Before Christmas, I had the students create interactive QuickTime movies that gave information about each part of the plant when it was clicked. It works by mapping out those parts and linking them to slides where students type in that information. The movie I made above walks you through all of that. Here’s an example of the final result.

The students seemed to enjoy it. I think a big part of it is that they were able to put it on their blogs. It would have been easier though if we had them do a simpler one earlier in the year. That way they would have been more familiar with exporting the QuickTime movie and how to upload files in their blog. This was pretty hard for a first one (although they had experience doing one in third grade).

I’m sure there’s a lot of other topics you could make one of these interactive movies for. We had students make one earlier in the year about the regions of Texas - it’d be perfect for any geographic area. You could do the parts of the water cycle, parts of the body and parts of sentences, just to name a few. You can also use PowerPoint, if you don’t have Keynote.

If you want to try it with your students, you can use my documents. You need to have iWork ‘08 to open them however.

It looks like I’ve got my pictures showing up on my blog again, so I think I’m just about done moving the Edgemere Roadrunners website  from one webhosting company to another.

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do it, but at the same time, I was preparing for it after Wesley Fryer had similar problems with Siteground, the same company I’d be using. Still, I imagined that he had a much bigger audience, so I was hoping my little elementary school site would avoid a similar fate. No such luck.

It happened last Wednesday. Ms. Ward brought her first class in to their blogs and about two-thirds of them had logged in and geotten started writing their posts when suddenly no one connecting to the website. Those students who hadn’t logged in, couldn’t, nor was it saving the drafts of those students who had begun typing in their posts. It was a huge mess.

I quickly figured out that this was just happening to my website, every other website was coming in fine. I logged into Siteground’s support site and reported my problem. To their credit, they responded quickly to my problem and had it fixed by the time Ms. Ward’s second class came in. What wasn’t so good was this: Apparently we had more than 10 simultaneous connections from the same IP address which was a violation of the terms of my webhosting plan. They said I needed to upgrade to a plan that costs $100 a month which wouldn’t have those restrictions.

Well, there was no way that was going to happen. I pay for this site out of my own pocket and there’s no way I can afford that. I immediately began a mad search for a replacement. I contacted several webhosting companies, telling each of them what I was using this website for, asking for a recommended plan and seeing if they had similar restrictions about simultaneous connections. I was shocked to discover many of them did. How can this be? If this is commonplace, how can any but the richest schools afford to buy commercial web space?

I got the best answer to this question from an employee at Dreamhost. First, he said they allowed 30 simultaneous connections from the same IP address. Second, he explained that it would be very unlikely to get anywhere near that number as those connections tended to be very brief. Thirst, he explained that his company didn’t consider going over 30 connections a “violation.” In the unlikely event that there were 31 connections at the same time, 30 would get through and the one that was left would have to wait until one of them were freed up. That’s it. Since the company has a good online reputation, I purchased a two year plan from them.

On Saturday, I moved the majority of the files over. It took me the better part of the day. By far, the most time-consuming part was uploading the blogs’ database. It’s over 100 MB big and I had to upload it in 7 MB chunks. It took forever!

But I did it! I got just about everything back to where it once was and very few people noticed any chance at all. It good to know I can make another change in the future if I need to and I don’t need to stick with a bad arrangement because I’m afraid of making the jump.

Being a Minnesota Vikings fan while living in the Southwest isn’t easy. The local TV stations rarely show their games, so unless they’re playing Sunday, Monday or Thursday night, chances are I’m not going to see them.

So imagine how happy I was when I saw today’s Vikings-Giants game on today’s TV schedule. As you might know, this was a huge game. Not only is this the last regular-season game of the season, it had playoff implications as well. If the Vikings won, they would’ve been guarenteed to win their division and would be headed for the playoffs for the first time in years.

Unfortunately when I navigated to KASA with my remote a few minutes before the game was to start, I saw this message:

Niiiice! Every other channel was working fine except the one that was broadcasting the game I wanted to see! What were the odds of that happening? The channel wasn’t off just for a few minutes either, it was gone the entire game. In fact, right now it’s after 5:00 PM and the same message still appears. It sounded like it was a good game too. The Viking won the game, 20 to 19, as the result of a last-second field goal. Too bad I didn’t get a chance to see it.

