Chris selected as K12OnlineConference keynote speaker
Each year the K12OnlineConference provides tremendous professional development for free, and entirely online. This year, they have selected me as one of their keynote speakers. I am thrilled to have been chosen and look forward to participating in the conversation.
Read the full post announcing all the keynote speakers here.
Two quick links on Cognitive Load Theory I've been fielding lots of questions lately about Cognitive Load Theory.
Here are two quick links that may be useful. First is an article talking about the practical implications of CLT on the design of learning.
The second are some "recent" (as of 2003) developments regarding CLT.
Happy reading!
Update: I clarified the second...
Practical advice on kids and Android app development After hearing about my students' success developing an Android app, I've gotten several emails asking for more details as to how I practically worked with my kids.
Here are some pointers that I offered to the first person that emailed me, perhaps they are of some use to you. Please note that your mileage may vary.
It's ok to not be...
Publishing an App Inventor app to the Android Market As I mentioned earlier, my students and I published an Android app to the Android Market. See those links for more information on the background. This post is decidedly technical.
First, once we finished the coding process, we packaged the app for to download to the computer. This is an option in App Inventor. This downloaded an .apk file....
Designing and publishing an Android app with kids This post is designed to provide some context around how/why we decided to build this app. The more technical details of the code and how we published it will come in a future post.
My students and I recently completed and published an Android app, and here's how we did it.
First, the genesis for this goes back to a question I asked...
I am interested in the nature of global connections. That should not come as a shock if you know me.
Yesterday, my daughter came home interested in Australia. It turns out her teacher’s mother came in to talk about Australia. Evidently she has traveled there.
Being an American (and overly US-centric I admit) I had no answers to her questions. I suppose I had to options.
1. Find the answers myself and give them to her.
2. Let her ask someone who would know.
I reached out to Jason Hando, who lives in Sydney, Australia. Jason and I met a few years ago online as we were exploring the educational uses of Second Life. Jason ended up being a critical part of the building of Life Round Here.
Jason happened to be available so we Skyped. I recorded the interview and sent it to my daughter’s teacher. She was floored and plans to show it to her class and perhaps beyond. Here is the interview if you care to watch. It’s about 8 minutes.
I offered to present to the PLP Year 2 participants and was accepted to present on student blogging. This is a topic that has interested me in both a tools perspective as well as a pedagogical one. I have seen student blogging done very well and I have seen it done not so well. My aim here is to identify both potential tool-based issues and considerations as well as to consider the pedagogical implications.
The first question to ask is what the purpose is when blogging. I posit that there are a variety of purposes for blogging.
1. Teacher-centered blog for communcation with students and families
2. Teacher-centered blog for communcation with other educators
3. Student-centered blog for communication with teacher and/or classmates
4. Student-centered blog for communcation with wider audience
I suppose that is not an exhaustive list but will serve us for the purposes of this discussion.
So once you decide what sort of blog you want to begin, you can begin looking at tools. We will focus on student blogging here, as it has a different set of implications requiring a more specific tool.
Here are the specific tools that I think are suited for student blogging, with each having certain benefits and drawbacks.
I’ve been thinking about PleaseRobMe. It’s a clever idea, and a clever name. But all it does it search.
So I went to their site, and figured out how it works. And I set up a search for my local area. Now I can easily see who in my local area is not home. It certainly brings the robbing me issue closer to home.
Now the question is, what do I do about it? I’m not sure I need to do anything. My thinking goes like this..
1. Most of the time I check in, I am out of town at a conference. This is obvious by my earlier tweets, anyway. Am I putting my wife and daughters at greater risk?
2. Is anyone really reading that stuff anyway?
3. Shouldn’t I just protect my updates and not worry so much?
How do you all handle it that travel a lot? I confess I like to see folks check-in. It gives me a personal flavor to their tweets. And for me, Twitter is inherently personal.
Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure to present to a group of educators in Mexico via Elluminate. They were attending the Jornadas Tic conference. The room was full of folks who clearly wanted to learn about technology in education. They had to want to, since they were there at 5:15pm on a Friday evening!
Here is the recording of the session, should you want to hear it. It’s in Spanish, so if you want to brush up on your Spanish or just hear if I’m any good, hit up the link.
As you might recall, I have been teaching a new class this year. A fresh prep, if you will.
Back in the Spring of 2009 the administration came to me and asked me if I would be willing to take on a class of students and teach them about media production, emerging technology and so on. You might recall I asked for your help in determining what I should teach them.
First and foremost, our goal has been to produce a morning news show, which they named Cougar KidKast.
