DV for Teachers

Nancy Blachman’s list of advanced terms for searching Google. Bookmark this one.——-

Today will be a full one. The sessions begin, the exhibitor hall opens, the weather looks like it will clear and be less hot than it’s been, and colleagues have arrived in town to meet and share with (Hi, Shelley!).

I also haven’t eaten a cheese steak yet on this trip….——-

Macintouch readers discuss their preferred (and often very inexpensive) tools for archiving VHS tapes to DVD. Useful for your library, teaching videos, those old episodes of McGyver you don’t want to lose….——-

Computing with Bifocals: “I gleaned this list from a number of Internet sources, Mac OS X’s built-in Help screens, my friends, and dumb luck—not necessarily in that order.”

I believe I’ve linked to similar lists before, but it’s always good to have an update, and besides… I wear bifocals myself….——-

I have had two excellent conversations in the last 45 minutes.

The first was with Matt Miller, who sat next to me (and helped a lot) during the PHP workshop. After comparing Philadelphia’s current swelter with the similar (and to me, familiar) humidity of Atlanta and the dry warmth of his native eastern Washington state, we got to talking about what we do. Matt works for Mead School District outside Spokane, and does almost everything, from what he says. What’s remarkable is the degree of cooperation they share and the commitment to the faculty and students. He and his one-member staff support county, school, and individual teacher websites, laptops, media and more. They regularly meet with other staff – network support people, others – to do all they can to make it work for those teachers. They’ve spent the last few years showcasing (and learning) new technologies: blogs, RSS, digital video, and more, and they’ve been so successful at showing what these tools can do that now the teachers are asking to learn it and implement it themselves. So, being successful, Matt and his team have an enormous amount of work to do to get all the tools and programs they’ve been asked for ready in time for fall. It sounds to me that Matt and the people running his district have what it takes: a commitment to learning, a commitment to shared goals, and a willingness to listen to the people they work for: the teachers and their students.

Too often technology is for its own sake – and it is “cool” – but when it gets out of the way, when it becomes transparent, people can see their work and their goals more clearly. When you’re trying to learn to drive, there’s an overwhelming amount of information to pay attention to. When you’re used to it, the car kind of disappears and you can concentrate on where you’re trying to go. All technology, and training for technology, needs to have that transparency in mind for the people who will use it. Get the tool – a car, a computer – out of the way so you can work consciously toward your goal.

Matt and his colleagues seem to have the sweet spot right now: a cooperative group who meet regularly to assess and work to meet the needs of the people who depend on them. No battles over turf, or permissions; effort to make things better. Must be nice.

It’s always more than the technology, as Matt knows. That leads me to the second conversation, from a chance meeting in the convention center with David Weksler.

David is from Tenafly New Jersey, and remembered me from somewhere – another NECC maybe; neither of us could remember where. He told me a series stories of educators that made a difference: the late Clark Kerr of California, who eased university admssion for a tearful despairing young woman he met on an airplane, and whose parents visited his office 25 years later, out of the blue, to give him their daughter’s newly published book and thank him for changing her life; Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network, whom I know from his regular posts at EdTech, has turned a love of helping people and a gift for teaching into a position to travel the world and live the difference, not just talk about it. There were others he mentioned, but my mind just ran over.

I love this conference. I love the chance to run into people I don’t know and find out I do know them. I know their desire to use these fantastic tools to smooth the way, to help that light go off over the heads of others: “A-HAH! Now I see!” Oh man, that’s why I teach. It’s so great to meet with so many other teachers.

Man, my head is still spinning. David put up the workshop docs and resources, so I can keep working on it. The PHP exercises covered creating an automaticallly mailed e-postcard: filling out forms with names and addresses, choosing a picture, and filling in a message to accompany it. Familiar idea, a fair amount of complexity (a tad too much for me, with an error we didn’t have time to debug during the class… more work for me later, with help if necessary from David by email).

I won’t soon be creating a postcard sender. I may try to use it for workshop registration at the ITC, and I’ll definitely work on testing WordPress blogs.

[Update: David just showed how all this works with MySQL databases, and now he’s running through a demo to access a database of blogs and podcasts that he hosts to automatically update an RSS feed of educational podcasts. Intricate, but exciting. Set up properly, a teacher could use this to track all kinds of submissions by their students: hip stuff like podcasts, sure, but there’s homework of course, and questions, discussion among students, and so on.]——-

But it isn’t David Warlick’s fault. I deliberately jumped into this workshop hoping to learn more about PHP so I could do more with weblogs, specifically those on WordPress. We just finished working through basic instructions for inserting pre-defined variables in a web page; next is creating links to the index page, carring our new variables with it. After that (likely after lunch) is Forms. And it’s going to work, but I have to flounder in the deep end before I swim smoothly. Joy!

As Sergeant Gray would say, “This is so cool.”

Made it. The presenter, David Warlick, will be leading us, and we’re waiting for another couple of buses. Transport problems at a conference like this, on the first morning, can be difficult to overcome. After registration, we walked down to the bus area, and … there was nobody to guide us to the buses. They were all across the street, on the other side of the buses, where we couldn’t see them. Hmph. They’ll improve that, but it was a rocky start.

David is starting now, so I’ll post during a break about this workshop.——-

Made it in a couple of hours ago, and my room wasn’t ready here at the Comfort Inn Penn’s Landing (made less grumpy by free speedy wireless, thanks very much), so I took a walk in search of lunch. Things didn’t look promising. The hotel looks our on a busy divided 6-lane street between it and the Delaware River. From the ground floor here there’s little to see except for the huge bridge spanning the river a few blocks north, and some buildings blocking the view of the river itself and across the way, New Jersey.

I walked a couple of blocks down an unappealing concrete stretch of Christopher Columbus Boulevard, jay-walked over to Penn’s Landing proper, and found an Irish Festival going on. Not a huge turnout, but things began to look up. I was sorely tempted by the beer tents, but no lunch yet and the prospect of a long wait for my room kept me from them. I crossed over I-95 on Chestnhet back into a neighborhood with a mix off yuppie-looking condos, ethnic restaurants including Afghan and Indian and Irish, as well as philly cheese and pizza. Ate a “Sonoma burger” at Anjou, a nicely appointed restaurant and sushi bar. Jin wins waitron honors for the day.

Walked back north on 2nd Street, found two used book stores. The Book Trader had the requisite sleeping cat and a bonus reading space upstairs overlooking the street adorned with fresh flowers. Nice.

Making sure I knew how to get back there easily, I continued north to the route my airport-hotel shuttle driver took, to Race Street to cross back over to the hotel. Encountered Elfreth’s Alley, a row of brick houses dating from the late 1700s to the 1830s, continually lived in all that time. I only took a quick walk through, but it looked very historical.

Back to the Comfort Inn, to the semi-comfortable lobby and the ongoing wait for my room. E just called suggesting I ask for some breakfast comps. Good idea.

I’m getting antsy because I need to get to the convention center to see about tomorrow morning’s workshop. Rrrrggh.——-

Important notes on Macintouch regarding issues with Tiger: unrecognized Firewire drives, different versions of QuickTime, and Final Cut HD. One key bit of advice: do not upgrade to or install Tiger with any Firewire peripherals connected: no external drives, no DV decks or cameras, no scanners. Always go back to the bare minimum of anything connected to your Mac, ideally nothing more than the stock keyboard and mouse it came with. After moving to Tiger and making sure your files and apps behave, start one by one with peripherals and go slowly.

Users who like Tiger really like Tiger, but apparently, even with the 10.4.1 update, there are significant issues even with Apple’s flagship applications and technologies, like FCP and QuickTime. Sigh.——-