artclectic preview, ya'll

I'm just sayin' -- if you are anywhere near Nashville the 3rd week of October, and you fail to visit artclectic 2010, you're playin' de foooooooool.

I'm So Lucky

It's my 1st graders and Kindergarteners using Starfall.com, ya'll. Just sharing...

Gearing up for artclectic 2009!

I should mention that I’m knee-deep in artclectic work as the season barrels down upon us ineluctably. From helping to maintain the artclectic website to working on emma.com mailings to snapping pictures and working the twitter and facebook feeds I’m there, sports fans.

If you’re in Nashville, or anywhere within driving distance, or anywhere within flying distance, I’m tellin’ ya, get here for the show. The USN Sperling Gymnasium becomes something in no way resembling a school gym, there are family events running virtually the entire time, and the art this year promises to be more varied and more exciting than ever before in the 13 years this unique event has taken place.

Last night, my son Colin and his friend and classmate Hope joined USN drum teacher extraordinaire Ed Haggard at Whole Foods in Green Hills to provide fun (and skilled) percussion to underscore the first public sneak peek at a few of the pieces that will be available for viewing and/or purchase from October 22-25. The show opens to the public on the 23rd after a private Patrons Party the evening of the 22nd and runs all weekend long. I’ll leave you with a link to the website where the schedule of events can be found, along with much more information, and with a little video from last night. Please check out the large comprehensive video on the website homepage as well, just put up by our media helper, Courtney Drake. It contains music by the USN HS Jazz band!

I also want to put in a word of praise for my lovely and talented wife, Lee Ann, Arts Coordinator at USN. Throughout the event and the days leading up to it, there are repeated times for all the volunteers who support the event to get praise and credit. Because she is so selfless and so proud of her people, Lee Ann rarely gets any of it, though one might easlily argue that she deserves it all. Don't think that this event would ever have grown into the one Nashville Parent Magazine calls "The Art Event of the Year" without Lee Ann Merrick's professional and careful nurturing and, most importantly, her wizardly people skills. Don't think it for a minute.

Here's the video!

Opening Night! and USN Parent Workshop on Teens and the Internet

It's opening night! Can't WAIT to see the whole play, though I'll of course be focused on me boy-o as Young York.

In other news, I had a wonderful chat--along with USN Tech Director Kathy Weiczerza and Middle School Tech Coordinator Jake Wilson, after school yesterday--with 8 or 10 parents of USN 7th graders, on the topic of Teenagers and the Internet. In preparation for that, I created a free wiki at http://usn7thparentsnight.wikispaces.com to use as both a presentation tool and as a repository for further dialog. Please feel free to visit that site and use the "Edit this page" link on any page to which you'd like to contribute (especially the "Questions" and the "Comments" pages!

Thanks to the parents who came by. This was truly an enjoyable experience for me, since I'm one of you. I'm all to familiar with how challenging it can be for a parent, even one as geeky as I, to keep up with socio-technological change and I deeply appreciate your concern and your contributions to my own learning...

artclectic Education Day 2008!

Education Day, the Friday school day of artclectic weekend 2008. See artclectic.org for more information.

artclectic2007 from Start to Finish

I put this up at TeacherTube and if it performs okay I'll leave it there at least during the week before artclectic2008! There's another, very much longer, video available at the USN website, but delivery mileage will vary greatly with the speed of your internet connection.

Graduation Pics

Very fun. Very family. Very proudmaking:

Quick-flic! "Without You" video from April's Cabaret Night

Well, using DVDx to rip the video from the DVD sent to our family from the school, then editing the resulting .avi file with Windows Movie Maker took a while, but even though the video is iffy after all the compressions it's pretty tasty. Have at it:

It's a relatively long download, so I'll just link to it here:

End of Year "How am I Gonna Get It Done" Blues

Weeeeeeeeeee! It's zoning down on us, ya'll, the end of the school year. I don't have any earthly idea why it so takes us by such surprise every year. This year, of course, with my lovely daughter graduating high school, a major project going on at the CSO, and two summer workshops for Vanderbilt plus a week in Mexico, a week at NECC in San Antonio, with its SLedupotential workshop in planning stages, I've hardly had a chance to post. I think this may be the longest I've gone between posts, since, well, since ever...

