BLC10: Alas Media-Digital Storytelling

In the two presentations I had the pleasure of attending, Alas Media told us that we could all be story tellers and journalists, capturing stories in words, pictures and video! This blog comprises the salient links from the two presentations, from good music editing sites to those offering the technology to capture initial ideas and information in a storyboarding exercise. Finally, there are links to free websites offering image manipulation. Further information and explanations can be found on the fabulous websites that Alas Media operate, namely ...

http://www.alasmedia.net/
http://alasmedia.wikispaces.com/AM_home

The following sites offer royalty-free images and music for presentations ...

• Compfight - Creative Commons licenced images [look for images that are no less than 700 pix in dimension!]
• Incompetech - copyright-free music

Applications for making slideshows and presentations ...

• Animoto
• Animoto for the iphone
• Kizoa

Free music editing applications on the web ...

• Apple Garageband for Mac - drag your video over Garageband to turn this into a whole scoring schedule
• Mantis by Indabamusic
• Aviary Suite

Mindmaps are brilliant for story boarding videos before you begin filming ...

• My WebSpiration - an Alas Media fave!
• Mindomo - free basic version
• Bubbl.us
• Text2Mindmap

Online image editors ...

• Aviary Suite
• PixIr
• Sumo Paint
• Picasa photo editing
• Pixelmator [not free]

Finally, some tips ... iMovie - choose a royalty-free or self-created piece of music and drag ito the main window. Use the clip trimmer tool by right-clicking on the icon. You can place markers at certain time intervals [use the m key to invoke the marker]. If you drag images or video footage over the icon you get a montage of images and videos to the music.

When you are taking photos, take wide shots, medium and close ups; each picture will help tell a story from different angles. And the same is true for videos - shoot the same scene from different angles and use 'precision' editing to switch between them for the final result.

When you're buying a camera, make sure you get one with video/audio capability. Sometimes, putting a cover over the microphone improves the sound by cutting out the background noise!

BLC10: Darren Kuropatwa sessions

Design Matters!

An exploration of relationship between visual, presentation and instructional design, this resource will model and illustrate how teachers can incorporate modern skills into their teaching practice, supported by current technologies.

What Can I Do Now? (web 2.0 pedagogy)

These resources demonstrate how teachers can redesign their lessons to take advantage of social media and free tools available on the Internet - for example, Flickr, wikis, Google Maps and mashups of a great many more tools. Check this site out for 'Cool Web 2.0 tools'!

A Day in the Life (of a teacher teaching with technology)

This resource is a walk through of a typical day in the life or a teacher whose pedagogy is infused with all sorts of web 2.0 tools such as Slideshare, Flickr, Twitter etc and how a blog can serve as the central online presence hub for several different classes.

BLC10: Dean Shareski - 4 billion photos on Flickr ... now what?

Dean's presentation can be found here ...

Dean's ice-breaker activity was to ask us to form groups of 3/4 and to take turns in telling a story, using a random display of images to prompt us! The stories became more and more ridiculous but the activity was hilarious ... and noisy!

We process images 60,000 faster than we process text but Dean posed the question ... "Are we text snobs? Is material delivered in text format a more sophisticated form of learning?" After all, images can be more powerful and emotive. [Discussions on Dean's blog.]

Why do people need to capture an image, particularly when that image is readily available around the world? Is it for 'ownership', 'personalising the experience' etc? We can take as many photos as we like ... and simply discard any that we don't want! We live with cheap failure nowadays!

How can we we teach our students to 'view' and 'present'?

We can use media more readily than ever before and we can use other people's photos. There are circa 4 billion photos on Flickr, 150 million of which have been uploaded under a Creative Commons licence. It is often advisable to search for images on Flickr than via Google, where a lot of the images yield are not always free to use.

A good website to search images available under a Creative Commons licence is Compfight

When people upload their photos now, they tend to use more and more tags to describe their photos - this would seem to be a better system than using folders. Tags are mostly personal, but they should also reflect a public circumstance too. [A good activity for students is to ask them what tags they might attach to images - take a look at Google Image Labeller.]

Dean suggests taking a photo every day ... if nothing else, you will be helping to tell the story of life. And research applications on the web that enable you to add special effects, for example, tilt shifting . Two other applications worth investigating for editing images and adding special effects are Picnik and BigHugeLabs

Voicethread is a good way to allow others to talk about images and other media.

if you're about to buy a camera, then look at the pictures it takes ... don't just consider the price! Flickr's camera site might help.

BLC10: Adora Svitak - Innovative Classrooms

Adora is a 13 year old American child prodigy; her keynote centred around providing opportunities for students to be leaders in education.

Adora's official website
YouTube video about Adora's hope and aspirations

BLC10: Bronwyn Stuckey - Online Communities of Practice

Bronwyn invited the audience to contribute to her document in TypeWith.me during the session.

She also used the Common Craft video on social networking.

