More Mixed Media
Lessons Learned the Hard Way – this could be a lot of fun with literary and historical figures.
Real Life Fodder for Copyright Conversations
Participate in primary source research in real life. Geography, history, science.
Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
Related posts
High Speed Film Making
We had a pretty interesting staff development team meeting on Wednesday. We met Lucas Krost the director of a local film company who’d won the 48 Hour Film FestivalEach team draws a genre (science fiction, horror, comedy, etc.), a line of dialogue and a prop. Then they have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit their film. and had their film screened at Cannes. So we spoke to him for a while. Lucas wasn’t a fan of school (if I recall correctly he was thrown out of five high schools). He told the story of how he eventually found editing and film work. It was a good story but nothing you haven’t heard in variations a number of other times. What was interesting was hearing how this group communicated and worked together to make a film in only 48 hours. So here’s what we did following the conversation. We drew a genre from a hat and got our topic- 21st Century Skills. We then had 48 minutes to write our scripts and 48 minutes to film and edit. My group of 6 drew cop/detective for genre. The hardest part for us was coming up with the idea which took pretty much the whole 48 minutes due to differing ideas as to how to attack the project. We never wrote a […]
Markov Tweet Generator Code, Path, & Potential
[snap url=”http://bionicteaching.com/trials/markov/” alt=”DS106 Markov Tweet Generator” w=”400″ h=”300″ link=”on”] The following is how I adapted the Markov chain generator from Hay Kranen. Thanks to the commentsComments matter and help stitch together the Internet. I found below Hay’s postwhich is from 2008 I might add- long tail etc. etc. this Markov + Shakespeare version inspired me to figure out the “post-to-Twitter” option.Note to self and other clueless people, urlencode is just a bit easier way to clean up the text than trying to think through a str_replace. That’s a fairly awesome example of the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing. I only happened across that function (?) by chance on some random StackOverflow post and it was as if the world just fell into place. Anyway, the much cleaner version is up and running. It now allows you to push the results to Twitter although I’m still adjusting this a bit. The code for the page I modified is below. It’s still slower than I’d like but it’ll do for now. The fact that I can go from a conversation one day to a fairly finished product the next is the piece that amazes me about computers and the Internet. I cannot stress enough that I don’t know how to write PHP. I feel that’s a statement of […]
Creative Communication: The Persona
Ever trying to follow in the footsteps of Tom, I realized quickly that it helps to add drama and humor into your communication with staff and students. Shortly after taking the Instructional Technology Resource Teacher (ITRT) position, I began brainstorming possible personae to catch the attention of my staff. I finally settled on I created a wall size poster of the image above, laminated it, and hung it behind my desk. I put reminders on it for students and staff. Whether reminders of training dates or loud calls to back up and archive weekly, this poster has definitely caught the eyes of teachers and learners. Taking it one step further, I ventured into film with “Ted Coe”–my twin brother. I casted Ted as a bumbling authority who really had little knowledge of technology, and placed myself next to him as the voice of reason. My most recent project was a series of videos that introduce our county’s Technology Integration Progression Chart (or TIP-C) to the staff. Below is one of the videos. Under it is a link to my TIP-C page with all of the videos. The TIP-Chart Page The teachers are responding favorably to the videos. I think it keeps communication fresh, and it is always nice to be entertained while you are learning something new. This idea could […]