Logistics Victory!

For about two years now, an idea has been needling me, persistently floating around in the back of my mind. My iPad takes such great pictures, and such great videos. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could share these with the school community, if I could show folks exactly what is going on in my classroom? A private person myself when it comes to the world wide web, I am a little uncomfortable posting videos of my students online. But if I could somehow get these videos onto my bulletin board…then anybody walking by could stop for a quick look!

Contrary to most things I have tried with the iPad–which have been ludicrously easy–actually implementing this idea turned out to be somewhat of a logistics nightmare. Without posting the videos to YouTube, transferring them from my own iPad to another one that I could attach to my bulletin board was beyond my electronic capabilities. I could email pictures no problem, and videos if they were under a minute long, but most of my video footage was too long to email. Furthermore, editing videos from an iPad was an issue I had no luck figuring out, and the raw footage, while fantastic, needed editing in most cases. Finally, how on earth could I go about attaching an iPad securely to a bulletin board, anyway?

To make a long story short, I had to have a lot of help from my friends. David Lyle spent several hours with me one afternoon, helping me figure out how to post the videos to my Dropbox account, then download them onto a borrowed iPad from the library cart. It is not a very straightforward process, but as it turns out, it is pretty easy to do once you get it figured out. Ned Edwards then burned an entire free period (a 75-minute one!) teaching me how to use iMovie on my Macbook to edit videos, voice over footage, and put separate videos together to tell a story–all things I had no luck figuring out on my own. And it took our friendly neighborhood mechanical engineer (thanks, Joel Keneipp!) to figure out how to securely attach the borrowed iPad to my bulletin board.

But now, folks, I am happy to report that, together, we got the job done! There are videos describing projects my students are completing, chronicling the hatching of a chicken egg, highlighting modeling exercises completed in the lab, and showcasing an outreach project with a local elementary school, among many others. In several of the videos, you can even see how my students are using their iPads in class. Bonus! My students seem to enjoy watching videos of themselves and other classes, and I hope that advisors, parents, and visitors will stop and take a look when they are strolling through Shaw this spring.