That said, there's not a lot to share (isn't that enough? it seems not). I will mention that we got word last week that every classroom in the Lower School will have new paint and new carpet over the summer, which means that every book and pencil needs to be packed into boxes ready to be moved out of the room before the end of inservice. That means, as well, I'll need to label every single cable (I think--I'm still sorting out the plan) for re-assembly of my 22 computer lab. Neat.

We're going to Puerto Vallerta the second week in June, so if anyone has any suggestions for the trip, aside from don't drink the water ( :)), send 'em along.

I'm introducing my 3rd graders to Keyboarding for Kids today and for the rest of the week, toward subliminally implanting prior experience for access the first of next school year. Sure, they won't remember, but they'll "remember" and it'll make things go better as we get into serious keyboarding learning next year.

Buckle up, keep the faith, and hold on tight. It'll be summer before you know it. Picture is roses from my back yard. :)

Cheerio!

My "Little" School in the Top 60 College Prep Schools Nationwide

University School of Nashville fared well in an admittedly not-that-scientific survey of eight top colleges, according to a Wall Street Journal report from December 2007. The report, compiled by the Journal's "Weekend Journal" staff, looked at freshman classes at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins to see how many independent school students were enrolled from various schools in 2007, then divided that number by the number of graduates at the high school.

USN was the only southeastern school in the list.

Yay. Now the disclaimer from the announcement:

Of course, college placement is only one measure of a high school's success, and varies from year to year. Many high schools emphasized to us that they strive to find the right match for each student, not the college with the most cachet.

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Still, a nice little gem for a unique school that attempts to do more than it has the money to do. I'm proud.

Two New Videos Up Today AND Classroom 2.0 Live Meetups!

Amidst all kinds of crisis at school, with major network problems and our internet connectivity knocked out completely yesterday and only just spotty today, I did manage to upload one post to the SLeducation video ning and one to a new site for me, SchoolTube.

The former is a brief SLutorial about how to work the voting station at the Blogger's Hut on ISTE's ISTE Island in Second Life. I manage the Blogger's Hut and I'm working to make it as interactive as possible. The latter is some footage I took during our school's first Theatrelink IVC with Teacher Artist Joe White from the Manhattan Theatre Club. Pick your poison:

1) SLeducation SL video at ning.com
2) USN and Manhattan Theatre Club Theatrelink Session 1

I also want to call attention to friend Steve Hargadon's new online meetups about Classroom 2.0. Go see the schedule of upcoming meetups (using Talkshoe.com and, soon, Elluminate) and drop in on one soon!

So much to learn!

Agony and Ecstasy

So, the agony is in all the shortfalls one has regarding actual instruction and affect. The ecstasy is the good stuff (though the agony has its place in that queue). I'm doing a day long workshop tomorrow on aspects of Adobe CS3, an opportunity located by my Technology Director and supported by my school administration, and I'm reeeeeallly excited to be going. We just purchased Adobe CS3 and I want to know how to lead my teachers to places where they'll use it.

Today (the Ecstasy) I facilitated a fabulous interactive videoconference offered by the Vanderbilt Virtual School, a program about classical music featuring a chamber orchestra called Alias. Wonderful. Marvelous. Underappreciated and underutilized by the tens of thousands of classrooms across the nation that might have benefited from the chance to ask questions of professional classical musicians: The agony.

This week, my kids are all creating holiday cards for homeless folks and retirement village residents who may otherwise not receive anything loving or celebratory from friends or relatives, since--guess what--there are a lot of our fellow humans in the world who have neither. This will be facilitated by technology (.jpg files created in Powerpoint and the freeware Drawing for Children program) and by the local radio station Mix 92.9. I only hope they will utilize our kids' work even though some of it may not fit their "Christmas" mold. Our kids, in our eclectic, diverse, odd, inclusive, wonderful, one-of-a-kind independent school, will be creating "Holiday" cards. Sure, many will be Christmas cards, but we will provide Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, and other cards as well. By the end of the week we'll have over 300 of them that I'll print and deliver to the station. Wish us luck. In the long run, of course, it's all about the process, now, isn't it?

