Post it Notes

One of the things I love about the Huckleberry Hill Project is that we are modeling skills that the children can use to help them along in their own personal projects.  On Tuesday afternoons we are making a documentary as a group and no matter what the outcome, the group project is a fantastic way to introduce and role model skills the children will need to make their own ideas come alive.

Today the children worked on their projects for almost two hours before we met to watch a presentation by Cormac who is starting the Green Project.  You can see one of his recent blog posts here.  Cormac used Pages, an editing/publishing software available as an app for the Mac.  This is a great program for the children to become familiar with.  We decided that it is beneficial for them to use similar software so they can teach each other how to use it and recognize files. All of our members have Macbooks or iPads.  We are going to get a dongle so that the children can project presentations onto the wall using iPads to make presenting easier.

In the afternoon we started brainstorming ideas for the documentary.  What do we want to do it on? What is our story?  We used technique we use doing Destination ImagiNation called "Stop and Go".  We wrote ideas on post it notes and put them up on the wall.  We read them out and then went to round two of idea creation and put up more and more ideas.  Soon we had a wall of ideas.  Then we started organizing them.  Themes popped out of the wall and a picture started developing about what the group wants to do.

That was fun. Time whizzed by. We could have gone on and on.  In the second half of the meeting we talked about storage. We talked about how and where we need to store the video that we take for our documentary.  We all have footage already and we need to have a system so we don't lose our precious files.  Steph, one of our parents and IT specialist explained that we all needed Dropbox accounts so we  can keep our data on a server.  We all downloaded Dropbox onto our devices.  We made a 2HP storage bin in Dropbox to use as a collection point.

The other part of todays meeting was the importance of proper "nomenclature" to name files so we can easily retrieve media that we will need for the documentary.  We need to be masters in digital organization to make our workflow more efficient.  Steph consults with companies on how to manage their technology effectively and we need everyone to adopt the same protocol for file management to make our experience with technology less frustrating. I am incredibly grateful to have her expertise on hand during our meetings.

We will be working on this again next week.  It takes a while to get the hang of all of this technology, but at the same time it is empowering.

The best part of learning these skills is watching the children independently use them on their own for their own projects.  After the meeting I went upstairs for a relax and a cup of coffee.  Little did I know that Claire was working out how to bring dogs to Connecticut from a high kill shelter in Georgia using skills we practiced today.

It is all very exciting.