Honeymoon is over

Well I have now officially ended my time at Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre. Although I am on holidays I haven’t had a great deal of time to reflect as yet about the whole experience. I would strongly suggest to anyone that if they are given such an opportunity as I was to be at Mac ICT for a period of time that they take it straight away. Although at times I found it selfish of myself that I was learning a great deal without giving a lot back. Sure I collated and organised a lot of film resources and madea decent film unit fro Stage 3 for the centre while taking professional courses for the Northern Region and teachers in both High and Primary School in the area of film making, but at the time I was learning a great deal that I can only hope will benefit ‘the greater good’… no just kiddding… both my school and the northern beaches region ( or further). I look foward to hopefully hooking up with Urunga PS and look at their use of film making and use. I will be using video conferencing skills to have my own class ‘tutorialised’ with Stop Motion Animation which will build on their use of film making skills and tools this term.

There were many skills and concepts I learnt at Mac ICT that I can’t even begin to list or go through right now. There were technologies and technical issues that have provided me with expertise in the field of computing that will no doubt have every teacher now asking for assistance in tech issues. I know I will be running many workshops when I get back to North Curly PS. Really looking forward to it. As for this blog, well I am not sure of the usefuness anymore. This blog was meant to document what I has done at Mac ICT for later reference so I am sure that i will come back to it now and then….especially when presenting workshops using content learnt at Mac ICT. To everyone at Mac ICT that I came across in my short time there, I owe you alot, for your expertise, your willingness to help and show me things I didnt know, for supporting me yet giving me total autonomy to guide my own path. To Debbie Evans especially for having my number on a post it note in your office….thanks for ringing me and giving me the opportunity to come to Mac ICT. I hope I will come back soon either for a day or another stint in which ever area of project I would fit. Thanks a bundle.

Program, Glogster and Marvin

This week has been a fairly busy week. I held some workshops for kids at Curly in windows movie maker which going from the teacher’s follow up email, was their best excursion ever. I had a few problems with file saving onto the server here but that was a server problem not a workshop problem. I have been making a few posters on http://www.glogster.com/ but have been unable to save the file as an image without all the glogster logos on it so i have been usuing desktop recorder to copy parts of teh poster then stick them back together using photoshop. This worked ok and a reasonably high quality image was still able to come through.

I did an animation workshop with http://www.marvin.com.au/ yesterday which was quite interesting but a little but difiicult at first to understand as it uses scripting to write the various tasks you want the character to do eg/move, resize, speak etc. It is a fairly time consuming animation creation so a teacher/student would need to make sure they would use their animation a lot more than the 2 minutes my animation played for. It took me about 2 1/2 hours to create that 2 minute animation adn it still wasn’t really finished.

Movie Workshops

Well it was a fairly hectic week last week. I ran two lots of movie workshops for teachers last week. This week I have some student workshops. They went really well. I now have video and notebook tutorials for both movie maker and imovie. Really happy with the resources I now have. At the moment I am in the middle of writing a Stage 3 literacy unit using film making and visual media. Starting to take shape now. Anyway really happy even though I had some tech issues with computers that I need to log and hopefully remedy either this week or the next.

Tutorials everywhere

Well looking at my last post I have been quite busy. I have now created a fairly comprehensive wiki that has video tutorials on Movie maker, Imovie HD 06 and imovie 08. I used apple videos for the 06 version so I can’t take credit for that one. I am almost finished a Smart notebook on windows movie maker and hope to hav an ilife 08 or ilife 09 finished by the end of this week. I have 2 workshops I am running this week on digital film making. One is with North Sydney Region DET consultants today another is with primary adn high school teachers on Thursday. It’s all going really well. Days are really flying past when you get pretty focused on a task. Anyway back to finishing this movie maker notebook before 9am. Here is the link for both my class wiki and movies in schools wikis which is still majorly under construction.

http://mrsmith5s.wikispaces.com/

http://moviemakingschools.wikispaces.com/

Movie Maker Tutorials

I have been having a really hard time with video uploading today. I started off the day yesterday with the intention of making 8 tutorials that would be embedded into a wiki on movies inteh classroom. All seemed easy until Teacher Tube started to stuff me around. I thought at first it was the fact thast my files were too large to download ( even though there is an unlimited file size on teacher tube). This was not the case as I then reduced the size of my file to only about 20MB each. Still nothing is happening..in fact Ive got one trying to upload as I speak. I just feel like Im wasting so much time on soemthing that should be so easy. Anyway you can hear the frustration in my tone of writing. Will have to think of other ways I can do this if teacher tube continues to not happen. I know this would be ok with Youtube but then it isnt accessible in a school context due to being a blocked site…so many hurdles in the way.

