Having been away from the blog for the better part of the summer I came across Karl Fisch's Did you know? post last weekend. Like everyone else, I was completely blown away.

Karl put a very generous copyright on his work. On Monday and Tuesday I downloaded the powerpoint and mp3 files and started remixing Karl's work. Just a little bit. I took out reference to Karl's school, added a reference to mine and some Winnipeg and Canadian content.

On Wednesday we had an orientation day. Our first introduction to our students. I decided to wait another day before discussing the course outline. I showed them this movie ... the day my daughter Emilia started first grade:

We had a class discussion afterwards. Mostly, they were very quiet. I posted about it to their blogs and they have been reacting in the comments ever since. Just this morning I finally posted a link to the video. You can see it, and my student's reactions on their blogs: Pre-Cal 30S (Fall '06), Pre-Cal 40S (Fall '06) (this blog had a "bug." It was deleted and rebuilt. The 10 comments left by students beforehand were preserved and reposted as a single long comment by myself. Authour's names were preserved), AP Calculus AB (2006-2007).

I feel there are a number of lessons to be learned from Karl's presentation. The most important of which is: To be successful in the very near future will require that everyone become life long learners. What students should take from school is learning how to learn.

As you read my student's comments you'll note that they confuse "computational ability" with intelligence. Something I have to clear up with them. ;-)

On a technical note, I learned how to convert a powerpoint presenation into a movie while doing this. The steps I took on my mac:

• »In PowerPoint, save as a movie.
• »Open iMovie. Drag the PowerPoint movie into iMovie window. (It took about 15-20 minutes for this operation to complete.)
• »Click on media. Drag the mp3 file into iMovie. (Loaded fairly quick.)
• »Edited the movie to match the length of the mp3 file; cut "seconds" from individual slides. It seems that the movie gives a greater amount of time for each slide than was in the original PowerPoint file.
• »Export as an mp4 file.

I wanted to share what I learned. It also occured to me that this might be a good way to create presentations for K12 Online 2006 -- create slides in PowerPower and use something like Audacity to create the mp3 file. We had hoped to have the conference blog up by this weekend. Right now it looks like we should have it operational by Monday or Tuesday -- no promises but we're working hard on it. We'll also make badges for your blog available at that time.

Tags: k12online, k12online06, Karl_Fisch, Did_you_know