My students have been getting comments from a computer class in Oregon. I’m not sure if anyone has commented back yet–this will need to be addressed tomorrow.

Unfortunately tomorrow is our last day of school and I’m not sure how many of my darlings will continue to blog over the summer. I will make it part of their final to comment on a blog at the Beaverton school. The cool thing is that many of them have blogs about issues they care about. It might be a nice circle back to the conversations that we had about what we care most deeply about and how we can inform, persuade, and effect change by communicating with others. Perhaps there will be some empathy with people who are trying to effect change in their own small way.

The other thing that was great for me to see on the Beaverton students’ blogs was the way they had incorporated multi-modal forms of communication (video, images, surveys, posters) All were cited, I was glad to see :-). I’m not sure if edublogs supports surveys or not, but I’m going to investigate. That could be a great resource next year. It looked like the Beaverton school used Google to do the survey. I’ll have to play around.

The DVD is burning as I write.  I knew it would take a long time to burn the first one, but I didn’t know how long.  I finally finished putting the whole thing together last night at 7:00–the last student left just before 6:00 and so then I decided that I just needed to put them all together before I left for my son’s baseball game.

It was pretty easy to export–I say that now after 35 e-mails, skype chats and harried voice mails to Bill, our friendly technology integration specialist.  I was using the export button instead of the export menu under File (file that away for next year) and when that was finally clear, I could easily save as an .avi file.  So I exported each project separately and then combined them into one big Premiere file.

Anyway, I let it render itself overnight (so it was nice and tender?) and then was going to burn it this morning before taking it over to Alex in Library Media to duplicate for the kids in class.  But the encoding and burning of one 25 minute video took over 2 hours.  I’m not sure how long it actually took because I left to go buy more blank DVDs, but it was a long time.  I need to remember to do the burning overnight.

Some problems:

• sound was very different in the different files–some were VERY loud and some were quiet–I played with the yellow bar that makes audio input levels, but even so, it’s still something I need to work on
• proof-reading–one of the titles had the wrong use of affect/effect–we’ll have to make sure they triple check spelling before burning–I know I shouldn’t have, but I changed it.
• Remembering to title the DVD menu–I listed all of the scenes, but forgot to put a title, so I had to stop the burning and go back and fix it.  Also, next year I will make the scene markers on places that have a picture instead of the transition–that way the little picture will be more meaningful.  I wonder if there is a way to keep the marker on the transition, but put in a meaningful image in the thumbnail.  Hmmm.

Also, I think Bill and I figured out a workaround for how the kids could share edited clips–do a “save-as” and then delete the rest of the clips and then export and then import.  It would be more lovely to just be able to share .prel files, but alas.

I think we will have 7 or 8 guests tomorrow.  I’m excited for the kids to see their work.