She asked us to think about the networked teacher and their personal learning network [PLN] - no two teachers will have the same PLN, even though they may overlap. And so, creating a PLN is not about the tools or technology. You are in control of your own PLN; indeed, in your own PLN, you are the facilitator!

She then asked us to think about communities of practice and what they meant to us ... some people were able to visualise them as villages ... nests even! But in each, there were people, a place, social interaction and common interests. Everyone agreed that developing one's own identity in a community of practice is very important.

Twitter is a community of practice, but is there knowledge creation as well as knowledge sharing going on [Bronwyn said she hadn't seen much of the former].

Tips for running successful communities ...

• Think carefully about their format ... are their activities designed to work in real time or can they be completed asynchronously?
• Will they be large or small, public or private?
• Who will own the community?
• What is the purpose of the community? - there is a need to keep communities relevant and focused, or people will lose interest.
• Consider putting a poll on the front page of your community to try and engage people from the beginning.
• Generate content .... not just knowledge share ... that people can walk away with.
• Accreditation and recognition - ways to give people something
• Rhythm ... get a mental calendar going for people ... meeting, newsletter circulation ie a core of activity ... and keep to the dates that have been agreed.

Quest Atlantis Global Teacher Community - Bronwyn doesn't create content but she pulls it together from teachers [and many are in overseas locations]

Other examples of communities of practice ...

Tapped In
Classroom 2.0
Scratched -
MirandaNet
Jokaydia
ICT Register

BLC10: Lainie Rowell - iPhone Supersession

Recent survey predicts that by 2020, most people in the world will be using a mobile device as their primary means for connecting to the internet. Advantages of using portable devices - they are affordable, portable, accessible, and easier to use than a desktop computer with lots of functionality.

http://www.ipevo.com/

Many of her tips, for iphone 3GS and 4 can be found on the Apple site

• Shake ... to undo typing!
• You can save a draft of your email by actually clicking the Cancel button ... then you get options to Save [as draft] or really cancelling!
• Scrolling in Safari, tap the top bar near the time to return yourself to the top of the page ... and to reveal the search box!
• Saving images on the web ... holding anything down on the iPhone is the same as a right click! So if you hold image down, you get options ... and you get the options to save or copy the image!
• Hold down any key to get special characters!
• Hold down the .com key to get more url suffix options
• Double-click the home button to enter the multi-tasking mode
• Clock app allows you to set multiple alarms; the alarms still work even if the phone is silenced!
• Calculator - turn sideways to convert into a graphic calculator!
• Screen shot - hold down the Home button and tap the power button

Some recommended apps ...

• Use the NetNewsWire app to aggregate online news
• Podcasts - subscribe to TED Talks!
• Science apps are numerous - simple Google 'free science apps for iphone'
• Whiteboard apps [example]
• iBowl [game]
• Bump
• Augmented Reality - taking something real and layering other things on it ... for example
• Yelp
• Diigo and Delicious for social bookmarking with your iphone
• ReelDirector - does for iphone 3GS what iphone 4 iMovie does

BLC10: David Jakes

The above link will take you to the resources and salient points of David's BLC10 sessions.

140 Characters and Beyond:
Extend Your Use of Twitter

These resources will help extend your use of Twitter and add value to your Twitter experience by demonstrating a variety of new tools that can serve to create a more comprehensive and capable platform for learning.

Capturing Stories, Capturing Lives:
An Introduction to Digital Storytelling

Digital story telling is the art of capturing personal stories and experiences in text and multimedia format. These resources provide ideas for producing effective digital stories and demonstrate their value in the classroom.

Life on the screen

How do we create an online presence that supports who we are, our learning, our work and our lives? These resources explore methodologies and tools that can be used to creatively and consciously promote and project our digital selves.

Digital Footprints

These resources explore the concept of a digital footprint and how to be an effective and ethical contributor online. They also provide guidance to classroom practitioners about how to encourage students to represent themselves appropriately in the digital world.

My personal gem from these sessions has been David's use of Only2Clicks for creating web quests etc!

BLC10: Lee Kolbert - So you want to be a blogger?

Lee's resources sites ...

http://sites.google.com/site/edtechlearning
http://sites.google.com/site/edtechlearning/so-you-want-to-be-a-blogger
A Geeky Momma's Blog
Mrs Kolbert's Class Blog

Returned to classroom last year as a 4th grade teacher and was able to take a lot of her previous five years' experience into the classroom. She suggested that teachers often don't realise the autonomy that they have!

She started the session by showing some exemplary blogs, all written in different styles but all highly featurable on anyone 'blogs followed' list:

Lisa Thumann
Kevin Jarrett
Beth Still
Richard Byrne
Wes Fryer

People who contribute or write on the web are leaving a digital footprint - this video by Steve Johnson shows how important it is to ensure that anything you post on the web puts you in a good light - for example, in 2011, it is expected that a high percentage of employers [little short of 100%] will look out on social networking sites to scan a candidate's suitability for employment! On the other hand, valuable contributions online may also help enhance your prospects of employment!