Today I also witnessed and archived some fabulous presentations from the freshman class at the School for Math and Science at Vanderbilt, using ustream.tv, and I hope that those experiences will inform my presentations in San Antonio come summer, at NECC2008. Wish me luck.

Peace to you and yours as we barrel into the holiday season. Remember balance, and strive, ever, for that.

Free Choices Thanksgiving Break Week!

The bar graph above illustrates (in order of their appearance in the lab) self-reported free choices exercised by my students in the Lower School Technology for Learning Lab this morning. It's the one day of classes this week, and as such I'm offering the full class session for free choice, as long as each time a student makes a selection it's noted on the board.

The graph was created in Google Documents, which we'll be using soon in the upper grades!

Everyone have a safe and fun and thankful break!

A Vision of Students Today, from Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch is, as David Warlick notes today, "at it again." Wesch (a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University) created the worldwide noted YouTube video "Web 2.0--The Machine is Us/ing Us," a digital ditty that earned him, among other noteriety, a 2007 WIRED magazine "Rave Award."

I thank David for the quick heads up on this one, via my RSS feed of his 2 Cents Worth blog. I took the time to post it here in part because it actually brought me to tears. I'd be interested to see your responses commented here.

Here's the link to Wesch's page containing the video, entitled "A Vision of Students Today," in turn embedded from YouTube.

(Not available at USN--blocked for bandwidth issues)

Got the Winter Crud but...

Lying flat on my back with a chest cold today but it does give me a chance to catch up, inbetween nappies. I've been most active in my Second Life blogging lately. So much happening there, not a great deal happening here. Excepting, well, hmmmm...

Awaiting word on the proposal applications for NECC2008 in San Antonio. I put in three: two for the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt and one for Second Life. The first two are similar, one a session with IVC and one a poster session with IVC capability. I've done several of the former but none of the latter and I'm hoping that if one is accepted over the other that the poster goes through. I didn't even make it to the poster floor last year in Atlanta but I recall from the year before that it can be a busy place; plus it'll be a challenge for me to put together something in a new (two hour!) format. I'm so proud of the work that's going on at the school that I'd love to get the chance to share it out face to face with fellow educators: It's a big task to implement a program that brings 100 public school high school students, 25 from each grade level (the ultimate goal), to a university research campus one day a week. The fact that such a small staff makes it happen is nothing short of remarkable. The use of Moodle as a LMS (Learning Management System) is going well, and everyone's learning, even the young and stellar faculty!

It's also delivering some great audio for my podcast, Snacks4theBrain!. If you haven't caught the last one, featuring portions of an interactive videoconference between School freshmen and the director of the National Ice Core Laboratory, do so post haste...

I've blogged about the SL 3-hour workshop presentation proposal but if you missed that you can find its meat, carved up and served to the reviewers' table by 9 chefs from 9 different states in the country, at the SLedupotential wiki.

Finally, my lovely wife has just completed a huge fundraising event for and at my school, and you can see something about that at artclectic.org, the event's website. Due to the work of many volunteers it was immensely successful (and I should say that it is a testament to her capable and untiring work all year long that it even happened!), raising let's-just-say a bundle of discretionary funding for my school, including funding for teacher professional development and for its exemplary need-based scholarship program. artclectic (no caps) is also what my school director likes to say a "friendraiser," this year achieving great mention and excellent review in the local press and nothing but superlative comments from everyone I talked to. For me, it was a chance to see artists who are both world-class artists and wonderful human beings, some of whom I consider friends from the long association over the years Lee Ann's been making artclectic tick. To watch the little ones move through the stunning gallery on Education Day, especially, was both heartwarming and encouraging. I've been working on a video from that day, and when it's done I'll share it here!

Sigh, going back to sleep now...