We shall see….

I took this picture last week. I was passing through Cobourg and popped down to the beach to see if there was anything interesting to photograph.  This man was playing catch with his dog. It was really foggy and you could barely even see the lake from the walking path. I snapped a few pics and moved on. I didn’t even use it for the @dailyshoot topic for that day which was to make a high contast photo.

On Sunday, I wanted a photo for addition to the Sliders Sunday group on Flickr. Basically, the goal of this group is to take a photo and post process it to make it interesting. I opened this photo in Aperture 3, and started clicking and sliding. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what I did. I know it was a sepia-like thing, and then I played with contrast, saturation, exposure and maybe some other things. I just kept messing around until I liked the look I achieved.

I recieved a few comments, a handful of people favorited it as well. Then someone mentioned Explore, which is a Flickr feature whereby photos are highlighted and added to a group that is one of the main areas of Flickr for just, well, exploring and finding interesting photos. I’m not sure how this all quite comes about, and apparently it’s a bit of mystery as to how photos get found and selected.  So with some interest I clicked the link that was provided, and found my photo was part of the group selected for Explore for that day.

So, in the last week, that photo has had over 300 views, 16 comments and 21 faves. Crazy. This blows away all my previous photo efforts for photo views. Goes to show what fun things can happen when you share your work and put it out in communities for others to see. Once in a while what you produce strikes a chord.

If you’ve not checked out some of the Flickr communities and groups, and you enjoy taking photos, I encourage you to do so. It’s another vibrant and interesting social network to be sure.

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• How do you find out about and decide to use new technologies?

I tend to be ‘plugged in’ to a lot of different channels with regards to technology. Through Twitter, blog feeds and other connections I get a constant stream of new websites, gadgets and ideas to think about and try if I so desire. I think that I’ve always done that, and I’m always on the lookout for the ‘next new thing’. Not for any particular reason, but just the way it is. I’m the same way with things like outdoor gear too. Just like trying and experimenting with new things.

• What are the reasons why you adopt or reject some new technologies more than others?

It’s sure not a step-by-step evaluative process. I tend to adopt/reject often. My adoption is mostly focused around practical things. Do I like what it can do? Does it do something I wasn’t able to do before, or didn’t know that I could do? Often the technologies that solve a problem that I didn’t really know I had are the ones that I stick with. Dropbox.com comes to mind. As a solution, it’s brilliant. But it was a problem I solved other ways until I happened upon this. But I do like to try things. I have a string of website accounts and and hardware items that I’ve used and either upgraded or stopped using. I need to try them to see if they are useful.

• What is the process by which you start using a new technology?

I usually start with seeing what others think about it. Reviews, tweets, discussions about it and then decide to give it a whirl. Depending on the price, I may purchase one to play with, or wait and see what others think about it and decide if it’s worth trying out.

• How does it affect how you approach certain activities?

As McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” I think this is true to a very large extent. How I approach many activities is shaped by the things that I’ve adopted as technologies. I’m quite sure that my brain works in certain ways because I know that I can use these tools to accomplish tasks. I can give one very specific example. In the past, when I went somewhere I’d often look at a map and find out how to get there. With the advent of online maps (Google etc..) I’d go online, and get a map overview, maybe print it out before leaving the house. Now with mobile tech (iPhone/iPad) I often don’t even check the address I’m going to, as I know it’s in a email somewhere on the phone, and I can use the maps/GPS on the phone to find the address and guide me there. I’m not saying its a good or bad thing, but that I’ve noticed a change in my personal behaviour with respect to that. So in that sense, the tool is shaping me.

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"What if school was the best 7 hours of a kids day?"

Good question. And I like good questions.

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I had the good fortune today to be part of the Kirk Wipper Portage, which was a tribute event to Kirk Wipper, who was the founder of the Canadian Canoe Museum, and a huge influence on a generation of canoers and campers. I never personally had the pleasure of knowing him, but was aware of his influence on the sport of canoeing in Canada.

Andy Forgrave asked me last week if I’d be interested in taking part in this tribute which consisted of teams of volunteers portaging a canoe from Hart House at U of T to the Canoe Museum. A distance of 130 kms over 4 days. It sounded like a great event and tribute, and I agreed to help.  Andy sent out a few more emails and he assembled a small team of families to pull off our section.  In the end, we carried the canoe about 6 kms, and most of the crew carried it solo, including some of the sons on our team. They were all super troopers and did an amazing job.  The route started up HWY 7 just west of Peterborough and took us into town where we passed off the boat to the next crew who headed down the busy Lansdowne Street to the museum. The above picture is me on the shoulder of HWY 7. Not a typical portage trail to be sure.

We were joined by Alana Callan and 6 year old Kyla who became the youngest member of the portage team. It was such a cool moment when Kyla rested the canoe on her head and headed down the street with her mom. Truly a rockstar! 

Makes you realize the kind of things that are important and leave a lasting impact.

Thanks to Andy for seeing and seizing the opportunity for the rest of us!

More pics on my Flickr stream here.

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The guiding questions for this session will be the role of research in education. Specifically, I’m going to be speaking of the research I’m currently working on.  My Ethics Board application went in last week. (It’s hard to type with your fingers crossed BTW.)  My guiding topic is around the use of technologies, particularly mobile technologies, by educators and how their personal use may or may not be related to their professional use. I’m going to draw some parallels between what I’ve learned, what I hope to learn in the research and how it’s impacted my daily work as an educator. But thinking about this has gotten me to pondering the larger pictures. (It usually does.)

So what role does educational research play in the day to day workings of a typical classroom?

