RJ Stangherlin

Keystone Technology Integrator and STAR Discovery Educator

This site is for Mrs. Stangherlin's classes at Salisbury High School.

Virtually Yours

Nothing beats attending a performance live, but is time, space, and conflicts create issues for you, then attending virtually is a great option.  For our IP presentations, my colleague, friend, fellow STAR DEN, and now Instructional Coach (next year’s dream job) and IP partner for over a decade, Jen Brinson and I decided to run a backchannel for the presentations.  I had run backchannels before at conferences, presentations, and most recently in my classroom for students who were absent and for review purposes.  My go-to platform of choice has always been Ustream.tv, although I hold similar accounts in other Web 2.0 offerings as well.  The idea was the easy part; executing two-camera channels was an llama of a different color.  So, I went to my go-to student, William Kennington, a great example of Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital Net Generation.  Kennington was convinced that Ustream.tv could handle multiple channels; I knew Mogulus (now Livestream, but more about that later) could, but had my doubts about the former.  Trust William; Ustream could and did handle the two-channel set up, and he also found a way to use CFF Macs to pull in the individual teams’ home laptop videos.  We were glad to go with Ustream, because the streaming resolution and end-output quality when archived have always been superior.

On May 27, 2009, when this year’s IP debuted, two students, Megan Heverly and Mark Attilio ran the backchannels, starting, ending, saving, and archiving each team’s two-channel streams for posterity.  They were my link to the streams, since I was, as always, mutitasking.  Brinson anchored the streaming the whole day, since she had formulated her defense questions for the teams in advance, and was our connection with our guest viewers, which included her family in NC and her Canadian colleagues in her online course with Discovery Education/Wilkes University, Salisbury Middle School history classes, and Mrs. Meholic’s math classes.  At one point, Brinson said we had 21 site guests.  Not bad at all for IPs maiden voyage into virtual productions.

The question that Brinson and I continue to be bombarded with is when will the presentation be posted.  Here’s the timetable.  William is giving the teams their stage footage to mix and edit with videos/slides tomorrow.  Thursday is binder due date, and that includes a mixed final video.  At that point, I will compress each video, render it, and upload it.  Each video takes about a half a day from start to finish for embeddable code for online posting.  At that point we will post to our blogs: Changing Connections, RJ Stangherlin SHS, Learning Curve, PA DEN, Education, Technology, and Fun blogs.  I am guessing that a week from this Thursday you can start checking our blogs.  If you are part of our social networks (Brinson’s and mine overlap to a point), you can follow our tweets.  We’ll keep you posted for when the students amazing presentations can be virtually yours.
IP
Multimedia
Stage Presentation
Education
Technology
Integrated Project
Turbo Tagger