A Remarkable Life

Nanna Brown and II know this rather personal post is out of character for this blog, but I felt I wanted to post it anyway…  I hope you don’t mind.

My grandmother died this week. The funeral was today, and it was a tough day to get through.  I was brave on the outside because my mum needed me to be, but on the inside, I cried a lot.

I really loved my Nanna Brown. She was an extraordinary woman who, at nearly 98, lived through most of the past century.  I had never really stopped to think about it, but when I looked at the list of world events she’d lived through it was astonishing.  I know we talk a lot about change, and the pace of change, and how important it is to deal with the changing world we live in, but in my nan’s lifetime she lived through both World Wars, as well as an assortment of other wars and a Great Depression.

She was just over 1 year old when the first transatlantic flight was made, 15 years old when Penicillin was discovered, 24 when construction started on the Golden Gate Bridge, and just a few months older when the Hindenburg disaster happened.

At 32 she saw the Atomic Bomb drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she was 39 when the world’s first jet airliner went into commercial use, and 48 when the first human went into space.

At 50 years old, she watched the construction of the Berlin Wall, and at 77, she watched it come down again.  When she was 80 the European Union was founded, and she was 88 when New York’s Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11.

She grew up before television, before radio, before cars, before the Internet. While she was alive, so was Gustav Eiffel, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Sigmund Freud, Walt Disney and Henry Ford. She was born before, and died after, John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Benito Mussolini.

What a remarkable period of history to have lived through!

The last few conferences I’ve been to all had keynote speakers who repeated the same basic message… the world is changing and we better get good at dealing with change.  As much as we edtech types like to carry on about adaptability and the need to learn to deal with dramatic changes in our world, we sometimes tend to forget just how much the world can change in one person’s lifetime even if that person grew up before the invention of the Internet, Social Networking and the rise of China.

I was really close to my nan, and I’m glad I was with her just a few days before she died. She was a truly remarkable lady.

If you’re interested, this is the eulogy that I wrote and read at the church today…

A couple of days ago, I was asked what I remembered most about Nan.  There are lots of memories of course, and although I’d not really thought about it before, I’m starting to realise that many of these memories have profoundly affected who I am as a person, the way I see the world and the way I’ve grown up.

  • When I was very young – before I started school – I remember waking up one morning to be told by Nan “we’re going to Japan this morning” and finding a little low table in the middle of the dining room floor.  Nan had set a Japanese breakfast on the floor and we had to sit on cushions and eat with chopsticks.  Nan taught us to have a sense of the whimsical, a sense of the unexpected, a sense of curiosity about the world.
  • When we were young, my cousins and I used to put on plays in Nan’s house.  We were often short of a character, so Nan would volunteer to dress up as an extra character in these childhood plays. The one that I think we all remember the best – because even to this day we still talk about it – was our production of Robinson Crusoe, and we can still see Nan playing the part of the savage boy, Man Friday, dressed in a leopard skin stole, her hair all messed up and her face painted black with boot polish.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of humour, a sense of fun and to never take ourselves too seriously.
  • When I was quite young, I remember going with Nan to the African Lion Safari in Sydney. There was a rather long, high swinging rope bridge there and as I walked across it with Nan it started to swing dramatically.  I was petrified and started to cry and scream. Nan calmed me down by explaining that it was ok, it was safe. That the people who built it obviously didn’t build it to fall down, so why would it fall down?  As she unfolded the logic of why the bridge was safe, my worry started to disappear and suddenly everything seemed ok.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of bravery, a sense of calm, and most of all, a sense of commonsense.
  • A couple of years ago, we took Nan for a drive down to Denman and Yarrawa, where she grew up as a child. She loved going for drives, and would always be pointing things out, telling stories, admiring the Hunter Valley landscape which she loved so much. She managed to find the house in which she was born and as we drove around the area she told us lots of stores from her childhood.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of history, a sense of self, a sense of heritage.
  • I remember sitting down at a family dinner one day, with the whole family there, and realising that there was one too many plates set at the table.  When I told Nan that she’d miscounted, she replied that, no, she just likes to set an extra place in case somebody unexpectedly dropped by… she wantedl them to feel welcome and to be able to join us without feeling like they were intruding.  Nan taught us to have a sense of welcome, a sense of pride, and sense of giving.
  • And that’s the thing that stands out the most about Nan to me… her love of people. In all the years I knew Nan, I never once heard her talk poorly about anybody.  She always seemed to find  the good side of other people, and always managed to find something nice to say about them.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of goodness, a sense of the positive.  A sense of humanity.

There are so many things that Nan taught us all. When we lose someone we love, it’s hard to not feel sad and upset and to grieve about the loss of what we no longer have. But I know that everyone in this room could come up with a list of their favourite “Nan moments”… those treasured times when she made you laugh, or made you think, or made you see the world a little bit differently to the way you’d seen it before.  Although Nan isn’t with us anymore, if we can remember back to those special moments she created with each of us, I’m sure we’ll find that there are ways in which they’ve touched our lives that will live on for a very long time.

