Today at the Learning 2.010 conference in Shanghai, attendees attended both “cohort” sessions as well as “unconference” sessions led by other participants. I created a local Etherpad page on the server they’re running here at Concordia, and exported that unformatted document of links and notes as a webpage I’ve saved in my public Dropbox folder. There are a lot of links there, so I’ll briefly summarize some of the key highlights. In this post, I’ll just focus on notes from the first unconference session I attended and helped facilitate, “Tell a Story in Frames.” If you’re interested in using Etherpad yourself, check out the list of updated Etherpad sites/links on Etherpad.org.
The cohort I’m co-facilitating with Carol Jordon is focused on Visual Literacy and Digital Storytelling, and we have shared all our resources and links on the wiki, talkwithmedia.wikispaces.com. The first half of the Etherpad notes I’ve linked above were from an unconference session titled, “Tell a Story in 5 Frames.” I shared several of the links on our “Talk with Media” wiki on the “Tell a Story in 5 Frames” page. Those included three examples of 5 photo stories: It’s a Dog’s Life, Getting a new haircut, and The Great Pumpkin. These are three of the 71 examples currently on the “Tell a Story in 5 Photos for Educators” Flickr group. What I FORGOT to mention during our session was that I created a new Posterous blog recently for sharing 5 photo / 5 frame stories via email. That address is 5photos.posterous.com, and more information about how to use it is available.
Two tools mentioned by session participants for creating cartoon-based digital stories were Toondoo and Xtranormal. A participant mentioned a downloadable/client version of Xtranormal is now available, which is VERY good news here in China where sites like Xtranormal and VoiceThread can be VERY slow. Toondoo allows people to create static cartoons, while Xtranormal permits the creation of animated cartoon videos. One of our session participants (BWilliams) shared his OUTSTANDING blog post with examples of Xtranormal videos about the laws of motion.
Another animated comics tool which was added by a participant to our Etherpad instance is Stage’D: stagedproject.com. I hadn’t heard of this previously.
Storybird is collaborative storytelling website and tool which was also new to me and mentioned in our session. This reminds me of Storykit, which is an iOS-based (free) application for creating simple digital stories integrating images and text. Storykit also permits people to add audio, and I don’t think Storybird does YET, but the two are similar in some ways. See my post from September 13th for more information about StoryKit. Here is an example of a Storybird digital story. Note these are flash-based and therefore NOT iOS compatible.
About us: a peek inside Storybird on Storybird
TikaTok is a website which is focused on the digital creation of paper-based, printed books for kids. I haven’t used it, but someone shared this also in our Etherpad doc.
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On this day..
- Creating a Society6 Store of Digital Photography Products – 2017
- K12 Online Conference Webinar Saturday Sept 19th – 2015
- Minecraft and MinecraftEDU in the Classroom – 2014
- Amazon Isn’t a Consumer Electronics Company: It’s WalMart Online – 2012
- Rachel Wants to Be a Scientist – 2012
- The Natives are Getting Restless: Growing Up and Learning in a Web 2.0 World by Robyn Treyvaud – 2009
- Emerging Trends that Redefine Education in the 21st Century by Bruce Dixon – 2009
- Interviews and subway videos from Hong Kong International Schools (Part 1) – 2009
- An amazing view from school (Discovery College in Hong Kong) – 2009
- Digital Footprints – Digital Dossier – 2009