As we finished up production of the eight episodes for which this class was responsible we found ourselves with a few extra class periods. The kids asked if we could make a movie.
I set them to start talking about it. Together, they determined that they wanted to make a video that would have a positive impact. As we talked further, my kids began to reveal to me the unpleasant underbelly of school culture. My kids feel pressured to conform to societal norms in a manner that seems to me different from when I was a student. Perhaps it is pure distance (having not say where they sit in 20 years) or my own ignorance, I was unaware that the social pressures are as tough as they are.
They wanted to flip the script.
I asked them to talk further about who would play what role and what shape this would take. During our time together, we have explored different types of video. We’ve talked about documentaries, interviews, B roll, and more. My kids decided out of all of them, they wanted to create a performance piece.
As they began the storyboarding process, I noticed that one student had misspelled the genre. Instead of performance piece, he had written:
Performance Peace
An accidental misspelling turned out to be the cornerstone of their idea. As they began to allow the title to dance in their minds, ideas turned into action. One student in particular took a keen interest in writing lyrics for the piece. Shy-Kyra’s lyrics are posted below. I should note that they are unedited. I have made no changes to them and they remain in their original, pure form.
I am thoroughly impressed with my students. I am impressed not only with their effort, but their hearts. Please remember these students are 11 and 12 years old. I feel the work they have created is far beyond their ages.
They ask only that you consider sharing their work. Enjoy.
Here is the video. Click through to see it or click here to watch it in HD on YouTube. Lyrics follow the video.
Lyrics by Shy-Kyra:
PERFORMANCE PEACE
popularity comes and destroys our mind …
sometimes we can’t find that trend, that friend, that life
in life we can always lose our confidence or self-esteem because of what people tend to say behind your back
then our come back is violence or the old saying “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”
when the words hurt as much as the sticks and stones;
deep down this world has lost its mind with the trend of the year or should we say week
the schools has lost its mind with the trend setters or popularity we have started a DEMOCRACY and we
fought this war for months
played this game for years
IT’S TIME TO FLIP THE SCRIPT!!!
this is my life, my turn,
you’re not in my clothes
you don’t know my story
you haven’t taken the time to look me in my eyes
taken the time to see my pain
you’re not going to throw me around anymore
i’m going to stand on my two feet i’m going to hit a homerun
IT’S TIME TO MAKE A CHANGE ……
I’M GOING TO PAINT MY LIFE COLORFUL
On Christmas Eve, I went to NewSpring for a service that blew my mind. One of the components that I most enjoyed was the opener they used, which immediately followed praise and worship. If you are not a NewSpringer, I encourage you to watch it. Even if you don’t consider yourself Christian, or even religious, the production values alone make it worth watching.
But that’s not the point of this post. This post is about how I got his video to show a few folks where Vimeo is blocked.
On the Vimeo page for the video above, Jesse points folks back to Kadence.tv to download the video. However, it is not there. So I began to research how to download videos from Vimeo.
On a side note, I seriously heart Vimeo.I love how they welcome me home when I stop by.
I think Vimeo has the most polished video sharing site without much of the drivel found at other sites. And yes, I know that it is possible to make a video available for download. Ethical discussions aside, here’s how I saved this video for offline viewing. Of course, I wouldn’t sell it or make a profit in any way, I simply wanted to view it offline.
Through a quick search on the Google I found this script, which allows one to download Vimeo videos. I am not certain if this is the easiest way, but I tried Zamzar to no avail, and this worked. Here are the steps for making this work on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I am not sure how well it works on Windows.
1. Download the script to the Desktop.
2. Open a terminal window and enter this command: chmod u+x ~/Desktop/vimeo_downloader.sh
3. Run the following command: ~/Desktop/vimeo_downloader.sh VIDEOID
(Replace VIDEOID with the numeric code from a video URL. For example if the URL is http://www.vimeo.com/6674062 you would replace VIDEOID with 6674062).
4. Look for the downloaded video to be named VIDEOID.flv on your Desktop.
UPDATE: The author of the original post mentions this in the comments that I thought worth mentioning here:
For an easier method, try the Free Youtube user script, which places a Download link under each video (supports YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, and more):
The trouble is that user script totally changes how flash videos function in your browser. So yes, it does work to allow one to download a video, but it makes the user experience quite different. I will leave the script installed, but disabled. I’ll enable it as needed.
Interestingly, when I downloaded the file from Vimeo using the shell script, it downloaded as an .flv whereas using this Greasemonkey script it downloads as .mp4.
Update 2 (updated on November 14, 2010): The script author contacted me with an update. Here is the new link to Vimeo Downloader Script. I have also changed the links in the post.
