Choices

Life is about choices.

Do we take path A or path B? Do we pursue something or let it sit unattended? Do we devote or energies in one direction, or do we sit and hope that we can cover all directions at once?

I have been making lots of choices lately. It actually feels good, because my path gets really clear when I do this. Am I sure that the choices are the correct ones? Absolutely not, but I'm living them. Sometimes I get in binds, sure, but with each step I shrug off the doubt and fear that has plagued me my whole life. And I am glad. I don't want to live in limbo ever again.

And with that I move on, certain only in the fact that I have confidence in myself to do what is right at the moment, to accept what my gut tells me.

No one ever succeeded by playing it safe. With great risk comes great success (or monumental failure). Pray for the success and make sure you can live with the failure. The rest will sort itself out.

Media Arts Festival

My school held a Media Arts Festival last night to celebrate the work our students do in the field of media arts. I was asked to MC the event in my capacity as an educational technologist. Here's the speech in all of its glory:

Good evening and welcome to the first ever Voorheesville Media Arts Festival. My name is Brian Stumbaugh, and one of my many tasks here at the high school is to function as the educational technologist. This job affords me the opportunity to be in classrooms and to see the exceptionally fine work that our students are doing in the field of technology. So it is my great pleasure to be here tonight and to serve as Master of Ceremonies as we showcase our students' work in the field of media arts.

But first it is essential to grasp the idea of media arts. And to grasp the idea of media arts we must begin with the basic premise that the world is changing. These students face a much different workplace than that of their parents. It is a much faster, more competitive place, one that is filled with smart phones, text messages, and status updates. And with that changing world comes a changing school. The old, traditional methodologies are fading, and so are the tried and true projects. Students are losing engagement, lured by the draw of the faster paced, sexier digital world. In short, we are losing them.

So how do we bring them back? The answer is Media Arts. Media Arts represents a marriage of conventional art, research, and writing with the new and exciting world of technology, whether it be movie making, digital music creation, or digital storytelling, by blending these diverse and oftentimes cutting edge media with more time-honored educational approaches, we have the opportunity to connect with students on their own turf: the digital playground. The researcher and educational writer Marc Prensky describes today's kids as digital natives because they grew up with digital media (in fact, all of the students whose work we highlight tonight grew up in a world that always had the Internet!). We, the older generation, are simply digital immigrants, slowly dipping our toes in the technological world whipping by us at light speed. But smart immigrants don't let go of their past, so, being smart, we have to focus on the traditional skills of planning, research, and writing while we're all having fun hanging out on that digital playground.

And what do you hear on that playground? Names like Digital Storytelling, Stop Motion Animation, and Documentary Film Making have budged their way into the forefront of our educational lexicon, taking up places next to the traditional essay, research project, and term paper. Sometimes they even surpass those older forms in the scope and breadth of student engagement. Students are spending time on the computer with applications like Facebook, Twitter, Photoshop, and iMovie, and, as you will see tonight, they are doing more than just typing. They’re researching, creating, mixing, and filtering data; they’re collecting artifacts, writing copy, and storyboarding ideas. In short, they're building skills that they need to be competitive in this ever-changing global economy. Never before has the need for these skills been greater, and, as you will see tonight, our students are rising to the challenge.

Tech Video and the Visual Image

I was asked to produce a video for my school's annual "8th Grade Parent Orientation Night." It took a lot of time but was a fulfilling and invigorating process, and I'm glad I was able to strike off in this direction.

TED Speaking

I found this on Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen website (found here).

Thanks to Tim Longhurst (The TED Commandments - rules every speaker needs to know) you can see the list in an easier to read format below:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

These are great rules, hands down, and ones we should follow as we again mount the downward stairs to PowerPoint Hell (fifth ring, I believe). I may use this with my students, too. I mean, why not? The people on TED are pretty smart, after all!

The Friday Five on Monday

The Friday Five
May 1, 2009 (actually, May 4, 2009)

The next installment of The Friday Five is a day late, but not a dollar short! Check out these cool sites here, as well!

1. Flickr Color Selector (http://color.slightlyblue.com/): a very cool site that allows you to check out Creative Commons Licensed Photographs from Flickr, and then find photos by their colors and Rate Them! Very cool way to coordinate lots of free, high res photos.

2. Tag Galaxy (http://taggalaxy.de/) Probably the most interesting Flickr search engine I've seen. Simply type your tag (search criteria) in the box and Tag Galaxy goes into Flickr and builds a globe of related shots! You'll be hard pressed to find a more unique way to find your pics.



3. Why are text messages limited to 160 characters? (found here): Los Angeles Times article explains why your texts are limited.

4. Suprglu (http://suprglu.com/) A handy free tool that you can use to piece together all of the pieces of your web world. Great way to tie together RSS feeds, pictures from Flickr, and other web services all in one, convenient spot. Also a really easy way to develop your own web site, complete with all the multimedia stuff you will need to develop a class site. Try it for free.

5. Feedly (http://www.feedly.com/index.html). Like Suprglu, Feedly binds your online world into one really accessible start page. This is a Firefox extension, so you'll need to run that browser, but it's free, so why not give it a try. Oh, for thos asking, "Isn't this a lot like iGoogle, the answer is yes, but the difference is that by being a Firefox extension and not a website, Feedly is free to analyze what you browse; i.e. it gets a sense of what you like to look at and will funnel it onto your start page.