Resources for Educators

Do You Welcome Visitors to Your School for Site Visits?
Yes! We have had a significant number of teams, both from individual schools (public and private) and school districts around the country visit with us. Visits are very flexible, and a typical visit consists of:

• collecting initial questions or areas of focus from the visiting team members
• a Q&A time with a group of Mabry students
• meeting with Dr. Tyson to discuss philosophical framework, resources and processes, how the Mabry story began and is sustained, Mabry's future plans, logical first steps for replication in different school settings, and time to answer questions and/or provide demonstrations of how to...
• classroom visits as desired

Wendy Pettett is our administrator who coordinates site visits. To minimize disrupting day-to-day school operations, we schedule visits once a month.

How Long Has Mabry Been Blogging?
While some teachers began blogging during the 2004 - 2005 school year, MabryOnline.org did not begin until July, 2005. Not counting any digital media files, we average serving over 1,000,000 files per month. Last month, February, 2006, with the Jekyll Island Science Expedition going online in the Mabry Global Learning Collaborative, we served up over 1.5 million files! Interestingly, the two peek times for server traffic are at 2:00PM and 6:00PM. I hope I know why!

What Software Do You Use for Blogging?
When we first began blogging in 2004, Mabry purchased an account at TypePad. The account provided us with an unlimited number of blogs and authors to those blogs. TypePad actually hosts the blogs so the users do not need any expertise in installing the blogging system. The disadvantage is a limited amount of disk space and bandwidth on the TypePad server. With a very limited number of teachers blogging during the 2004 - 2005 school year for only about 7 months, we exceeded the account limits. TypePad was generous in not making us pay any additional fees. However, I suspect that we would have had to go with a more comprehensive account plan if we had had every teacher in our school blogging all year. Because of this, we chose to setup our web presence differently for the 2005 - 2006 school year.

MabryOnline uses MovableType as the blogging software. We purchased a school-wide license. As a school, the folks at MovableType were very generous with the license agreement. We purchased web hosting from DreamHost. The domain name, MabryOnline.org, was purchased through GoDaddy. I installed MovableType on the DreamHost server, built all of the initial blogs for each teacher, and re-wrote all of the MovableType index files and CSS files. Putting it mildly, this was no small task! But the system has been self-sustaining and requires little upkeep.

As large as MabryOnline has become, to date (7th months) we have only used 1.7% of the disk space allotted in DreamHost's smallest account plan. The account plan also allows for generous bandwidth. However, very importantly, all of our digital media files (podcasts, and movie files) are hosted on the county's server. Even compressed for the web, these files are very large! MabryOnline links to these files. Unfortunately, at present, we have no way of knowing how much traffic we have at the county server or the amount of bandwidth being used by that traffic on the county server. Be advised as you plan your setup: podcasts and online video consume a great deal of bandwidth. Since they are very popular with students, they earn a large number of hits. Plan accordingly.

To help you put this in perspective, last month we transfered almost 13 gigabytes of data over the internet not counting a single digital media file! This is primarily text data files and small image files. When you consider that some of our digital media files are hundreds of megabytes each, you can see that just playing such files 10 times adds up very quickly!

If you choose to go with DreamHost, please tell them that Dr. Tyson from MabryOnline.org referred you. They have a wonderful referral plan that will benefit our account.

Finally, we use ecto, a little program that makes posting to our blogs as easy as sending an email. Additionally, as teachers become more comfortable with the blogs, ecto makes posting pictures easy. It also has other very, very powerful features! Adriaan, who wrote the program, was very generous with his site license agreement with our school! I highly recommend his little program. The teachers love it, and it will work with a large number of blogging systems!

What Equipment and Software Do You Use to Create Podcasts?
We use iLife '06 installed on Apple iBooks. iLife is a suite of software products that comes free on every Mac you purchase. The software suite contains: iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, iWeb, and iDVD. One of the most powerful aspects of this software is that all of its components work seamlessly with each other.

Here is an example of a typical workflow: the students shoot pictures with a digital camera. They plug the camera into the iBook. The computer sees the camera and automatically launches iPhoto. iPhoto asks if the user wants to import the photos. The user clicks "yes." The photos automatically go into iPhoto. The user launches GarageBand and records the spoken dialogue into the computer. (It can be as simple as clicking record and talking to the computer.) The pictures just imported into iPhoto appear ready to be dropped where the user wants them in the podcast. The user adds music from iTunes or from GarageBand to the podcast. Both sources of music are available to the user right there in GarageBand just like the pictures were! The user then simply exports the podcast to a file to upload to their school server. Or, the user could export the podcast to iWeb for automatic posting to their .Mac account. Oh, and I shouldn't forget, you can export the podcast to iTunes so the next time you plug in your iPod, the podcast is synced onto your iPod so you have it with you where ever you go.