I’d like to think that it’s those moments that are the real legacy Nanna Brown leaves with us.

Ideas for End of Year Slideshows

Slide ViewerIt’s that time of year when I start to get a lot of teachers at school asking me for assistance with creating an end of year slideshow of photographs of their classes, often with an intention to create a DVD that can be sent home as a memento of the year.

It’s a lovely idea, and I encourage it.  The kids love it, and it’s a lovely way to finish the year.

To assist with this, I thought I’d offer a few tips and suggestions on making slideshows…

  • Start by gathering all the photos you intend to include into a single folder.  It’s much easier if all your assets are already gathered in one place before you begin working with them.
  • Use a piece of software well suited to the task.  Although PowerPoint is often suggested, it’s a bit of a dog when it comes to putting these types of presentations together.  PowerPoint is the right tool for slideware presentations, but it’s actually not very good at doing “slideshows” with music.  The end product of PowerPoint is, well, a PowerPoint file, and it requires PowerPoint to view it, so it can’t just be “played”in the same way a video can.
  • Instead of PowerPoint, try a tool like Photostory.  It’s much easier to get your photos in the desired order, add music and narration soundtracks, add titles, etc.  Plus, it gives you an actual video file at the end so everything is nice and self contained.  It’s the right tool for the task, and does a much better job than PowerPoint!
  • You could also try a web 2.0 service such as www.animoto.com, which makes amazing high definition slideshows with only a few mouse clicks.  Feed it your photos, choose a template and you’re done! Both myself and the school have Animoto Pro accounts, so you can use this to make your shows if you like.  Just see me if you want the login details.
  • You can copy the final slideshow file onto a disk, either a CD or a DVD, as a way of distributing it.  However, getting your video onto a DVD – that actually plays in a DVD player, as a DVD – requires several more steps and some more specialised software.  Ask me for more details if this is what you want to do (and be prepared for more work to do it!)
  • If you want to make multiple copies of the finished disk, there is a CD/DVD duplication tower up in IT Services.  If you take your master copy up there, and a stack of blank disks, that’s the fastest way to make lots of copies.

Then there is the thorny issue of copyright for the music… (sigh)

  • Please respect copyright when you choose your music!  If you just want to make a slideshow with a music backing track, you are in a very grey area (copyright wise) if you just rip commercially available music from a CD, or download it from the web.  If you were just using it in class, then you’d probably be fine, but if you intend to make multiple copies and distribute them to parents… well, personally, I think you’re taking a big risk.
  • While you may never get caught for flaunting copyrighted music, you never know whose parent just happens to be a copyright lawyer.  And you’re certainly not modelling good ethical use of media to your students.  If they see you ripping commercial music from CD, or downloading illegal music files from the net, then you’re just encouraging them to do the wrong thing.  Is that really what you want to do?
  • There are plenty of free and legal music sources you can use, where the music has been released under a Creative Commons license, or some other Open License.  Sure, it’s not going to be Top 40 stuff, but there’s lots of great musicians out there making amazing music that they quite willingly give away for free use.  Why risk a copyright violation (and worse, set a bad example for the kids!) when there are plenty of legal, ethical alternatives you can use.  Do you REALLY need a soundtrack by Pink?
  • For copyright free music, take a look at www.jamendo.com or www.freeplaymusic.com.  It’s amazing what’s out there.

Photo Credit: Slide Viewer by bcostin
NB: This post is based on an email I sent to all the staff at school

A Little More Scratch

Towards the end of the 20 minute video I made for K12 Online, Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch, I very briefly mentioned two other things that I would have liked to say more about but simply didn’t have enough time in the time allowed.

The first thing was the use of Scratch on the iPad and the iPhone.  I mentioned that there was a Scratch iOS app, but didn’t have time to elaborate.  Since then, a few people contacted me about this app and wanted to know more, telling me that the couldn’t find it in the Apple App Store.  The reason you can’t find it is unfortunately quite simple… it’s been removed from the App Store and is no longer available so unless you got a copy of it prior to it being removed, you’re out of luck I’m afraid.

So if you missed out, sorry… but if it’s any consolation, the Scratch app only allowed you to browse the Scratch website and then execute existing Scratch projects.  You couldn’t actually manipulate code or use it as a tool for creating programs, so all those schools implementing iPad programs and getting all excited about the possibility of doing Scratch on the iPads… sorry, it was never a possibility anyway.

But the main thing I wanted to follow up on was the PicoBoards.  I was put onto the PicoBoards by my buddy Martin Levins, and they are proving to be a fabulous extension to what you can do with Scratch. Essentially they are a circuit board  with a bunch of sensors on them that you connect to your computer via USB so that Scratch can directly address the sensors on the board.  With a rheostat (voltage slider), microphone, light sensor, button, and four resistance circuits, the Picoboards open up all sorts of possibilities for creating software based programs that interact directly with the real world.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah… there’s lots more I could say about them, but just watch the video. And then go buy a few.  Your kids will really like them.  Trust me.