In thinking about this, I have to say that over the last <cough, cough> years I’ve been in education that my answer would have changed. I can recall when I first started teaching, and the ‘next new thing’ would be introduced at a meeting or PD day and I’d roll my eyes and wonder what bush they had just crawled out from under. There’s no way that this this would work in MY classroom.  Etc.. etc…

Fast forward a decade (or more) and I have started to take a longer view of educational research. I see that most of the ‘new’ things that are now hitting the classroom, are things that have been talked about and researched quite extensively for many years. In some cases, many decades. And I think that the role of a clued-in educator is to understand, in a practical way, how to deal with it all. There is still a theory-practice disconnect. Often you’ll hear that teachers blame the ‘ivory tower’ of acadmia with being out of touch, and then the academics turn around and blame the stagnacy of the system and the lack of change on the inertia of the teaching profession.

I suspect that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, and that there needs to be a close relationship between the two ends of the spectrum.   To provide some evidence, lets look at two of the latest things to come ‘down the pipe’.

Growing Success
The Ontario Ministry of Education has recently released a new document on assessment and evaluation called Growing Success. This document is meant to shape policy and how students are assessed and evaluated in our classrooms. There’s been some mighty interesting discussion around staff rooms across the province. (Ask someone about the definition of homework. Go on. I dare you.)

But here’s the thing. That document reflects some solid thinking and research based writing by some great educational thinkers. Folks like Damian Cooper and Alfie Kohn have had a huge influence on this. And they’ve been researching this for decades. Nothing new to see here.

Professional Learning Communities
The current move in professional learning is around professional learning communities. This has been ongoing in elementary for a few years, and is now being implemented in secondary schools across the province. When it first rolled out, there was lots of misunderstandings around what it could look like, and what the goals of PLC’s were. There was lots of ‘this too shall pass’ conversations around.  But here’s the thing, this has a strong research base by folks like Michael Fullan and folks like him. But in my opinion, it’s nothing new. If you asked teachers (which I did) what would YOU like to most do to learn in a professional capacity, guess what I heard?  ‘I want time. Time to sit with my colleagues and work on things with them. To learn with and from on another about practical strategies and classroom ideas.’

Huh.  Guess what PLCs are for?

Ohhhh.  I see.

When framed that way, you get more interest in the process then. It’s what folks often want, and it’s backed by research. Go figure.

So what’s all this boil down to? In my opinion, we, as educators, need to be aware of the research. Not necessarily the latest journals and the nitty gritty of experimental and quasi-experimental studies, but the meta-analysis. The Big Ideas if you will. Because the people we work for sure are aware of it, and they are trying to implement some of it in our schools and classes.  I’ll be the first to admit that implementation (practical) does not always look like it did on paper (theory).  But if we have an understanding of both, we can find the good in all of it, and put these things in place for the betterment of both the students and the teachers.

Not a bad thing.

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I use a program called Photomatix Light to do my HDR processing. I works simply and I’ve gotten some decent results with it. I was at Bronte Creek Provincial Park for short walk earlier this week, and happened to be there just as the sun was setting. The colours were amazing, and I wanted to capture some of it if I could. I didn’t have a tripod so it made the holding of the camera steady a bit tricky. With HDR photos, I capture 3 pics in quick succession at +/- 2 on the auto exposure settings. It’s best to do it on  a tripod, as the photos need to be exactly aligned for the best results.

In the computer, the program takes the 3 pictures and puts them together with the result being high exposure lighting in all areas of the photo, so there are no washed out or overexposed areas.  Here are 3 of the pictures I created.

I’ve also experimented with an iPhone app called Pro HDR which, although much simpler, does a decent job of getting HDR photos too. It takes 2 pictures and combines them right on the phone. I took this one tonight.

If you’re interested in this kind of photography at all, I recommend checking out the tutorials at StuckInCustoms.com and if you have an iPhone, trying the Pro HRD app.  I think you’ll be pleased at the results you get.

Or is it?

Well, turns out I found one problem. I was trying to do some movie editing a few weeks ago in iMovie, and I was getting odd behavior from the Event panel. Not all my clips had sound when trying to preview them, and many of them simply wouldn’t play. They just displayed a static image from another clip. Very odd. I tried searching around the interwebs but came up with nothing.

So, I phoned the good people at Apple. After a bit, I got a chap named Frank on the line, and he was able to sort out my problem. Turns out that iPhoto libraries start to misbehave in the media browser and other applications when it gets too large. He said that Apple claims iPhoto libraries can handle 250,000 photos. I had less than 30,000 items, but some of those were video files. There was a total of almost 150 GB of media in the library. Frank said that in his experience as an Apple tech (I believe him.) that about 100 GB is the max that iPhoto likes to deal with before issues start cropping up.

So what to do? Well, we split the library in 2 parts. I now had a library that contains everything up to 2010, and another that just contains the ones from 2011. They seem to both work fine now when I pull them up in iMovie to do editing. Problem solved.

But wait there’s one more thing.

What do I do going forward? With my new 18 megapixel digital camera, each photo I take in basic format (not including RAW) is 10 MB or so. That’s a lot of data. So, do I start to be more ruthless in which pictures I keep, and get rid of the other ones? (I likely will do some of that)  But there’s still going to be a lot of data to be stored. I had a PC hard drive and an external backup fail within weeks of each other last fall, so I’m still shy about only having one set.  Do I keep adding new instances of iPhoto libraries and make new ones when they start to approach that limit? Or only have the current on on my Mac as a working library, and keep the others backed up in external HD’s?

Is there a simple solution? What do you do? I’m curious how you manage your digital storage.