Dabbling With Data

Image: "I'm not keen to shift the blame"


To begin with - excuses... 

I've been neglecting this space a little as of late, and I have a few reasons I must share to justify my absence.

First of all, Blogger is no longer supporting the hosting of their blogs on custom domains.  I've hosted the TECH Talks blog on my own site, mckiel.ca, for a couple of years and kind of enjoyed the freedom to have my own piece of the pie.  Alas, all good things must come to an end, so I've finally rolled the content forward and now have a slightly less unique URL for the TECH Talks blog - 

http://andymckiel.blogspot.com

 If you're new to this blog - welcome!  If you're revisiting this blog following my delayed absence, you may want to re-subscribe to the blog on the right, as the feed may not behave as expected following the move...

Secondly, as seems to be the trend with several of the edubloggers whose thoughts, rants & ramblings I subscribe to, I've taken to condensing many of the ideas & information I used to share through this blog down to 140 characters or less.  Twitter has become the mortar in my PLN, and I find that it's often the first place I stumble upon news, trends & resources.  By the time I get around to browsing through my blog reader, I feel as though there's a lot of old news sitting there.  Through the people I follow on Twitter, I get links to new and noteworthy blog posts and I end up reading them as they're posted, not a week or two later through my RSS aggregator...

Thirdly, I sometimes question who actually sees the things I share here.  I'm not very well established in the blogosphere, and I really have no way to appreciate my reach.  Sure, I closely follow many bloggers - reading and commenting on their posts - giving back to my network.  But I don't have a lot of 'discussion' taking place on my blog.  Sure, I see some red dots popping up from across the globe on my clustrmap, but I sometimes question the value of saying things if there's no-one listening.  Audience matters & we all have a need to be heard.  In an era where collaboration is celebrated, we all want to feel connected and we value the conversations with (and feedback from) our peers.

And lastly, I've been kinda busy.  As is the case with educators everywhere, I occasionally feel the crunch from juggling too many projects and facing too many impending deadlines.  This sometimes leaves me struggling with what I share on this space.  I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about how I use my online spaces - I'm feeling the need to de-clutter and maximize the use of the online spaces that I have available.  I'm still in the process of re-thinking my primary vision for this space so that I can share things here with a little more clarity, rather than presenting a broad spectrum of ideas and information.

On that note, my current thought is that this space should be used to highlight and showcase some of the work that I'm currently involved with - projects & presentations - that sort of thing.  With that in mind, the following slidedeck was used to support a session that I presented and facilitated at the recent Riding The Wave of Change conference in Gimli, Manitoba.  Overall, this year's conference was fantastic, with lots of great sessions and opportunities to network and collaborate face to face with many members of my PLN :-)

Dabbling With Data

View more presentations from Andy McKiel.

If you're interested in finding out a little more about the focus of my presentation, you'll find a few more resources on the Dabbling With Data wiki that I utilized during my session to demonstrate the ability to embed Poll Everywhere polls and Google Forms surveys.  You'll also find links to a few tools that can be used to visualize data with (and for) your students.

Thanks for stopping by the TECH Talks blog :-)
I'll start writing here a little more frequently to provide you with a reason to come back soon!
Andy

TEDxOntarioEd - The Winnipeg Satellite Event

Looking forward to the upcoming TEDxOntarioEd event?

If you're anywhere near Winnipeg and would like to participate along with many other like-minded individuals, please register to attend this event in person.

Of course, you could take in most of the content while eating popcorn in your pajamas. However, you'll miss out on some of the rich virtual & F2F conversations that will be taking place at the Winnipeg Satellite event and many of the other TEDxOntarioEd Satellite events that are taking place synchronously around the world :-)

There is no cost to participate in this event.
And - we'll have refreshments & prizes!!!

Register now...

LISTEN - A Song Mosaic

Image: 'Megaphone' - http://www.flickr.com/photos/57498517@N00/158790381

My good friend and colleague is at it again - incorporating his love of composing and performing music into his teaching and the learning that takes place in his classrooms. I wrote about Ryan Miller several months ago (Rockin' The School Community) when he had written and recorded a song celebrating one of the schools in our division.

