Class, it's time to learn

I love when I can share the great work done by the students in my school.

I came across a tweet announcing a student film contest sponsored by the White House.  It asked them to create short (less than 3 minute) video describing how technology has changed their school and the future for education.  I didn't see it until mid-January, but I immediately shared it with our video production teacher and his advanced students.  Two students stepped up and got their video shot in 1 day, edited in 2 days, and submitted a few hours before the deadline.  It looks fantastic and I hope they get the chance to have it shown at the White House film festival.

It's Official!!!

I am sorry to be slow in updating this blog, but I wanted to formally write that we are an Official TED Ed Club!!!  It has been an amazing journey so far and it is only going to get better from here.

So now that I talk about what we are doing without putting the word "PILOT" in front, what does that really mean for the club?  Actually, not much is going to change.  We are still going to be a Community Impact Club (I think I need to copyright that phrase), but rather than having meetings centered around discussions, the students need to start putting their ideas into action.  The discussion format is being dropped by TED Ed so we are shifting to a presentation format--basically the students are required for creating their own TED Ed Talks.  My club is composed, primarily, of students who don't really talk much in class--great workers, just not stand-up/take control types--so I am particularly interested to see how this all develops.

We are also taking on a more formal training method to our meetings to get the students ready to give 10 minutes talks about what they are passionate about.  I have made modifications to the Idea Book that was given to all advisors so that it would work better to our club and my methods as an advisor.

Because we have grown so much over the past few months (7 students at our first meeting, 40 today) I decided to mix things up.  Each student was assigned a seat and given an index card with their name on it.  On the back they were to "Draw a picture of something they are passionate about."  We then discussed within our small groups what we drew and then a few members shared with the group as a whole.  Here are some of my groups' passions:

Some members have approached me in the last couple of weeks about projects they wanted to start so we shared their ideas and the videos that inspired them.  In the planning stages, we have:

1.  Gangster Garden--We are going to build a community garden for the purposes of not only feeding the community, but also improve the quality of the food provided by the school.  We also talked about using the food as a fundraiser for some of the other projects and reinvesting in the garden (possible greenhouse).  I think our biggest step was that everyone agreed to plant seeds and take them home to germinate as a way to get the garden going before spring arrives.

2.  Dumpster Diving for the Homeless--one student saw a talk on YouTube about a man who was collecting non-expired food from dumpsters behind supermarkets and was living completely off of this food.  After doing some research he found that supermarkets actually have a policy of throwing out the food rather than donating it to shelters simply for the ease of disposal.  He also found that clothing stores will shred clothing rather than donating them because they can't thrown them away if they aren't damaged.  We are not dumpster diving, but it will include trying to convince a lot of stores (supermarkets, bakeries, bagel shops) to change their policies to help those less fortunate.

3.  Look Up More--The first video we saw as a club was by Charlie Todd.  One of his projects was called "Look Up More" which basically focused on getting people out of their own head and to take a look around.  So, inspired by this photo

we are going to hang a variety of objects that catch the sunlight (cocktail drink umbrellas, small prisms, tissue paper flowers, etc) from the ceiling in the atrium outside of our media center.  The ceiling in that area is about 30 feet above the students and has large windows with a fantastic amount of sunlight streaming through.  On the floor we are going to put LOOK UP MORE in the hopes that student stop walking through the halls in a trance.

I will update again after our next meeting.

Small Update:  I forgot to post the pictures of our tentative plans for the projects.  We identified what we needed, who needed to be contacted, and where we wanted to do the project.  These pictures were taken with Google Glass.

My 2013 Reflection

I had 2 professional goals for 2013.

1. Reach 10,000 Tweets
2. Do 1 audacious thing

Well, I fell way short of #1.  My goal in 2012 was to increase my tweets from 2500 to 5000 and I beat that easily so I wanted to try and double my number of tweets in 2013.  Even though I didn't hit my mark, I did increase the number of tweets I made to nearly 4000.  

The second goal on my list, on the other hand, I crushed.  You can read about why I chose this goal here.  Being the over achiever that I am, I didn't do 1 goal, I did THREE!

• Audacious Goal #1--Be the number 1 fundraising team at Relay for Life.
• Relay for Life has an event in my district every year, but the students from my school never really participated.  Two years ago, one student got 10 of his friends to join him and they fundraised over $1000 together.  So for the 2013, we wanted to get more of our school involved.  Through mostly word of mouth, 90 students signed up.  Since we were extremely disorganized, fundraising really only happened in the second half of April and all of May.  But, in the end we brought in over $20,000!!!  We were the #1 fundraising group at Relay representing 20% of the total for the event even though we were less than 15% of the people there.
• Audacious Goal #2--Pilot a TED Ed Club
• So this wasn't supposed to be a goal.  There were no TED Ed Clubs prior to July so I had no intentions of ever starting one.  But the opportunity came up and I jumped at it.  We were one of 25 TED Ed Clubs from around the world this summer.  We continued the pilot through the fall being one of only 150 clubs.  Our application has been submitted to TED to be a full club, allowing us to publish all of our work and use the TED logo in everything we do.  I never knew that I wanted to be a TED Ed Club advisor until I became one.  You can read about some of our work here.
• Audacious Goal #3--Own a pair of Google Glass
• When I saw the announcement of Google Glass back in the spring, I said to myself that I needed to own a pair no matter what the cost.  When the application to own a pair was sent out I applied, but I missed the original deadline by a few hours.  Fast forward 6 months and the invitation email was in my inbox.  I have only scratched the surface in December with what I am going to do with these, but I know it will be huge.  Google Glass will definitely be part of my professional goals in 2014.

