I have this little project going over on Vimeo called the Video Story Problem Channel, and up until now most of the teachers involved have been creating a lot of really great student-created videos based around actual math from the real world (video from restaurants, home improvements stores, four wheeler races, etc.). Recently, I’ve been dabbling more with science-based videos, and wondering if there isn’t a way to encourage students and teachers in disciplines outside of the typical math classroom to latch onto the idea of creating videos of curiosity to help provide some learning experiences that are slightly more authentic than what we find in a text book (paper or digital). With that in mind, I created a short video in an attempt to provide a prompt for talking about viscosity. I intended to have the video serve as a prompt that might engage students to start thinking about what they already know about fluids, how they move, and maybe perhaps formulate a rough concept of what viscosity means. However, it could also serve as a formative assessment piece, one that requires the students to process what they may have been learning about fluid dynamics or viscosity, apply it to the leading questions in the video below, and then try to apply their growing understanding of the concept by creating their own video.   Now, the question I know many teachers are going to ask is "doesn’t this take a lot of time?" My reply would be "yes….and, no". If you look at just using a simple substitution of your usual content with this video, and then expecting the students to author, shoot, create, and publish the film in your classroom, it’s going to take a tremendous amount of time. More so if they’ve never done a media project like this before. However, if you’re willing to be flexible with your time-tables, and can afford some independence to your learners, you could certainly assign this as weekend homework, or maybe as an ongoing activity over the course of a unit. Students might be given some small amounts of "flex time" in your classroom, and use some time outside of class, to put together their example video. Regardless of how you set it up, the result is that you’ve got a really nice piece of formative assessment data, complete with some real world application, that will give you a much deeper understanding of how the students are grasping the concept, and more importantly trying to apply it to the world. The videos could then serve as examples for future courses or learners in other sections of the course. Once you’ve completed a few rounds of this type of video-based assessment, you’d have a nice snowballing of students video production skills and a level of comfort with the process that should help the students become more independent in creating and publishing them. Which in turn helps us lean towards the "not really" answer when the teacher across the hall wants to try and asks if it’s going to take a lot of time. Because we’re all supposed to be working towards the long-term growth and acquisition of skills, right?

I’m helping facilitate a wonderful series of video conferences this week and next in my school district, and I wanted to share a little bit of the excitement as students in Michigan connect with others in Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, Oklahoma, and many other states! Read Around the Planet is a huge collaboration in celebration of reading that happens alongside many other celebrations in the U.S. and schools for "March is Reading Month". Students get to work on real world presentation skills, public speaking, and share their love of literature with their peers in the next school over, the next city down the road, or the neighboring state or country! I created a Storify to share what we’ve experienced thus far in our district, and if you can’t see it below, I encourage you to check it out here. If you’re participating in Read Around the Planet as well, please consider sharing on Twitter using the #rap13 hashtag so we can all enjoy! Celebrating reading, writing, and literature by connecting classrooms through video. View the story "Read Around the Planet Makes Me Happy!" on Storify

It’s been awhile since I shared some of the video story problems that I’ve created, and even longer since I showcased some of the great work by other educators and learners out there. Shame on me! There’s a LOT of awesome work getting published, and I’ve been so wrapped up lately with Read Around the Planet and travelling around to conferences getting other people excited about video in the K-12 classroom, I feel as though I’ve neglected some great digital math-based storytelling. So here goes! A whole heap of video story problems for you! Oreo Permutations A video story problem in which I use a big math term, wax philosophic on the nature of stuffing an Oreo with Oreos, and challenge students to create their own flavor combinations of Oreos.   Emily’s Driving Dilemma Andy Losik’s first venture into the video story problem space (at least through the channel) in which a meticulous overview of the problem solving strategies are outlined in expert 5th grade fashion! Love the blooper reel at the end, and can’t wait to see what else these learners create!   Cup Stack A great video for elementary students working with time and decimals. Plus it has cup stacking, which is always fun to watch, even if it’s not from professional stackers Frank Fitzpatrick put this great video together with the help of students.   Road Trip The students in Pat Elsey’s classroom in Jackson, MI put together a deceptively easy video story problem about travelling across country, and adding up the duration of the trip. If you don’t think about time zones, you might have to rethink your answer, and think about how you can incorporate social studies content along with math.   Home Improvement Project Another Michigan educator, Michelle Dubois (click here for her class blog), has created an entire home remodeling project with her students! She gave them all a budget, took the class to Menard’s (A regional home improvement store) and captured a lot of great video story problems about whether the students had enough in their budgets to cover their expenses.   Having played with the concept of turning traditional story problems into video story problems for over a year now, even toying with the idea of using them as formative assessment tools, I’m looking to go on a bit of a digital storytelling "evangelism" spree in the next few months. I presented at ICE this month, am planning on submitting a workshop based on video story problems for the Games, Learning, and Society Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin this Spring, and have already sent in my application for an ICE Indiana workshop for the fall. I’d love to see more educators using video as a strategic part of developing "new literacy" skills in their classroom; I hope some of these examples help. They push me to create and challenge those around me in new directions every day.

Help, the sky is falling, the sky is fall….er, Google is closing down Google Reader as of July 1st, 2013. I know a LOT of educators use Google Reader for subscribing to professional, casual, and entertainment blogs through RSS. Many students use Google Reader as well to follow blogs for classroom purposes. Sadly, that’s all ending in less than 4 months. Time to start packing up subscriptions and moving to new digital tool for RSS subscriptions! Here’s how to export your subscriptions out of Google Reader into one neat XML file you can use to import your feeds back into other RSS feed readers.   This is only half the journey! Now you need to import that subscriptions.xml file into a new RSS feed reader. I use Newsblur (they’re getting hammered right now with new sign-ups), but there are plenty more out there! Please share your favorite RSS reader in the comments, and I’ll add them to a post tomorrow about alternatives to Google Reader for RSS subscriptions.

Yesterday I shared a quick "how-to" video about exporting your Google Reader subscriptions. It’s the first step for users looking to find a new RSS feed reader with the announcement this week that Google will shutter the service on July 1st. I shot out a tweet asking for alternatives to Google’s Reader service, and created the Storify below of some alternatives. Hopefully, the second step of getting your exported subscriptions into a new RSS reader goes well. A quick run down of alternative RSS feed reader alternatives to Google Reader, as collected from the greater Twitterverse! View the story "Alternatives to Google Reader" on Storify

The annual conference for the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) came to a close last Friday with a rousing call from Steve Dembo (@teach42). He urged educators and schools to dare to be first; first with new ideas, first with destroying traditional classroom notions, and first with charting new paths to digital learning and collaboration. Somewhere between Steve calling out the "crazies" amongst us as being the ones with the greatest potential for positive change and being urged to avoid policies dictated by fear, I got an idea. I decided to have a bit of fun and "meme-ify" some of the main elements of the closing keynote. I brought up the MemeGenerator site and brought up a few choice image memes. A word of warning, it’s probably not a good idea to use MemeGenerator with your students; while the site attracts some of the funniest users on the internet, it also attracts some of the web’s bottom feeders as far as humor goes.   With such a diverse crowd of educators in attendance at the MACUL Conference (over 4,200 this year), we could certainly spend a lifetime arguing over the nuances of what traditional classroom notions are. I’m confident there’s a strong consensus that desks in rows, teacher-centered lectures, students regurgitating others’ work, and no connection to digital tools or the media ecosystem omnipresent in our lives today covers most of the big definitions of traditional classroom notions. So how do we try to innovate our learning environments without being labeled as one of the "bad crazies"?   I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to avoid being labeled crazy (whether it’s the bad or good kind.) If you’re the teacher who’s encouraging students to ask open ended questions and challenge the traditional notion of lecture, skill acquisition through repetition, and mastery determined through high stakes assessment, you’re going to get called on it. If you’re not called out as crazy by your colleagues, then perhaps a principal, parent, or community member. That’s alright, Steve suggests; brilliance is often mistaken for crazy in most cases before the big "shift" occurs pushing everyone else into the "crazy" bin. It’s happened already with our culture Steve pointed out; who would have thought 5 years ago that "checking in" at stores and restaurants using your mobile device, and sharing pictures of what you’re eating with the rest of the world would now be considered normal? A few crazy people that are now selling their start-up companies for billions of dollars to the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.   The inner critic in me begged the question, "But how do we know the "good" crazy from the "bad" crazy?" Not every notion of how to move past traditional classrooms leads to greater knowledge acquisition and empowering learning environments. Khan Academy was heralded as a "personalized" learning environment for every student, but drives a farther wedge between districts and communities that have access to technology and those that don’t. The Common Core State Standards have refocused the integration of technology into all content areas, but many parent groups are now pushing back on the idea of students all being put into the same "mold". There’s a dangerous game we play within our learning communities when we paint ideas as being crazy or brilliant with such bold brush strokes, so I’d advocate that all of those willing to take the "crazier" path of learning, make sure you still have lines of communication back to home base. It’s not bad to be crazy, but it can be extremely detrimental when we breed fear of the unknown in those around us.   The point Steve made about fear was earlier in his talk, but I saved it for the end. He made an excellent point about the fears that legislators, administrators, and even our colleagues use to justify poor policies, and discourage sharing of what others might deem crazy. Fear is a big business in many industries; personal and corporate liability insurance, web content filtering in education, anti-poaching policies and deals among corporate rivals. To build on that point, how do we build encouragement and excitement about breaking down our classroom walls, sharing what our students are accomplishing (both the process and the end product) without creating new atmospheres of fear? I’ve seen the "bright spots" of sharing in my district push teachers and students to greater depths of understanding and achievement. I’ve also seen those same bright spots of sharing breed resentment and fear in colleagues around them. What sort of strategies can we employ to combat those fears and anxiety of "I’m not doing enough?" Do we herald and champion the success of every teacher and student, no matter how small? Do we pour what little resources we have left (in Michigan at least) into hiring more instructional coaches, or steal create time for more dialogue and conversation among teachers? These are the questions I’m curious about, and I hope others are asking the same. I certainly want to help the exciting learning continue to happen in our more non-traditional classrooms, but I’d love for the rising tides to truly lift all boats in this situation as well. How do we do this, before we miss the boat entirely, and find ourselves on a sinking ship? Or worse, wind up like "Bad Luck, Brian"…with no "ship" at all.      

