The Green Cup

One of my colleagues watched President Obama’s speech to students on Tuesday – during her lunch hour. Her students were at lunch, as well. IN fact, every student at my small school was at lunch. So none of them saw the speech live.

I had planned to show the canned version of the speech in the afternoon. Whitehouse.gov said it would be available at 1pm. It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t available at all as a recording on Tuesday afternoon.

This morning I discovered that the speech was available as an Mp4 file and as a flash video from YouTube. Of course, YouTube is blocked at our school (and statewide, I think), so I downloaded the file. The result was frustrating. It took an hour on the first attempt. I left the computer working and came back to discover that Windows had decided to update in the middle of the download and the computer had restarted. I tried again and succeed. But then I figured out that most of the older XP computers in our building couldn’t play the MP4 file.

I succeed in playing it for a group of third graders. Their classroom has the school’s newest computers – and. thus, had the software needed to play an MP4 file. For other classes I’m going to have to take my laptop in to the school tomorrow.

Reaction from the third graders? The sat gathered around a PC and watched the video on a normal-sized screen. The general ed teacher an I kept our distance and watched from a distance. When it was over the third graders applauded spontaneously. It wasn’t a reaction we expected from third graders. A pleasant surprise…