A Tale of Two Tuesdays

I had David Truss' quote from "A Brave New World Wide Web" on my mind this morning, "Learning is messy... sometimes the technology didn't work."

It began with great intentions. Our school has an exchange program bringing in German students from Aalen and Saltzgitter. During a few days of their visit, the 40+ students travel through an eight-period day at the high school, and teachers volunteer to host all or some of the students. I volunteered to host the visitors this morning to show a little of what we do as Academic Integration Coaches, and to let them have a little fun with our tech equipment. The plan was fairly simple: the students would each use video cameras to record a commentary about their visit to America, then edit the videos and post them on a Wikispaces site so their friends and family at home could watch them.

Our planning for this event was considerable. We reserved one of the smaller auditoriums in the high school, procured a cart of 30 CFF laptops from a neighboring classroom, and amassed around 15 cameras, ranging from Flips to Canons to webcams, from around the district. I drove to four schools yesterday to collect the cameras from the buildings that volunteered them for our use ( a big "thank you" to Oak Park, Montgomery, Bridle Path, and NPHS!). Our HS tech department created temporary accounts for the German students to log on to our network, and I made a wiki and, using the "User Creator," created Wikispaces accounts for all the students to use the site.

The students received their instructions, formed groups, grabbed cameras and headed into the nearby stairwells and hallways to record their videos. We were excited by the enthusiasm and creativity they showed as they took turns recording each other's testimonials. But when they returned to the room to plug in the cameras to the laptops to edit and save their videos, we encountered one problem after another. The Flip cameras recorded video that would not import into Windows Movie Maker (we did not have enough MacBooks at our disposal to have them use iMovie or Final Cut, which would have handled the videos fine). The students who shot thier videos on the older Canon video cameras had no trouble getting the video to import to Movie Maker, but the time it took to capture the video from the devices left them little time to edit their work. Jason and I went from group to group, helping them figure out alternative methods for completing the project. Some of the students were able to post their videos on the wiki directly from the cameras, with the intent of later getting the files and editing from a computer at their host families' houses. Other students were unable to even post their clips to edit later because the files were too large to upload to the wiki. Some of these students were able to use a file-sharing site to temporarily host their footage until later.

When the dust settled and it was time for the students to head to their next class, only four of the more-than-40 students had posted videos on the wiki as we had intended. As they powered down the equipment and we said our goodbyes, I appologized to the group for our lack of success. However, the smiles on their faces and the very nice comments from their chaperones quickly lifted my spirits. Though many of the students will end up being unable to share their videos with their friends and families at home, all of them had met the lesson objective. They had all reflected upon their visit, and recorded a narrative telling their stories. They had all had fun in the process. And there was a great lesson in the way we all adapted and collaborated to attempt to get the videos posted. Learning is messy. The technology doesn't always work. That does not mean that some great learning did not take place!

At the end of the work day, I facilitated an advanced training session for Schoolwires Teacher Web Pages. I worked with a dozen or so of my colleagues through an agenda I helped create showing them advanced uses for our district's teacher websites. This time, technology smiled on us. Everything worked well, and the two-hour session concluded with plenty of time left for me to answer individual questions while the teachers got a lot of hands-on time working on their pages. The attendees were excellent. Everyone was willing to help each other find the solutions to things they wanted their web sites to do, and their attitudes made it an excellent working and learning environment. Several times, when I was busy helping one teacher with his or her web pages, I witnessed teachers helping other teachers with a tool, tip, or trick that they knew how to do. The teamwork they demonstrated was an even bigger factor in the success of this training session than the fact that the technology worked. Of course, that didn't hurt!

It was a tale of two Tuesdays in the way the technology "cooperated" or did not, but the constant between both of today's endeavors was a strong sense of collaboration. This is certainly an age where learning needs to happen through collaboration. It can be messy, but out of the experience of working together to solve problems, some really incredible things are possible.