Nexus

The neat thing about edubloggers is that they don’t just write about “stuff” after it happens; they get out there, jump in with both feet and try things. We’re all geared up for the K12 Online Conference and its theme of Playing with Boundaries seems to have hit home with many of us, as that’s exactly what we’ve been doing the past few days. There have been several opportunities this week to push the boundaries of professional learning by experimenting with social networking tools such as UStream TV.

Checking my Google Reader Friday morning led me to an invitation from Vicki Davis to virtually attend her sessions that day at the MAINEducation 2007 Technology Conference. She invited us to “pull up the stream [on UStream TV] and then follow along in the Google presentation“. I decided to accept the invitation and take the opportunity to “learn over the shoulders” of the participants in the Blogging for a Better Classroom presentation.

Having had a few experiences watching Will Richardson, David Jakes, Dean Shareski, IJohn Pederson and others play with UStream TV and Operator11 earlier in the week, I thought I knew what to expect - audio and video from the presentation and a running chat with the other viewers/listeners. Vicki’s expert use of UStream blew me away! She confidently and expertly handled the technology and skillfully drew those of us on the outside into the group, as though she’d been presenting this way for years. There are several factors which made Vicki’s presentation so successful.

1. The use of the UStream TV tool was planned by the presenter and not spring upon the presenter. Earlier on Friday I watched David Warlick’s presentation in Webster, Wisconsin courtesy of IJohn Pederson’s broadcast through UStream TV. Although David was made aware that IJohn was broadcasting, he hadn’t planned for the broadcast to be integrated into his presentation. Those of us “on the outside” never joined the group “on the inside”. Vicki on the other hand invited us, acknowledged our presence, welcomed us, encouraged her face to face participants to join us in the backchannel, and planned for ways for us to be drawn into the F2F group.
2. The viewers/listeners, (back channelers), were drawn into the presentation in a meaningful way. For instance, right off the bat, we were invited to drop links to our own blogs in the backchannel chat. Rather than talking about teachers who blog, Vicki brought us along and immediately connected the session participants to our blogs. There were other opportunities for us to add to the presentation, e.g. “Tell us how you are handling comments on your blogs”.
3. Vicki assigned what she called a “Backchannel Bouncer”, (sorry Vicki, I don’t care for the term), to watch the backchannel, welcome the participants, summarize responses to the presenter’s questions, and report back comments or questions that should be addressed. This role which was played expertly by Cheryl Oakes, is essential for managing the communication flow!

Here’s a snapshot of the session.

I went in intending to “learn over the shoulders” of the participants. Instead I found myself actively engaged with the group - all without leaving my desk. How’s that for playing with boundaries?

Technorati tags: education, edubloggers, blogging, UStream TV, backchanneling, Vicki Davis, David Warlick, K12 Online Conference, k12online07

Image above: Artist’s rendition of spaceship Orion orbiting the moon with disc-shaped solar arrays tracking the sun to generate electricity.

Image Credit: Lockheed Martin Corp.

Mission Control Houston…requesting permission to land Orion…

Orion…please stand by…checking coordinates on Google Moon…

Roger…Houston!

Sound like science fiction? Maybe not! NASA is making preparations right now to send a new generation of human space explorers to the moon and beyond in the next decade.

Working with NASA to lay a foundation for future web-based moon applications is…

Google!

Here’s this week’s announcement from the Johnson Space Center in Houston:

New higher-resolution lunar imagery and maps that include NASA multimedia content now are available on the Google Moon Web site.

Updates include new content from the Apollo missions, including dozens of embedded panoramic images, links to audio clips and videos, and descriptions of the astronauts’ activities during the missions. The new content is overlaid on updated, higher-resolution lunar maps. Also added are detailed charts of different regions of the moon suitable for use by anyone simulating a lunar mission.

Google Moon’s visible imagery and topography are aligned with the recently updated lunar coordinate system and can be used for scientifically accurate mission planning and data analysis. The new site is designed to be user-friendly and encourage the exchange of data and ideas among scientists and amateur astronomers.

This announcement closely follows the release of new NASA content in Google Earth, including photographs taken by NASA astronauts and imagery from NASA’s Earth observing satellite sensors, such as the Sea-viewing Wide Field of View Sensor, Landsat and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer.

Astronaut photography was developed in collaboration with the Crew Earth Observations team, part of the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston. Satellite imagery of Earth was developed in partnership with the Earth Observatory team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The alliance was accomplished under a Space Act Agreement signed in December 2006 by Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center. Google is headquartered near Ames in northern California’s Silicon Valley.

There’s an expectation that runs throughout the grades and strands in the Pan Canadian Science Curriculum - “identify and use a variety of sources and technologies to gather pertinent information.” That’s been a tough one to accomplish. There have been times in my teaching career when I have really scrambled to come up with any appropriate resources for my students to use, let alone a variety. Now it seems like every day a new application, tool or information source comes along to help teachers and students make sense from the vast amount of information that’s available. Got to love it!

For more information about Google Moon see:  www.google.com/moon/about.html

Technorati Tags: Google Earth NASA Ames Research Center Moon Johnson Space Center edutools Web 2.0

Thanks to this post on Darren Kuropatwa’s blog, I’ve discovered a cool new service that produces music videos. Animoto combines your images and music into a short production. It’s easy:

1. Upload your images from your hard drive or Flickr account.
2. Upload your own music or choose from their CC library.
3. The software analyzes your pictures and music and renders a movie.
4. You can then e-mail your movie to friends or get the code to post it online.
5. If you’re not happy with your movie you can do a manual edit, deleting, adding or re-arranging your pictures, and choosing new music. Or you can choose to have it automatically re-mixed. They claim you never get the same movie twice.
6. The whole process takes from five to fifteen minutes.

The licence agreement precludes using the service with younger students, (you have to be at least thirteen). I would try it though with older students.

What I like is that the emphasis is on the message and not the bells and whistles of the software. You have no control over the transitions, effects and timing. You can only choose the images, sequence and music and therefore need to concentrate on your message. If you don’t think the resulting video communicates your message, you can re-mix it until you are satisfied. I would ask students to create a video on a topic of their choice, post it to their blog and then write about its production, explaining their choice of images and music. A short video is only thirty seconds long. In that time you can’t really use more than 10-15 images, so like Twitter, you have to be concise and go for meaning and impact.

So…drumroll…

Here’s my first video, a promo for our International Space Station Project, ISS07. What do you think? Should I keep my day job, or am I ready for a career change?

Addendum:

OK, there’s a bit of a glitch. The embed code messes up the formatting of my blog page, so I’ve placed the code on its own html page . The Animoto site allows you to get the code for most other blog sites; this is a Wordpress issue I think.

Technorati tags: Animoto online service video production ISS07