This page contains information and links to material related to the work I did on August 17, 2009, at Longwood University. These resources will only remain available online for a limited time.

The materials are for your personal learning with some rights reserved under a Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, share alike license. You can find specific information about your legal obligations under that license at this link.

Below and throughout this post you will find links to student-created movies and screencast(s) of presentation(s) I made while visiting with you. The screencasts were made with ScreenFlow, a powerful program! The movies were made with iMovie and Final Cut Pro. For these media files to play in your browser, you must have QuickTime, which is free, properly installed on your Windows machine. (None of this should be an issue for Mac users as these come on your Mac at purchase.) Perhaps the best way to do that is to install iTunes on your Windows machine. iTunes, which is also free, opens up a whole world of amazing content to you! Download times for the media files vary depending on your connection speed. You may need to be patient!

Feedback

I know things can be very hectic at a conference, even for presenters! Sometimes I don't think to mention how to provide me with feedback, which I use to inform my professional practice. So below are two ways you can provide me with feedback about the presentation content, presentation style, resources provided, just anything that's on your mind.

• You can send me a text message. [This is another great way to use PollEverywhere, which I may have demonstrated in one of the sessions you attended.] Simply text 45569 followed by a space and then your text message to: 99503.
• You can also click on this link and fill out a short, more traditional online survey.

I appreciate your helping me better help educators!

Movie Links

I also have many requests for links to the movies I show in my presentations. As I show many different movies every time I present, let me recommend these, listed below, that are probably the most common ones I show. Each link goes to an entire series of movies. Each of the times listed next to the movie is the section of the movie where the student interviews begin. The movies start after the interviews.

• Celebrate Achievement: the student interviews for this 2005 movie about special needs students actually appear at the very beginning of the link.
• Chocolate: the student interviews for this 2006 movie about child slave labor on the Ivory Coast can be found 4 minutes and 33 seconds into the URL.
• Stem Cell Research: the student interviews for this 2006 movie presenting the pros and cons of stem cellresearch can be found 13 minutes and 21 seconds into the URL. I rarely show this interview with the students.
• Frankengenes: the student interviews for this 2007 movie about genetically modified food can be found 7 minutes and 39 seconds into the URL.
• Organ Donors: Who Lives and Who Dies?: the student interviews for this 2007 movie can be found 20 minutes and 21 seconds into the URL.

Numerous excellent movie projects abound both on MabryOnline.org at this link and on the iTunes Store at this link. As we got further into the online publishing process we typically grouped the movies into categories rather than singling out individual projects. This was generally done because of the time constraints of running school. Putting individual movies up on the web required more time than just converting, for online publication, the same files used the night of the film festival.

PollEverywhere

I probably mentioned Poll Everywhere, an excellent tool for educators that are comfortable allowing student use of cell phones in school (with parent permission). If I didn't mention it in the sessions you attended, you might want to explore it here. Below are a couple of polls embedded on this page. You can embed PollEverywhere polls into your classroom and parent presentations for realtime feedback as well as on web pages or blogs.

We may not have actually used these two polls, but I wanted you to see different ways of using this technology. If the polls were still open (they probably are not) you could actually vote from here as well as see the results. The results will change over time as I reset them for different groups.

This is an example of the same poll in a different format--one that allows SMS (text messaging) use when the poll is actually open.

You can also choose to just embed a results graphic which does not permit voting from the site or by SMS.

Tools I Use

Below is a list of tools I may have used during our time together. Since I get a lot of questions about these, I'm including the information here for your use.

• I typically use Keynote to do the presentations themselves. And I often control Keynote with one of several applications on my iPhone. These applications are downloaded through the iTunes Store and will work on the iPod Touch as well as the iPhone. iTunes will run on a Windows machine and comes automatically installed on every Mac. ( iTunes U and iTunes K-12 are rich sources of information and resources for schools and educators.) You can find detailed information about Keynote and the iPhone applications I use to control Keynote in this post on my blog.
• You may also have attended a session in which I mentioned CoolIris as the presentation tool. In fact, one of the links in the presentations section below is to a CoolIris version of the presentation: Leadership Applied: Building Powerful Learning Communities. CoolIris is not for the faint of heart. If you want to design presentations with it, you must be comfortable editing a media.rss file, which is written in XML, a very unforgiving programming language. For more information about using CoolIris as a presentation platform, take a look at this post on my blog.
• The blogging system used for MabryOnline.org and for drTimTyson.com is MovableType. For more information about that implementation, you can consult this blog post on the MabryOnline website that covers answers to many frequently asked questions about the work we were doing at Mabry Middle School.
• The application I use to record presentations is ScreenFlow for the Mac. A number of screen capture utilities are available, but, as of this writing, I believe ScreenFlow to be the most elegant implementation of screen capture you can find on the Mac. Not only can it be used effortlessly and quickly, with just a few more minutes, you can make your screen casts look awesome. Exporting the finished screen cast is also incredibly easy: choose a preset and walk away from your computer while it generates the finished project for uploading. If you're interested in purchasing ScreenFlow, be sure to inquire about the education discount. A similar, but far more expensive, tool is available for Windows and now Mac users as well: Camtasia.
• I also frequently use my iPod and a mic attachment (be sure you purchase one that is specifically designed to work with your exact iPod model) to record an audio only podcast of the presentation. You may also use your iPhone and iPod Touch to record podcasts. For more information on using the iPhone and iPod Touch to record podcasts, watch this podcast I produced on the subject.
• I also probably mentioned using uStream.tv to broadcast and record from the computer. As of this writing the service is free. Other similar services are also available.
• I probably used the xTag USB wireless mic from revolabs to record the screencasts in this post. I have written a review about this little mic after learning about it from Dr. Andy Brovey.

Many other tools could be listed here, but this is probably more than you have time to explore if you're not already familiar with them.

Presentation Resources

An Irresistible Vision of Global Contribution

1. Screencast of An Irresistible Vision of Global Contribution
2. Audio-only Podcast of An Irresistible Vision of Global Contribution
- This is the same presentation as above (in number 1); however, the audio quality is sometimes better as the mic is closer, in my pocket, connected to my iPod. No video or slides are shown, just the audio.

Concluding Thoughts

After our time together, I had a wonderful dinner with two people from Longwood. The conversation was engaging. As a result of that conversation, I wanted to make certain I wasn't misunderstood.

The human connection, to me, is the most important thing we have in education, in life experience for that matter. You at Longwood rightfully take great pride in the personal and supportive connections you make with your students. You are also masters of pedagogy and curriculum. Think of ways you can use the tools to which you have been exposed to maximize the human connection you have with your students in those precious few moments of classtime. With your creativity and expertise, I am confident you will have an even greater impact on the lives of your students this year!

I wish you only the very, very best!
Tim