Second School Presentation - March 28, 2008
I haven’t had much time to blog since March because the end of the year was quite the whirlwind! After a few successes with a handful of teachers, I asked my principal for time to present the iPods to my staff again. This time I had more experience, practical examples, and a host of other ideas on how to use them. I also had the additional twenty 30GB iPod Classics a local Beebe family donated to the cause, bringing our total to 25. This completely changed the game now that each student could have their own iPod. I also presented for the second time without PowerPoint, using my private wiki Beyond4Walls. Several teachers were more interested and more receptive afterwards and I was happy to hear their ideas and support them in the classroom.
Web 2.0 - May 2, 2008
The following week I presented Web 2.0 to our district Library Resource Center (LRC) Directors and some of the technology department heads. As David Jakes said when he visited last summer’s doctorate technology class I took, Web 2.0 is not something he felt he could give us a grasp of in two to three hours. Unfortunately, I only had twenty minutes with the LRC Directors, and they walked away humbled. It probably didn’t help that i had decided to drink one of those Monster energy drinks for the first time, although it did help me to cover ground quickly! 
There were several requests for follow-up meetings discussing specific applications we could use in the LRC.
NEF Breakfast - May 8, 2008
The largest of the three presentations was my presentation on iPodject before the entire district at the annual Naperville Education Foundation (NEF) Breakfast! Two students and I worked through a three tier presentation: 1) video montage of interviews with staff and students using the iPods in their classrooms, 2) two students shared their personal projects and learning using iPods, and 3) an automated PowerPoint I made sharing other possibilities on how to use iPods in education. I’m happy to say that all three of these went well, but the last one inspired me to think that maybe I could use it to share our successes?
iPodject Video - Currently Testing
With that in mind, I spoke with the students who helped write the grant about releasing the last portion of my presentation (the automated PowerPoint) to TeacherTube or YouTube. I worked on this the last two weeks of school and the past three weeks of summer break. The most difficult part was not expanding upon the idea (I already know a variety of ways to use the iPod for educational purposes), it was following copyright rules! Originally the music I used was the last segment from Vanessa Carlton’s Home, which I wrote Universal Studios and asked permission for this one time use. I spent the first two weeks looking for copyright free and/or noncommercial music. Thankfully I found the works of John Holowach on the open source audio page from the Internet Archive. He was very receptive to my inquiry about using his music for an educational video about using iPods in education.
My second problem was taking an automated PowerPoint presentation and changing it into a video with high quality music. I tried several methods, including Window’s Media Encoder to make this transition, but none of the free or trial programs I used worked…well. Strangely enough, I found that the free site, authorStream, and it’s free companion software, authorPoint Lite, did the best job and could distribute my video through their site, send it to YouTube, and allow you to download it in iPod format all from the same place. Perfect!
At the moment, the video is privately uploaded and being reviewed by the musician, my district PR department, and Apple for copyright compliance. This has been the largest step thus far and slightly irksome, if you consider all the red tape it takes to reach that moment of self-publishing gratification. I was thinking of creating an additional wiki to publish some of the schools I found who do use iPods and encourage others to share/edit the list if they do too. Seems kinda like what Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod did with their video Did You Know? The link to their shifthappens wiki generated a lot of discussion in the educational community and is still impacting us today.
Who knows where this will go, but it’s a worthy discussion and one I would like to continue. If the video goes over well I’ve already asked John if I could use another one of his songs for a follow-up video. Here’s to hoping!
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