Bored and tired of the constant high winds that have been battering Ruidoso during Christmas break, I set off for El Paso yesterday to do a few errands and catch a movie.

Slumdog Millionaire , the movie I saw, is certainly an interesting film - it stands apart in its setting, topic and structure. It’s both the most real film out there right now, by showing us living conditions in one of India’s slums, and also tells the biggest fairytale.

It tells the story of Jamal who, despite being an orphan with no formal education, gets on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and is able to answer the first 13 questions. It’s assumed he’s cheating, so before he appears on his final show to answer the last questions to win his fortune, he is interrogated as to how he came up with all those correct answers. Through a series of flashbacks, we find out how he learned each answer and we also learn about his life and his close bond with the beautiful Latika.

The film was made by the noted British director Danny Boyle, and it seems to me that he was trying to mix the grittier, complex elements of a Western film with the more sweeping, melodramatic elements of an Indian one. The movie never failed to hold my interest and it used the built-in drama of the Millionaire show as the glue that holds all the different elements together.

It’s the interrogation scenes that I didn’t buy. All of that for a game show contestant? Even going to the extreme of applying military-type of torture techniques like electrocution to get the truth out of him? Couldn’t they simply check the videotape to see if anyone was giving him signals?

The movie is rated R because of language and some violent language, so I wouldn’t recommend it for children. Adults and older teenagers who are looking for a movie that gives them a glimpse into a different part of the world should check it out.

Watch CBS Videos Online

I don’t see 60 Minutes very often anymore, but I’m sure glad I saw it this last Sunday. They ran a fascinating story about an elephant orphanage in Kenya that cares for young elephants after their mothers have been killed by poachers.

The people that work there are clearly extraordinary people. According to the story, they have to personally stay with the young elephant continuously because they have to replicate the best they can the experience it would have otherwise had with its mother. I also thought it was interesting that you blow into an elephant’s trunk so they can learn your scent.

I’d always heard that elephants were intelligent animals and that they had long memories, but I didn’t realize what a capacity for caring they had until I saw this story. How anyone could kill these animals is beyond me. Fortunately there are some caring people that are there to repair some of the damage that other humans cause.

One of the most maddening aspects of modern politics is this “either you’re with us or against us” mindset. If you hold one contrary opinion, you must be kicked out of the club, your ideas never considered again and called the enemy every time your name comes up.

The perfect display of this happened late last week when Pastor Rick Warren accepted President Elect Barack Obama’s invitation to give the invocation at next month’s inauguration ceremony. Obama got condemned by many of his supporters for extending the invitation and Warren got criticism from the evangelical community for accepting. Never mind that it’s exactly what both men should be doing.

Barack Obama has been elected president of the United States, not president of the Democrats. He represents the whole country - all of us - right now, and I think it’s great that he recognizes the importance of people that don’t necessarily represent his political base. Besides, if he’s going to get anything done, he needs to reach out and enlist the support of people who don’t agree with his entire agenda. Obama and Warren definitely don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but it’d be a tremendous accomplishment they can make progress on those items they do agree on - like fighting poverty and global warming.

Similarly, Rick Warren’s job as a pastor is to spread the word of God, not advance the cause of conservatism. I would also guess this also means he shouldn’t just preach to the same old choir all the time, but to seek out new audiences to speak to. What sort of pastor would he be if passed up this historic opportunity?

I think both men made the right decision. I hope neither one compromises their principles, but I hope they continue to demonstrate what a civil dialogue should be. It doesn’t mean just talking just to the people you agree with. Both men represent our country, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask that both men be listened to with respect, if not total agreement.

I got a little scare yesterday when my iPod Touch was no longer charging after connecting it to my computer with its USB cord nor was it showing up in iTunes.

I went to Apple’s support pages and customer forums for possible fixes but none of them worked. I even went as far as wiping everything off of it, but to no avail. Out of ideas and with my iPod nearly out of battery, things seemed hopeless. I was steadying myself for an expected trip to Best Buy to purchase a replacement.

Yet something seemed a little off. After all, the iPod was working fine except for the fact that it wasn’t able to make a connection through the cord.

That gave me an idea. I got a paperclip and started poking around the iPod’s connector on the bottom. To my surprise, I was able to take out a significant amount of lint that gotten itself nested in there. I reconnected the iPod to my computer, and - sure enough - it started charging again and soon showed up in iTunes. After all my files got recopied over, I was back to normal.

