Soon I will venture into an exercise I have not yet tried. I am going to outsource my class of 9th and 10th grade Multimedia students to do a job for me. I stand to make some big bucks. I jest of course, but only about the big bucks. I am going to outsource said students, but they will be doing a job for a fellow Spanish class. I’ve recently discovered Muvizu, a 3D animation tool which is free to download. It would be a great forum for a foreign language dialog, but as it’s not simple, it’s not fast. It doesn’t make sense for a Spanish class to spend thrice more time editing a cartoon as it does to script it and record dialog. After all, they are in a Spanish class, not a computer class. That’s where my group comes in. My students will each receive a Spanish client, who will deliver his/her pre-recorded dialog, and they must transform that dialog into a living, breathing cartoon. This works really well for my class too, because they will be working on Muvizu and this is a great second project for them. Additionally, the experinece of outsourcing for another is a very topical experience for today’s world. I am also curious to find what effect it will have on the quality of their work. I anticipate that they will care a little more about delivering an excellent piece of work and I feel that the quality will improve.
A further, unintended benefit of our experience is in preparing them for a Flat Classroom Project later in the year, which, until now, was my only experience of students outsourcing for other students. In the Flat Classroom Project, students must create a film clip for another student across the globe. While this is one of the exciting elements of the project and one of the reasons I value their programs, I am excited about the face to face meetings we hope our students will have. It will also be a different experience because not only will my students know their clients; but also, my class is going to have almost complete control over the visual aspect of this project. In the Flat Classroom Project, students describe what they want for their video clips, but with this project, we are going to let the Multimedia students take the audio dialog and run with it. They will make all the decisions about what the characters look like and where they are located and how the camera angles may change from shot-to-shot. This will add a fun element of surprise. We will then have the clients assess the cartooners draft work and allow them to request small changes if they wish, and they will also get to assess the final product (as a client, not as a teacher). Similarly at development stage, if the cartooners get a clip that is hard to hear or of otherwise sub-standard quality, they may request a re-recording of the dialog.
It makes me wonder why I have never done this before. The possibilities are endless. I know classes of varying grades and subject areas have been working together for ages and I think that’s one of the beautiful advantages we have when we work in a pre-K to twelve school. Yet this notion of outsourcing parts of projects feels new to me, or maybe it’s just me, finally getting out of my cave. I’m excited though and maybe later when my grade 7 students learn Flash, we can have the 2nd grade ESL students that often use the lab at the same time, write stories for us to animate. How beautiful would that be? I hope I can make it happen.
Sync.in is a tool that allows multiple users to edit a page at the same time. It also has a chat area on the side where users can type thoughts and ideas related to their work, which wouldn’t necessarily fit into the document itself. It is incredibly easy to use and the free version does not even require sign up. I simply went to the site, clicked ‘Create a new Public Note’ and it immediately went to the editing page and I could start right away. To share the space, I could either paste the URL into my class page for my students to access, or I can click a ‘Share This Note’ button and either enter some email addresses, or use one of the many social services that are connected.
Using it was fun. When users follow the link, they can enter their name in a box and just start contributing. One of the features I really like is that users have colors associated with them. So even if a student didn’t enter his/her name, if I know what color they are, I will be able to track their contributions. Colors can easily be disabled, in fact, any user can disable the color, which at first worried me as I always like to foresee what bad decisions students could make when introducing a new tool. So if ’Jonny’ came in and didn’t use his real name then proceeded to turn off the color tracking and wrote something distasteful, would he get away with it? Turns out, it would be hard, because Sync.in has a brilliant feature called ‘Time Slider’ which lets you play all of the additions and changes that occur within a document; and even if the colors are turned off, it plays back the sequence with colors fully in-tact.
I haven’t yet discovered what the limits are in terms of the document itself nor the number of users, but I have a feeling it won’t be an issue. It also doesn’t have a lot of formatting options, but realistically, that’s not the purpose of this tool. The tool exists to allow simultaneous editing and from what I’ve seen, it does this brilliantly. When users are done editing, the document can be exported to HTML, plain text or a bookmark file. I imagine I would export it to plain text, open it in Word and do all the formatting I needed.
I can imagine lots of fantastic uses for this tool in a variety of classes. I’m very excited to share it with language teachers, I think it would be an amazing resource for students learning and developing a new language. I could also see it being used in Social Studies or even within MUN clubs to develop resolutions or similar activities where students mimic how historical decisions might have been made. It could also simply be used as a brainstorming tool. I think about scenarios where student groups are asked to come up with a script or another collaboratively written piece and I think Sync.in would be ideal. Clearly, there might be issues with students erasing each other’s work insensitively, but I think a little classroom management and discussion, along with the ability to play back what was there already are solutions enough to keep that from being a real problem. I am excited to use this tool and encourage you to have a look as well.
