I'd never do that again

The idea was alright - looking at producing some episodic TV series that we could publish online to establish a following for.  It seemed straight forward at the time.  Actually I have to admit this was first attempted by myself in the form of a TV studio program back in 2007.  It failed miserably because I completed the first episode which was showed to great enjoyment by the students at the time, and then had all the release time that I was using to film the episode cut, rendering it impossible to complete.  I kept the music file which I downloaded on a memory stick for years always thinking at some point I'd run with it.  With a dual AP/DP role at school this year I did find myself with time on my hands.  The time frame that I came up with to complete it was complete rubbish.  I decided that if I did it for ten weeks then it would be realistic.  Realistic my arse.  I struggled hugely in building up an audience for a number of reasons - I was loosely calling it a homage but in fact there was a direct rip, the atmospheric music at the start was the biggest.  I felt that I couldn't necessarily promote something that was in essence a steal, and I tried it without the music and it completly lost the impact - of course if I had wanted to involve more students then I could have had music created, but then it would still have lacked something.

Anyway the idea was for the first episode, we had four cameras rolling during that episode (to put it in perspective we had the entire video camera collection of school operating at that time, that was one video camera that we use to record everything, one with a broken view finder, one digital camera set to movie mode and then my personal i-pod touch.  And it stank.  It was terrible when I viewed it all back - I'd tried to get too ambitious, it was me driving it, rather than the kids... four cameras made a mess, cutting out the other camera people, it was rather ordinary.   So following that we started scaling things back and that worked better.  It still wasn't great, I think we were hitting our stride in the episodes in the middle.  Then I  ended up otherwise engaged when we should have been drawing it to a conclusion - we filmed five episodes back to back over five days, and then proceeded to eek them out over five weeks.   Only problem was the weather went South and we had to cancel the last two planned activities, bring them inside and then have them really a shadow of what they had been.   If you have ever bothered to watch the series, you'll see the presenter dissappears for the final two episodes and has to be replaced by the stand in.   I would like to same one thing, the production crew was nothing if extremely resilient.   The main presenter did the whole script from start to finish ad lib in every episode in one take (I abhor those sanctioned programs that are re-shot to take the energy out of them) and we effectivley after episode one ran off one camera).

The idea was to run it on the school network with the class emphasis building up a regular audience - well that never happened.  The school network, and this is a very contentious personal viewpoint, isn't suitable for showing material in a reliable way, we put it online of course, and the response was okay, it wasn't great the kids themselves who were involved while they liked the concept, didn't even watch it all themselves and it just kind of dropped out...  so it was a good idea, one that I think with refining could work well - I haven't seen it elsewhere, but the music would be a huge, huge part of any attempt to mass promote it.  The music would have to be created elsewhere and then become part of the signature of it.  And I'd work with a much more realistic time frame, so I'm not saying we'd never do something like that again... but it would be unlikely...

Rehash of the Blogger Sites

I've decided to re-hash a number of the blogs that I run. Firstly the collaborative MIS School team blog that I tried to start in 2010 fell apart completely when it end up being solely my responsibility. I've been meaning for a while to create some sort of collaborative blog that concentrates on the cultural work my students have done, and looking at doing more collaboration for that. That's my thought at the moment - either redesigning that page completely or simply deleting the existing one. Furthermore the Literacy work with Skype that I've been planning or designing for nearly a year I have to run with this year. The logical home for it is this page - but I need to re haul this site completely. The reason being if its an official site to show work and demonstrate something worthwhile the 'fun' side of things needs to be toned down.

Its not something I take lightly. This site was intended just as somewhere that I could chart my personal work that didn't have a logical home elsewhere, I haven't really considered the implications of opening this site up is a logical consequence of it.  Hopefully if it takes off, which I believe it will it will mean that there's a lot more



traffic through here. I've always had two sides to my work and I've always felt comfortable skipping between the two 'persona'. As an example when I set up my Twitter account I didn't really grasp the positive educational nature of it as much as I do know, so there was some irrelevant stuff that went through there. I think that tainted me a bit, I certainly think that some people read some of the Tweets and switched off about them, so that's limited my opportunities from time to time. I've always felt quite comfortable with that as I say, other people not so much. If it means that I need to delete a lot of work here then so be it, which is what Im about to do now. I don't want it judged in the context of what I want to do with the literacy project, so it has to go, which I've just spent about five minutes doing, effectively deleting nearly a years work.

Which brings me to the issue of awards and what not.  I've never been someone to endlessly self promote (I can think of some shocking examples that I've seen since I've been online) and up until this year I've only nominated myself twice for two separate things.  This year I nominated myself for a competition being run by Interface Magazine.  They held two separate competitions best class blog/page and best use of a free ICT tool.   Knowing someone who'd been overlooked for the Class Page competition and given that it was based on personal votes, something that I wouldn't be 'hawking' for, I through in my lot for free ICT tool.  This year I've managed to get a couple of awards for the Maori Language work that's been done. The first one, to the left came completely out of the blue, it came as a result of the google search results for our class page, which have run consistently within the top ten for the past two years.  We had a random email from the Race Relations Commissioner, who found us on Google.   The other award which is one we've been nominated before in the past was an Edublog Award for best use of Video (although they've changed the criteria slightly over the past two years.   We've been nominated the last two years and also my previous site was nominated in 2008 for the same thing.   There's no secret to why we use video, its a matter of trying to get a lot of work up that's relevant to the students that engages them as well. 

I've written on this site before about the technology and the reasons with it, so won't go into that again.  Given the number of nominations and the wide range of nominated finalists, getting nominated has been significant in itself.  We would defiantly do better if I was prepared to 'hawk' the site more, I've seen people using Twitter for instance to ask for votes for the categories or their sites, and its very common to see posts asking for votes.  The concept of digital integrity comes into play here, and I don't think its worth degrading the work that the students have done in the classroom.  There was one final thing that came up, but details of that are due in another post.  Stay tuned.