One of the summer reading books for sixth graders at Classen School of Advanced Studies, in Oklahoma City Public Schools, is “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien. To review the book before the start of school Monday, my kids and I created a four minute and eighteen second “quick edit” movie about “The Hobbit” using Legos,
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Yesterday was a day of great joy in the Fryer household: At long last, the eBook I’ve been rather obsessively writing for the past few months (“Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing“) was finally published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany in the respective Kindle stores for each country. I
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This short, creative video was made by a friend and former neighbor in Oklahoma. She sent this to her parents to say: Your tenth grandchild is coming soon! Nice job playing with media, Sunshine! http://playingwithmedia.com/pages/about Sent from my iPhone Posted via email from wesley fryer’s posterous
Please shed some light on this TwitPic mystery if you can. A month or so ago, my mom (who subscribes to my TwitPic account feed in her news reader) told me some strange photos were showing up in my stream. I tried to replicate what she was seeing and couldn’t. The strange photos were not
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At long last I’ve finished writing my first eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” I’m going to publish two eBook versions: a “multimedia EPUB” with 17 embedded videos / screencasts, and a standard eBook version without the videos. E-Ink powered eReaders like Kindle don’t support embedded videos. Lulu has an excellent comparative
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What’s the untold epiphany that inspires your project? The Internet is the ideal platform for sharing experiences. These and other messages are included in the 4.5 minute video, “How the Internet Is Changing Advertising” by Epipheo Studios. This video isn’t just about marketing. It’s about technological and communications convergence, the ways we’re increasingly processing digital,
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I’ll readily admit I wasn’t very excited when I learned Google has started a new social networking platform, Google+. It isn’t that I doubt Google engineers’ abilities to innovate. My lack of enthusiasm has more to do with information and social networking fatigue. Starting to use a new social networking platform at this point in
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Amidst final edits of my “Playing with Media” eBook today, I’ve been polishing some ideas for proposed conference session topics and professional development workshops I’d like to share in the upcoming 2011-2012 academic year as a digital learning consultant. “Playing with Media” will definitely shape many of the sessions I hope to share. As you
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Thanks to a Twisst alert I saw last night in my Twitter replies on Hootsuite for iPad, my girls and I saw the International Space Station fly over central Oklahoma early this morning. I’ve highlighted the pass we saw in this screenshot of the NASA Human Spaceflight Live Tracking site, taken about 30 minutes after
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One of the coolest things about the EPUB eBook format is its ability to include “embedded” videos within the eBook which are playable directly. It is NOT necessary to have a “live” Internet connection to view these. They do not stream. The videos play as part of the eBook. Together with images and hyperlinks, I
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Paul Simon’s song, “Kodachrome,” is an old favorite of mine. Last week during a lunch conversation, someone said “I’ve got a Nikon camera” and that was all it took to start another person at our table singing the first verse and chorus: When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
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About a month ago, at the end of June 2011, author J.K. Rowling delighted fans with her announcement that she’s creating a new online environment where the stories and characters of Hogwarts will continue to develop in the years ahead: Pottermore. According to Alison Flood’s June 23rd post for The Guardian: Although the author made
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This 30 second advertisement for the new Samsung Infuse 4G smartphone will make you laugh. Is the spider real, or is it virtual? Of course it’s an exaggeration, but the video does make the very serious point that graphics on new smartphones can be amazingly detailed. I’m generally not a big fan of advertisements and
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Because of the importance and relevance of clear copyright and fair use guidelines for ALL learners “playing with media,” I’ve provided a free, updated version of my chapter on Copyright in the eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” Access it on: http://playingwithmedia.com/pages/copyright I hope this chapter helps provide you and your students
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I will admit it off the bat: The title for this blog post is ridiculous. First of all, who would WANT to cross-post stuff from one social network to another, like from Twitter to Facebook? Second of all, what’s with all the cryptic lingo? Visibli? “Selective Tweets?” Are we working for AT&T here or on
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As educators we should be advocates for “open web publishing.” Open web publishing is sharing content on the Internet’s World Wide Web which does NOT require a login or password to access. “Closed web publishing” is sharing digital content online which is password protected. There are good reasons to interactively share content on the closed
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As I’ve been finalizing the “Video” chapter of my first eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” I realized a screencast I recorded back in January on Screenr about turning on YouTube comment moderation wasn’t cross-posted to YouTube. That’s now been remedied. The video tutorial is three minutes, seventeen seconds long. I think
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Today I have to drive about six hours getting one of our kids to a summer event, and I want proofread my new eBook which is almost finished, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” These are the steps I followed to convert the text I’ve typed in Pages on my Apple laptop into
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As the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s project, “Go Outside!” exhorts us, we need to get outside and get our students outside in natural environments to learn REAL science as well as develop an environmental ethic as stewards of our world. Nebraska Loves Public Schools, one of my favorite digital storytelling and educational advocacy programs
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