My three year old son stole my wife’s iPad yesterday and took more than four dozen photos before we knew what was happening. I’m not sure what he was taking pictures of, but I created an animated gif from the images that showed up in my Photostream this morning. It’s quite serene, creating the illusion of something breathing, or a heart beating. Enjoy the end of the week (almost).

It’s April 12th! It’s my Birthday! What better way to celebrate than a special edition of "My Animated GIF Day"! Come back throughout the day for updates with new GIFs…if you’re into that sort of thing   5:56 am I’ve been up for about 30 minutes or so. I woke up before my alarm went off, putting me in a slightly off mood. Sometimes I welcome an early start, and sometimes I feel as though I’ve been cheated out of a few minutes sleep when my body decides it’s time to wake up before the alarm. Regardless, toast helps right any early morning grumpiness, especially toast with butter and jam. Yes, my toaster is a bit grubby. It’s my birthday today, I’ll clean it tomorrow.   6:24 am In the last year I’ve taken up running 3-4 days a week with 50-60 crunches, 20-30 push ups, and a few other exercises on most days. I’ve lost nearly 25 pounds, so while I’m not terribly fit, I’m getting there. Yes, I know I have terrible form. Yes, I know my bedroom looks cluttered. No, I will not show you my pathetic attempts at push ups.   6:38 am My wife started teaching nearly full time again this week after 3 years of being laid off and part time teaching gigs. I’ve been trying to pick up some extra chores in the morning to help make sure the family still gets moving and ready for the day. Packing lunch for the kids is one of my new chores in the morning. It’s fun to help pack some healthy lunches for the kids, but today held an extra treat for me; my daughter (7 years old) decided she wanted to make the sandwiches for her and her brother this morning, so we got to pack up lunch together and chat about the day before we all rushed off to school.   10:15 am After a relatively quiet morning (Friday mornings are when I usually catch up on a lot of emails, paperwork, and other clerical work), I got to help one of our school board members setup his new iPad. Our district purchased the devices for the school board members to ensure they had a simple way to communicate and access all of the important school documents and files through the school’s Google Apps account. After setting up the board member’s email, calendar, and contacts, we chatted a bit about technology in the district (it’s decent), how well our money was being spent (we think we’re getting the best bang for our buck), and what the future holds (we both agreed it looks grim for public schools in Michigan).   11:34 am The Tech department treated me to lunch and homemade desert for my birthday! It was a great lunch at a local place that makes everything from scratch. Country smoked ham and split pea soup on a chilly rainy April day is poetic lunch perfection. As an added bonus, the Systems Administrator at our school has his birthday on Sunday, so our most wonderful co-worker made flour-less chocolate cake and raspberry cheesecake for dessert. My belly is full as I snuggle into my warm chair; it should help me get through the rest of this report I’ve been trying to digest all day amid my other tasks.   2:47 pm I’ve spent a good portion of my day working through the school district’s Technology Profile Report that Apple helped facilitate for us. It’s not the most exhaustive report I’ve ever seen about technology, but it’s certainly one that you want to look through a couple of times with several highlighters and a full pad of sticky notes. There’s a lot of data covering faculties familiarity with various forms of technology and a great cross section of where staff falls on the continuum of technology infusion with their instructional practices. Some of the data is skewed a bit due to a lack of universal access to the tools that every teacher wants, but it’s still a good look at how far along our teacher are with their technology skills. Besides an overview of the district, I can look at each building’s results of the profile survey, and I’ve been surprised with how well one of our buildings is doing at moving the majority of their staff members through the process together. The other three buildings have bright spots as well, but they’re much more scattered along the continuum of Entry/Adoption/Adaptation/Appropriation/Innovation. The stand-out building seems to be clumped together along the continuum in a positive way. This will certainly help shape some of my strategies in the coming months and into next school year as I look to implement some new professional development with staff.   5:14 pm I’m so close to a 30 minute 5K. Another 30 seconds faster and I’ll be there. For now, let’s pretend I can run as quickly as I can tie my shoes in this GIF. It was a nice birthday treat for my wife to let me run when I got home from work. She’s actually been quite supportive of all the time needed to take up the past time; 60 minutes three to four times a week is a big commitment to getting healthy, and we’ve supported one another as she’s been running more regularly as well.     6:03 pm My family went out for a nice birthday dinner at a local restaurant that usually caters to a slightly more upscale crowd than we’re used to dining with. My wife and I usually reserve such an evening for date-night without the kids, but we took them along and we had a blast. The table was covered with thick brown butcher paper that we wrote all over with crayon, and plates piled with chicken nuggets and french fried were a welcome site on the kids menu. They have a pizza oven near the front on the entrance powered by a gas log burner, so while it isn’t terribly authentic, it still gives off a nice glow as you walk in.

Google has been having a rough go of keeping their cloud services up and running smoothly for all users lately. Today is just another example of the sporadic nature of Google Apps "up time" as of late. Google Drive is down, this too shall. Although, would be nice if Google’s 3rd shift janitor updated Dashboard google.com/appsstatus#hl=… — Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) April 17, 2013 Besides the general headache of lost instructional time that an important educational cloud-based server being down causes, Google’s customer service (or lack thereof) isn’t as robust as many would like it to be. That leaves many Google Apps users to take to Twitter and other social networks just to figure out what’s going on. In my mind, that’s pretty crummy, and leads to all sorts of back and forth speculation as to the cause. Some individuals experience no outages whatsoever, while others have sporadic use of some of their apps. Enter the Google Apps Status Dashboard. It’s not the best tool in the world for keeping up with service outages in real time, but at least it’s a place to start. While it did take at least 45 minutes from the time outages started appearing this morning and the first "problem" was indicated on the Apps Status Dashboard, you can rest assured that if there’s any hint of an orange or pink indicator light on one of the apps, there’s certainly a problem with other apps in Google’s stable. Granted, this gives little comfort to those of us savvy enough to br prowling Twitter for updates on the situation. @kjarrett The Apps Status Dashboard is such a joke. It will be updated at 3pm today after all is cleared up. — Daniel Rezac (@drezac) April 17, 2013 I’m with Daniel on this one, Google could REALLY step up their reporting of outages and real time status updates of Google Apps. However, there are many educators and technical folks in school districts that are completely in the dark when Google Apps go down. Either they aren’t connected on Twitter, or have other re-occuring problems in their district with bandwidth, filtering, or some other internet related malady. For them, the Google Apps Status Dashboard is at least a starting place to make sure it’s "not just them" when Google’s services go down. From there, it’s wise to head over to Twitter to check out the situation. And then complain a bit (or a lot) to Google that offering up more timely information on what’s happening would be appreciated. If anyone else has a starting place for checking on Google’s outages, I’d love to know! Until then, someone get back to work on getting those servers back up and running! Update @techsavvyed Ben, downrightnow.com seems to do a better job of reporting outages than Google or other services. — David Prindle (@dprindle) April 17, 2013 David Prindle shared an excellent website that I hadn’t seen before called Down Right Now. It appears to list more than just Googles services, including Facebook, Tumblr, Skype and many other social and cloud services. This is certainly a great "go to" for future outages across a number of sites. While it doesn’t seem to offer the exact details as to the nature of each outage (you would still have to visit the service provider’s site for that level of information), it does have the great advantage of individual internet users being able to report outages.  

