Teaching with Tech... 👨‍🏫 w/ 👩‍💻

Positive communication, with students or their parents, can greatly impact the "experience" of a class, a teacher, or even school.  Many schools have communication goals, and as a part of those goals, teachers are the expected first voice heard by parents.  Unfortunately, even while teachers make their phone calls, send their post cards, and digitally show the might of student learning, group cooperation, and efforts of social wellbeing through email and the web, school boards are drilled by parents who claim they are unaware of the happenings within the walls of their community schools.  Likewise, administrators, when dealing with academic or behavioral concerns turn to teachers for a "record" of communication.  Paper logs lead to confidentially concerns, especially when one is teaching from a cart, wheeling around the school like a nomad.  Most electronic logs are either docs that are endlessly long, slow to log, or time consuming to copy and paste content. So, I

Talking heads, not the music group, seem to always go with videos about historical figures.  And while I admire how Ken Burns became the legend using historians to tell the stories, giving authority and weight to facts and ideas, making pictures of the people talk can be so much more fun. Activity Goal: Create a talking head (picture) from an online image using Adobe After Effects.  In this case,  I want Thomas Jefferson to sing a little Edwin Starr. The challenge will be to separate out the vocals so Thomas' lips are matching the lyrics. Could I have used a tool like Babberize ?  Sure, but what's the fun in that? Final Product: Below is the final product: If you're wondering why I selected, "War," it's because I thought it would be cool.  TJ wanted a smaller Navy, didn't believe in having a lot of soldiers, and really wanted to make the government small...like, tiny small.  What he found instead was, a small Navy could not protect American ships or its ci