Daily Archives: 12/6/2005

TIES: Teaching the Five Minute Film

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The presenter for this session at the TIES Conference is James McLellan from Oak Park High School in Winnipeg. I attended a session that James presented a couple years ago and thought I would come to this one to see what’s new. Plus, with our 1-to-1 initiative I’m getting a lot more interest from teachers who want to get their students making short films.

James’s recommendations for teaching video content:

  • Classes should be balanced with theory and practice
  • Discovery learning should not be the major vehicle for receiving new information
  • Avoid shooting during school hours if possible. Class time is for teaching or editing.
  • Give lead time for students to shoot outside of class. Make sure students are planning for due dates and build in adequate time.
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ITIL: An enterprise planning framework

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I was listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Michael Disabato’s talk from the Burton Group Catalyst Conference recently and discovered a fantastic resource. ITIL is the IT Infrastructural Library and the ITIL Website describes it as:

ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is essentially a series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management. This customisable framework defines how Service Management is applied within an organisation.

It’s clear that schools don’t operate their IT systems like businesses, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Schools and businesses have different outcomes in mind. But at the same time I recognize that schools have a lot to learn from large enterprises who have learned an enormous amount about how to build and maintain complex technology systems. The ITIL Toolkit is a comprehensive set of planning guides that are intended to help enterprises establish best practices. The Toolkit costs $199 and can be purchased from the Web site. Given what I heard in the podcast and what I’ve seen of the Toolkit online, I think that would be $199 well spent to make some significant improvements in a school’s IT department.