I’m sitting in a classroom on a Saturday morning…learning. That’s right, while all of the #satchat people are busy tweeting, sharing, and collaborating online, I decided to take it to the next level and make the trek to Jackson, Michigan to participate in a casual, participant driven conference focused on connecting educators, not just lecturing to us. The following are my notes, reflections, and thoughts on the day; my apologies for rambling and "stream of thought" composition. Updates throughout the day will hopefully occur. 9:53 am Typically I’m busy watching Saturday morning cartoons or getting ready for the weekly grocery run, but today I’ve already been introduced to GoSoapBox, an interesting Socrative clone that looks to offer a much more robust set of tools for student discussion response. Students can be directed to respond to reading selections, be given polls in class, and even submit questions and participate in quizzes in real time. I enjoyed the ability for Gary Abud (the BYOD session facilitator), I noticed that the while the tool is amazing for quickly generating rich classroom conversations, it’ still limited by your students’ literacy skills. I’m not the world’s best reader (or writer for that matter), and I found myself lagging behind the rest of the group when Gary gave us a short reading assignment to respond to in the workshop. Of course, typing up these notes is hindering my ability to focus as well, so I was glad when Chris Stanley brought up a great point of being able to revisit conversations points throughout the GoSoapBox "event". Sure enough, Gary followed up with a simplistic tool that GoSoapBox has to offer in that participants can simply use an "I’m getting it" or "I"m confused" check in poll (it’s persistent throughout the event) that only the teacher gets to see. So in a way, even though students might be struggling based on their own limited cognitive abilities, the teacher still gets at least an indicator beyond the "vacant stare" as to how well the classroom is getting it. A participant in the session brought up a great point about need the granular knowledge of which students aren’t "getting it" to which Gary responded with a great response; it’s not really all about the technology, you’ll still need some simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" or other face to face strategies to gain better fidelity of where students are at. I’m sure the last two paragraphs sounds like an advertisement for GoSoapBox, but it’s just me trying to work through the tool, finding some interesting features and applications for the teachers I support. It looks like GoSoapBox isn’t so much a Socrative clone as it looks more like an advanced and feature-rich application for learning. Gary went on to share a few more applications for helping students organize their learning (Evernote, Google Drive, InFuseLearning), but I was more interested in the elegant was he framed his BYOD session. Far too often school districts are focused on making a myriad of devices work on the school’s infrastructure, interoperate with shared resources, and make the tech "hum" as best they can. Gary’s BYOD workshop focused on the learning and tools that can happen across a wide number of devices (laptops, iPads, Android, etc.). I’m going to call it "Gary’s" ways to incorporate BYOD. Gary Abud’s 5 Ways to Incorporate BYOD Facilitate Class Discussions Share & Take Notes Interactive Instruction Collaboration Assessment That’s a much simpler framework to build a BYOD program atop. Focus on the instructional practices that need to happen first (something that I’m always advocating for), and then find the technical solutions to help make that happen. Starting with devices is a recipe for "tribalism" and conflicts that won’t get you nearly as far as starting with the instruction first. 10:44 am Gary finished up his workshop elaborating on the "interactive instructional space" that he’s created through blending his face to face instruction and conversations with digital tools. Socrative helps anonymize student responses, alleviating peer pressure that stunts curiosity in the classroom. I agree, and subscribe to this theory. Creating discrepant events for your students helps capture curiosity (Gary did a couple of simple physics demonstrations for us, having us pretend to be high school students), but that interest can quickly be squelched when the possibility of incorrect responses could potentially be used to "judge" anyone’s ability to learn. Finding the right "mix" of tools to help create this environment, but still deliver the type of individualized student responses and data we need as educators, can be difficult. Should we focus our scant time and resources into pushing students to use a single LMS like Edmodo or Moodle, often pushing those tools past their intended uses? Or should we find ways to blend some of the tools mentioned in this brief reflection (along with face to face learning opportunities) to create a much more flexible, yet slightly scattered, learning environment? Click here for Gary Abud’s presentation slides about BYOD. 11:46 am Lunch time…and trivia! Go team Imagination Dragons! We bombed out, but we had a great time doing it, and I got to chat more with Anthony DiLaura and hear about his work at Zeeland schools (a recent one to one iPad district). 12:27 pm Saturday afternoon, a time to finish up chores around the house, catch a quick nap, wrestle with the kids, and do a bit of grading for the online class I’m instructing currently….usually. This afternoon I’m headed into another round of sessions before leading my first ever Video Story Problem workshop. I’m a bit nervous about what participants will be able to accomplish in an hour and 15 minutes. I’m going to quickly re-hash my Video Story Problem presentation that I put together for the K-12 Online Conference, and then move into "lab time". I’m hopeful that participants will be able to capture some video, and still have enough time to edit it to the point of "ready to share". My ultimate goal is to have at least one video that someone feel good enough to share out to the wider audience of the internet. As an added bonus, Michelle Dubois, one of the awesome Michigan teachers whose great student video story problems I mentioned in a previous post, is here at the conference! And she’s brought a few teachers with her to start working on their own! 12:37 pm I’m sitting in Andy Losik’s session on iMovie, Keynote, and MacGyver. For those not familiar with the television show, MacGyver is a DIY mastermind, capable of turning a few scraps from your average workshop junk drawer into a torpedo. This was a great session choice right after lunch, when my capacity to engage in serious intellectually rigorous conversation is typically at a low point for the day.  Not that Andy doesn’t have a lot of great to talk about in the instructional arena. This session was more focused on the mechanics of creating some fun and engaging media. In addition to showing off how to create your own custom "video" titles for iMovie using Keynote, he also showed up the PopcornMaker tool from the Mozilla foundation. It’s a fascinating web-based video editing tool that lets you add your own custom overlays, "pop ups" and other media to your videos. He used it to create a fantastic lip dub video in the style of VH1′s old "pop up" videos. Check it out here or watch it below:   2:28 pm I led a rousing workshop about Video Story Problems. Well, I led a small workshop at least, with some good conversations. Not so sure about "rousing". It was an interesting experience as I got to work with some language arts and social studies teachers (a group that I would love to start exploring video with). They had some wonderful thoughts about how to bring in elements of the real world into their classroom via video to help illustrate concepts, and I was excited they saw ways to incorporate video into the classrooms that wasn’t just "flipping". Not there’s anything wrong with flipping, it just takes up a lot of the edtech conversation space that it’s difficult to make inroads with other forms of instructional practice. Here’s to "widening the plate".   2:41 pm And now I’m no longer in the dark on the "Pep Talk from Kid President" video. I have no idea why I hadn’t watched this video before. I had seen it go past my social media streams, but just never clicked on it. I’m glad I finally saw it. Share it widely!

For regular readers of my blog, you may have already guessed that the dancing mushrooms above can only mean one thing….I’m about to succumb to another intensive 5 weeks of DS106, the best digital storytelling course in this universe, although I’m told it will soon be available in many of the other multiverses. For those that many be unfamiliar with DS106, or have only recently stumbled across my musings here on the web, pull up a seat for the next few weeks, as this simple GIF is just the first small speed bump on the road to the digital storytelling dimension known as the DS106Zone!  

