Tom Kim

My school is requesting any recommendations of visiting artists (actors, authors, craftsmen, poets, dancers, visual artists, musicians) to host for the current academic year.

The Quaker principles are being highlighted this year with a special emphasis on stewardship, so you may want to consider how a visiting artist might support and enhance this theme or another aspect of your curriculum.

Recommendations are to be considered on a first-come, first-serve basis by an Arts Council committee.

Anyone want to throw a shout-out to someone you think might fit the criterion?

Last night was Back-to-School Night. I finished up some of my classroom decor to-do’s and tacked up some student work.

Usually I make a slideshow, but I only see each group of parents for 10 minutes at a time, and it occurred to me last year that I’m overwhelming them with fairly useless information (for them).

So this year, I just focused on a one-page handout. One side had the year’s theme, essential questions and books. I spent about five minutes on that.

The other side had my e-mail address and the URLs of the class wiki and blog. I briefed the parents on how I intended to use those sites (class reference, regular updates and reminders) and how they might be useful to them (micro-manage their kids). I also stated my intention to incorporate technology into this year’s instruction (blogging, research, creating media).

Surprisingly, I didn’t get many anxious questions.

So I played them a little video I made using the promotional web site for Bob Dylan’s new greatest hits album. They really loved that. You can watch it yourself — it’s at the bottom of the home page of the class wiki.

So I already mentioned the great time I had at Make Philly. I was impressed with the Rube Goldberg challenge they came up with, which was both fun and impressive. It was described as a kind of exquisite corpse, where each team contributed one part of the final machine that was compatible with its adjacent parts. Six teams were each given wooden panels. One corner of the panel had a written “input” instruction, indicating how an object would be received by their part, and an “output” instruction, indicating how they were to then send something to the next part. The team I was in was at the head, so we didn’t have an input, but our output instruction indicated that we were to “throw” something to the next team. So we decided to launch a billiard ball down a ramp and up a little jump into the next panel.

All in all, it worked beautifully, and it was poetic how we started with a billiard ball and ended with a bowling ball. I had to leave before all the tweaks got completely worked out, but here’s a video of the final working run:

There are writing and visual art versions of the exquisite corpse game — something possibly to keep in mind.

Cool People I Met

• Joel Mark Witt
  • Maryland Zoo TV: Fun promotional videocast of the Maryland Zoo
  • Folk Media: Storytelling in new media
• Bre Pettis
  • BrePettis.com includes links to all his current videocasts, including Make Magazine’s Weekend Projects
  • Bre used to be a middle school teacher out in the Northwest: Room 132
• The blogs of Philadelphia public schools: Didn’t even realize they had a blog program
  • Robert Karl (rkarl at phila.k12.pa.us) is part of the Educational Tech Group of the Philadelphia public school system and seems like a good resource for ed tech issues
• Rand Bradbury
  • Can I just tell you that this guy, who’s a sound engineer for the Keswick Theater, is the best technical instructor I have ever encountered? Things that eluded me in books for years have now made perfect sense because of his brief explanations. Rand rocks.
  • Roadie Show: A podcast that mostly features interviews with roadies and other backstage audio folk.
• CC Chapman
  • CC Chapman’s site has links to a number of podcasts that he’s involved with, including Managing the Gray (a new media marketing podcast), Accident Hash, and U-Turn Cafe (podsafe music podcasts)
• Linda Mills
  • Podcast User Magazine
• Mark Blevis
  • Another of the growing crop of new media specialists, his site is an impressive testament to his connectedness and reach within the podcasting community
  • Just One More Book: podcast on children’s books
  • Electric Sky: Several NPR-like interviews and exploration podcast shows
• David Tamés
  • kino-eye: David’s a freelance videographer from Boston. His blog’s got some good technical ruminations on producing video.
• Jen Yuan
  • A Thousand Times No is an interview podcast focusing on people who underwent a significant change or overcame devastating failure. Jen’s local, too, and really nice.
• Russ Starke and Todd Marrone
  • Both contribute to Used Wigs Radio, a chat and music podcast that seems like a lot of fun. Todd’s also an amazing artist who made several art pieces for the podcamp off the cuff.
• Chris Penn
  • Helped start the podcamp conferences with Chris Brogan. He has a financial advice podcast at financialaidpodcast.com
• Steve Lubetkin
  • I met Steve at Blog Philadelphia, and he’s the one who let me know about Podcamp Philly. He has a company that creates professional podcasts for clients at ProfessionalPodcasts.com

