Sharing the Addiction

Well, here I am back at home again after a very busy week in Christchurch last week. In between rendering video clips in Final Cut of the presentations, I thought I’d dash out a quick blog post.

Basically, this year was a very different experience with wearing a yellow lanyard and working with the kids media team. Being a person that misses working with kids now that I am in a largely administrative role, I had a ball with the team. We had a good mix of younger and older students and they were all incredibly quick to pick stuff up and had brilliant skills before they arrived. One of the younger kids instructed me on the frame rate that we should export for putting video on the web – I was happy to bow to his superior knowledge! There were lots of kids who could edit in iMovie and had a range of technical skills. The students were also great at approaching teachers in order to get video and photos for us to use.

When you go and check out the media team wiki , you will see the newsletters uploaded that the kids put together (with the support of the adults). I want to stress that the writing in the newsletter pretty much all came from the children with VERY little input at all when it came to drafting and editing. I was really impressed at the high standard of writing from the kids! An example of this is when coming up with a title for the piece on Twitter. I suggested ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’ which didn’t sit exactly right. The girls took this suggestion and reworked it to be ‘The good, the bad, and the off-topic’ which I consider to be very witty and insightful. The level of vocabularly and quality of writing style of the students (two girls in particular) was very high. Some of the younger boys struggled to get their ideas down but they worked at it until it was finished and I was impressed with their perservance. I have included some clips that are available on the wiki here to give you a taste – make sure you do go and check out the wiki and sign the guestbook or leave a message for the team on the Voicethread.

I didn’t get to see any presentations this year, I am now getting to watch all the Spotlights as I edit the videos for them. The is some great content in these Spotlights (so far I have particularly enjoyed listening to Julia Atkin talking about effective leadership) and when they are up online, you should definitely check them out. You will need to have a login for the site associated with a person who attended the conference to view them.

I also presented twice this year. I did a full day pre-conference workshop and then an hour and a half interactive presentation in the ‘graveyard shift’ (last breakout).  Both of these went really well (though I think I may have bambozzled some in my full day – we certainly packed a lot in!) I hope to do more workshops in general going forward to next year as I enjoy these chances to interact with other teachers. In preparation for these workshops, I revisited a lot of web 2.0 tools and found some new ones. All of these can be found on my new wiki at http://learningweb2.wikispaces.com. I plan to write a series of blog posts highlighting some of my favourite tools from this wiki so watch this space!  OK – it looks as if the video clips have just about rendered – back to work

Tags: ulearn08

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