Crises averted!

At my best, I might be able take an audience where they are and show them a few new things they might not know about, but Dr. Tim Tyson has the ability to take them on a journey to a whole new place.

He began his featured keynote at the TNT Conference on Saturday in a discursive manner, starting with an extended reading from The Phantom Tollbooth, a moving meditation on his grandmother and our links to the past, and his memories and thoughts about a trip to his old hometown. At this point, I was wondering how all of this connected to schools, when he eased into one of the themes of this keynote: Our world has changed but our school have not - and they need to.

He then started to explore what that change should be. It’s mostly it’s a place where students have taken ownership of their own learning, where they’re working hard not to get a grade, but because they have something to say and it’s important to them that it’s said well.

Yet as much as I found it illuminating and inspiring, I wonder about the impact of a such as keynote. Yes, it’s an enticing vision, but what’s going to happen when all these educators return to school? Change like that is not going to occur by flipping a switch. The right infrastructure, knowledge, leadership, support and environment all have to exist as well. These things do not sprout up overnight, they have to be developed over time.

Dr. Tyson was originally scheduled to present at a smaller, more informal session, which unfortunately was canceled. I would’ve like to have attended that session and, if I had the opportunity, I would’ve asked, “How did you get from there to here? What was that first step? Did it take off right away or did it begin with fits and starts before it started to take off?”

If I felt a little daunted by the vision he offered, I also felt a great deal of pride at what we have accomplished at Edgemere. We are actually making some of that happen. If you look hard, you can see these little sparks going off where students are starting to take initiative and produce creative content. I wonder though if we, as a community, are going to nurture, acknowledge and celebrate these efforts or are they going to be ignored because they don’t fit into our standards/testing/statistics paradigm?

“Why do I agree to do these presentations?”

That was most prominent question going through my mind early yesterday morning as I fretted over the session I was scheduled to present at the TNT Conference at 8:00 AM. I don’t feel like I’m very good at presenting in the first place, and I didn’t feel that I had practiced this particular one nearly enough. Visions of disaster flashed before my eyes.

Events did not get off to a promising start after I arrived at Hillcrest, the site of the conference, either. I had forgotten the adapter I needed to hook up my MacBook to the projector, my remote controller wasn’t working and I wanted to review the presentation one more time with Mrs. Hulburt, the co-presenter. Thankfully, everything fell into place. I was able to borrow an adapter, my remote magically decided to start working, and Shay and I were able to do a quick run-through.

It ended going very well. In fact, of all the regular presentations I saw today, I thought we did the best job. We had an interesting message, with a good mix of theory and practice, and we were the best prepared.

We probably would have been beaten out by the last speaker I saw, Oscar Porras, a high school teacher in the Socorro District, but he saddled with some technical problems because the YISD firewall blocks Animoto, the site he was trying to demonstrate. Otherwise, he is a natural performer, at ease in front in group and extremely entertaining.

Animoto is a great site that combines music and photos to great effect. I’ve used it myself for some projects, and I wanted to see how another teacher found uses for it. It looked like he’s been using it as a way to introduce certain subjects in a much more emotional way than you would otherwise. For example, he introduces the Holocaust with a haunting video he made from photos of concentration camp victims. I could easily see students doing this. Hopefully, YISD will start allowing this website to be accessed.

I also went to a session about the art website Kerpoof, where students can create their own pictures, cards, and simple animations. It’s another site I’ve known about, but I haven’t quite figured out how to use. I wish the presenters would’ve showed some examples of what their student created using the website, but at least they gave us some time to explore, and I got a few ideas. I found there’s a place where you can register as a teacher, and then you’re able to input your students’ names. Unfortunately, they have to review your submission before you can start adding students. I hope I get a confirmation before tomorrow, but I’m not counting on it.

But none of us presenters could hold a candle to the featured keynote from Dr. Tim Tyson, but I’ll share my thoughts about that one in a separate post.

“If you you have time to read everything your students write, they’re not writing enough.” - Konrad Glogowski

I opened my Google Reader this evening and was greeted by this:

No, it’s not I leave it for a month before I check it, or even a couple of days. That’s 82 posts that are new today that I haven’t read. And I already read plenty when I was at school today.

Oh, I think they’re writing enough, all right.