I have some tentative goals in mind for 2014, but I am going to wait a day or two more before I make them official.

Being a Google Glass Explorer

I have been obsessed with Google Glass since I first saw this video on YouTube.  I showed it to my Honors class at the time and said that if I was given the chance to buy one I wouldn't hesitate.  The original pilot for Glass included only industry leaders and companies looking to design apps for the device (now called Glassware).  About 6 months ago, I saw a tweet announcing that they were looking for additional Google Glass Explorers for the second phase of the pilot.  I don't know how I forgot to follow the link, but by the time I remembered, I literally missed the application deadline by less than 6 hours.  I submitted an application anyway and got a very nice email telling me that the deadline had passed, but they would be happy to keep me in mind.

Fast forward to this past Monday.  I open Gmail to find an email from Google Glass telling me I had been accepted into the 3rd pilot and I had 7 days to decide if I wanted to pay the large price tag for one of the devices.  The longest part of the decision making process was figuring out which color I wanted (of the 5 colors, only Tangerine and Sky Blue were left).  I literally ran across the hall to a colleague and asked her to help me make a life-altering decision.  And Tangerine it was!

I ordered the Glass on Monday at 12:30pm EST.  Received an email that my order was being processed about 3 hours later, and another email at 3:30am Tuesday saying they were shipped UPS.  Then came the email at 9:30am THAT SAME DAY saying that UPS tried to deliver them, but I wasn't home.  By 5pm I had the device in my hand.

It's been nearly 2 weeks and I love them.  There are some problems that I will go into in a different post.  I want to talk about some of the projects I am getting involved in to really impact education.

1. Broadcasting lab experiments--I have a student on home instruction because of having heart surgery and is going to be out for at least a month.  Since I run a flipped classroom, my lessons are already on YouTube so she doesn't miss any of the material.  But, she is going to miss all of the labs we do.  So, one of her friends in the class is going to wear Glass while performing the lab and do a Google Hangout with her.  Labs are performed on Google Docs so the girl will be able to record results and observations right along with her in-class lab partners.  Connected to this idea, we will also be recording our labs and posting to YouTube.  There will be no missed classes anymore.
2. Art from start to finish--I can only do so much in my room, so I am expanding to the arts wing.  I saw a post of a 4th grade teacher who had her students wear Glass during their art time, recording the entire process.  Working with several students, we are going to record the entire Art process from initial brain-storming and rough sketches to the final product.  All of the time will be recorded as a video, edited together, and run at triple speed to create a 5 minute video of the entire process.
3. A concert from the perspective of the band--unless you played an instrument, you have no idea what it's like to actually sit in the band while they are playing.  Working with one of our spring concerts, we are going to have a member from each section of the band wear Glass during their final rehearsals.  All of the videos will be edited together to show what a song looks like from the stage.  Unfortunately, Glass came 1 week too late, otherwise we were going to record the marching band performance from the perspective of the band.
4. In the show--we have several fundraisers in the spring including Dancing With the Teachers.  I think it would be amazing to live broadcast the performance on YouTube so that those who can't make the performance can still witness everything live.

These are just some of my initial thoughts after a week of use.  My students have been having a blast taking pictures of random things in the classroom using Glass and are fighting for the chance to record their labs.  I can't post pictures of my students so below are some pics I have been taking with Glass.

This was my very first picture using Google Glass.  My sons have been obsessed with it, especially my older (not pictured).  He is a real technology junkie.

Glass has a Translate feature.  The original picture is bottom left.  In the upper right you can see how it translated the text using augmented reality.

We got a couple of inches of snow last week.  I was testing out how fast the camera worked on Glass.  You can see just to the right of the garbage can the snow ball my son was throwing at me.  

Google+ has added some interesting features called Auto Awesome.  The snow effect is caused by that.  On Glass, you can make Vignettes, which is basically a picture within a picture.  I downloaded a holiday theme and added it to the upper corner.

The shimmering lights is another Auto Awesome effect.  Again, I used the Vignette feature.

 I think the best part of the camera is how fast Glass takes a picture.  There are so many times that by the time I get my phone out, open the camera app, the opportunity has passed.  Now I have the picture within seconds.

I will post more about my experiences as they happen.  Big things happening in class this week so another post coming by Friday.