During my time home this summer, I’ve had a couple people ask me about how to get into the overseas teaching gig. It reminded that this amazing opportunity to live and teach overseas continues to remain relatively unknown to the masses. I feel lucky to have discovered this gem early enough to have spent my career overseas and repeatedly preach the benefits of this life. Not only do we get to absorb and embrace other cultures from the inside, but typically our teaching conditions are outstanding. For me, having a class of 18 seems big and dare I say it, but I hope to not have classes as small as 3 again. For the most part we teach quite motivated students who value their relationships with the school in their teachers in addition to that of their peers. We overseas teachers have to be careful at home, if in the company of US teachers, not to gripe about the ‘headaches’ we incur which include too much talking, not listening the first time, or the inability to follow directions. We are immune to the issues plaguing many US schools to the point that we forget there are such issues at all. On top of it all, overseas teachers live a pretty spoiled life. Most school not only provide a decent salary, but it often includes housing, airfare, shipping and other perks. Washing machine not working properly? Bathtub not draining? Simple. Send an email to the designated person at school and they will fix it in the next couple of days when you are at school. Wow. Where else do you regularly hear a conversation detailing the ‘dilemna’ of which country to explore during an upcoming break, but in a faculty lounge at an international school? It really is an amazing gig and if you want in, I suggest the following:
Start with a subscription to The International Educator, which has a companion website, called TIE online and can also be found on Facebook. Their website answers basic questions about overseas teaching while their newspaper is a quarterly publication with articles about teaching, events at various schools and job listings/adverts from schools all over the world.
Once you feel more familiar with all it has to offer and you are ready to make the plunge, I feel the next best step is joining one or more placement agency(s). While some are lucky enough to secure a job with direct communication with a school, it is becoming more rare, especially for those who do not already have multiple years overseas and lots of contacts. However, that is not to say you should not contact schools directly; it just means you should not do it exclusively. Rather, sign up with one of the agencies I’ll detail below and when the recruiting season begins, it’s a good idea to get your name and paperwork directly to the schools so that they are aware you are interested. Doing so will result in a few scenarios: they’ll respond saying that you don’t match what they are looking for which is a benefit, because you’ll no longer waste time & energy pursuing them; they’ll say thank you and we’ll keep you in mind (which probably means you’re not their first choice); or they’ll say something even more promising like ‘We’ll look for you at the fair.’ or ‘Can we set up a Skype interview?’. Again, that last invitation often only happens to those with experience and/or in a hard to fill position (like IB Higher Physics). Anyway, these agencies do a few things for you:
They put you in a database where school directors can search and find your details
They give you access to their database of job availability in schools registered with them
You can sign up to attend one (or more) of their recruiting fairs that happen between December and March each year (with a last minute one in June).
The following, in my opinion, are the 3 top agencies that do this:
I also have a friend that has started a personalized consulting service called Teach Abroad Solutions. She has several years of experience teaching abroach and coaches those new to the community on the process of securing a job overseas.
I can’t recommend overseas teaching enough, whether for a career or a shorter experience, it is a wonderful way to see the world and to have a rewarding teaching experience at the same time.
I had a colleague today that wanted to include the ability to discuss art topics on his web page, which he created on his Mac. Well iWeb only allows for a ‘reply’ button (for commenting) when one publishes to Apple’s me.com server so he was in a bit of a bind because our web sites are published on our school’s server. Knowing that Ning had the tools to solve his problem, we almost went that route. However, I then came across Nabble Forums, thanks to seeing it as part of an embed option in Weebly. Nabble Forums allow one to set up a forum page on the fly without even signing up, though I wouldn’t recommend that, as the forum will only ‘remember’ you as the owner based on cookies in your browser. So while you could save the URL and use the forum, if you use a different browser or a different computer, your ownership would be lost leaving you powerless to moderate the forum and/or change settings. Given all those issues, you should choose to register when presented with the option during the forum setup.
Once you have finished the steps to create a forum, you can then leave it as a standalone Nabble page and share the URL with whomever you want to participate. You can also embed the forum by opening the forum and using the options link in the upper right. One of the options there is to embed the forum and it will display the code for you to copy and paste into your web page.
I think the simplicity of Nabble Forums makes it very valuable. I suppose a disadvantage would be that there doesn’t appear to be any way to restrict who is allowed to post. I think anyone is able to view and post to any Forum as I didn’t see any invite ability to restrict users to only people I invite. However, you can receive emails for anything posted and that would seem enough to keep content school appropriate, and I think the benefits of the tool far outweigh this drawback.
Finally, I look forward to exploring Nabble’s other tools including mailing lists, photo galleries, newspapers and blogs. If those tools are are simple as the forum, I think they’ll be worth at least investigating. Don’t you just love simple FREE tools?
