Windows MovieMaker – RIP

I heard today that Windows MovieMaker is no more! Double checking when I got home I discovered that as of January 10, 2017, MovieMaker was discontinued with no replacement.

What a bittersweet moment! This workhorse of a multimedia program was a staple in my classes for many years, before we had iPads and the wizardry of iMovie and many other apps. No, in those days, we had MovieMaker and it was fantastic!

Looking back to nearly 15 years ago, teachers at our school only used the computer lab during their assigned periods for word processing and sometimes research – to be written up via more word processing. Myself included!

Then, my friend Len told me about this app that was built into Windows and therefore available for free on all our machines. He taught his class, then me, and then one of his students came along on Day 1 to help me out.

I never looked back.

MovieMaker might have been a bit clunky but by gosh you could search for and save photos off the Internet, make a slideshow, and add a soundtrack (I am sure I could still hum Blues Highway if I put my mind to it!) – all on a computer in the lab. This simple process alone called upon skills that were new to students. For example, it provided an authentic reason to discuss and insist on using network drives instead of the local C: drives. In later years, it prompted lessons on Creative Commons photos and music.

For a long time, I started every year with MovieMaker projects. It was definitely a case of introducing something quite new to the students. In Year 1 of MovieMaker we started simple with some personal projects. To this day I still have Who Let The Dogs Out in my iTunes, after buying it for a student to use:)

But several years later my Grade 8 history students used MovieMaker to make incredibly evocative photo essays comparing the lives of children in other countries to their own in Canada. We always built a sharing component into their work, and the discussions and metacognition value were enormous.

The height of our use of MovieMaker occurred in the years of Speaker’s Corner. We had a large free-standing brick-wall backdrop from the theatre, and a tripod and small video camera – containing mini-cassette tapes. All this apparatus lived in my core classroom for a month. My friend Len came through again and showed me how to work the camera. Then, for a month all my media classes in the computer lab ran as follows: pick a topic, start researching and creating a basic slideshow into which the video would be dropped. Meanwhile, across the hall to my classroom they would go in small groups to film themselves. I tried to make the task as realistic as possible, with short speeches and all production work done by the students themselves. I kept away from the room, and left them to show some responsibility. I was never disappointed.

My work came later. Every Saturday for three weeks I would go to school and transfer the speech files off the cassette tapes, to name them and store them on the shared network drive where the students could pick them up and place them as the centrepiece of their opinion slide shows.

With three or four classes, this was usually 100+ projects. What a production!

We also held a film festival in the theatre during the last week of school to screen a wide range of projects and vote on an equally wide range of “awards.” I still remember one popular Speaker’s Corner. Many years ago, this student chose to speak about gay rights, and the theme of tolerance. I still remember one of her slides: “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get one!”.

I have to say, the values I learned through the process of learning MovieMaker and regularly integrating multi-media forms of response into my classes has stayed with me to this day. Yes I will miss it, but I am equally happy to be learning new apps and spreading the word about the wonderful variety of assessment forms now available to us.