Lessons Learned: Technical

• Audio is super important, even on video

  • Mics

    • Dynamic: non-powered, durable, more background noise, best for field work
      • Recommended: Shure-SM58
      • Have the speaker hold it 3-5 inches from the face, between the mouth and the adam’s apple
    • Compressed: delicate, need to be powered (phantom power off mixer), best for studio work
      • Recommended: MXL, Snowball
    • Mic setup for a classroom: 2 condensers, omnidirectional, up high

  • Mixer

    • firewire mixer (for multiple inputs)
      • Recommended: Alesis 4/8-channel mixer (Multimix)
    • master
    • channels
      • gain
        • start at 0, then slowly turn gain up until peak light just starts to light up and then back off a few clicks
      • EQs
        • start at straight up and down
        • adjust after gain (turn down if high pitch, ss’s)
        • generally leave mids alone
      • aux
        • for effects or monitors
  • Standard sample rate for podcasts: 44.1 kHz
  • CD standard bit-depth: 16
  • Put your notes in a plastic sleeve so that they don’t make a sound when you flip through them when recording
  • Always record 10 seconds of white noise
    • For ambient filler when you edit
  • Recommended store for audio gear: Musician’s Friend
  • Also recommended as a place to buy a low-end binaural stereo mic ($80): Core-Sound
  • skype
    • Turn everything else off
    • Record volume at 70 (3/4 of way up — never record at full input)
  • Recommended portable digital recorders
    • Edirol R-1, Edirol R-9, Zoom H4, M-Audio Microtrack 24/C
    • A lot of these are reviewed in the latest issue of Podcast User Magazine
    • Also seriously informed opinions can be found at the Tapers’ Section
    • What looks sweetest to me: the new Zoom H2
  • Other equipment you might need to record audio on the field
    • headphones
    • spare memory
    • spare batteries
      • rechargeable + charger
    • USB memory reader
    • case for recorder (Crumpler)
    • extra wind covers for mic
    • extra laptop battery
• Video considerations
  • Lighting
    • Basic setup: key light + soft fill
    • add hard background if you want to distinguish foreground and background
  • shoot subject more than once in two different locations
    • before the formal interview do a pre-interview
    • people are more natural when walking and talking in their own environment
  • Ask people not to wear white or black when filming them (especially without added lighting)
    • because the face comes first
  • Make sure you have visual elements that you can cut away to
    • B-roll
  • Make sure there’s a lot of overlap at the head and end of the cut
  • Shoot from multiple angles
    • use two cameras if you can
  • Look for color
    • strong contrasts
    • saturated, rich colors
  • Sound
    • keep microphone separate from camera
    • if you can use, use a boom
    • get a tram lavalier
  • What to buy first
    1. $400 camcorder w mic input, headphone output
    2. $200 shotgun mic + fan windsystem
    3. $150 lavelier mic
    4. $150 beachtek adapter
    5. $50 extra batteries
• Make everyone sign a standard release form for podcasting
• Garageband (comes as part of iLife) makes enhanced podcasts real easy
  • Profcast (commercial software) makes recording lectures even easier and more powerful

Lessons Learned: Non-Technical

• Don’t be afraid to get help from people
  • Podcasting community tends to be very helpful
  • Get someone to teach you
  • Or delegate to someone who has the passion, expertise
• Know your audience
  • Consider what audience you might already have
  • Involve them
  • Get face-to-face with them when you can
• Old-school storytelling techniques still apply
  • Go for anecdotes instead of just facts
  • Look for dramatic/cinematic moments
• Create a rhythm
  • Make sure you add variety, break the pattern at frequent intervals
• Plan to do multiple takes with students
  • Often the best, most natural takes are the “practice” ones
  • Tell the students to plan to make a mistake
• Interviews
  • Don’t be in a rush to fill silences; pauses can extend conversations
  • At the end ask for any afterthoughts
    • What haven’t I asked you?
• Contribute, don’t dictate, the conversation
• Make mistakes on purpose, or take a confrontational stance, to catalyze feedback
• Be a brand; sell a lifestyle
• Consider other distribution channels
  • Example: Maryland Zoo TV gets shown on cable
  • Mind TV is a Philly site that will show uploaded 5-minute video clips on cable.
• Apply for grants
  • Example: Best Buy > Community Relations > Grant (given once or twice a year)

Sites of Interest that Came Up

Red Lasso allows you to clip commercial media (news, entertainment, sports) and share and embed them without intellectual property violations. This seems like a great way to share current media with my classrooms. And it’s a local King of Prussia company.