Let’s keep this relatively short and simple shall we? I’ve spent just a month shy of 10 years in education, and I feel as though some days I know just about as much as I did on day one in the teaching field. I’m not going to call it an industry, because that term would only serve to acknowledge the increasingly perverse ways that educational institutions are being transmogrified (or at least attempted) into for-profit institutions that no longer server the public, only public shareholders. No, let’s not tap that keg of dynamite….yet. Instead, let’s take a few moments to lament that the more things change, the more they stay the same, including technology. It would seem that the more creative, collaborative, and integral technological tools become to education, the quicker people are to turn these new tools into nothing more than digital pencils. Desktops and laptops quickly become "electronic typewriters" despite their ability to edit movies, produce music, manipulate imagery, and reach out to the web. iPads and other mobile devices become "portable televisions" despite their feature set begging these devices to be mobile digital video production units and windows capable of capturing small glimpses into the educational progress of learners. We’re given Google Docs, and we find new ways for students to share writing and comments with JUST their teacher. We ignore the precipice of unabridged transformational writing that real-time collaborative and revisioning tools like Google Docs offer. We’re given iPads, and we find new ways for students to play rote math and emergent literacy games. We ignore the sublime valley of digital storytelling and learner narration of the world around them through video, audio, and text. We’re given electronic interactive surfaces covering our walls, and we find new ways to present slideshows. We don’t even risk allowing learners to build their own simulations and interactives to share with the rest of the class, demonstrating how they perceive the world. Before you fire up some flaming hot comments below, especially if you work with me currently, please understand these are not the realities of every classroom that I observe. But they are the reality in many more classrooms than should be the norm. Even as we profess our desires for every student to have access to a device for learning and growing numbers of educators clamor for professional development "our way, meeting our needs", far too many of us are too slow on transforming our own learning environments and realities. When we get access to the technology, we find ways to replace or substitute analog learning quite rapidly, many of us even going so far as to adapt and transform activities and units in subtle and slight ways. Then we start to slip. Instead of trying to push forward to some sort of true transformational experience, the "shininess" wears off. The grind, or the test, or the standards, or some other mass of excuses stunts our growth. We find ourselves slowly sliding backward, unable to make the final leap to some new level of deeper understanding of how the small rectangular pieces of plastic and metal on our desks will truly help our students in new ways. We go back to waiting for the next push; the next new thing. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still moving forward, we’re still growing, we’re still discovering new instructional realities in ever so incremental steps. It’s just that some days it feels like we’re only retreading a path we’ve already pushed forward down once before, and will likely retrace yet again. Our RSS readers and inboxes are full of links from "the best" educational technology resource sharing blogs, many of which seem now to merely present rehashed tools, websites, and apps that only re-arrange our sandboxes for learning, rather than create new ones. The tools, social networks, and silver bullets of yesteryear become the digital dust beneath our feet as we trod along the weary paths. Perhaps I’m being too melancholy, or reacting poorly after a small string of failures. I can’t help but ask though if I’m not too far off the mark, or if there truly is some large upswell of transformative teaching and learning through technology that I’m missing. Perhaps one more trip around will tell.

It’s the end of the school year, end of term work is piling up on your desk and inbox,  it makes more sense to count the remainder of the instructional time you have with students in hours rather than days, and you feel like if a panic button magically appeared on your desk, you’d smash it without a moment of hesitation. That’s sort of where I am right now. I’ve been failing miserably in keeping up with the DS106 assignments for this past week (I managed a lowly 3 animated GIFS), the end of year PD plan for technology is falling apart, and I’m chasing the loose ends of all the conferences I’m attending his summer like a neophyte teacher with wide eyes. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying the experience! But after watching the pilot episode of the Twilight Zone, I’m desperately seeking a panic button for a few hours of escape. Titled under the misnomer of "Where is Everybody?", the fledgling episode of Rod Serling’s seminal program about the paranormal explores the depths of human sanity with the deprivation of all contact with other beings (sorry, no spoiler alerts for a 60+ year old television program). The premise starts simply enough; a man with no recollection of who he is, or where he came from, awakens to find the world completely devoid of other beings. Tea kettles are left boiling on stoves, jukeboxes playing, and automated recordings are all that’s to be heard when dialing the operator. As the main character attempts to pass off his uncanny solitude with jokes and monologues delivered to himself in the mirror, it becomes painfully obvious that someone, or something is watching his every move. The feeling of being under careful watch, something that all teachers in Michigan can most likely identify with these days, becomes apparent. Before long, our protagonist is reduced to a sobbing heap of a man, finding a crosswalk signal, and desperately mashing the button as though it were some sort of "panic button" capable of ending his torment. It’s a fantastic story, and worth watching if you haven’t experienced the joys of the Twilight Zone. Provided Hulu is still allowing embedded video, you can watch it below. I’m glad that I’ve jumped into this abbreviated term of DS106. It’s a great release for the stress that builds up at the end of the school year (my own personal "panic button" if you will), and it’s a great chance to explore and mine a lot of really great vintage media from the Twilight Zone; the theme of DS106 this go around is the DS106 Zone, a riff on the black and white series of yesteryear. If you haven’t ever watched the original Twilight Zone episodes, or if it’s just been a nice long time since you caught them on TV, slide over to Hulu and watch a few episodes! I had anticipated watching a few minutes in order to produce the animated GIF at the top of this article for the Twilight Zone animated GIF assignment, but I ended up watching nearly an hour of terrific classic sci-fi and paranormal story telling, a great release for any teacher at the end of the school year, when some of the stress and duties put upon us feels as though some omnipotent being is orchestrating the very demise of our sanity.

DS106 is a magical and serendipitous course. There’s really nothing else like it. The recent Education Technology MOOC that Alec Couros and Alan Levine, among others, helped facilitate this Winter came close to matching DS106. It had awesomely silly collaborative experiences, and fantastic conversations based around the educational use of technology that helped introduce a host of educators to blogging, but it just wasn’t DS106. There’s something about the student generated assignments, and creative constraints placed upon participants, that scratches a particularly fantastic itch for me. Enter Brian Bennett, young educator and "Flipped Learning" expert. After some early prodding, some video story problems, and a few exploratory GIFs, Brian decided to jump in with both feet for this "Twilight Zone" themed go-around of DS106. I’d say he’s in way over his head, but the man has been treading water like a champ, completing scores of assignments last week alone! He even completed a special assignment for yours truly, entitled Ben Rimes is a Monster. I know, some of you may be confused…how is that a good thing? It’s DS106, it’s always good! By creating the "Savvy Mage", a Dungeons and Dragons character, Brian adroitly captured my more pugnacious failings, yet stroked my ego by extolling my perceptive abilities….unless of course that’s just the fake Dungeons and Dragons wizard part of it I decided I wanted to return the favor. The actual DS106 design assignment was to create a Dungeons and Dragons creature card for someone else, weaving a backstory for the individual chosen into the creature’s description. This is a digital storytelling class remember, so there’s a lot of fun to be had in describing fellow classmates as monsters. I was really excited to do this assignment, as I hadn’t attempted it before now, and even though I’ve only played Dungeons and Dragons once, I did spend a lot of time playing Magic: The Gathering in the mid 90s (yes, I’m a nerd). I decided to put a twist on the assignment, and rather than turn Brian into a Dungeons and Dragons monster, I turned him into a Magic card. Meet Brian Bennett, the Human Educator, otherwise known as "Azamuki, the Video Lord". For those that have never played Magic: The Gathering, it’s a skill and luck based strategic card game in which players cast spells, summon monsters, and conjure up power artifacts, representing all the magic with cards placed in front of them on a table. Each turn a player gets to draw a new unseen card from a draw pile, and hopefully have enough "mana" (magic points basically) to cast a spell. I had an absolute blast creating this card, as not only was it a special "flip" card (which I thought might be fitting for Brian), but I also tossed a couple of easter eggs into the design. For those that may still be confused about the whole concept, I took an image of the "Cunning Bandit/Azamuki, Treachery Incarnate" card and took it into Photoshop to doctor it up for the assignment. Replacing the names of the card was relatively easy, using the clone stamp tool to erase the words with the color and texture from elsewhere on the card. I left the hit and defense points the same as the original since I figured Brian Bennet the human, and Brian Bennett as Azamuki would have simliar attributes. I played with his creature type, turning him into a "Human Educator" when first brought out onto the field, but felt it was fitting to leave him as a Legendary Spirit once the card is flipped. Brian’s sort of a legend in the "Flipped Learning" world, so that worked well. The text describing the creature’s actual abilities were a hoot, and I was able to play Brian’s strength in the flipped world of video learning against Khan Academy, the defacto "Flipped Video Learning" heavyweight. The idea was devilish, geeky, and humorous all at once. Brian’s creature card is actually a heavy-handed deterrent for anyone looking to play a "Khan-based" game of education. Once Brian is on the field of play, he welcomes all Khan creatures, but comes loaded for bear to deal with any of the shenanigans that Khan supporters might toss his way. Upon arrival of any Khan-based creatures, Brian’s card is flipped, and Azamuki is born, armed with several "Ki" bombs to lob should any Khan supporters claim individual teachers (with actual connections to the students they’re teaching) shouldn’t waste their time making instructional "flipped" videos, instead using the cookie cutter videos provided by Khan. I’m really happy about the way this project turned out, and I’m looking forward to digging a bit deeper with DS106 in the coming weeks. This assignment was a blast, and it reminded me of the Explorer Baseball Cards that I used to have my 5th graders make back when Webquests were still cool. I’m a sucker for assignments that get kids manipulating digital images, giving them free reign to explore how digital art tools can often be analogous to real world art tools, but provide a depth of fidelity that traditional paper and paint can’t achieve. Working with layers, clone tools, copy/paste, and graphic design basics are all important elements of creation with computers. You can even go younger, as I had 3rd graders that turned pictures of themselves into super heroes. They had a blast doing that particular assignment, and were able to turn them into wonderful spoken stories via VoiceThread. You don’t need Photoshop to do this sort of work either; a simple JPEG from the internet or a camera opened in MS Paint or GIMP are both great FREE alternatives that can get your students exploring the basics of digital storytelling through graphic design and remixing.

