Perennial Passion

Paulo Freire says in his book, "The Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage", that we, as educators, should critically reflect. I am going to take this opportunity to do just that within this blog post. My presentation at Encyclomedia on Friday, the 18th of September ,focused on digital storytelling and how the library can be an engine of growth in your school. To demonstrate this I created a digital story after interviewing a teacher with 62 years of classroom experience who, by the way, is still teaching - alternative ed! Mrs. Jerry Phillips has taught everything and everybody including Lt. Governor Jari Askins who was in attendance. Lt. Gov. Askins presented Mrs. Phillips with an honorary Lt. Governship which is only the third time ever done by her. The digital story represented well Mrs. Phillips ' legacy that she created during her distinguished career. As far as the mechanics of the presentation, the technology worked beautifully. I was determined to figure out why last year at Encyclomedia I could not "full screen" a video that had been uploaded to the COV website; downloading a newer version of Adobe FlashPlayer was the answer. I recorded my presentation using my Olympus digital recorder received during a COV workshop and reflected upon that. Content and delivery much improved over last year. Practise makes perfect. Approximately 65 people attended. I also used Google presentation to access and show my presentation. It worked great. I love Google! It also uploaded easily as an html into my blog at http://whit.edublogs.org/. The next thing I would like to try is to upload this digital story, Perennial Passion, into Google video and then link to my Google presentation. I did try but the video exceeded the 10 minute length requirement. I will "prune" and try again as my plans are to use this topic and presentation during the Master Teacher Conference in June, 2010. The COV project has definitely helped me grow as an educator. It is the quintessential professional development as I stated at Encyclomedia; teachers teaching teachers.