Facebook, a School-Year Later

   So a back at the beginning of the school-year I wrote an entry about our school and district beginning an initiative to post on Facebook as a communication tool. I created attendance area pages (South Carolina schools are organized by county. Attendance areas contain a high-school, one to two middle schools, and several elementary schools) and each school was asked to have a Facebook page. Our school took that a step further: our principal encouraged teachers or grade-levels to set up pages as well for communication purposes. They could even use those pages in place of an end-of-the-week newsletter so long as a post was made by Friday. I can't speak for the individual teacher pages or grade-level pages, but our school page has been quite successful. The image of the graphs  is our weekly reach: basically how many people see our page, share something, how many friends of friends of ours can see the pages, etc. While we have about 777 "likes" we have a total weekly reach of close to 3,000. Basically that means that a lot of our "likers" are sharing our stories or their comments on our stories are showing up on their friends timelines. That also means a lot of good publicity and community building through our Facebook page.
     When this initiative first came up a lot of folks were concerned about community members using it as a sounding board to complain about whatever they had to complain about. We've actually seen the opposite. We've seen more questions resolved by the community itself than our page admins. For example, someone posted a question about an event time. Very soon after two other people posted responses completely clearing up the confusion before we even got to respond.
     What our school pages have done is amplify the support and corroboration that already existed within our community. It gives it a common area to converse, leave comments, and share their support. It also supports our "Green" initiatives as we get to cut down on printed newsletters (newsletters do get sent home to those without internet who opt to receive them). It also creates a clear, quick line of communication between teachers, administration, and parents.
     We have three admins of our school FB page and we all keep pretty close tabs on what goes on with comments. We have pretty tight reins on the pages meaning that only admins can make original posts and upload photos/videos. We also keep our comments "compact" meaning that a viewer has to "expand selection" prior to seeing the comment thread. This keeps any "unruly users'" posts from being seen right away without us moderating first. Our principal has really taken the lead on this: posting; moderating; and updating.  She also reviews the comments and really only keeps ones that pertain to school and not personal issues (which doesn't happen much).
    So overall its been a highly positive experience. The communication between our school and the community has opened wider and it gives us the opportunity to quickly relay what has been going on behind our doors. If you're toying with the idea of a school or classroom pages, I would highly recommend it.
      
   

Author Cards/Podcast - Tech/LA Project Ideas

Hey all,
   This week in a Technology in Language Arts class I'm taking, we developed an Author Trading Card: a brief bio and reflection using Word or another publisher (I used Pages for mine - does graphics a little more simply). After that was complete we crafted persuasive podcasts on the same author. I chose Mo Willems of "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus" fame.
   Anyway, I thought this was an interesting way of using a word publishing program/app for something other than its original intent (which I always like). I feel like breaking out of the confines of "Word is used for typing papers, PowerPoint is used for presentations" mentality is always a good thing. It keeps us creative and it opens up a ton of new options.
   I spoke with a mom recently who's daughter (in a different school) had to create a diorama of a medieval times village. It came out huge and they had to spend about $40 at the craft store for something which didn't really challenge her to learn, she could really share outside of the classroom (but through photographs), and ultimately would get thrown away in a couple of weeks. This is really frustrating to me for obvious reasons. We rely on traditional methods that may not be worth our students' time and effort.
    Why not take 10 minutes and brainstorm what an application with which you're already familiar can do other than the normal. Or better yet, tweet it out as a question. Post it to Edmodo: "What have you done with Word other than papers?". "Have you used PowerPoint for something other than a presentation?" Or, even better, leave your ideas in the comments!

Here's the Mo Willems Writes for Un-Cool People podcast!

A closer community with Facebook?

  I decided I should chronicle a bit of the process we've begun to increase community/school and school/district relationships. This fall we're launching community Facebook pages for our district's attendance areas. In South Carolina, school districts are county-wide. Horry (O-REE) County Schools has nine attendance areas that will each have a community Facebook page. We're in the toddler stages of the process so far as the pages have been created, myself and another in the district tech department are admins of each page, and we're developing a plan for 'dissemination of the information' so-to-speak.
  The way I see this working (and it will most likely change to be a bit easier than my stream-of-consiousness take on things) is that each school administrator in an attendance area needs to have two things set in place:
 1) They need to have a personal Facebook page.
 2) They need to have a Facebook Page set up for their own school.

   If I'm correct (and this post is rather preliminary) if the school admin selects to "View Facebook as Page" and selects their school page, they can not only post to their school page as the school (not as their personal user account), but also "Like" the community page.
   Here's where it begins to get a bit cumbersome. Because of the content settings we're putting in place on the Community Pages, folks who post or share content to those pages must be administrators of those community pages. (Users or "likers" can post comments, but cannot originate a post, share links, or videos, etc...).
   This brings me to the point of the Community Pages. Let's say there's an attendance area with one elementary, one middle, and one high school, each with individual school Facebook pages. A community page will allow those schools to share main events, school awards, or plans which may effect the community.
  Our hope is that the dynamic and social features of Facebook will allow the greater attendance communities as well as county to become more involved in the life of the school district.
  Again, we're only planning right now, so keep checking back.
PS - the Diigo links aren't live pages yet - they will be after August 4, 2011.
Here's another article on The Plan...

Sound off in the comments on what you think!

Earth Day, Film, and iMovie

For our elementary school's inaugural Earth Day celebration, our music teacher crafted some creative lyrics and choreography to the Miley Cyrus tune "Hoedown Throwdown". Despite what you may think of Miley and her tunes, the kids thoroughly enjoyed the song. With 2 Canon GL-2's, a Sony Digital HD camera, and the assistance of our local electric company (who allowed me to travel up in the cherry picker for overhead shots!), we caught it on film.
After recording the audio track of the performance on Tuesday morning, we caught 2.5 takes on film. Using firewire, I imported all 3 cameras' footage onto my MacBook using iMovie, making a separate event for each camera. From here I went about selecting the first scene of the video. I had some difficulty getting it to match up correctly with the audio once I imported that track from iTunes, but I found that placing a large section of video into the project which lasted longer than the entire audio track made it easier to manipulate the timing of the first scene (and all subsequent scenes for that matter). I simply deleted the superfluous video from the end once the edit was complete.
What I found to be very helpful in iMovie were the precision editing tools. Pulling in clips from each camera feed made it tricky to match the words/motions up with the audio track. The precision editing features made this a bit simpler. While the original audio was captured inside on an earlier day, it didn't feature any live clapping. That was problematic since the kids in the video are clapping along with the song. Each clip imported into the project can have its audio altered to be either raised or lowered. I lowered the volume on each clip enough to still allow clapping to come through, but not much else. The main audio track overtook any extra noise I didn't want.
While other video editors for the Mac may offer more features and a simpler means to edit multiple camera feeds, iMovie (falling quite below the $200 tag of Final Edit Express) got the job done.
Here's the final result: