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12th April 2007

Beautiful sunrise this morning

posted in creativity, digitalstorytelling, travel |

The sunrise over the Oklahoma plains this morning was breathtaking!

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I’ve been seeing the sun rise a lot this week, commuting to Enid from Edmond! :-)
Tomorrow’s my last day of facilitator training in Enid with our 2nd group of teachers for the Oklahoma Digital Centennial Project. Boy is this ever a fun group! Mike King, the tech director in Enid, is the most creative digital storyteller I’ve personally met who uses Windows computers instead of Macs. It’s so fun to work closely with creative people on a common project! The Google Earth integration Mike and his team are helping us all do is GREAT. Click on one of the blue Oklahoma counties on this state map to launch a Google Earth KMZ file, that will give you links to some of the digital stories that have been created so far.

Great stuff! And we’re just getting started! We have one more round of facilitator training in May, and then some one-day summer workshops focused just on digital storytelling to setup for the summer. We’re likely going to have each teacher bring a STUDENT with them to the training, along with some pictures and information about their local history to use for a digital story they’ll make together. I’ve only participated in one other professional development workshop that included student-teacher teams, and it worked out very well. I’m thinking this model could be a powerful one to use here in Oklahoma for this project, especially since it’s focused on digital storytelling and the tools we have at our disposal are more accessible and powerful than ever before.

I will be teaching on web 2.0 tomorrow, including wikis. (I got my schedule mixed up a bit.) Today I taught on Flickr and del.icio.us, and did make a 2 page QuickStart Guide for del.icio.us. (PDF) Feel free to use and share it. I have this linked now in my “powerful blending” workshop curriculum under “social bookmarks.”

I’ve recorded all our sessions in this 3 day workshop, and will be posting those later (hopefully this weekend) as audio podcasts. My two sessions today were also recorded with video on a Codian IP-VCR, and those may be posted online soon as well. We’re using MediaCAST software to upload and index all our digital stories for the project, and the system is fairly robust. It doesn’t allow for tagging and the creation of dynamic folksonomies of content, however, or share the direct URL link for posted media. I figured out today how to find those links (which are available for firewall bypass) in the source code of the created webpages, but I wish the process was easier. The system also does not yet support the creation of web feeds. Overall, however, it is a great system, and has robust features for DRM protection if you need to share copyrighted content with different forms of use restrictions.

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On this day..

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 11:48 pm and is filed under creativity, digitalstorytelling, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 3 responses to “Beautiful sunrise this morning”

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  1. 1 On April 13th, 2007, Andrew Boatman said:

    Morning Wesley,
    Reminds me of a project I have been wanting to have students create. With the advances in Web 2.0 tt could be an effective statewide project.
    I would like to chart all the Historical Markers in Oklahoma. Google Earth to catalogue these sites. Student can gather historical information from the Internet and original source documents and create an interactive storyboard much like this Oklahoma Centenial Project or like the GoogleLit Trips at http://web.mac.com/jburg/iWeb/GoogleLit/GoogleLit%20Trips.html

    Question now, how to get the word out and make it happen?

  2. 2 On April 13th, 2007, Andrew Boatman said:

    Seek and find…
    I found the BlogOklahoma.US site today after posting this earlier message. http://www.blogoklahoma.us/ They are creating just such a database I was referring too. I hope to see one of the new Google Earth Maps created soon.

  3. 3 On April 14th, 2007, David Stone said:

    Gorgeous sunrise photos. The best part of a day! A new beginning every morn.