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Girls and Tech

OK, this is totally unscientific. But my hypothesis today is that social media are helping to create a new class of tech over-achievers - and these IT stars are female.
Teaching several sections of Grades 5-8 IT there is no shortage of observations to be made. It is always so interesting to watch the students who excel when you put them in front of a computer, sometimes in sharp contrast to their achievements in other academic areas. Each year I always have a student or two who are unbelievably proficient – lightning fast on the keyboard, knowledgeable about many different softwares, able to learn intuitively when given a new and unfamiliar app or task, able to teach others in a sort of shorthand.
(This is not to say that the end products created by these students are necessarily better in all cases than the other learners. Occasionally, yes, their innate ability does translate into a superior thoughtful or creative project but, just as often, others are able to succeed as well, at their own pace, with beautiful, well-designed work.)
What I am really talking about is a natural facility with technology combined with an intuitive speed in learning and leaps in achievement that far outpace their peers.
In the past, these students of mine have without exception been boys - in fact that special category of boy who spends many waking hours in the gaming world day in and day out.
This year, for the first time, my most technically intuitive student is female.
“Erin” is in my grade 8 core class so I have the opportunity to see a broad range of her work. She is very bright, but doesn’t put forth a big effort, and by and large lacks confidence in subjects such as English, math and history. Her marks could be high, but are actually average. She is pretty and very social, has many friends, both girls and boys, likes to listen to music especially Justin Bieber, and just seems like a regular Grade 8 girl.
Right away in September I noticed that she seemed to have quite a few keyboard shortcuts mastered. In one lesson, I was teaching the students how to use the print screen button to put a screenshot from Google Streetview into Paint and then save it as a jpeg. Erin was way ahead of everyone else and hadn’t asked any questions. I walked by and asked her how her work was going and she just shrugged and said, “Fine, I use print screen all the time.” I have to say that is the first time I have ever had that response.
As time went by, I observed that she was always finishing tasks early, demonstrating an excellent graphic design sense, exploring new apps to the fullest not just doing the basics, eager to have free time on the Internet, and able to follow complex instructions easily and also to troubleshoot problems that the class was bogged down in.
A month or two later, I called Erin out into the hall during IT, following up with my usual, “No, you’re not in trouble.”
I told her I just wanted to ask her a couple of questions about computers, and I started with, “Do you play a lot of video games?” I thought I already knew the answer. During our Halloween party, I had let the kids bring in an Xbox and I noticed that they were trying to teach her how to play the games.
As I predicted, she shot me a skeptical look and said emphatically, “No.”
I then asked if she spent a lot of time on Facebook or other social media sites. “Yes,” was the answer. She was reticent to talk any more and didn’t really understand what I was trying to explain to her, so back she went to her computer.
I think Erin has in fact spent a huge amount of very enjoyable time investigating Facebook, configuring her own profile, accessing a wide range of other pages, and uploading content. Not to mention the time spent on what I think is her mom’s cell phone and her iPod Touch. It is also interesting that money or the lack of it does not seem to have stood in Erin’s way. Our school community is largely rural and at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum and Erin is not an exception to this profile.
Is this a shift? Are girls now going to outpace boys the field of technology? Who knows? A real study is needed. But I am very happy to see that as tech is evolving into the social realm it is being (unconsciously) used as a stepping stone by girls to achieve at the same pace as their game-addicted male peers. I also often take the time to encourage all of my students to enroll in tech courses as high school, from business software-type courses to the intro to programming options.