This week in DS106 we’re supposed to be creating audio and design assignment based around three particular episodes from the famous series. I choose to create an assignment around none of them, because I like to rock the boat in seemingly harmless and inconsequential ways like that. We all have learners like this in our classrooms, right? Besides, if I had created the 4 Icon Challenge assignment around one of the three episodes suggested, it would have been too easy. As it is, for fans of the Twilight Zone, this should be easy enough; guess the episode based on these four icons representing four of the main elements from the show. Was this particularly difficult to do? No, I went over to the Noun Project (a website every serious digital storyteller in K-12 should have bookmarked), and grabbed the four Public Domain images above, lined them up in Photoshop (although GIMP would work just as well), and "bam!" Instant visual assignment that would be useful for anyone to help summarize a story. I’ve done this assignment a number of times, including having a group of elementary students use Google Image search to assemble their own 4 image stories. Come to think of it, the students had a blast doing the assignment, and it would be an excellent way for students to practice some proper image and web citation repetition. Not that I’m a fan of drill and kill rote-learning, but for me it’s ok when you get to have so much fun trying to craft the perfect visual puzzle that isn’t too difficult, yet requires viewers to stretch their imaginations for them to be solved. The first icon is obviously death, but does the little girl represent an actual girl, or just a child, or perhaps youthfulness? Does the tie represent some emotional connection to the other images, or does it merely represent an article of men’s clothing? If it is just a tie, what element of the story does it represent? A character’s costume, a "macguffin" to move the story along, or a visual cue from a scene? The paths you can take this assignment down in the K-12 classroom are endless, with students using 4 icon challenges to express their current understanding of a piece of informational text, or process new vocabulary words. Students could even use them as a storyboard for a comic or graphic novel review of a novel being read in small groups. I’ve harped about this assignment enough in other posts, so I’ll stop here. The potential for tapping learners’ visual areas of learning is reaching an untold peak of pedagogical "gold" with the advent of so many devices, connections, and tools present in many classrooms today. With new whiteboarding apps appearing in "app stores" almost daily, there’s an overabundance for students to create visual literacy processing assignments like this with just their finger and a screen if need be. Sure, it might be more fun to do it with crayons and paper (cheaper too), but there’s nothing quite like searching for an icon of "death" on a Wednesday night as part of homework for an online course

If you haven’t heard already, The cicadas of Brood II in the Eastern United States will be emerging in the billions this summer. Yes, billions. Science and Biology educators along the East Coast are likely in a state of teacher-nerd joy for the anticipated event. Once the soil temperature reaches a comfortably steady 64 degrees Fahrenheit, the nymphs that have been living underground for 17 years, surviving on the juice of tree roots, will emerge. The six weeks that follow will be an amazing display of evolutionary and biological events. The Return of the Cicadas video by Samuel Orr is a gorgeous 7-minute snapshot of a larger one hour documentary that could serve as a wonderful way to get students curious and excited about the event. It’s embedded below for your viewing pleasure. The time-lapse elements used throughout the film turn what many consider to be a slightly disturbing, annoying, and otherwise bothersome event (the noise!) into a gorgeously choreographed emergence of billions of lifeforms that occurs only once every 17 years. As a former middle school science teacher, I’m a little geeked for the full length documentary being completed. It seems as though I’m not the only one, as the Return of the Cicadas documentary has already smashed its $3,000 KickStarter goal with a whopping 28 days left! I’m tempted myself to "back" the project at the $20 level in order to secure the HD download of the final film once it’s available this August. The geeky fun doesn’t stop there! RadioLab has created the Cicada Tracker website, a whimsical portal that includes ways for you to help alert scientists along the Eastern seaboard when the cicadas are active in your area. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, The Cicada Tracker project includes a complete parts list and assembly instruction for building a soil temperature detector ($80 for all parts) using an Arduino board and parts found at RadioShack. Double geeky awesome!

I haven’t blogged about anything music-related since November of 2012. That’s criminal. Especially considering the last one was a lazy post with several different examples of teachers parodying Rebecca Black’s "Friday". No I will not link to it, you can go search for it if you like. I’m going to pretend as though I never hit the "publish" button on that post. I feel as though I may have made up for it with this post; a special assignment from deep within the DS106 Audio Archives entitled "Make Your Own Ringtone". Considering this is the summer of the DS106Zone, I decided to add a Twilight Zone twist to this audio assignment, creating a funky fresh, beat-heavy ringtone based on the iconic opening bar of the Twilight Zone theme song. It’s guaranteed to grate on your ears like a piece of broken chalk down a slate chalkboard. You can hop over to SoundCloud and listen to my Twilight Zone ringtone, or listen through the embedded player below. This was a ridiculously fun little piece of work, made easy thanks to Garageband. I fired up a new ringtone project, and it provided me with a few examples of some pre-arranged loops. Better than that, this "starter" ringtone project came with a 13 bar looping playback, adjustable as you added or took away sound loops, and plenty of options for manipulating it. I choose to delete all of the loops in the example ringtone and start from scratch, using the opening measure of the Twilight Zone theme song as the base. I snagged the Twlight Zone theme from Youtube using Keepvid’s cousin-site, SnipMP3. For those immediately raising alarm bells of "Ben, you violated copyright, how could you!?" I sampled only 3.5 seconds of the piece, well under the fair use guidelines for media literacy education. That means, I can repurpose, remix, and republish the work for non-commercial educational purposes. Since this is for a class on digital storytelling, I think that counts. From there, I brought the MP3 into Garageband, where I chopped it down to my already mentioned 3.5 seconds, and then dragged that one little loop out to last 11 measures or so. I wish I could say that I started methodically placing beats and loops to help build the ringtone in a cohesive way, but I’ll be honest; I dug through the hundreds of loops that Apple provides with Garageband, trying out many different synth, drum, and guitar loops until I found the ones that "sounded good", being careful to create new tracks for each new instrument. Once I had assembled the loops I wanted, I then fiddled with adding some audio effects to the individual instruments. These effects included a host of terminology that I am completely ignorant of, including Resonance Ticks (that’s the one that makes the Twilight Zone theme sound so staccato and jumpy), Compressors, and Reverbs. I wish I could explain what these did, other than how it made certain instruments sound a bit more "crunchy", but I can’t. Just imagine how powerful Garageband would be in the hands of a trained musician, or music teacher? I’ve long harbored a guilty desire to work in a 1:1 school just so I could see an amazing band, choir, or music teacher have students compose their own short pieces of music and tunes using Garageband while providing the necessary background for learners to understand what they’re doing. Garageband even has a nice "Share" menu that takes projects directly into iTunes in MP3 or AAC format. There’s even an option to export as an M4R, a ringtone format used by Apple’s iOS devices. That means I can take this file and annoy people with my iPad every time someone "tweets" me, or a new message arrives Seriously though, if there are music teachers out there that have access to Apple’s devices and haven’t found a way for students to deepen their appreciation of music through creation of short, playful tunes of their own, I could only imagine the creative learning they’re missing out on.