For those who are very new to blogging and who might lack confidence to start with, Lee suggests reading other's blogs and making comments, even two word comments like ... "Great post!" to get used to the idea of interacting. Then to start their own blogs, she recommends Google's Blogger and the very popular Edublogs.

Blogs generally are easy to set up; besides adding regular posts, bloggers may well want to add in widgets which enable other applications to display within your blog, like your Twitter feed or a survey of some sort. [Live traffic feeds might be a little off-putting though!]. Most blogs offer a widget that aggregates news and blogs of your choosing via RSS feeds - this Common Craft video explains RSS feeds very well!

When setting up a class blog, you could start by writing a little about yourself. You can embed homework assignments in your blog posts, even code from application like Slide Share if you wish students to follow a presentation as part of the schedule.

Most teachers will ask their students to email work to them [advisedly from their parent's email address] and then upload it to the blog, using first names only to describe the student's work. You need to be very careful about instructing students on the use of their email address in the blogosphere, for some blogs only allow you to make comments after you've supplied an email address ... this doesn't have to be your correct one! And if commenting also requires you to supply a website, then that should be left completely blank.

BLC10: Mitch Resnick - Keynote on Scratch

A line in the new President's inauguration speech struck a chord with many people ... and has formed the basis of Mitch's keynote ...

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."

So how do we help the students of today become makers and not just consumers in today's digital world? Sure creativity is key and therefore, it is important as educators that we encourage doing and making through creative thinking. Interacting with animations and simulations, and writing on people's Facebook pages simply isn't enough.

When Mitch and his team at MIT started out with their Scratch venture, they had no idea that children as young as 12 would be uploading tutorials on how to use this programme. Today, children all over the world are collaborating on games and resource development, and sharing these via the Scratch website - http://scratch.mit.edu/ - these children have become 'makers' with technology.

The Scratch website now offers a global collaborative community: students can upload projects to the website and engage in discussion about improving them! And students who modify projects can upload their own versions! It is important to remember that creativity doesn't have to be something started from new but can often rise from the adaptation of something that exists already!

For example, one user put up an anime project and invited others in the Scratch community to create new characters for her story. Other children have created scrolling backgrounds which were not offered in the original programme. A number of children have created projects around the very successful Warrior cats books etc. Some young people even used the site to create and adapt Mother's Day cards!

Scratch now being used more and more in schools ... and is providing a means to encourage children to think logically and systematically. Scratched - http://scratched.media.mit.edu/ offers support for teachers wishing to get started. Trevor Blunn's resource on the Teachnet UK website is also a good place to start - http://bit.ly/os4J0

BLC10: Some new tools already!

Taken from the BLC10 blog and cross posted from Lisa Thumann's blog, here is the first of many links to tools that aim to support teaching and learning. You might find that not all are relevant for your needs but they are certainly worth a look!

Access My Library
Cast.org – The Science Writer
Connect The Dots
Delicious [social bookmarking]
Evernote
Google Squared
Instapaper
iSock
Intel Thinking Tools
IPEVO Point 2 vView USB camera
Mashpedia
Packrati.us
Paper.li
Read 2 Me [ipad App]
Readability [Firefox add-on]
SweetSearch
Toondoo
TutPup
Twitter Tim.es
Voice Thread
Yolink

Promethean's Visionary Leadership Conference

Alan November's introductory keynote began with a question to the audience about where they think the mass of a tree comes from! His audience used voting handsets to make their choice of answer from four options ... A) Sun B) Water C) Air D) Soil

The correct answer [option C] was chosen by only a small number within the audience ... reflecting a common misconception that is shared by many, including fresh new biology graduates from Harvard University!

This led Alan into a riveting presentation about how the current model of learning and teaching may well be fostering student misconceptions. Students are capable of memorising information and regurgitating it for tests and examinations etc, but not truly understanding basic concepts. Indeed, it's only by giving students a means to feedback in class regularly, even allowing students to formulate their own questions [part of a re-engineering process to learning] that student understanding improves.

Alan directed his audience towards the work of Professor Eric Mazur, an optical physicist from Harvard University. Upon realising that students in his introductory Physics class were passing exams without understanding fundamental concepts, he developed a variety of interlinking interactive techniques to help rectify this. He required his students to read, think and reflect before their lecture, and then via the course website, to submit questions anonymously, around which he would shape his next lecture.

Some questions where students had little grasp of the reading were inevitably rendered 'useless' ... but others deemed 'brilliant' were those he displayed during the lecture and used as the basis of discussion and debate in the classroom, with the effect that the students helped each other to learn.

Alan finished his session by challenging his audience to participate in action research that would help change practice based on this and similar models, thereby helping misconceptions in learning to avoid going unchecked.

Some useful links:

Introduction to Mazur's work
Presentation: Confessions of a converted lecturer
Follow Eric Mazur on Twitter