CKLW: The Big 8

I can’t even remember how many times I have tried to recount to people what it was like growing up in Windsor in the 60s and 70s. I admit to major nostalgia, and have set the novel I am perpetually revising there, in that period.
Part of my explanation always has to do with the music. How to describe to others what it was like, how I was positive our experience was different from elsewhere. Who else can name “What Does It Take” (Jr. Walker and the All Stars) and “Rainy Night In Georgia” (Brooke Benton) as their favourite songs from elementary school? I mean really.
Well folks, finally I have a full and complete answer. I just bought and watched RADIO REVOLUTION: The Rise and Fall of The Big 8. No wonder I was having trouble. It took writer/director Michael McNamara 72 minutes to do justice to Windsor in the era I grew up in. (To buy it, and I strongly recommend this – go here http://radiorevolutiondvd.com/ )
The documentary is a Gemini winner, fast-paced and full of amazing background on the radio station and the songs that we were glued to… We would have said 24/7 if the expression had existed.
At the same time, I was totally unprepared for the factual side of the film – the immense musical, cultural and news achievements of the station. OK it was important to us, but I just had no idea about the huge role that the station played in both Windsor and Detroit. Any viewers will recognize the huge names of Canadian media, who started out in the border city, at CKLW.
In our world of Grade 7 and 8, we were obsessed with music. Artists from Detroit and Memphis and elsewhere in Canada and the States, but really it was the Motown r’n’b tunes that were the soundtrack to our lives. Little did we know that CKLW was itself responsible for making these songs hits across most of the northeastern States. We just knew which ones we were in love with.
The mom of our friend Pam worked for a Detroit radio station which, having seen the movie, I believe must have been “Keener.” One day Pam showed up with tear-off pads of Keener’s Top 30 listings, and before long we were collecting the weekly Keener charts, the CKLW charts and charts put out by CHYR in Leamington.
We all listened to this music primarily on transistor radios. In the fashion of the day, many of the girls had long, straight hair. Our friend Geri’s sister, in Grade 8, could weave the earphone up through her hair and listen in class. I even remember that her favourite song was “Chain, Chain, Chain” (Aretha Franklin). And I still remember the first time I heard “These Eyes” (The Guess Who). On the radio, being driven to a city-wide mass band rehearsal one Saturday morning, jammed into the back seat of some parent’s car with four or five other girls. I learned in Radio Revolution that airtime on CKLW was a major reason the song became such a massive international hit.
Now, the reason I know Windsor music was different from elsewhere stems from our family camping trips. Four kids, Ford Falcon, tent trailer and cat. As the oldest, I went on three: Grade 9, around Ontario, Grade 10, west coast, Grade 11, east coast. Then mercifully I entered the work world and stayed home. On our travels, my sister and I were appalled. There was nothing to listen to from Windsor to Vancouver and back again. We discovered that three songs were in constant rotation in Canada: Close To You (The Carpenters), Snowbird (Anne Murray) and Sweet City Woman (The Stampeders). We actually stopped replacing the batteries in our radios during these trips.
Then we got to Calgary and our cousins were playing Carole King’s “Tapestry.” And the BeeGees. Honestly we had never heard of either one, but ended up liking them anyway. The cousins had never heard of any of the groups we liked.
In one final music memory, Alice Cooper played our high school gym about six months before “Eighteen” became a hit, via CKLW. The band wrecked the boys’ changing room. And we never went because the school grapevine said he was going to bite the head off a live chicken.

Facebook for the high seas

FROM JULY
I was talking to our NL neighbour Clara about technology, and she described a heart-stopping use of FB that she had experienced this past year.
Someone she is friends with began posting a series of photos, one after the next, of a boat in jeopardy, fighting huge waves and basically almost sinking. She said it was horrifying and impossible to take your eyes off. To the viewer it seemed impossible that the vessel could survive. Then, with each successive image more FB users began commenting, sending messages of hope and support for those on board. And presumably for the friend or family member who was taking the pictures and posting them.
Miraculously the boat made it back safely.
Citizens have been documenting events and disasters and tragedies since the technology became available, but there is something about placing the camera almost within an event of natural violence and making the photos immediately available that is even more thought-provoking.
Watching the movie The Perfect Storm, as terrifying as the images of the Andrea Gail are, fighting her way up the sky-high side of a hurricane-induced wave, you still know that the sequence was created in a studio. Secondly, on some level you know that the crew died alone.
What the FB pictures were doing was putting the viewers into an ongoing potential disaster, hoping that the crew would prevail and desperately hoping that they would not witness a real-time tragedy.
Since getting our house in Rose Blanche I have subscribed to the Twitter feed for CBC NL. It is shocking how many lives are still lost at sea every year. I would be surprised if more than a month ever goes by without a marine search taking place. Some have happy endings and far too many do not.
Recently the communities on the south west coast banded together to carry out an exercise in branding. We read the account in the local paper, which we subscribe to and read back in Ontario. They wanted to decide on a moniker for the 45-kilometre-long Highway 470 that starts in Port aux Basques and ends in Rose Blanche. Two of the alternatives were The Shipwreck Highway and The Granite Highway.
To tourists without a marine background it’s no contest. The Shipwreck Highway is evocative in a historical, romantic way, summoning forth the stories of bravery and tragedy that characterize the area. As one councilor told us, “This is isn’t any Anne of Green Gables fiction. This is all real.”
But they went with The Granite Highway, for the breathtaking beauty of the route, waves of old mountains rolling to the north and east and skirting the ocean itself to the south. But still. The Granite Highway. Would it tempt you?
The account in the paper said that people thought The Shipwreck Highway was just too depressing. And if your friends and family were a part of that particular heritage it must be. So I’m wrong. To paraphrase the councilor it’s not marketing, “It’s real.”