Info Night and Movie Making Program

Last night was the Parent Teacher Information Night at Curl Curl. Went really well. Talked about the class wiki I had created and the implications and uses it has. Couldn’t show everyone because I didn’t have a cable long enough for the net.. Doh! I also said ( jokingly) that they didn’t have to be here as I had a Youtube Video of the presentation available on the wiki. I have been working all day on not just making phone calls to schools about being involved in various film making activities but on matching up outcomes with the film making unit I am currently doing for Stage 3. I want something that can be taken into a classroom and taught. Taking a while but I will get there.

Youtube dramas

I spent a lot of yersterdya working through the idea of recording on IWBs the pages or files that are displayed on your screen and saving this as a video. It took a lot longer than expected due to the fact that when I finally got the presntation finished and recorded my wiki didn’t allow me to be able to embed the file or the recorded file without a video browser. In the end I uploaded to a new Youtube address I made that will just have my educational and movie videos on it. The last drama occurred when Youtube didn’t take my video because it was over 10minutes long. What a sham! oh well. I then realised that I had to re-edit my recorded presenation so I opened up Premiere Elements and skimmed some clips to reduce the time fo the presenation. I tried again this morning and after a long preocessing time… BINGO! Presenation now on Youtube.See link parent information presentation 09

Picasa exporting and Activstudio

Have been trying to work out ways in which to export a video that I make using Picasa into wikis and blogs. At the moment it is only possible to embed the file into a wiki using the embedding widget but it seems to then connect to the web video files… not just have the file contained in th ewiki. Im not really wanting it linked but be a file into itself ON the wiki. Will try again using some other kinds of photo organising software or video makers tomorrow. We also did a couple of hours looking at Activstudio today. Seems like there are some different things that notebook softweare doesnt have but in saying that there is also some things that Smart notebook has that Activstudio doesnt have. I plan to get accreditation for Activstudio so that I can use this and Notebook on the IWBs at Curly. Good to use as many applications as possible… just like PC and Mac…not just putting yourself in a box but being able to understand all platforms even if there is a perference to one or the other.

Wiki Session

I ran a Wiki session for the teachers last Thursday at Curl Curl North which had a positive turn out. Seems like most have gone through the motions in joining one early this term but havent really done much else since then.  I went through the use of a Wiki and how I have set mine up ( http://mrsmith5s.wikispaces.com/ ). Some find it a little daunting in setting it up but if you know what you are doing i think you can set one up properly in the matter of a couple of hours. Updating it doesnt take too much effort either. I plan to look at Illustrator CS3 today along with trying to hunt done Photoshop elements and Final Cut Express to have a look at these programs as well. Will also be looking at a couple of other school wikis to see how they have been used. I have also made the movie/film making course I will be runnin able to be an accredited course for the institute of teachers.

Class Wiki, Film Making and Tim Winton

Yesterday I spent a great deal of the day finding out information about Tim Winton. I am attempting to organise a video conference with him for teachers adn possibly students but it’s a pretty difficult task. No contacts on the web at all and a pretty solid covering behind a publisher and agent who is in Victoria. Anyway I spent an hour writing a letter to the agent which I will send of by…MAIL…today. I also went off to Curl curl north to have a look at a new series on Australian Surfing called Bombora. This was directed by a parent called Paul at the school. Paul was saying how hard it was to get Tim to agree to an interview so Im crossing my fingers that we will be able to get him involved. Today I want to set up users and members on the class wiki so that the students will be able to add information to this tomorrow in their computer time. I will see how it goes. I’m quite pleased with it so far but it takes a bit to get it up and running properly.