Ryan was recently the recipient of a provincial grant that enabled him to develop a project that focused on student engagement, student voice, social justice and the infusion of technology across the curriculum. He tied all of these themes together through music, by composing and recording a song that showcases lyrics that were contributed by individual students.

The result is LISTEN - check it out:

Ryan refers to LISTEN as a 'song mosaic', as it unites so many voices and important ideas in a very meaningful way. The collective and collaborative nature of this project serves to demonstrate the power of banding together to make a difference.

Thank you, Ryan, for allowing me to share this project in such a public way and for providing your students with such rich learning experiences. It will make a difference :-)

For more information about LISTEN, or to access the song/video where access to YouTube may be filtered, check out http://mckiel.ca/listen

Digital Artifacts & The Twitter Test

Last night, I had the opportunity to present a couple of sessions at ManACE's 'Making Connections' TIN. I've sat on the board of the Manitoba Association for Computing Educators for several years, and have had the opportunity to present many sessions and take in lots of great presentations through our Technology Information Nights (TIN's).

We host TINs around the province several times a year, and often have between 20 & 50 people in the room. The sessions that are presented often demonstrate the use of leading edge technologies, and I've always wanted to increase the profile of our TIN sessions to include even more participation from around the province and around the world.

This has led me to consider different ways of connecting with an audience, and I've played a pivotal role in pulling together some innovative events through ManACE over the last couple of years. Events like the Manitoba Edubloggercon and Awakening Possibilities have involved Skyping in presenters and uStreaming the content out over the intertubes so that we could engage our virtual audience and impact more than just the people who were in the room.

These events have given birth to several other events taking place within the province, like Windows To The World last spring and, more recently, the Media Literacy event that Manitoba Education Citizenship and Youth (MECY) and the Manitoba Association for Computing Educators (ManACE) organized as Manitoba's contribution to our national Media Literacy Week celebrations.

Through these events, and through my affiliations with the ManACE Board and membership, I've had the opportunity to collaborate with many amazing educators. I've learned a lot from my network and, I'd like to think, I give back to my network in many different ways. I think that one of the greatest strengths of planning and delivering sessions as described above is that all of the content is archived on the web. This allows for professional learning opportunities to take place anytime and anywhere. These digital artifacts that have been created will continue to impact the educators who stumble upon them (or actively seek them out) for many years to come. We're leaving a legacy of learning online so that educators can continue to reap the benefit over time.

On that note, several people were hoping to attend last night's ManACE TIN but were unable to be there in person. I had several requests to uStream the presentations so that they could participate from a distance. I wanted to make the content available to a virtual audience, but we didn't have the time or resources to pull it together on short notice. But it got me thinking about how I could archive the presentation in a different way. I thought about whipping out my Flip Mino HD to capture the sessions. Instead, I opted for trying out a little experiment.

For the last couple of years, I've been dabbling with an application on my Mac called Screenflow. It's a very powerful app for creating polished screencasts, and you can also capture external audio and video at the same time. I wanted to try capturing the presentation as it appeared for the folks who were in the room & record the audio to accompany the presentation.

All I had to do was click record the content of the session, then stop the recording at the end. When I got home, I opened the recording in Screenflow, exported it to Quicktime (coincidentally, it's only 66mb for 33 minutes of footage...) and uploaded it to Vimeo. I chose Vimeo over YouTube simply because not as many school divisions block/filter access to Vimeo.

It took no time or expertise to crop, render or encode the video. Just a couple clicks of a button and I was done. I'm extremely impressed with the ease of capturing this presentation, and am happy to say that it has now been archived and made available for your viewing pleasure :-)

BuildingYourPLN from Andy McKiel on Vimeo.

Due to the ease of capturing and sharing this presentation, I plan to adopt this technique a little more often over the coming weeks and months. I'd love to hear examples of how other educators create and share digital artifacts :-)

Outta This World!

This morning I got to be part of something very cool - connecting a handful of high school students with Dr. Robert Thirsk, a Canadian astronaut who is currently orbiting earth aboard the International Space Station.

