Saskatoon Public School announced that they were anticipating vacancies for the following school year. The school division indicated that they were accepting letters of interest for these positions. I wrote a letter for the position of Online Learning Teacher. I have never made a video for a potential job. Truth be told, I have always stayed true to the cover letter as a communication tool between myself and an employer. I chose to make a movie presentation to introduce myself, to highlighting my strength and abilities, and to take a different yet logical angle to this letter of interest.
I made my video on my iMac. I used iMovie 7.1.4 The introduction was shot with my built-in camera using a black backdrop. The title image is from a pre-made template. The Google Earth clip was recorded with Jing Pro. The still images were shot from 2006-2008 from several different occasions. These images were salvaged from my scortched iMac after the house fire this summer. The Educational Technology Tools showcase were also recorded with Jing Pro. The music is by Depart. (I am a huge JoJo Mayer fan). In this movie I featured part of the song Prospection.
So enough said. Here is my iMovie.
For the longest time, I have wanted to update my About section on my blog with a multimedia presentation but have yet to do so. Maybe this first iMovie project will encourage me to do so.
My book club has completed it’s study of the 7 Keys to Comprehension by Suzan Zimmerman and Chryse Hutchins.
We met twice other then our introductory meeting. The first two session were held at the Saskatoon Public board office and the third was changed to one of the participants home-school. I was able to book room 3304 where a projector and large screen was available to facilitate my two original Keynotes created for the introductory and first session.
The introductory session had the best attendance. By the final session attendance was below 50% of the registered attendees. I attribute poor attendance to seasonal scheduling conflicts and poor weather conditions. My original intent for scheduling my book club at the downtown office was to offer participants a central location to which to travel as it is centrally located in Saskatoon. In hind site, I should have acknowledged that downtown Saskatoon is very congested after school and makes travelling difficult. Later, I learned that some past book clubs have scheduled their sessions at coffee shops to allow participants to have something warm do eat or drink should they desire. This is something I would seriously consider for future book clubs. After teaching all day, people would appreciate something to allow them to unwind prior to commencing professional development.
Things I really appreciated about this book club was revisting key concepts in this book with colleagues and sharing ideas, experiences, tips, and strategies. Our book club was very lucky to have a member of the Sasktoon Public School’s Literacy Team sign up for our book club and to share valuable information with the group. This was really powerful because participants were able to hear a similar message from somebody else during the book club session. This reminded me of past experiences of offering my Web 2.0 and usessions. Many of my participants were new to Education Technology tools and the most powerful moments for them were Skype calls with other networked teachers who reinforced my message.
I think the one thing I will always remember about this book club experience is the participant who attendent all three sessions. This teacher diligently read and referenced sections of the book that were important to her and that could inform her classroom instruction. What was really marking was the powerful personal stories she shared about her growth as a reader, her willingness to admit moments of frustration and proud to share stories of her moments of growth as a reader. The one message I share in my session when working with this book is that everybody can become a better reader, even a parent or the classroom teacher. Her contributions marked our book club sessions.
As a point of interests:
When preparing myself for the final session of the book club I looked around online for content from other sessions. When you google “The 7 Keys to Comprehension” you can find a copy of slides that were used by one of the author of the book for a parent session in Ottawa.
Students in kindergarten can use visual clues. These clues are important for children to make sense of the world around them. They influence their perception of the who people are in their school and their role.
If your gym teacher wears a collared shirt and a tie, then he is both your teacher and the principal. To someone in Kindergarten, the collared shirt and tie automatically give the status of principal to any person working in a school.
This rule is observed even if the known principal is standing next to your gym teacher.
As the New Year approaches, I feel it’s time for a new layout and banner. As I understand my Clustrmap counter resets tomorrow so I took a screenshot of my final viewer numbers.
I was hoping to break 1000 viewers this year but fell short of my goal. The lesson to learn from all of this is to better advertise my posts and my blog in the network. My new layout is called “Cutline”. It is a Edublogs premade template that I have seen used several times. I like this layout because it is very plain and uses high contrast. This high contrast makes color pictures in posts much more vibrant. The new banner is a picture of me taken by Meaghan on the University of Saskatchewan campus by the sheep pen with Lily the lone survivor from this summer’s house fire.
I Am In The Current- Episode 2 is complete. It has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada. Please listen to the podcast and leave feedback.
This podcast continues to be one piece of my professional growth plan for the 2008-2009 school year. I have strategically set this goal of reflecting, podcasting, and discussion this subject with my online network to grow professionally.
This podcast was recorded today in my basement suite using Garageband on my Macbook and iMac. This episode features three samples from Depart’s 2008 release Mountain Messenger: I’m a Road Runner, Hip Hop Tamus, and Mountain Messenger. I hope this musical track makes the podcast more interesting to listen to.
Students in kindergarten can use visual clues. These clues are important for children to make sense of the world around them. They influence their perception of the who people are in their school and their role.