We create all of our video podcasts using iMovie. These can be uploaded to a server, burned to a DVD (with iDVD), played on the computer, or exported to iTunes so it can be synced to your iPod the next time you plug in your video iPod to your computer. What is most astounding is the ease of use this suite of products affords the user, for very little money, without sacrificing professional quality that rivals that of any DVD you would purchase in the store! This simply couldn't be done just a few years ago without enormous financial investments beyond the scope of any public school budget!

I also use Soundtrack Pro to reduce any undesired ambient noise when I record podcasts. For example, the location I use to record is just beneath an air conditioner/heating vent. The blowing air makes a very loud and annoying noise. Using Soundtrack Pro, I can easily and quickly eliminate all of the noise without adversely impacting the speaking.

You may also consider purchasing a USB mic. We use this Logitech solution, which is uni-directional. Depending on what you want to record, choose a uni-directional microphone (which minimizes noise in the room), or an omni directional mic (which would be better for recording a group of people speaking or performing). USB mics range in price but are rather inexpensive.

And finally, you may want to purchase a portable digital recorder. Many good models exist on the market today. We use the Marantz PMD660. You can purchase a larger card for the recorder, like you would for a camera, to extend recording time. The Marantz PMD660 can run on batteries, is small, lite, and does an excellent job of recording stereo in the field without any additional equipment. We simply plug it into the iBook as an external hard drive to import the recorded audio files into GarageBand. Shop around for the best price on the product at Froogle.com.

What Resources Are Available for Windows?
Our experience base is with the simplicity and elegance of the Apple solutions that reliably and easily create professional digital media products. I have very limited knowledge of any comparable solutions for Windows. If our readers would like to share with me your expertise in this area, I would welcome it.

Here is the limited information I know as of this writing:

• I am unaware of any solution on Windows to create enhanced podcasts. If you know of any, please share!
• Audacity runs reliably on Windows (Macs and Unix) and will produce audio-only podcasts. It also has noise elimination capacity. As of this writing Audacity is a free download.
• MovieMaker, part of the Windows operating system, will produce movies. I don't know any gentle way to say this, so I'll just blurt it out there: in my opinion, they look horrendous--not because of the user but because of the limitations of the software.
• Adobe makes some movie-making software solutions for Windows. These products produce some very nice results.
• I am unsure if you can convert a movie file from a Windows format into a video podcast. If this can be done, you would probably have to use QuickTime Pro (from Apple) for Windows. Again, I invite the knowledge and expertise of those more knowledgeable than I.

Where Do We Start?
At Mabry, we began during the 2001 - 2002 school year with 10 iBooks and 1 digital video camera. The film festival was born. We actually astounded ourselves that we were able to create movies that were really amazingly good!

Each year the quality of the movies the students produced grew exponentially. The training we provided improved year after year. The scope of the festival grew beyond our wildest expectations. Now many of these student-created digital movie products are on MabryOnline.org and can be located through the iTunes store.

We began blogging in 2004 - 2005. We began podcasting at the beginning of the 2005 - 2006 school year. We started blogging and podcasting at these times because, basically, that's when the technology was becoming available! Today, with the technology that is available, we would start differently.

Consider beginning with blogging--you, personally. Get to know what this is, and see what it can be for an educator. You will be hooked. Then think about adding audio-only podcasts to your blogs. Then consider enhanced podcasts. Finally explore video podcasting. The train may perhaps leave the station slowly, but it will pick up steam faster than you could begin to anticipate. Simply keep the focus on learning and exploring, on creating new ways of knowing.

I would encourage you to consider the resources, support, access, and training. This process can be fun and empowering beyond belief. Train students early on. They get it! This entire question, "Where do we start?", deserves a great deal of conversation, thought, and excitement. I encourage you to come visit with us so we can begin that discussion.

Have You Written a Book We Can Read?
No, I haven't. I need to! I just don't have the required time right now. But I can recommend some resources to you about what I think. The School Library Journal published this interview with me. David Warlick has published these two podcast interviews with me. I also highly recommend Podcasting Hacks for a comprehensive overview of all things podcasting. Well, not all things and not comprehensive. Video podcasting didn't exist when this book was written just a few months back. But it is an excellent resource guide!