's the social aspect of social bookmarking: you have the ability to share your great finds with others (like course committee colleagues). Or, if you like, you can keep ALL or some of them completely private. It's your choice.

If it still doesn't quite make sense, please check out this video (above, right) from the great folks at CommonCraft that explains this concept further.






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VoiceThreads

In two of my classes, I am using a tool called VoiceThread in two different ways. VoiceThread allows anyone to post presentations or slides online for others to view and/or add comments. Remember VH1's "Pop-Up Video"? The added comments are "pop-up" annotations created by any or all of these methods:

  • typing
  • recording your voice with your computer
  • recording your voice with your phone
  • uploading pre-recorded audio
  • recording video via webcam

This tool allows you to control exactly who has permission to "comment" on your presentation. You could easily narrate your own presentation for students who missed class. Alternatively, you could have 30 students comment on 30 slides. Or, 30 students could comment on a common slide or image. Here's 2 ways I am currently using VoiceThread:

  1. In my AP US History course, each student has been invited to annotate every past presentation in a collective effort to review the entire semester. I call this a "collaborative lecture", since the students are actually enriching the original presentation with information from their own reading. Press the big PLAY button to see a demonstration using actual student comments.
  2. In my Modern World History course, in preparation for a unit on European Imperialism, each student was asked to view a single image and add their unique comments into 3 distinct categories of responses, according to Ron Ritchhart's Intellectual Character.

    "SEE": what do you observe (do not interpret)
    "THINK": make an interpretation, but only with evidence
    "WONDER": ask a question
     
     How are you using or planning to use VoiceThread? For many more ideas, please check out out Collette Cassinelli's VoiceThread 4 Education web page.

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