Techie Tuesday: 31 Day Challenge Days 12 - 20

Yes, I realize that today isn't Tuesday, but why not get a jump start on next week's blogging?  

I have finally completed another week of the 31 Day Challenge.  This was definitely a "one thing leads to another" challenge week for me.  I have gotten very good at day 12's task to introduce myself to other bloggers.  This task was much easier due to my twitter addiction:)  I decided to branch outside of my PLN and googled to find someone blogging about high school reform.  I found Mike's blog post about small learning communities.  I quickly emailed him an introduction and question about his work.

For day 14 we were asked to analyze our blog competition.  Mine is so new that I actually spend more time looking at other blogs for ideas not for competition:)  Day 15 asked us to make our posts sticky by adding rss feed to the bottom of posts.  So I created this feed image.  Im still working on getting it to work correctly.



I wasn't able to complete the day 16 challenge, because I can't add the code to my blog.  It was still informative to sign up and learn about the heat map. I might create one for our school website:) This led me to my most time consuming task...day 18:  sneeze page.  I decided to create a sneeze page about the 31 day challenge hopeing more of our teachers would decide to join at a later date.  When I went to add the page my theme caused the nav link to no longer be one nice neat line and instead became a double.  Im sure some of you can guess that this led me to searching for more themes...which led to creating a new header...which led to editing my widget sizes....

I guess it was time for a new look, but I really wanted to wait until summer to venture into a new theme.  I really want a three column so maybe that will come later.

Thank goodness the next two tasks were easy enough:) I already respond to all comments on my blog and interact with my PLN and readers frequently.  Ok, not so frequently over the past few weeks but I was snowed under:)

Adding the ACTION to Lights, Camera, ...

With some sadness we are officially ending our photography unit and moving on to applying some of these skills to our new unit Movie Making.  If you would like to see some of the photography projects, stop by my student blogs to view their photo books.  I was out the day they uploaded, so some might not be published until Monday afternoon.  

OK students, it is time to begin our Movie Making:)  Are you surprised to know that we are going to apply some of the same principals to movies?  Is there a particular photography technique you think movies, advertisements, etc use?

For every unit, we start out with research and move to organization.  We will combine these two for this unit and thus you will not complete a "Chat About It" for Movie Making.  We will start with two group storytelling activities and move to learning more about storytelling using the below video.

 
 

Then on to complete a quick storyboard using a movie clip.  You will complete this unit in four day, so it will be important to stay focused and ASK questions immediately!  Are you curious about your project? Well, you know I was at an apple training last week. Do you ever wonder what we do while we are gone?  Here is a hint:

Smoking Kills

Watch it a second time and count how many cuts (changes in camera view) there are in the movie.  What do you think our story starter was?

Your unit project will be a group movie with a common story starter (given in class).  Here are our standards and objectives for this unit:

Standards:  1, 2, 3, 6

Objectives (9-12): A, E, G, H, J, K