In my position I get to try out a lot of new gadgets for use in the classroom. Sometimes our school pays for these "trial gadgets" and sometimes vendors are willing to give us a device gratis for testing. I’m not sure if it’s my blogging that helps, the large purchases we make at least once or twice a year, or the fact that I get to put the devices into real world scenarios with teachers and students, but it’s nice to be able to play with all of these gadgets. We recently received a Bamboo Create wireless tablet by Wacom, free of charge for full disclosure, to see how it would work in a classroom setting. I wanted to put it up against one of the Promethean ActivSlate wireless tablets that a few of our teachers have to see how it compared. Although we did receive one of the Promethean tablets for free with a large purchase of interactive white boards a couple of years ago, the rest we’ve paid for as teachers found they enjoyed the wireless freedom to move about the room. I found a couple of teachers that were pretty comfortable using wireless tablets to try out the Wacom device to see how it stacked up against the Promethean tablet.   The Promethean ActivSlate A standard Promethean Activboard The ActivSlate is one of those work-duty grade devices, built to take a lot of abuse, tumbling, fumbling, and still work like a champ. It’s designed primarily for schools, so the teachers in my district appreciate the sturdiness of engineering that Promethean put into the device. It’s reliable, uses an internal rechargeable battery, and integrates nicely with some of features found in the ActivInspire software that comes bundled with Promethean’s interactive whiteboards. As a side note, ActivInspire is one of my go-to applications for digital whiteboarding and interactive building in the classroom. The Promethean ActivSlate has seen limited success in a few classrooms in our school. The hardware has proven to be effective and work almost flawlessly. The teachers that have them originally requested them so they could be more mobile in their classrooms. It helps them get away from the front of the room, and wander around, while still being able to control what’s happening on their projected computer screen. It also makes it easier to hand control over to a student, who may or may not be comfortable getting up at the board. Mostly teachers use it for doing math work on our interactive whiteboards, and in those classrooms where traditional whiteboards have been removed from the front of the room, it’s been mostly a positive change. The Upsides The ActivSlate is great to setup, provided you have the necessary Promethean software already installed, and already have an existing ActivHub (pictured above), the wireless unit the slate uses to communicate with your computer. Just plug in the hub, and the computer instantly recognizes the tablet, and you’re ready to go. The tablet’s size makes it good to hold in your hand and walk around, and with the pen clip at the top, it’s easier to remember where you left your stylus. The ActivSlate also ties into the Promethean software’s polling system, so not only can you or a student drive the computer from anywhere in the room, but you have some control over polling as well. That is, if you have the additional student response devices (clickers). The Downsides USB ACtivhub for the Promethean wireless devices.   Did the see the massive size of the USB hub above for Promethean wireless devices? It’s HUGE, and on any laptop, once you have that thing plugged in, it covers the rest of the USB ports of your computer, so don’t expect to plug in any more peripherals without a USB multi-hub. Our teachers haven’t complained too much, but the tablet has a 4:3 ratio, while all of our laptops at school are closer to widescreen formats, meaning you have to lift up and move the stylus a few times for a lot of scrolling or moving about the screen. It’s a rather small tablet, so you have to do that a lot, something that not everyone can get used to. The responsiveness is decent, if a little off at times though. The biggest complaint for this wireless tablet though is the price and software needed. The price for the hub and the slate is close to $400, and that’s the educational pricing! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a rock solid product that has withstood many beatings and accidental drops from students and teachers alike, but that price tag is s bit steep.   The Wacom Bamboo Create Wacom’s Bamboo line of tablets have a highly polished look. As I said at the top of this post, the Bamboo Create was sent to me at school gratis to try it out. However, since I don’t get to work in a classroom on a regular basis, I had a couple of art teachers in my district try it out. They loved it! Niether had used one of the Promethean ActivSlates before, so this was their first experience with a tablet, wireless or wired. I played a bit with the tablet as well, to get a feel for it, and while it’s doesn’t seem as accident proof as the Promethean model (dentable aluminum vs. hardened plastic), the teachers that used it felt it was comfortable and light like the ActivSlate. One art teacher in particular that spent the most time with Wacom Bamboo tablet was really looking for the freedom to move around the room, without losing access to our additional USB ports on her laptop. In particular, she was hoping to make her drawing examples with the early elementary students (1st and 2nd grades) a little easier to make "mobile". She uses her document camera for drawing examples, but that tethers her to her presenter podium. With the Bamboo, she was able to move around the room and help individual students, while still doing some drawing examples using her wireless tablet and the always fantastic Art Rage painting application on her Mac. While it took some getting used to not being able to look down at her art as she was creating it with the Bamboo, she took to the tablet pretty well, and enjoyed being able to manipulate her computer from afar. It helped her keep tabs on some of the more rambunctious younger students The Upsides Super awesomely small USB receiver. The USB receiver for the Wacom Bamboo Create is practically microscopic compared to the ActivHub! It’s one of those nano-receivers that come with most wireless mice, and once seated, is barely even noticeable along side your laptop or in your desktop USB port. The wireless kit comes separately from the actual tablet, and includes a battery. Otherwise, the Bamboo Create has to be tethered via USB cord to function. The wireless package fit into its space nicely, and there’s even a spot in the side of the Wacom tablet to house the receiver when not in use, which was rather handy for one of the art teachers who tried it out, as she takes her laptop back and forth and didn’t want to lost the receiver while travelling. The Wacom seems to have a bit finer fidelity than the Promethean tablet, and possess dimensions that almost mirrored the Macbooks we have in the district for teacher use. That meant the Wacom Bamboo seemed better suited for the wider computer screens that our teachers use. Buttons along the side allow for turning touch capacity on the surface of the tablet on or off, with one art teacher enjoying touch mode for younger students. The Downsides We’ve had a few wireless issues, with the tablet just dropping its connection to the computer while using the wireless receiver. However, the helpful tech support at Wacom hooked us up with newer drivers, and helped remove some of the problem ones. It’s been running flawlessly now, but I was concerned that it had issues in the first place given the rock solid performance of the ActivSlate. The Wacom Bamboo Create was a bit more awkward to walk around with than the Promethean ActivSlate as well. Its longer width meant it didn’t cradle quite as nicely while being carried around the room. Other than that, the biggest beef I had with the unit was installing all of the software (drivers and applications) that it came with. Don’t get me wrong, the installation went smoothly, but there are a LOT of helper applications that want to "pop up" and run every time you start using the tablet; I’m looking at your Bamboo Dock App.   Closing Thoughts I hope this post doesn’t come off as an advertisement, but rather a reflection on how we explore technology in my district, and some of the rather practical questions that get asked, and hopefully answered, as a part of that process. There are many educators who feel the need to champion one piece of technology over another, and even though I may be guilty of that at times as well, I’m always striving to try to find the best solutions for the situation. Both of these tablet offer strong points for classroom use. They’re fairly durable, have good battery life, and work well (once I worked out the driver bugs). Students felt comfortable using either tablet, but the teachers seemed more willing to hand the Promethean ActivSlate over to students more so than the Wacom Bamboo Create. Perhaps because it was still too new, as the teachers wanted to keep it "shiny". The Bamboo would probably make a much better "teacher demo" device for art and other fine application control give its seemingly higher fidelity. The price of the Bamboo is MUCH better as well, costing around $99. The wireless kit was another $40, so the entire package is still significantly cheaper than the Promethean ActivSlate. Given that price difference, it’s hard to justify more purchases of the Promethean models, given their more clunky USB receiver and large price difference. The ability for the Wacom to go back to wired USB mode is also appealing, as the ACtivSlate is only wireless, so if the receiver is damaged, you have to get a replacement before the unit is back in service. Both are solid wireless slates, but the price difference is enough to give my nod to the Wacom Bamboo Create for this battle. However, districts that are already deeply invested with Promethean hardware, should consider the ActivSlate’s added functionality of the polling integration as an excellent option as well. Expect to see more of both of these in classrooms soon as teachers look for ways to be more mobile, but don’t yet have an iPad or other mobile device with a screen.