Viddler allows you, not only to upload videos and share them, but also comment on them within the timeline of the video. A very cool feature and another great local company. I just wish they were supported by WordPress.com.

Bre Pettis gave a great tip for doing 30-second low-tech podcasts: Use K7.net, which is a free service that sends voice messages to your email. The phone numbers seem local only to Seattle, though. PrivatePhone seems like another free alternative — it’s affiliated with NetZero. ureach.com or (GotVoice)(http://gotvoice.com) are paid services that also do the same thing (with more features).

Pods & Blogs is a BBC-produced hour-long weekly podcast that takes measure of the news as seen through the lens of social media and the blogosphere.

Sound About Philly features podcast tours of Philly.

One way to announce your podcast to strangers is to add it to Podcast 411’s directory. I also found out about a UK podcast directory for educators

Somebody recommended the CLIP Podcast as an interesting show that looks at critical literacies in different spaces.

Libsyn came highly recommended as a paid podcasting host. They charge by storage and not by audience size, so they’re ideal for growing an ever expanding listener base.

From Idea to Air is Tod Maffin’s e-book on creating and pitching radio segments to public radio.

Radio: An Illustrated Guide is an informative comic book on producing for radio, which can be bought on the This American Life store.

• Funky Fridays followed by YRock at XPN. Makes me love being stuck in traffic on Fridays.
• Kanye West’s Graduation. There can be worse things to dominate the airwaves right now. Don’t be hat’n.
• Myriad Harbor

Okay, it’s only now that I can catch my breath to report on last weekend — possibly the most jam-packed, enjoyable weekend I’ve had all year.

Warning: This post gloats at how great and charmed my life is right now, so if that will make you hateful, don’t go past this crease.

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One little trick I learned to move myself around the classroom more, is to situate props at different places around the room. I’ll park my coffee by the window, and a book on my desk, and I always use the computer, and I also tend to write on the chalkboards as well as the smartboard.

By consciously leaving little things for me to do in different areas of the class, I make sure I don’t just stand at the front and talk. I weave around the students, which helps not only in classroom management but also in introducing some variety and movement in the instruction.

And now, a request for a tip: Another thing I need to work on is making sure I provide adequate positive feedback. I’m not, by any means, a negative nelly, but I always feel I’m lacking in positively reinforcing behavior. I hear for every criticism, you should have made four or five compliments. What sort of things can you do to ensure this? I’m not good at keeping track of things inside my head.

Tue: Locker Night

I planned to attend. I overslept and didn’t. A great tradition in the middle school, though. It’s an evening meeting where new students and their parents can have a quick orientation to some of the more quotidian concerns of adjustment to the middle school: the schedule, the facilities, etc.

New students are given their locker assignments and given a chance to try out their combinations. They get to wander around the school and find out what rooms their classes are.

This year our new director of the middle school asked several students who were already attending our school to volunteer to help and guide and befriend the new students.

Wed: Registration Day

The first day of school is really a half day spent almost entirely with homeroom advisors. New students are given another welcome by the head of the middle school. Students then gather in their homerooms and collectively rotate through several stations, taking care of administrative tasks: selecting fall sports, turning in Technology Acceptable Use policy forms, receiving locker combinations and academic schedules, posing for their ID photographs.

At the end of the day, the students have a picnic outside as their parents come by to pick them up.

Another great day to buffer all the annoying things that occupy the first days of school.

Thur: First Classes and All-School Assembly

Classes officially start. There’s a traditional morning assembly where all the students in the entire school gather to hear the headmaster’s welcome and his theme for the year.

What did I do?

I had assigned seats for students to sit in as they came in. I arranged desks so that I had five clusters of four desks spread throughout the room. Within each group, I asked to students to learn each others’ names and then discuss a series of “Would you rather…?” questions as icebreakers. I tried to think of scenarios that were directly relevant to the themes and essential questions we’d be addressing all year. The 7th grade, for example, has a geography focus with the theme “People in Places,” and I asked them to consider if they’d rather stay at a 4-star hotel in Philadelphia for a week or take a road trip across the country. As they were sharing their preferences and their summer experiences, I passed around prepared index cards to random students around the room.

