Professional Development

This past week in DigCit we prepared for our presentations in the teachers professional development. We prepared multiple different apps and ways for them to use them for different lesson plans that they could use during class. I think it went well overall and I hope that many of them took what they learned from us and incorporate it into a lesson plan. I presented a tool called Stoodle, Stoodle is a collaborative whiteboard on Safari. Using Stoodle, a group of people can draw and type anything they want to. We presented the main idea that teachers could give students assignments for each slide and after it was completed the Stoodle, which is always saved as long as you have the URL, could be used as a study guide. 

 I was initially worried about the feedback we would receive about students teaching teachers and whether they would take us seriously or not. Overall, they seemed very interested with the tools and we got a lot of positive feedback which I was very happy with. I think if I could work on something a little more it would be to capture their attention towards the beginning, I think it would have gone a little smoother. But overall, I think it went well and all of the teachers learned a lot of great new ways to teach their students.

Passion and Creativity

     My passion project has been going well this past week. In class we have continued to talk about twitter chats and we all participated in some at home. The one I took part in was #whatisschool. In it we mainly talked about how creativity is being stumped by perfection and how students are being taught one way to do things rather than be creative and think of a better way that works for them or for everyone. We also talked about how creativity is very important in school and in some cases can be more important than logic. Speaking of that I found this quote from Albert Einstein and thought I would share it...

As for my passion project, I am still undecided on how I exactly want to recieve feedback. I definitely would like to do a twitter chat with the students at my school, I just worry that I will not get a lot of participation. I am leaning towards doing a survey at first to get a feel for what everyone would like to see in the videos we are making. Then I think I would announce the date and time of the twitter chat so that I could assure that everyone knows about it and when it would be occuring. I am hoping that I can get some good feedback, we are planning on filming in the next month or so. I am planning on releasing a video every week or two, hopefully around 3 a month. Even if you do not attent/work at my school; you may have never heard of my school before but I would love if you do watch the videos once they are released, all feedback is appreciated and encouraged!

Twitter Chat!

This week in class we learned about and planned for a Twitter chat. These are ongoing conversations on twitter using a specific hashtag. A moderator would give out a few questions while this goes on and people would answer and talk to others about their ideas. If I could choose to moderate a twitter chat, I would make one based on creating films and for filmmakers to share their ideas and improve with each other. I would like to do this because creating videos is something I am passionate about and I think a chat like this would be a great place for people to better their ideas with other people.

I think that a Twitter chat could be something that would help out my passion project a lot. I am focusing on a news series for my school and one thing I need to look into is what people would like to see in this and how we can add that into the script. A Twitter chat throughout the school would allow me to reach out to a lot of people at once and get their feedback. There are a ton of students at my school that are using Twitter multiple times a day so I think this way I would be able to reach out to them much easier than using a school website or something along those lines. I think that using a Twitter chat is a very effective way to communicate with others as Twitter is an extremely popular app, especially among people my age. I think that because it is so popular people are more likely to see a conversation and be curious about what it is. This way they will discover the chat on their own even if they do not previously know about it. I think that a twitter chat would be a great way to get some feedback on my project and learn what people would like to see in my videos so that we are more succesful.

The Knightly News

Over the last few days in class, we had a shark tank themed proposal of all of our projects in order to recieve feedback and better our ideas. As for mine, I decided to focus on the news with a group of my friends so that we can involve the students in more after school activities. I recieved a lot of great feedback from my presentation and one idea that I decided to follow was for me to help promote a few other ideas in our news for the school. This way the word can get out locally about what we are doing and hopefully other students will be on board with some of us. 

So far I have learned a lot of great things that I could incorporate into my project. Since the news is a very flexible program for us I can easily add new segments into the video and spread awareness about other passion projects. I think that I would like to have a short segment each time we film the news that can set the spotlight on another project in my class so that the school can be notified about some of our ideas. For this project I have not decided if I will be more infront or behind the camera but I am planning on being behind the camera for the most part and talking about other projects myself so that I can be involved infront of the camera as well as editing and filming. We decided on the name "The Knightly News" for this project last year and I would like to keep that name.

I would like to reach a small benchmark by next week just to get things rolling with this process. We will most likely not begin to film until late September or early October. But, I think by next week I would like to fully plan out the entire script so that when we are ready to film it is on hand. I will not necessarily be writing down exactly what we will say, but more about what we are planning to say, how long it will last, and who will be saying it so that we have an idea of who is going to show up and how long it will take them to film everything. This way when we are ready we are not scrambling to write down everything we need to do and possibly forget something. We will hopefully shoot about one video every 2-3 weeks. But, as for now I am not focused on the filming but more on being prepared for when we do, hopefully by next week I can accomplish this!