On Demand Video

I love the availability of online video today. I was reading a book to my daughters about our great nation's history and came to a page about landing on the moon. I asked them if they wanted to look for videos about that. We googled it and came up with a bunch of hits.

Lunar Landing Google Search

For some reason, my two daughters, 6 and under, were not very excited by the raw, unedited views. Not surprising. Then I found an edited version at HowStuffWorks. Of course, this is much more interesting. They (and I) wanted more. This reminds me of the 2008 Horizon Report about grassroots video and the easy availability of on-demand video. They predicted a one year or less timeline for grassroots video and I can see it in my work as an educator and our home life.

Recently we were researching tarantulas on the Web as well (our new pet). We found videos and articles galore--over 4.5 million hits! Going through this info was exciting for me as a father as I heard my 6 year old actually reading from the Wikipedia article (Go, Wikipedia!).

Interesting that though I'm an elementary school technology teacher, I would find the most convincing evidence of 21st century learning at my own home.

Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Twitter is a one of the many Web 2.0 social networking tools out these days. I decided to try it out after our district IT director started an ewcsdtech twitter feed. I'd heard about Twitter many times before, but I just am not that big on "staying in touch" with a lot of people or "keeping up" with the latest news or gossip. My lovely wife has gotten into Facebook over the last few months and really likes it. She's in the loop on many happenings among our church friends and with her old friends back home in Arkansas. I had the strange experience the other night of going to our kinship meeting at church and finding that many of the group had already heard the news of several sick families through FB. I was a little "behind". I think I can live with that. After choosing to not watch regular TV for the last 20 years, I've been a little "behind" for some time and not too sorry about it.

There are quite a lot of people on FB in my district and school site as well. I guess as long as we're not doing official communication over FB, I'll be OK.

Is there any use for Twitter, FB, etc. for people like me? We'll see. Anyway MrRosa2 is my Twitter feed.

Our class is also gearing up for a class meeting on Second Life. Interesting that when I talk to others about this I get apprehensive reactions citing the "adult entertainment" reports they have heard. I've noticed a number of risque images on my visits. I DO NOT want to get involved in anything of that sort, nor risk exposing my students to it. Mainly it seems like a big hobby to put time into. The visual experience reminds me of FPS games like HalfLife and its ilk which can be a lot of fun and very addicting.

A personal triumph I had this week was finding out that two of my video production students were recruited by the PTA to make a pancake breakfast advertisement. They took on the project with gusto and turned out a decent product in an afternoon. Not bad for fourth graders... See video below (w/ ID protecting masks). Honestly, I get a special kind of satisfaction when people implement skills that I have taught them. That is a big part of why I got into teaching.

Expanding Tech for Mr Rosa

I'm enjoying many aspects of my classes this quarter.

In 513, I'm enjoying the step-wise building of the websites.

In 578, Using Skype again is cool. My last venture there was visiting with a friend in Hong Kong. I really enjoyed talking with him while doing a virtual tour of HK with Google Earth.

I'm really glad to have been nudged to use delicious.com bookmarking because they are available everywhere and in any browser I use.

Getting my first draft of Action Research out for the wiki was stressful. I'm not much of a research writer, but I'm starting to get more used to the Web 2.0 mindset, mainly due my growing use of Google sites in my teaching. MrRosa2

I'm still iffy about Second Life. Seems like it could be a huge time suck with not much pay off. We'll see next week I guess.