Teacher Moveable Feast Day 1 Overview

Today I attended day one of the Teacher Moveable Feast at Bloomington Junior High located in Bloomington, IL. A Moveable feast is a one-week summer project based technology institute organized by the Office of Educational Technology at the University of Illinois. In addition to the Teacher Feast geared towards K-12 educators who are interested in technology integration, there is a kidsfeast for students entering grades 6-8, a techfeast for technology coordinators, and several others. The idea for the name of these series of summer institutes is derived from an Ernest Hemingway quote, "If you are lucky enough to live in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (quoted in A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, part 1, ch. 3., 1966).

In the first session, Feast 101, we began by logging into Windows 7 Professional.  This was my first experience with Windows 7 and I absolutely LOVE IT - the shortcuts are awesome!  We further explored Windows 7's  Shake and Snap Features, and learned about Gadgets and Ease of Access Center.  We then explored the Feast Moodle and set up Twitter accounts if needed to follow the TeacherFeast Twitter Feed throughout the day. After spending some time discussing the educational benefits of Twitter as a tool for communication and professional development, we learned how to shorten long URLs with tinyURL, Bit.ly, and MiniURL. 


During this session we also explored the following nine web 2.0 tools:  delicious, dimdim, skype, jaycut, prezi, flickr, cacoo, glogsteredu, and jog the web.  

At lunch, we found our group members with the color indicated on our name tags.  I am assigned to the Indigo group for the rest of the week.  Once at our table, we were to come up with a group name and a trainer assigned as our group leader led us in a discussion on how we communicate with students, parents, other teachers, and administration.  Our group had a great discussion about using current technology (IM, Share Point, email, websites, Powerschool, Skyward) and some archaic yet still effective modes of communication as well (phone calls, face-to-face conferences, and sending paper notes home).  

The next and last session of the day was entitled Media Feast. The goal of the first session was to learn the basics of digital photography, file types, and an overview various applications for management, editing and distribution. We were given a digital camera and video camera to upload pictures and video to use with ComicLife – An application that allows you to add comic strip attributes to any photo (see my example on the left I created using pictures of my son I upload from my iPhone), Paint.Net – a FREE application for photo editing (like Photoshop) and Windows 7 Photo Tools.  We also explored blabbarize, aviary, Picnik, Dumpr, Artsonia, and Picasa.

We did not spend much time on the audio component of the Media Feast session, but we were to create a recording using Audacity, set up devices for recording and playback, record audio, import music files, explore the basics of audio editing, export files to .mp3 for playback on portable devices and computers, and explore various technology and ways to acquire and share audio.

Resources for the audio session:

Audacity

http://www.how-to-recording-tutorial.com/00-recording-tutorial-four-ps.htm

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Category:Tutorial

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Category:Tips

Recording

http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11206/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recordinging

http://www.how-to-recording-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm

http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/

Free Music

http://freemusicarchive.org/

http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/free-music-resources.html

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/free_music_loops.shtml

http://www.free-samples-n-loops.com/loops.html

More Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_software_for_audio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Encoder

http://www.apple.com/itunes/recordings/specs.html

Finally, for the video component of the media feast session, we practiced uploading videos and digital storytelling with Photostory and Windows Live Media Maker.