After a few of these discussion questions, I had students rearrange their desks in “test formation.” I was a little frustrated last year the amount of time students took in rearranging their desks for tests, and so I decided they needed explicit practice doing so this year. I gave little direction except for a picture of how the desks had to look at the end, so this little assignment also became an exercise in teamwork and collaborative problem-solving. It was interesting to see, for example, which students took charge and started moving others’ desks around and which students turned their own desk around and then sat down as they waited for others to rearrange their desks around them.

I then asked students to move five desks away from their original location, which became another group puzzle. Depending on the time, I then asked the class to get back into the original cluster arrangements (with their new seats) or go straight into another icebreaker question.

It was clear by now to the students that I was going to move fairly through a lot of planned stuff. I was keeping them on their toes. I had the students line up against the wall to pose for a few class photos.

When they were finally seated, I related an anecdote about first impressions that I read in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. I talked about how crucial first impressions were and how I was going to use these first few weeks to evaluate students’ inclinations socially and academically so that I could come up with effective seating assignments — permanent seating assignments.

I think this was an effective transition; it let them know that the stakes were high and that I wanted them to be serious. It made my fairly lighthearted presentation of my three class rules still carry some gravitas.

My presentation of class rules might have been a little talky — my wife constantly complains that I’m longwinded. But I was hopping around the class and no one was yawning.

At the end, I asked students if they had any questions. Only one class actually had any of their own questions for me. The other classes figured out that the index cards I handed out had all the banal but important concerns that every student has to figure out about each of their teachers: What do I have to do to go to the bathroom? How do you feel about me getting up to sharpen my pencil? How do I get in touch with you about a late assignment? etc. etc.

Having these planted questions allowed me to talk about my personal preferences and pet peeves without diluting my “rules,” which I like to keep down to a potent two or three.

I was surprised that for most of my classes I actually finished a few minutes early, which allowed me to introduce the class wiki and blog and ask students to fill out the survey I prepared for homework.

Fri: Year’s Themes

We had a morning middle-school assembly on Friday in which the director of the middle school introduced herself and told her story of “Crossing the River” which would inform the rest of the middle-school year.

As for my classes, I started class with a screencast giving specific directions on how to send their summer reading assignments to me via e-mail. It turned out to be a great idea:

• Students were really captivated by the novelty of the screencast. Some students even looked back at me in disbelief as if to see if I was throwing my voice from the smartboard.
• It clued students in to the importance I was going to place upon technology this year.
• It drove in the importance of taking detailed notes. I emphasized the importance of getting several persnickety details (like how to name your file) just right.
• At the same time, students were relieved and appreciative when I said that the video was going to posted on the class blog for them to revisit if they ever got confused.
• Having a screencast arrangement like this seemed to settle some of the anxieties and the million requests for clarification that inevitably accompany tech instruction.

From that I launched into a keynote lecture on the theme for the year in the class and the essential questions that were going to inform our analyses of the literature throughout the year. I tend to be much more of a stickler about the theme and the essential questions than my colleagues — I appreciate the focus and unity they give to me personally as I plan the year out, and I feel that they help give the class a stronger sense of purpose and spiraled instruction.

I ended class with another screencast. I kid you not, the kids cheered. This time I stepped through logging in and editing a page on the class wiki. I gave them a simple assignment of adding their name to the wiki to indicate which summer reading book they plan to do their creative project on.

Unlike Thursday, Friday’s classes ended right on time.

Meetings

The week ended with planning meetings with my 7th and 8th grade co-workers. We nailed down what we wanted to do for the rest of the trimester. These practical meetings tend to be super-productive and super-valuable. I like our no-nonsense, let’s-get-our-expectations-straight camaraderie — it reminds me of the streamlined Red Team in the Millenium War Games anecdote in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

I invite the curious to check out my class wiki at cubinclass.pbwiki.com
and my class blog at cubinclass.wordpress.com.

I also post my keynote slideshows and video tutorials (which can be see in on the blog) at blip.tv: cubinclass.blip.tv.

Several times throughout the summer, I started hauling in books and supplies from home into my classroom. I took some time clearing through some old papers and files. But I never really got around to cleaning my room properly. Here’s what my room looked like at the end of August:

If I learned anything from Blink, it’s that first impressions make a huge impact. And the first things students notice is your room. Blink actually cites a study where people accurately made judgments about the personality of strangers based a quick look-through of their dorm rooms.

My reformed room after the jump…
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