Back To School: If You Don't Use It...

Being an instructional coach has its major advantages. One of the major downsides, however, is not blogging as often. My job isn't very blog-worthy right now, but not because I'm not busy. In fact, I'm busier now than I've ever been and that's great for everyone, except for me and my desire to reflect on my learning as my career progresses. Therefore, it is always a pleasure when a teacher tosses an email my way:

Hey John, I'm wondering if you can come by this Friday to work with my students on how to use YouTube video editor. If you don't have time, we can reschedule.

 YEAH! THIS is why I love my job. Getting the chance to go in and work with teachers and students is a blessing that I will never take for granted. Today, I was able to teach studetns about using YouTube video editor to create a PSA on a topic that they chose in a previous class - right up my alley as a tech coach and a guy who's up for a challenge.

Set 'em up, knock 'em down.

Here's the two big things about using YouTube video editor today: 

1. WiFi is really helpful when you're having students use chromebooks to access the internet. Duh, right?
2. If you don't use those skills often enough, they get tossed into the wind.

Our network has been going through absolute technohell lately and the team in the IT department is working their tails off to make it so that our ever-increasingly tech-confident teachers aren't without that essential component of their tech-laden lessons. Even with how hard they are working, there's only so much that can be done to support a crashing King Kong like a WiFi network for a district as big as ours. First period started off rough, and I'll blame it on the internet, but it would've been better if I knew my stuff.

Like any Google product, YouTube video editor makes random changes and upgrades. Pro tip: check out Google products the night before you're about to present about them. My confidence -- no, arrogance -- got in the way of that one. Oops. WiFi was down, but I forgot to tell the kids how to use the snipping tool, didn't talk about Creative Commons, and completely forgot that we needed to collect the videos. Wow, way to go, John.

Once the debacle of first period ended, the bike that is teaching got easier to ride and I was happy to hit my stride. Getting a chance to hand out more high fives and banter with kids about their projects was worth every bit of stress and haggling over the chromebooks not connecting and, of course, my "issues". From second period on, students in Ms. P's class were quiet -- SILENT -- as they worked to create and edit a video that they could be proud of by the end of the period. In that, they learned how to:

• Find Creative Commons videos
• Find Creative Commons audio
• Trim videos
• Watch incredibly sad videos about current events
• Use transitions appropriately
• Splice video
• Add text and a banner to video

As expected, the students walked away with much more than a deeper understanding of the topic that was assigned to them. I hope that those students go back to their videos and keep working on them, learning how to do more and more cool things with video as they get more confident with the tools. You know, as they say, if you don't use it, you struggle a bit before realizing that you actually remember it and it's like you never took a break in the first place. Or something like that. Either way, it was great to be back in school.

Happy "Check Your Ego (and WiFi)" Fishing