My nine-year-old came home with a project from his gifted services teacher last month linked to Art History Month. He was asked to select an artist, musician or playwright whose work has stood the test of time and determine which of the Habits of Mind this person demonstrated.

My son selected Vincent Van Gogh, probably because the art teacher at my son’s school had delivered a great lesson on Van Gogh recently. We got books from the library, found websites, and my son started taking notes in Inspiration.

After a while, he thought that one of the habits of mind that Van Gogh demonstrated was “Listening with Empathy and Understanding,” because of his compassion for the poor. He consulted with his art teacher, who suggested that “Determination” would be another hallmark of this artist. Another online connection through a professional learning network (an art teacher who is a friend’s mother) suggested that Van Gogh’s experimentation with color might demonstrate “Creating, Imagining, and Innovating.”

My son browsed online galleries, collected the paintings that he thought best represented each of these Habits of Mind, and began assembling his tri-fold board. He’s done a nice job on it, and I’ll post a photo of it here tonight.

Somewhere in the process, he asked me if we could do something using some of the technology that I use every day with students in the district where I teach. I wasn’t sure what that would look like, but he collected the paintings in a folder on our computer, and started keying in some notes about what he wanted to say about each one. He really liked the idea of using the green screen effect and the Alpha Tool in Keynote, so we assembled the project there.

I was really proud of him for learning so quickly how to import, crop and edit photos in iPhoto, export them to Keynote, layer the photos after removing the green, and then resize himself appropriately for the paintings. It reminds me a bit of the book Katie’s Picture Show.

He then set to work writing his own scripts for each slide. He rehearsed them and recorded them (patiently, as I had not done that before, and we kept making mistakes.) Then he happily ran off to play while I worked on exporting the Keynote to a QuickTime movie so that his school could show it.

But then disaster struck. The exported version made all the timings go wrong. So we re-recorded the audio and re-exported it. It was even worse than the first one. Suggestions from my online PLN came in, and we opted to try to reconstruct the whole thing using Audacity, GarageBand and iMovie. So that meant having to re-record the audio AGAIN.

He got most of it done Sunday night, but was just too tired. So get this — he got up at 5:45am on Monday morning to record the last four audio clips before I went to work. THAT’S dedication.

Anyway, it took a little tweaking and editing, but he completed it. He added some cool transitions. (Gotta love Keynote for those!) And he selected the parts of Don McClean’s song that he wanted. I’m proud of him for wanting to do something different, something 21st century and beyond the trifold board. I’m proud of him for recording all of the narrations three times. And I’m really proud of him for all of the tech learning he’s done in the last week.

So proudly, proudly, I share with you… his presentation.

Please leave your comments for him here or on the fliggo site.

After a couple of snow days at the end of last week, followed by Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my brain was racing to find a way to allow our students and staff to view the Inauguration of President Obama. We don’t have access to TV broadcasts, and I worried about streaming video on our network.

As I suspected, streaming video was not really an option using our school district’s T-1 lines. Several teachers tried it throughout the morning, and it kept cutting out and/or slipping back into the buffering mode. Our principal and network manager worked together to ask teachers not to attempt to pull up the live streams in their classrooms as we tried desperately to find a reliable stream to project in the gym for all students to see.  We weren’t having much success.

So I pulled out my Blackberry Curve. I just learned on Saturday morning how to use the “tethering” option. This basically means that the Blackberry acts as a modem, and “dials” the Verizon network, accessing the internet from there. In order to activate this, I actually had to disconnect from the school’s wireless network. After that it was just a couple of clicks and my MacBook was connected to the CNN’s live coverage. It wasn’t “perfect” and the video did freeze up every now and then, but only briefly, and we didn’t miss anything. But that wasn’t our fault; I am sure that the freezing had to do with the remarkable number of people accessing that site.

Over 500 people in our school — students and staff — watched coverage for over an hour. They cheered, applauded, giggled, became somber, cheered some more, and put their fists in the air in victorious gestures.

I sighed in relief. This “tethering” option proved itself to be quite handy, on its inauguration.

Postscript: I  didn’t think to take the photo of the set-up until hours later, when the President and First Lady were walking the parade route.

I’ve been listening to some of the Twitter-chatter regarding this subject in the past week or so, and discovered a resounding lack of satisfaction with the fact that most of the low-cost alternatives are only Windows-compatible. In a remarkably well-timed e-mail follow-up, Jim Flanagan forwarded to me this February post from Uwe Schmidt. The comments on this blog have continued for three months, so be sure to scroll down and see all of the updates!