Bud the Teacher

    Here’s an update on the Google/NASA collaboration. 

    This press release announces an event to announce a partnership between Google and NASA.  Hmm   .  .  .  .  I’ll be listening to hear what the announcement actually is.  In the meantime, anyone want to harbor a guess?

(via Drudge)

    After a long delay (one month, to be precise), I present to you, via podcast, the audio from Greg, Bill and my presentation at NCTE’s 2006 Annual Convention.  The hour and fifteen minute workshop is about how we are using blogs with our students in different ways and for different purposes.  My contribution to the presentation is the "why" of Web 2.0 . 
   We were fortunate to have a big and friendly audience for our presentation, and you’ll notice a deterioration in the audio quality when I enter the audience to solicit some ideas and participation for my yarn activity.  Enjoy the chaos — just pull out a bit of yarn and you’re right there with us.
    Here’s the presentation wiki that we used as a handout — all the links referenced in the podcast can be found there.  Feel free to add to the wiki if you’d like.
    I’d draw your attention to two moments from my portion of the presentation.  First, when I got to the room where we were presenting, I was listening to the previous presenter talking with someone.  I recognized the voice, and the content sounded familiar — eventually, I realized I was sharing a room with Clarence Fisher.  That was pretty cool, and you’ll notice that I refer to that moment in the podcast. 
    Second, I think I make a rather bold statement when I tell the audience that it’s selfish of them to keep the good work going on in their classrooms to themselves.  It’s selfish to not blog, or otherwise publish.  Just plain selfish.  How dare you keep the good stuff to yourself?
    Too harsh? 

    Congratulations, y’all.  We’re all the people of the year, according to Time, at least. 

    I’ve been meaning to mention that I had an opportunity to speak with Harris at VisualThesaurus about my classroom practice for a feature interview at his place.  Might be interesting to some of you.
    Then again, might not, but I enjoyed the conversation.  Thanks, Harris.

    My thanks to those of you who offered help and assistance, both in public and in private, to my "friend" yesterday.  After lots of right moves down wrong roads, I thought I’d, as Stephen asked me to, share how I got from the DVD to a file that we could use in Windows Movie Maker. 
    Via the comments, I discovered Handbrake, a cool piece of software that did the ripping/encoding work that I needed.  Using Handbrake’s Windows version (which is pretty new, I guess), I was able to get the video and audio off of the DVD and into .mp4 format.  But Windows Movie Maker couldn’t work with that, so I needed to do another conversion.  I immediately thought of Zamzar, but my file was too big (Zamzar has a maximum upload size of 100 MB per file).  So I searched for, found, and installed several promising little programs.
    Since not a single one of them worked properly, or would allow me to do a full conversion without paying a fee, I’m not going to tell you which ones I found.  What I will tell you is that I eventually realized that I could use Handbrake to encode the files into smaller chunks (basically, going chapter by chapter from the DVD), which I could then upload to Zamzar and transfer to .avi. 
    Within twenty minutes of uploading an awful lot of video, I was able to download the converted files, which I then burned to a CD for my student. 
    Whew.   I rather hate video.  But, as more and more folks get into using video online on a regular basis, I have a hunch that there’ll be more universal tools out there so, hopefully, I won’t ever have a funky video experience like this again.
    (Hurry up, video software folks.)

    I have this, uh, friend.  He’s a teacher working with a student on a video project, and he kinda told this student that he could, uh, very easily convert video from DVD (.vob) to a format that he could work with in Windows Movie Maker. 
    I This friend needs to get started on that conversion, and he’s found several programs that will do the job — but they all cost around $30.00.  That’s too expensive for me this friend.  The "free" versions of these tools will only convert about half of any particular file without being registered, which isn’t quite what I  my friend needs.  All the files we’re transferring are original work;  the student shot them this month. 
    I know he’s already considered online services — but the files are
really too big for uploading in any reasonable length of time. Any suggestions?  I’ll be sure to let him know.

Nancy‘s begun a blogging project with some 4th through 6th graders, and needs your help for suggestions for RSS feeds for them to read and learn from.  Can you suggest any grade level specific content for her?  Also, are your 4th-6th graders blogging?  Maybe y’all should hook up. 
    Leave a comment — and be sure to check out their blog.  Lots of interesting posts from some interesting young people, each of whom has a blog via the sidebar.

    In one of my roles as the co-editor of the New Voices column for English Journal, I regularly have space in a print publication to discuss how particular issues or topics in language arts instruction at the secondary level affect or are affected by early career teachers.  There are several upcoming calls that would be appropriate for writers from this community to address, so I thought I’d better pass along the calls here.  If these interest you, and you’d like to submit a manuscript, or ask any questions whatsoever, please do.  Take a look.  It’s my job to help you get published, not to keep it from happening.  In addition, you don’t need to be an early career teacher in order to write with me — you just need to be relevant to early career teachers. 
    You can find more upcoming calls, or more information about requirements, at EJ’s website.  If you’re interested, I’d need to hear from you by the postmark deadline on these calls.  But I’ve got some additional time flexibility, so if you’re interested but need a little extra time, I can make that work, too.:

New Literacies

Postmark Deadline: January 15, 2007
 
Publication Date: September 2007
         

As
our vision of what counts as texts enlarges, educators are increasingly
interested in not only meanings but also representations. We find a
variety of ways of labeling our interests in this broader area of
meaning-making—multimodal literacy, media literacy, new literacies,
multiliteracies—each with slightly different meanings and uses. For
this issue, we are not interested in pinning down a particular
definition or set of assumptions and approaches. Instead, we are
interested in knowing what you do to help students recognize new
textual media, understand how texts are created, and think critically
about how representation influences meaning and value. We invite you to
consider the following questions or create your own. In all cases, we
are interested in the research and/or theory that support your practice.

         

In
what ways have you expanded the texts you include in class? What roles
do graphic novels, video and film, blogs, sound files, visual art
(graphic design), or other texts play in instruction? How do you help
students understand why certain texts have been valued and others
dismissed? In what ways do you engender understanding of media
production and consumerism? What multimodal representations do you
encourage students to use and critique? What projects or demonstrations
do you use to create and assess students’ multiple literacies? How do
you employ and/or critique digital technologies? How do you address
ethics?

Transforming English Teaching
      
      
       
         

Postmark Deadline: March 15, 2007

Publication Date: November 2007

         

To transform
is to change substance and form, or to re-create by reconceiving,
resituating, reimagining. Because teachers are always in the midst of
change, we know that not all change is transformative. True
transformation results in changed perspectives and practices, even new
paradigms. For this issue, we invite you to write about transformations
in teaching English language arts in the past, present, and future,
with an emphasis on how and why such transformations are significant in
the twenty-first century. We also seek manuscripts that show how you
help students use the English language arts to transform their world.

         

How
has the profession been transformed by historical moments, such as the
formation of NCTE in 1911, the Dartmouth Seminar in 1966, or the
English Coalition Conference in 1987, and what is the current
significance of such a historical event? How have the provisions and
implications of NCLB affected English language arts curriculum and
instruction? In what ways have those changes been transformative, or
how could they be? In an era of high-stakes testing, how are we
teaching beyond tests to help adolescents deal with the challenges of
being teenagers in difficult times or learn lessons that will help them
live productive lives after graduation? What are English language arts
teachers doing to address achievement gaps experienced because of
differences in gender, race, class, and language? How is teaching for
social change or justice a transformative approach? How have you used
technology to transform your teaching and students’ learning? What
transformations are essential, and how can we make them?

Seven short paragraphs is never enough for the story of someone’s life.  But y’all know that.