Tom Kim

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.

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.

Reflect on your teaching this past year. Please include the goals you set for yourself in your last reflection or evaluation and comment on how you made measurable progress towards meeting each goal.

Last year I focused my goals in three areas:

• Becoming more organized and efficient in assessing, tracking, and following through on student performance.
  • I followed through on developing a personal database to support my personal habits of grading and planning — though not without technical hiccups. Nevertheless, I believe I became more prompt in generating grade reports and follow-up for students.
• Incorporating technology in the classrooom, specifically through blogging.
  • My ambitious plans for 7th grade blogging fell by the wayside as I struggled to juggle side issues of technical instruction with the curricular schedule. Nevertheless, the 8th grade did manage to use blogs meaningfully as a proxy for literature circles in their Book Review unit. Lots of valuable lessons learned.
• Strengthen my extracurricular obligations: the Literary magazine and the Robotics Club
  • I experimented with a middle school blog for the literary magazine. Once again, there were many valuable lessons learned — including a spam attack that forced the deletion of the site.
  • The Robotics Club did take on a more formal, rigorous structure and followed a set curriculum. What we did not do that I wished we had is visit competitions and proactively plan to move the club to be more ready to engage such activities.
  • I also oversaw the Computer Academy, which was a more free-form, exploratory extracurricular activity that covered a variety of technological topics.

Please outline your goals for the 2007-2008 year.

How do you see your own professional development goals intersecting with the institutional goals of Quakerism, diversity, and technology?

Blogging, in particular, addresses all three dimensions:

• it is a technological medium for communication and community
• it provides an alternate means of expression and instruction than is normally available in the classroom
• it can facilitate ecological stewardship (paperless office), reflective practice, and consensual collaboration

An excerpt from “Good Teaching: A Matter of Living the Mystery” by Parker Palmer

Good teaching is an act of generosity, a whim of the wanton muse, a craft that may grow with practice, and always risky business. It is, to speak plainly, a maddening mystery. How can I explain the wild variety of teachers who have incited me to learn — from one whose lectures were tropical downpours that drowned out most other comments, to one who created an arid silence by walking into class and asking, “Any questions?”

Good teaching cannot be equated with technique. It comes from the integrity of the teacher, from his or her relation to subject and students, from the capricious chemistry of it all. A method that lights one class afire extinguishes another. An approach that bores one student changes another’s life.

Faculty and administrators who encourage talk about teaching despite its vagaries are treasures among us. Too many educators respond to the mystery either by privatizing teaching or promoting a technical “fix.” The first group uses the variability of good teaching as an excuse to avoid discussing it in public — thus evading criticism or challenge. The second group tries to flatten the variations by insisting on the superiority of this or that method or subtlety. In both quarters, [?] the far-ranging conversation that could illumine the mystery when we think of it as a “black box,” something opaque and impenetrable that we must either avoid or manipulate by main force. Mystery is a primal and powerful human experience that can neither be ignored nor reduced to formula. To learn from mystery, we must enter with all our faculties alert, ready to laugh as well as groan, able to “live the question” rather than demand a final answer. When we enter into mystery this way, we will find the mystery entering us, and our lives are challenged and changed.

Good teachers dwell in the mystery of good teaching until it dwells in them. As they explore it alone and with others, the insight and energy of mystery begins to inform and animate their work. They discover and develop methods of teaching that emerge from their own integrity — but they never reduce their teaching to technique.

Now let’s consider what I dare to envision the actual classes to be like.

Blah Blah Blogs

For me, Language Arts is fundamentally about improving the quality of input and output. I guess that could be true of most subjects, but English emphasizes the medium of language. Everything in my class is about improving comprehension and literacy on one end and communication and expression on the other. I take comprehension to mean basic fluency in language and normative understandings of literal meanings. Literacy is a more sophisticated affair involving the critical discernment of meaning and context within a specific genre of communication. I take communication to mean articulate conveyance of intended meaning. Not necessarily easier or harder, but different, is creative self-expression which, for my purposes here, I’ll say involves employing rhetorical techniques to unexpected or ambiguous effects that somehow seem aesthetically or emotionally truthful.

Now most English teachers, myself included, generally teach these four areas as distinct skill sets. We read a text bit-by-bit, all the while going over major events and characters, perhaps tossing in a few pop quizzes. We then have our wonderful discussions about what the book is really about and go over themes and motifs. We have lessons on how to write the five-paragraph expository essay and include essay prompts with our multiple-choice tests. Finally, we assign a project, perhaps involving some creative writing or a small-group presentation. Vocabulary and grammar are sprinkled throughout as a kind of close study of the medium itself at its finest granularity.

This is not a bad way to go, and it’s worked for me for the past few years. I teach specific skills that fall under the broader ideals of my discipline. I cover the stuff that everybody else will continue to recursively cover, like a spiraling Babel to the heavens. Slowly and surely, brick-by-brick, most students handle inputs better and produce better outputs. At least in institutionally required ways.

But I think I may be missing an opportunity here. The literary texts we study are artifacts and models of these processes. They themselves “read” life and culture and then challenge us with newly artful levels of technique and meaning. They give us not only the occasions, but also the examples, to learn the communicative strategies they employ — so that we can understand and do the same. All writers start as readers — and students of what they read — and then at some point decide to jump into the conversation.

Conversation. Because what’s missing is what’s between the input and the output. The urge to respond, to engage. It’s the grail of all communication, including teaching; you want to say something that effects a change. You want to add something to the transcript that has a bearing on what follows after you. You want to be slashdotted, dugg, and deemed del.icio.us.

You might see where I’m going with this. I’ve been trying to incorporate blogs into my classroom ever since I was hired at this school — usually with fairly piddling results. They seemed so perfect in addressing the shifting literacies of our culture with their power to publish and interact, and yet they never found a comfortable fit with everything else I had going on.

But I’ve been re-thinking my entire approach, and I think I’m getting close to being able to articulate a new model, one that I hope will get me closer to the fundamental aims of my calling.

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