Coming Soon: "Learn It in 3 with Me"

This is an accountability post.  I figure that if I blog about the crazy idea that has been floating around in my head since August,  I'm gonna have to make it happen.  So, here is that post.

As the lone Integration Specialist in a district of 1,200+ students and 120 teachers, there are days that I feel as though I am not meeting the needs of all of those people.  No, I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm looking for a better way to meet the EdTech needs of these people.  A valuable resource.  A venue where my students and teachers can come to (quickly) learn something on their own time.  

I tend to talk too fast.  For those of you that know me or have seen me present, you will agree.  So I came up with the idea of creating some tutorials.  Needing a catchy title, I came up with "Learn It in 3 with Me." 

I'm planning on creating "how to" screencasts (using Screencast-O-Matic) that are three minutes or less on all sorts of "techie" related topics.  How to use Kahoot.  How to upload pictures to Google Drive.  How to create a Paper.li paper.  There will be a myriad of topics.  

I will probably create a page on this blog where I will store what I create.  I want these tutorials to be easily accessible for my students, teachers and patrons in my district. 

Well, I guess I just put a lot of pressure on myself!  Stay tuned.  First "Learn it in 3 with Me" will be published later this week. 

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The Most Important Question an Administrator Ever Asked Me

Let's flash back to the Spring of 2000.  I was just finishing up my first year of teaching and was on top of the world.  I made it.  I survived!  I was looking forward to spending the summer with my wife @JenBadura and our first born child Caleb just enjoying life.

The only thing holding me back was my end of the year "check out" meeting with my Principal, the late Gary Monter.  I didn't think much about it.  I had done fairly well on my formal evaluation, and received some very positive feedback from the walk-throughs that took place in my classroom throughout the school year.

The time had come. It was my turn to check out.  I entered the office, sat down and after some small talk on how I thought the year went, Principal Monter asked me the following question:

"What are you planning on changing next year?"

I was dumbfounded.  I didn't expect that question.

I didn't know what to say.  After all, I received had received nothing but great feedback on my evaluation.  Why would I have to change anything that I had done?  I thought my first year was great.

I stammered to come up with an answer.  I can't remember what I actually said, it's not really that important, but that question has had a profound impact on me throughout my 15 years in education.

I now know the answer.

As educators, we must be willing to continually change to best fit the needs of our students.  As Mr. Monter said, "that's where the good stuff happens."

Even today I find myself continually trying to change what I do from year to year in the classroom. Not getting stuck in the rut.  Not taking the easy road.

Yes, it's easy to do the same thing year in and year out. Is that what's really best for our students?

So, with the new year, let me ask you....

"What are you planning on changing next year?"

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Stop Motion Animation in the Classroom from a Student Perspective

I received an email from Mr. Dubas informing me that I needed to see what a student had created for a project in his seventh grade social studies class.  Being a former social studies teacher, I was immediately interested.  I headed over to our middle school wondering what this could be all about.  This particular students name is Ben, and he created a stop motion animated film with Legos using his iPad for a particular topic they chose in their social studies class. 

I watched it and was amazed at the creativity and mindset of this young man!  I loved the higher order thinking and planning that went into this project.  Take a couple minutes to watch Ben's finished product below. I think that you will be as amazed as I was the first time I watched it. 

Who says you can't CREATE on the iPad?  

This is a great example of what can happen if we empower students and allow them to create in our classrooms.  I wanted to take this blog post a step further, so I invited Ben to do a guest blog post summarizing how he created this awesome stop animation film.  

Below the video is Ben's guest post. I hope you enjoy reading his blog post about how he created this wonderful stop motion animation for a social studies project. 




To achieve the ending result of the Lego Animation you can see today, I used the iMotion app for iPad and iPhone. This app allows you to easily create stop-motion videos for any media, but there are a few things I had to keep in mind.

For those of you that might not be entirely familiar with Lego stop-motion or just stop-motion, it's the simple process of taking a picture for every frame of a video to form one, long video. The thing that makes it different from just animation is that whatever is being shot is being moved between each frame, therefore achieving flawless motion for an object that could usually not function movement on its own.

Now, you might also want to keep in mind that this wasn't my first stop-motion animation, for when I was younger I used to use the family's old camera to make animations with Legos at home. But when I was given the opportunity to do a project with my school iPad, I instantly jumped to Lego stop-motion. I had spent a few weeks before-hand looking for a good animation app, but it wasn't until a while later when I found iMotion, a free (full version is $2.99 and all it does is allow you to export in 1080p or to YouTube) stop motion application that I could use for my school project.

The app has three 'modes' of animation: time-lapse, manual, remote, and mic[rophone]. Time-lapse just takes a picture after every duration of time that you set before the animation (for example, it would take a picture every four seconds if you set it to four). Manual just has a button on the screen that you tap and it takes a picture. Remote, which is what I usually use for iPad animations, is where you connect the app to another device that has the app "iMotion Remote" which is literally just a button that you tap to take the picture for the other device (I used my iPod for the remote). This is extremely helpful for scenes with precarious lighting, which forces me to be out of the way of the camera when taking pictures, or in scenes where the iPad and its camera is in an awkward position and if touched, might move too much, which will furthermore ruin the flawless motion effect. The last is mic, which takes a picture every time it hears a noise of a certain set threshold (for example, I could tell it to take a picture only when it hears a noise as loud as my whistle, so whenever I whistled nearby, it would take a picture). The problem with this is background noise can mess up the animation or makes you end up sounding like a gorilla, hooting and hollering at what you hope is the right sound volume.

The final part of the animation, which happens after all the pictures are taken and you hit the 'stop' button on iMotion, is the most crucial. FPS. Frames Per Second. This could mean the difference between a racing animation and a choppy scenery driving animation. What it means is before you export the animation, it asks you how long you want to give each picture screen time. 30Fps, or thirty frames per second, would show thirty pictures per every second of video. It should also be noted that iMotion can only handle about 210 pictures at a time, so scenes that are about 7 seconds can only have a maximum of about 30fps. I like to move the camera around a lot and film lots of different scenes, so one shot usually doesn't last more than 12 seconds and I usually record at an average of 8fps, which by most standards is pretty slow, but as fast as I transition to different shots, it's hard to tell if it is choppy or not.

Either way, those are the ins-and-outs of iMotion for the iPad and basic (Lego) animation in general, but when it comes down to it, it's all about practice and patience. Thank you for reading, and I hope you learned something.

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