This was an incredible experience for everyone involved, and a moment that will live on forever in the minds of these students.

Dr. Thirsk graduated from John Taylor Collegiate here in Winnipeg, so this was a very unique home-coming celebration. In fact, Dr. Thirsk made reference to his high school chemistry teacher, George Bush (no, not that George Bush...), who was actually in attendance this morning. Must be nice to re-connect with your former students when you can see how far they've come ;-)

Each of the students who participated in this event had the opportunity to ask questions of Dr. Robert Thirsk. You can have a listen to the entire audio content here:



This event was attended by some local media, so I would expect to see some coverage in the local newspaper (Winnipeg Free Press) as well as on television (CBC News).

This was an experience that I won't soon forget. I just wish I had enriching opportunities like this as I made my own way through high school years ago :-)

Am I Media Literate?

Over the past few weeks, I've been working collaboratively with some amazing innovators from around Manitoba. We've been planning a series of projects on the topic of 'Media Literacy', which has forced me to continuously ponder the question, "What does it mean to become media literate?"

Here in Canada, the Media Awareness Network offers some great resources to help teachers, parents and students understand what it means to be media literate. They've broken media literacy down into several components, including the ability to access, consume, evaluate and create information. The Media Awareness Network is also responsible for establishing Media Literacy Week, an annual event that's celebrating its fourth occurrence November 2nd-6th, 2009.

Media Literacy Week will feature a variety of live events taking place across the country. Here in Manitoba, we're (MECY & ManACE) planning a unique event that features short virtual presentations from many innovative educators across the country. Mark your calendars for the evening of November 2nd, as you won't want to miss this event! Even if you're nowhere near Manitoba, the presentations and the panel discussion that follows will be broadcast via uStream to facilitate virtual participation :-)

Another project we've been working on has to do with demonstrating media literacy. We've created a short video to spark people's thinking about what it means to be media literate. It's been posted to YouTube, and our hope is that this seed video will prompt teachers and students from around the world to post their video responses to demonstrate their own media literacy. This video should generate some great classroom discussions about what it means to think critically & creatively, and to use technology ethically & responsibly.


I'd love to hear your thoughts on this video that we've produced. And I'd love it even more if you shared it with your students and/or your fellow educators. If you took the time to pop over to our YouTube channel to post a video response, that would REALLY make me happy :-)

* CREATE - PARTICIPATE - CELEBRATE *

The Tides of Change

Image: 'time disappears' - http://www.flickr.com/photos/14576317@N07/2427479094

As Google Wave begins to wash over us, we're bound to see another dramatic shift in the way we access ideas & information, and the way we connect to friends, family and experts in the field.

Over ten years ago, Google began to shift our thinking. For years, they've been increasingly impacting our online experiences. Google has been the dominant factor in shaping the internet r/evolution...

Google's success comes with a price - they have to answer a LOT of questions. While Google can provide quality answers to some excellent questions, they're also required to address many questions that are trivial, mundane, ludicrous and even absurd. Google doesn't have a choice - they must instantly produce an answer to any question that is asked.

As an educator, I've often told my students, "There's no such thing as a silly question". Well, that's just not true. By taking a look at Google's auto-complete entries when typing in a question, you'll come to discover that there are, indeed, many silly questions. And what's worse - millions of people around the world are asking the same silly questions! Here are just a few examples of the questions that are being asked of Google:

Are you one of the 17,500 people who've already asked Google this question?

Okay, maybe this is a good question ;-)

1.3 million young males with low self-esteem just gotta know...

Almost 3/4 of a billion people have gone to Google - hoping to see their own name atop the list?

No, really... to whom were these questions asked before Google???

How many times have you thought to yourself, 'If I had a nickel for every time I answered that question...' Well, Google's found a way to do just that - it's how they've built up their billions...

And that's just the beginning. Let's sit back, relax, and watch what happens as Google Wave spawns the new tides of change :-)

Now I just have to wait until I get to dip my toes in the water - I'm hoping Google Wave washes it's way toward me soon...