Last week I flew to Madison, Wisconsin from South Bend, Indiana. There was a short layover in Chicago, and the entire trip was supposed to take a little more than 3 hours. It turns out, a small fire on a plane is good enough cause to ground it (thankfully) and thoroughly checked over by the mechanical crew. It also turns a 45 minute layover into a 5 hour layover. I know it’s not the worst layover an air traveler could have, nor was it the longest I had on this particular trip (which is another story). I do know when a trip that you could have driven in 4 hours turns into an almost 8 hour air adventure (there were other delays on the first leg of the trip), the passage of time seems to come to a stand still. It’s as if each minute is stretched into ten, an uncertain tempo of time takes over, and you find yourself nervously checking the flight boards only to find that what you thought had been nearly an hour was only just a few moments. I tried to capture the sense of it with the video below, in which 2 minutes of quick travel along the neon-lit underground walkway between terminals is stretched into 20 minutes. To recap, I was delayed for almost 5 hours, a length of time that was longer than my original intended flight time. I had been up since 4:30 AM in order to make my original flight, which was delayed 2 hours upon arriving at the first airport in South Bend. United gave us no snacks, drinks, or any other form of comfort while we waited for the plane with mechanical issues to be checked out and then ultimately replaced with a new plane. And I missed the bulk of an important meeting of the advisory board of an exciting new platform for sharing ideas, activities, and ideas around games in education. By the time my plane finally boarded I was a bit groggy, my brain fuzzy around the edges, and was thoroughly convinced that I had spent 24 hours at O’Hare International, not 5. I hope the video captured my mood effectively; it was a rather simple creation, and I had fun putting it together in iMovie, so much so that I turned it into a ds106 video assignment entitled "Video Your Mood". The challenge for participants in ds106, or for any students in a digital storytelling or creative writing course, is to recreate a mood or feeling using nothing but the original audio and video captured during the moment. You can time-warp the video, add effects, or remix the audio, but no other elements can be added.   In this case, slowing the video down to 10% of its original speed worked nicely. Not only did it turn the neon-lit wave across the ceiling of the underground into a slow motion rainbow, but the low bass-filled growl of the moving walkway mimicked the constant white-noise of aircraft in flight, the "engine" of the underground becoming a soothing soundtrack for a long layover. I felt the effects of the "time-warp" helped convey my sense of time passing slowly. Thanks to iMovie, it was rather simple to alter the speed. Users of iMovie please take note, this is the full iMovie application on Mac OSX. The mobile version of iMovie does not allow you to alter video speed.   The "fuzzy around the edges" clarity brought on by waking far too early in the morning (4:30 AM!) and having far too little caffeine in my body was made equally as simple in iMovie thanks to one of the Video Effects. A simple double-click on any video clip gives you access to both one-click audio and video effects. From ethereal "grogginess" to alien x-ray vision, there are enough simple effects to make most amateur videographers and digital storytellers happy. As it turns out the trip wasn’t all that bad, as I did get the pleasure of sitting next to Lucy Gray for the final leg of the journey (we both serve on the same advisory board for the Playful Learning Network). It was nice to meet her, and get to know a little bit about the work she does in education, the connections we share, and have a rather pleasant travel companion after so many hours of wandering the back corridors of Concourse F, looking for an unused power outlet to charge my phone and laptop so I could put this video together.

I’m currently NOT at the 2013 ISTE Conference in San Antonia, Texas. In fact, the vast majority of educators in the United States and around the world are most likely not at the conference either. However, the amount of buzz that ISTE generates dominates the mindshare in the greater education blogging and tweeting world. Some individuals lament not being able to attend, determined groups banding together to form "I’m not at ISTE" support communities to talk about the intersection of education and technology from afar. At least one prominent and vocal member of the education community is questioning whether conferences like ISTE merely reflect a lot of what’s wrong with our educational system. What am I doing? I’m surviving not being at the conference the best I can with my kids, a little bit of Twitter mischief, and keeping myself busy with summer work for school. Oh, and I’ve created a couple of short videos with some tips for surviving the 2013 ISTE conference, in case you’re not there either. Enjoy!   Not enough tips for you? I made another one last night after the kids and I had some fun around town.   If you have your own tips for surviving the 2013 ISTE conference for those that aren’t there, I’d love for you to share them! Rather than mourn my lack of being unable to mingle, learn, and party with my colleagues in San Antonio, I’m trying to make the best of being home, and finding ways to connect with my family, friends, and colleagues here in Michigan. There’s no sense in torturing myself with incessantly watching the #ISTE13 twitter feed; sure I’m checking in on it from time to time, but there’s probably a lot of amazing experiences, opportunities, and people to connect with where you are too (at least I hope there are) without having to check in on a twitter hashtag. Make the most of the week, my fellow non-ISTE friends!

Earlier this month, I was given an opportunity to attend the inaugural Playful Learning Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a full day of playful learning workshops, conversations, and professional development dedicated to educators, education researchers, and web/app developers who have a keen interest in creating game-ful and playful learning experiences for students. That’s right, a game-ful environment, NOT a "gamified" learning experience. The summit was part of  the larger Games Learning and Society Conference, or GLS, a gathering much akin to the Games 4 Change conference in New York, but on a slightly more intimate scale. If you love games (video or otherwise), and strive to find ways to create playful learning experiences for your learners, I highly recommend attending next year. The GLS conference is an interesting mix of educators, developers, researchers, and theorists that gave rise to sessions about multiplayer gaming & collaboration in the classroom to effective analysis and research tools for digesting click-stream data from educational game-based apps (a topic that took me a bit of time to figure out).   Dani Herro’s keynote helped me better understand the underpinnings of game-ful and playful learning a bit better, but I’m still fuzzy about some of the details and implications for K-12 education. I was particularly fond of the opening keynote speaker, Dani Herro, an educator working with Clemson’s Digital Media and Learning Lab attached to their school of education. Dani is the most recent addition to my list of "edu heroes" (no pun intended), a small yet growing collection of mostly constructivist and game-based learning theorists and practitioners. While I wasn’t entirely new to the playful learning concept, I would consider myself a "noobie" when it comes to understanding some of the deeper implications of game-ful learning. I highly suspect that many teachers already include elements of play and lusory attitudes in their instructional environment, but do so in unconscious and informal ways.   You know you’re at a playful gathering when you see someone donate the use of their laptop all day long for this. Dani challenged us to ask "what is playful learning?" From the simple steps we take to help "game" classroom behavior, to the more powerful methodology of allowing students to set their own goals, risks, and rewards, there are many levels in which we can "play" with what and how our learners assimilate and reconstruct knowledge and information. The conversations around these topics are of personal interest to me, as I always sought out simulations and interactives with which my students could better play with a concept, and develop some sort of working knowledge, rather than rely on book reading alone. I personally have recently accepted an advisory board position with the Playful Learning Network to better explore, understand, and share how digital games can be used within the context of learning, as I recognize that there’s an emergence of both serious games, mainstream games, and simulation-based games to help students explore learning in ways that might have been restricted to pencil and paper previously.   I found some #michED spiritual brothers and sisters in the #WIAMIGOS group of Wisconsin educators. Groups that can transcend the digital connections to form real-world connections are some of the most powerful and productive. Particularly noteworthy in Dani’s speech, and the workshops throughout the day, was an emphasis on the connections we form among ourselves as learners, with technology becoming de-emphasized as it enters a new, more ubiquitous role in education. I love that lots of people are talking about this regardless of where you go in education; increasingly it’s all about the connections, rather than the tech. During the social lunch period conversations about the intersection of personal interests and passions, aspects of the home-school peer tutoring culture, and production-centered academically oriented learning environments were all fair game.  Dani emphasized that a lot of these conversations are happening among our "Digital Media Networks", and I personally see that among the digital communities I frequent, but I’ve recently been asking myself if this is necessarily the best way, or just the easiest.  Local, face to face, and blended networks exist as well; it’s the reason we come together at conferences. But there’s a level of difficulty that exists in the "real world" that makes it less attractive at times than working with your digital network. Co-workers may have too many dissimilar interests, trying to coordinate schedules to meet face to face is a challenge, and when the going gets rough and our ideas are challenge, we can’t just simply "walk away" from the computer, and retreat into our digital fortresses and echo chambers.   Further evidence of the amazingly playful learning atmosphere and Wisconsin hospitality. A group participating in my Video Story Problem workshop bought fried cheese curds for everyone in the workshop while working on their videos….about cheese curds. As if to drive home the point that learning should be "fun", I was able to work with a group of very playfully minded educators, and at least one software developer, during a Video Story Problem workshop that I led during the morning session. One of the smaller work groups had excellent chemistry, and decided to put together a video story problem based around the length of time it takes to order, prepare, and then eat fried cheese curds, a Wisconsin culinary staple that rivals the Chicago style hot dog or a New York slice of pizza. Many had come to the session looking for how I was encouraging teachers to use video within games, and how assessment could be coordinated seamlessly around the medium. Sadly, I didn’t deliver what some of them expected, as we took a much more DIY approach to instruction and curricular materials development. The assessment based upon the Video Story Problem idea is still relatively informal and much better suited for formative style assessment, and the learning is much more akin to play than to game-based learning. However, I think that the open structure of the workshop, and the cheese curds, helped sway them, and in the end we had some excellent examples of video work born out of genuine curiosity and play.   Any conference that includes open "gaming" time is now high on my list of "must attend" gatherings In short, the Playful Learning Summit, as well as the greater GLS conference, was magical. The ideas and mentions of James Paul Gee’s work were heavy in the air, and the after hours Arcade, well stocked with both serious and mainstream games, created a perfect after-note to the day’s activities. Meeting and conversing with amazing educators like Zack Gilbert, Lucy Gray, Jen Groff, Jeremiah McCall, and many more that I’m sure I’ll regret for not mentioning, in addition to reconnecting with Remi Holden, cemented the Playful Learning Summit as one of the few professional experiences in my life in which my personal hobbies and interests co-mingled with my professional role in a serendipitous way. While I’m not certain if these were Dani Herro’s closing remarks during her morning keynote, they were certainly the lasting ones for me; creating spaces for and encouraging time spent around learner agency. The incredible metaphors that exist between effective game design & mechanics, and effective classroom instruction take some of the more rudimentary theories of game-based learning and amplify them to the point where learners have choice in just about every aspect of their learning environment. We shouldn’t be focused on turning our learning environments into games, but rather adopting game-ful habits that encourage our learning environments to flow much more naturally and authentically, in ways that encourage students to adapt and grow in ways that help both the teacher and learn alike. Links & Resources For some resources ideas discussed during Dani Herro’s keynote, consider visiting the links below: http://gamesandimpact.org/ - Interesting site to get your feet wet with gaming http://www.simcity.com/en_US/simcityedu - If you own a copy of the latest SimCity, this site has lots of lesson plans and activities built around urban planning and civics http://dschool.stanford.edu/ - Standford d.school looks to be a group that helps learners with their projects, creating a space for people to work on creative implementations of learning http://www.k12lab.org/ - K12 Lab network looks like a good stepping stone into the play space.

