I guess I better start reflecting on all of the days for the 31 Day Comment Challenge–May is almost over.  I’ve actually done most of the activities, but have not had three seconds to reflect.

I like the new layout for Edublogs dashboard.  The only glitch I see so far is that the blog tabs at the top of the page have ALL of my students (whose blogs I set up) and so I can’t add another blog and actually see it.  Even though it was a pain to scroll down, at least I could eventually get to all of the students’ blogs–now I can’t get to all of my blogs.

I was just about to add another blog, but I wouldn’t be able to get to it because of the critical mass of student blogs already attached.  I’ll have to ask Bill if there is a way to get rid of some of the blogs on MY account without deactivating them.

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.

After receiving feedback from Christine Martell about the visual noisiness of my blog, I spent 9o minutes testing and re-testing every theme on the edublogs site. I wish I knew how to design a skin and I could submit it to edublogs.So I am trying this new one and will see if anyone mentions or notices or cares that it is new.

The picture of the eagle is one I took with my boys and Deb and her kids over Presidents Day Weekend. We went to Alton, IL where many eagles winter on the ice flows of the Mississippi River.

I finally figured it out! I knew you could split those tracks and that you could put something over the video track, but I couldn’t figure out how. After calls to my friends Bill and Brian , I finally figured it out all by myself. I feel quite proud .

Here is a screencast showing how to make a cutaway shot using overlays and also how to split audio and video tracks in order to edit them separately.

The kids are in the final stages of editing. One technical question that we didn’t quite figure out was if in Adobe Premiere Elements you can use the audio from a video clip while putting another image over it–a cutaway. I’m sure there is software that allows you to rip out the .mp3 file (0r however it is saved) from the video file, but I was hoping there was an easy way to do it. I’ll need to continue to research (and if by chance anyone runs across this blog and knows the answer, I’d take help, too!)

To encourage students to converse via their blogs and to allow easy grading for me, I would like to have sidebar similar to “recent comments” and “recent posts” that tracks the comments the students make on others’ blogs. I think this is possible, but I just don’t know how to do it.

If anyone has technical advice, I would appreciate it.

I thought it would be cool to put a ClustrMap on my page, but my theme makes all of my pages go over into the sidebar when I put the map widget in the sidebar.  It also is sort of ugly in the footer–I wonder what code is messing up.  I plead ignorance.But, it will be cool for the kids to see–I’ll suggest that they add a Map Widget to their blogs so they can see who is clicking around and reading.  Maybe it will inspire them to comment on more blogs and have a little dot on St. Louis appear somewhere across the world.

I started to notice that the kids are getting comments from people I don’t know. So I checked my Google Analytics and found that we are getting hits from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I have to believe that these are students whose teachers also signed up for the 31-day challenge. I’ll get my students’ responses to being international phenoms when we have class today.

I also commented on some blogs out there is cyber-space yesterday and am trying to use CoComment–not sure I completely understand how it works, but I do know that the tags are working :-). Baby steps.

OK, other than starting this thing at the beginning of the semester, I keep meaning to write down a few things that I want to have my students do differently on their blogs next year.

1. categories–I want them to have categories–that way I’ll be able to easily track research, reflections, documentary ideas.
2. listing their own comments on their blogs–I know there is a way to do that, I just have to figure out how.
3. posts–one thing per post, even if that means multiple posts per day
4. having more time for reflections in class on their blogs
5. reminding them to go back and edit (spelling, missing info, grammar) instead of clarifying only in comments
6. blogroll–having at least my blog linked, if not everyone else’s blog
7. blogroll categories–having them divide the members into segments and labeling them
8. hand subscribing blog partners to the e-mail alerts–I think that will help with people remembering to comment
9. expert interviews–reminding them to follow-up and get that interview
10. doing more explicit teaching of filmmaking to writing connections
11. blog voice–doing more to insist on non-text/non-email constructs–an informal, but academic voice
12. blog specifics–do more with prompts to make sure that they have specific things to write about

I’m sure I’ll think of more, but right now I have to grade my seniors’ late work because they finish in two days.

Today, when I met with Bill, Edublogs was down for over 2 hours.  Now it is working great, but it was touch and go all day.  I think Edublogs might have been updating the entire site.  I kept being told to go have a cup of tea by the kind people of Edublogs–kind of funny :-).

Another weird thing–my Google Reader stopped updating my students’ posts and comments.  That’s not good.  I thought that no one was doing any work, but it turns out, I was just not being notified.

But, on the happy side, my students started getting comments on their blogs.  Bill suggested that I have them moderate their comments so they don’t get blog spam–now I just need to make sure they accept the comments.  We talked about the importance of accepting comments that have to do with your discussion, even if they are not in accord with their posts.  Free speech issue?

The kids seemed really excited that people were reading their blogs.  Now that I have all blogs adopted, I think I’ll send out another e-mail asking for just one comment from anyone who wants to be involved.  What a nice way for the community to get involved.

I made a survey for the kids to decide what segment they want to focus on–that will help narrow their research a bit.  But I want to make sure they pass on any sources they find to the other groups.

Next time, I think we need to have them look at the encyclopedia resources that Chris showed us–there should be some interesting websites cross-referenced there.

Documentary Ideas

• Many of the comments that were posted suggested watching Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.  Maybe we should have an after school showing.
• I also liked the comment that we should find out how far teachers drive to North High–that would be an easy survey to make.
• It would be fun to film students figuring out their carbon footprints–maybe people not from our class?