Make it interesting

I recently went to Howe's Caverns and made a video about my visit! The video was filmed using a flip camera, then edited with youtube video editor. Making a virtual field trip is something I've been wanting to do since 2005 but never put all the pieces together and did. The concept models my interest in the natural world and brings meaning to sometimes abstract topics into focus. Looking back I understand why it took so long to put the pieces together. Probably the biggest reason is the delivery platform. This idea became much clearer after attending Dr. Wesley Fryer's presentation back in November where he used metaphors such as the "ship" to describe the delivery platform (see slide #12 below):

Roadmap to Blended Learning (4 Nov 2011)

View more presentations from Wesley Fryer

So the ship in my case is my school wordpress blog. Its been up for about a year now and I am really comfortable with using it (over 150 posts (about 50 from students) later!). I even have the wordpress application on my HTC Incredible which lets me post virtually anytime and anywhere. As a delivery platform it is about as good as it gets for my purposes although I have had some problems with student authoring permissions within wordpress (they can't embed videos or any html) but we've used wikispaces as a workaround for that problem. If I had tried this back in '05, I wouldn't have had anywhere to share the video. This is because I was still thinking about: 1) developing an online presence and 2)how to use youtube for my students. Not sharing on the internet sort of defeats the purpose of doing it in the first place. I'm so glad I broke the ice on doing this because now, I think it'll get a lot easier! These videos will add an interesting element to my student's classroom experience, and hopefully will motivate them to make their own virtual field trips when they go somewhere interesting. That way we'll all make it more interesting because bringing your audience along virtually is really cool.