It’s no secret that I’m openly in love with the anti-MOOC that is #ds106. It’s also no secret that my wife makes amazing digital art…when she actually has time to create. Last summer she created a 60-second narrative of her day, capturing small moments with her phone’s video camera. She cut each of those moments into one-second vignettes then stitched them all back together to create a minute of video that was a heart-warming and compelling narrative. You can watch it below or follow the link here to see it on YouTube. I should have tweeted, blogged, and Facebook’d it last summer, but I didn’t. I’m a bad husband (sorry, honey). I’m trying to make up for that now, and took last Saturday to create my own version, with my wife providing a few cameos throughout the day. There’s been a lot of buzz about the 1 Second Every Day App, mostly thanks to keynote speakers at educational technology conferences showing off the pieces they’ve created with the app. The pieces created are moving, playful, and fun….but require a lot more time and fore-thought to slowly build a narrative than I was willing to create. Sure, you could capture what’s happening in your life at the same time everyday for a year or a month. You could even try to capture at least one powerful emotion everyday, or a moment in which a human interaction has left you feeling just a little bit better about life. Personally, I would be tempted to capture at least one smile or laugh a day; from a co-worker, a friend, a family member…small moments of joy compounded over 365 days. I didn’t want to wait that long to create a one-second narrative, nor did I want to tackle the more ardent task of creating a narrative over several days; I can see where it would be very easy to create a disjointed narrative capturing just one moment everyday if there isn’t much thought put into it. Then again, what I created may not have a strong emotional impact either, as the staccato transitions from one second to the next creates a rapid-fire movie that often requires repeated viewing to capture small subtle movements, sounds, or emotions. Your narrative is much more limited as well; who knows if you’re encounter 60 amazing laughs or smiles in a day (I hope you do), or whether any given day will be particularly note-worthy. My goal then was to give everyone a glimpse into a typical summer Saturday with my family….farmer’s market, raspberry picking, skinned knees, and all. I hope you can get a sense of my day below, or over on YouTube. There’s so much room for broadening the definition of narrative story telling in our schools, not just from closer alignment to Common Core Standards, but as a society as well; YouTube and Vimeo have become the defacto video space for most individuals to tell their stories, with Twitter and Vine quickly becoming the standard bearer for snarky conversations and witty visual jokes. Even the animated GIF, once derided as the "this website under construction" butt of many web-based jokes, has seen a resurgence as a powerful storytelling medium. Imagine the impact a teacher could have on students and parents by redefining what the classroom newsletter could be, or how daily messages about homework or important papers could be transformed into 6 second videos? You don’t need a special service or app like Vine to do it either. A digital camera and the standard video editor that comes with just about every platform works in a pinch. Most students are already carrying the devices you would need to capture the video, so in many cases it’s just a matter of seeking permission, or moving forward in a deliberate and "safe" manner (for those teaching in districts with more conservative social media policies) and seeking forgiveness later. Regardless of whether you agree that narrative story telling is in need of a 21st century facelift in many classrooms (and be mindful, I’m not advocating doing away with written narratives), I hope that many would agree there’s a certain power and emotion that video makes it easier to elicit from viewers. I’ve created a ds106 assignment for the 60-Second Day in the assignment bank, but I’d love to see what other stories someone creative could tell. Perhaps a field trip, the life cycle of a frog, or an entire reading of a novel in class, each chapter distilled down to one sentence? Expand the parameters, allow 4 or 5 seconds instead of just one. Challenge students to tell the same story through video from multiple perspectives. You could even start telling your "summer story" right now, and have a one-second vignetter video narrative to show your class on the first day back this Fall.

It’s a brand new school year, I’ve got a shiny new theme on the blog, and the K-2 teachers in my district all have iPads in their classrooms to use with students this year! YAY! Alright, so we’re behind the curve on the whole "iPad" adoption thing, but I’m cool with that; I’m a huge fan of emphasizing pedagogy over devices in addition to our district being on the more conservative side of spending (Michigan schools are weathering both the financial meltdown and legislative re-allocating of funds to more post-secondary schools). I say this as a preface for my most recent "how to" video on redeeming app codes and restoring purchases on iPads, as it’s a rather simple task, but one that’s new to many teachers in my district. Most teachers who have personal iOS devices in my district usually purchase apps through their own personal iTunes account, and while many have redeemed gift cards, a fair number don’t personally own iPads, nor have they ever redeemed anything via a code on the device itself. Hence, one of the easiest "how to" videos I’ve created yet, and one that I hope will help a lot of them as professional development training that teachers receive before students show up can quickly be forgotten or pushed aside with the excitement that a new school year brings.

What a difference a few years can make! A recent post on Mashable about some radical differences in satellite imagery over the course of just a few years in Google Earth got me thinking. How could a Geology or Math teacher use a time-lapse video of the terraforming taking place in the thriving Middle Eastern metropolis? Over the last decade or so, Dubai has managed to build extravagantly expensive archipelagos  for development, and with the advent of satellite imagery and the "time slider" in Google Earth (more formally known as the Historical Imagery tool), you can peer back to a time when all that existed off the coast of Dubai was ocean. Below is a brief example of myself walking through a quick "time travel" in Google Earth. I’m not sure how a roomful of students could escape asking the curiosities about how much time is taking place, how much land, soil, and silt is being deposited in the ocean, and what does it even cost to build one island, let alone an entire peninsula out into the ocean. Using some of the other tools in Google Earth you could challenge students to find the average land area added each year, or the rate of expansion from one year to the next. Science teachers could challenge students with some great open ended questions about the systems being altered by such human activity (tides, long shore currents, animal habitats, etc.). Social Studies and Civics teachers could even delve into the deeper implications that such activity possess; where do resources come from for projects such as these, and at what cost to other projects and realities that municipalities deal with? I’m not sure if it’s the particular subject matter (the environment,  science, terraforming) that captures my interest, but I’m left wondering what other areas of the Earth could we explore through time, to see how human beings have changed their habitats. It might play nicely into an opportunity for teachers to invite older members of a community into their classrooms, to talk about and share photos and stories of what our urban landscape and the neighborhoods around us looked like decades ago. I have one of the last remaining apple trees from the orchard that my neighborhood was built upon in my front yard; I would LOVE to know the history of how the neighborhood developed, how long people held onto a fruit tree or two from the old farm, and how the changing landscape also changed the local economy as rural lands turned to residential. There’s a lot of questions here, and I feel as though I’m only starting to scratch at the surface; it makes me wonder if time-travelling in your classroom might spark the curiosity of learners as well.