Thank you for applying to the Google Teacher Academy at the Googleplex on June 25th. We’ve reviewed all the applications, and we recognize that you are doing some great things. As a result, we’ve placed your name on the Wait List. On Monday, June 9th, we will let you know if there is room to include you. You will have 24 hours to respond to us by the end of the day on Tuesday, June 10th.
The above is the e-mail I received on Thursday evening (Thursday morning, GoogleTime).
So, I’m not one of the 50 Definites, but I’m also not one of the 200+ Definitely Nots. I guess I am pretty pleased! I was not really expecting to get in, mostly due to the poor quality of my 1 minute video once it was uploaded to YouTube / GoogleVideo. And now, here I’ve gotten what I am viewing as honorable mention. Not bad, not bad at all! 🙂
But I still am not in, and thus I wait in In-Between-Land . . .
Some of you already know that this week I submitted my Google Teacher Academy application for this June’s session on the 25th in Mountain View, CA. I was pretty excited, as this is the first time that Google is accepting applications from outside of the immediate area of the GTA, and indeed, outside of the U.S.A. Woo hoo! (I heard about this Google news via the Infinite Thinking Machine Blog, btw. If that blog isn’t in your reader, get on it!)
What an experience for me just to put together the 1 minute required video. Fun, but definitely challenging. For my reflection and for your enjoyment (or perhaps mockery!), here are a few things I learned:
It is impossible for me to put my entire teaching philosophy about Classroom Innovation into 1 minute. Impossible! Perhaps I have too much to say…?
I can definitely type faster than I can write. The screen vids of me inking those memorable quotes across the screen of my tablet didn’t make the cut because I can’t ink three words in less than 9 seconds. But I can type three words in 4 seconds! (Thanks to my university days as a temp, I tell you!)
I have an incredibly talented partner who knows more about making music than I do, even on a computer. 😉 And I promise next time I will not ask him to do the music edits at 11 p.m. on a school night.
I have a lot to learn about using video software, though I have discovered that it doesn’t get much easier than iMovie.
The end of May is not a good time for me to be making movies (exams, report cards, people leaving, etc.). Mental note taken, stored, and written in cyberstone here. Amen. I think this vid would have been much better if I had not had 2398989712 things going on.
The difference in quality from my raw mp4 file (pretty good) to the Google Video / YouTube upload is REMARKABLE. My exported mp4 (using iMovie’s “Expert settings”) looks great — super sharp and clear. Upload to Google Vid / YouTube looks grainy and all around sucky. Anyone have tips on this? (Note that I am new to this kind of thing; most of my contributions to the digital world have happened via written text and photo. Video is a whole new (fun) ballgame.) Sadly, what this means is that the Google Earth portions of my video are not viewable in the way I intended. Wah.
I do not know enough about recording screen shots on video. Need to learn more about this.
And for those who are interested, the software / hardware I used:
Check out this article and the many references to bloggers who think that comments should be disabled on blogs. Read through those posts and consider whether or not you think it’s better to build community through comments or through conversations occurring across blogs–or maybe a combination of both. What, to your mind, is the purpose of comments on blogs and are we better served by encouraging people to respond to ideas on our blogs or over on their own blogs?
I read the article. Interesting. My short answer to the big question “Should we be commenting?”: it’s up to the blogger. Perhaps you want interaction on your own blog. Perhaps you don’t. Consider your purpose and audience and go from there. Incidentally, lots of non-blog websites offer a space for people to share and interact. Again, it depends on the purpose and what you hope to achieve. And perhaps you can turn on / off comments for a particular post, allowing you to play it by ear.
My perspective
If I didn’t want people to interact with me, I wouldn’t have started blogging in the first place. Whether that interaction comes via a trackback, a Tweet, or a comment makes little difference to me — I just want to connect. And enabling comments is an easy way for that to happen. As I said earlier, I have also realized recently that I often say more interesting and substantial things on other people’s blogs than I do on my own. I’m better at being invited than being the invitee, I guess.
Hi Adrienne –