Wow. I’ve spent about 2 hours with Flock today and I love it. Flock is an internet browser, but so much more (in my opinion) than a Firefox and I don’t think that Internet Explorer should even be mentioned in the same breath. Flock advertises itself as a social web browser and it sure lives up to that promise. I read one review by someone who had ‘fallen in love with an inanimate object’. I am typing this blog from its built-in blog editor, which is not even its best feature. So far the two best strengths I’ve observed are the media stream and the people sidebar which builds in your social networking sites. After launching Flock for the first time, you link your various social websites like Facebook and Twitter and then keep an eye on the updates & posts of those sites in the side panel while you do your ‘important’ internet work. The media stream is a strip that opens at the top to display media thumbnails from a media site of your choosing. When I used its drop-down menu to choose Facebook, after a few seconds I saw thumbnails of all the photos I had uploaded to Facebook. (It also includes Flicker, Photobucket, YouTube and more) I can then click a picture to open its source page (in this case Facebook), drag it to Flock’s Web Clipboard, or even drag it into one of my People Sidebar sites where it will become a post. Really it removes multitasking and a lot of flipping around that we normally have to do to share our stuff from one source to another. So, yes, I think I’m in love too – and it’s only been a few hours. Check it out, you won’t regret it. Flock – Getting Started And for any of you that might be reading from my recent PLN workshop, it’s a great way to be able to follow Twitter, without it sucking too much time from your other tasks.
I was talking with a colleague today about PowerPoint designs as we are both getting ready to present workshops at an upcoming conference. We both agreed we were looking for something beyond what PowerPoint offers. Though there are many that are attractive and functionally they’re just fine, it just seems like we see the same ones over and over and both of us were looking for something with a little more pizazz. I actually chose to make my own background, because it’s a good excuse for me to spend some time in Fireworks and I enjoy dabbling with their tools and effects to come up with something that fits my theme. However, many of us don’t have the time or simply prefer to use a ready-made option. I then remembered that I found a good resource last spring when I was assembling an end of year slide show. It’s called TemplatesWise.com and it’s got an excellent collection of backgrounds and themes, and best of all, it’s all free.
Each template comes in a .zip file that you download and unzip (remember the location of where you unzip it). To use the theme in PowerPoint ’07, go to the Design tab and where you see the 6 or so design thumbnails, click the down arrow right near the last thumbnail to see more. At the bottom of the window that expands, look for ‘Browse for Themes…’ Navigate to the location of the unzipped file and double click to use it. More than one step, but pretty simple nonetheless and much quicker than making your own.
They have their choices organized into 6 categories: Abstract, Business, Finance, General, Nature, Travel. The floral one above came from their Abstract category.
Along the lines of Did you Know, comes A Vision of Students Today by Kansas State’s Michael Wesch and the students of his Introductions to Cultural Antropology class from Spring ’07.
Very cool video illustrating today’s students who are digital natives. So many of us are making changes in the way we teach and present curriculum, but I suspect we are still the minority. Sharing videos such as this one and spreading the word via our blogs will surely affect change more, but I fear the change is slow. Too slow. What more can be done to get all educators on the path to meeting the needs of the digital natives?
A shout out to Steve Dembo where I discovered that video in his Mandatory YouTube Videos blog. Watch them all.
At the heart of each lesson is an NSTeens Video, which uses Flash animation to recreate an issue, followed by segments of teens expressing their voices on the issue with flashbacks of the cartoon edited in for optimum reinforcement.
Wallwisher is a cool tool that I think could have a lot of applications for education. In their own words, Wallwisher is “an online notice board maker…it is ideal for making announcements, wishing people, keeping notes, and things you can do with Post-its…”
This evening I was blog surfing, getting ideas for how to present the power of following others and I came across a posting about Tabbloid by Mike Bryant. Wow, what a great tool and what a great tool to share in my first real post in this blog. Tabbloid is a free service that will take your favorite feeds, lay them out in newsletter style, publish it as a .pdf and send it to the email you provide. When you subscribe, you simply paste the URLs of which feeds you want presented and choose whether you want your Tabbloid delivered daily or weekly. You can also see a preview of what you’ll get before submission. It’s as simple as that, although you will have to verify that you ordered your Tabbloid by responding to a confirmation email. That made it a little tricky for me to surprise my partner, for whom I created my first test.
For those of us who are already comfortable with setting up our RSS readers and checking our feeds routinely, this tool may just end up in the ‘great tool for someone else to use’ bin. However, I’m very excited about the value it can hold for beginners. I know many friends and colleagues who may not be aware of the power of RSS feeds; or they may know about them, but do not know how to subscribe; or perhaps they have subscribed but do not take the time to visit their reader regularly. Now, with only a few minutes, I can show them how to take their favorite feeds and get them delivered automatically. If only I could find a way for them to find and collect feeds that quickly! Anyway, check it out: Tabbloid, I’m guessing you’ll create a sample before moving on to the next feed in your aggregator.
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