Today as I was reviewing some of the material for the unit I’m still teaching for entry 1, I stumbled across a wonderful thing – a useable video for my portfolio. I had only taken it as a means of peer critique. I took a video of student performance (using miniDV camera captured it straight to my laptop), converted it into wmv format (prefer divx, but I windows media player is the only thing that I could be certain would be on all of the school computers), got the site up and running using my googlepages account and then created a free domain name so the students could use it (hooray for .co.nr!). I then used a site to create a web based evaluation form that emailed me the results. Its a pretty sweet little setup.
At any rate, I was reviewing the video after the fact today and thought – crap, I can use this! This means that as of this moment, I’m almost halfway finished with the commentary for entry 1 at this moment and will have it finished before I go to bed tonight (miles to go before I sleep).
Now I can spend the rest of this week doing heavy editing and physical assembly of the portfolio instead of sweating it out to actually continue teaching the unit and writing the commentary at the 11th hour. Now I’m looking pretty comfortable with sending it next day air on Wednesday.
It’s nice to have a break go my way, I really needed this . . .
In unrelated news, I have two posts that I’ve had in my drafts folder for a while. One is titled “if life were more like star trek” and the other “concert etiquette or lack thereof.” The star trek one may not see the light of day, but the concert etiquette one definitely will. Just give me time.