Moving at the Speed of Creativity

This was the video I submitted today as part of my application for the August 5th “Google Teacher’s Academy” in Boulder, Colorado. Not sure if this will be good enough, but we’ll see. It was fun to make!

I titled it, “Lincoln in 60 Seconds.” Video submissions for the GTA can be a maximum of 60 seconds in length. Mine’s exactly a minute long! Unfortunately I look like a shadow for the video segment from Ford’s Theater, but oh well. Next time, perhaps, I’ll bring supplementary lighting! I also said “Lincoln in 30 seconds” instead of “60 seconds” in the intro, but I realized that too late to re-record.

If you want to apply for the GTA August 5th in Colorado, you have until midnight, tonight to submit your application via a Google Form.

This video was edited from the porch of Robert E. Lee’s home (Arlington House) at Arlington National Cemetery today, and uploaded to YouTube via my 3G card. Mobile computing can be a good thing!

Technorati Tags:
google, history, gta, lincoln

These are my notes from Erin Gruwell’s closing keynote at NECC 2009. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. This was the program description:

Wednesday’s keynote wraps up your conference experience with an inspirational look into the 10+ years’ worth of technology-supported projects initiated by Freedom Writers founder Erin Gruwell. Born and raised in California, Gruwell has been inspiring students and teachers alike since beginning her teaching career in 1994.

By fostering an educational philosophy that valued and promoted diversity, she transformed her students’ lives. She encouraged them to rethink rigid beliefs about themselves and others, to reconsider daily decisions, and to rechart their futures. With Erin’s steadfast support, her students shattered stereotypes to become critical thinkers, aspiring college students, and citizens for change. They even dubbed themselves the “Freedom Writers”—in homage to civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders”—and published a book.

In January 2007, Paramount Pictures released “Freedom Writers,” a film based on this remarkable story, featuring Hilary Swank as Erin.

2009 marks the 10th anniversary of the original Freedom Writers project, and at NECC, Erin will connect the ways in which her ongoing work with the Freedom Writers Foundation has promoted digital citizenship through storytelling and has influenced teachers and students worldwide.

Freedom Writers Foundation
The Freedom Writers Diary
Film: Freedom Writers

Story of Maria Reyes inducted into a gang at age 11
- little girls like her could care less about a number 2 pencil and a scantron
- with more money, she could visit her daddy more often in prison
- repeated visits to juvenile hall
- she saw her life path options as VERY limited

Wanting her to understand we do not live in an “undeclared war”
- we don’t have to reach for weapons
- instead we can reach for pens
- I thought about Anne Frank
- I decided we would have a “toast for change” with sparkling Apple cider

Like so many teachers in our country, I had been brainwashed to teach to a test

Maria was teaching me a valuable lesson: teach to me, not to a test
- she said she wanted to change, not be pregnant by 15 like her mom, not go to prison like her dad

I’d like to bring you into my classroom in room 203
- share how a little girl was able to find her voice

Movie of Maria telling story of how she read “The Diary of Anne Frank”
- she didn’t think she had anything to relate to in that book
- every day she brought in new questions
- started to relate to Anne when things started to go bad
- I was able to link to that feeling of knowing the outside world was out there, but I just had this small connection to it
- from then on I wanted Anne to make it

One day Maria came in ad threw the book across the classroom, asked “Why didn’t you tell me?”
- I asked what? She said “you didn’t tell me she didn’t make it.”

Maria: I felt that same feeling of disappointment that I had felt with so many other disappointments in my life

Darius stood up and said: she did make it, because she wrote about it she is going to go on living even after she is dead
- that was real turning point
- that realization that writing makes you immortal, that was huge

Darius came up with an idea of getting lots of books in the library
- for so many kids who are transient, they may have missed out on show and tell

He learned that a woman who had helped save Anne is still alive, and thought they could write letters to her and she would come fly to the U.S. to come talk to 150 gangster students

Darius asked classmates to pony up cash to bring her from Amsterdam
- raising coins each day
- we sent 150 letters

She DID come from Amsterdam
- started talking about where she would stay, what we would feed her
- students repainted the graffiti covered walls of the school

Darius asked if he could be the MC of the event

Saw Maria holding her torn book (Diary of Anne Frank)
- she asked if we could get the book in Spanish because her mom wanted to read the book that changed her life

Darius who was so street tough, was deeply touched by this little, old lady telling this story about Anne

Most important thing she put into that attic was hope
- she looked at Darius and got very upset
- she said “No, I am not a hero. I simply did what I had to do because it was the right thing. Please make sure Anne’s death was not in vain.”

This made us realize perhaps we have a story, and someone would listen to us
- kids started talking about the stories they wanted to tell
- I made this desperate plea, my kids have no money, there are no computers in their homes, the librarian is afraid of my kids, they are afraid they will write on the keyboard and screen

If you tell a kid over and over again they are dumb and stupid, they will believe it
- so many people had stereotyped my kids they actually believed it
- that was a true until this one lady told my kids they were brilliant

If you don’t ask, you’ll never receive
- I was ready for a couple computers
- Two days later 36 computers arrived at my school
- it was like that new car smell
- My kids were wondering, “Are these for us?”

My kids wanted to have voice, they wanted to tell their story
- all of my kids could tell their story

As everyone began to write, I recognized those stories couldn’t be contained in room 203, in Long Beach

We decided to call ourselves the “Freedom Writers Diary”

Darius saw a video with the US secretary of Education
- asked if they could send their stories to them

Erin had just showed a video of civil rights leaders in 1950s and 1960s
- Darius wanted to take this message to Washington
- The sec of education would have to pay attention: this wasn’t about teaching to a test, this was about teaching to kids

I never envisioned that book would transcend our classroom, and become the #1 book
- all books sold, money was put into a fund to send all 150 of those students to colleg
- the first of their families to go to college

Right before we walked into the capitol we went into a juvenile hall
- they are treated like max security offenders
- people viewed those people and viewed them as bad because they had done bad things

Education is the only way to equalize an unfair playing field

you have a story

write your story down, give it to me, and I’ll take it there

Next thing we know, w

Being a dreamer, having that dream
- having kids who were written off, who were not supposed to make it

that blank screen gave them the power to become immortal

we walked into the halls of Congress
- Maria said, “Oh my God, there are so many old white men in here!” (with no script)

Maria was giving a face to millions of kids
- she recognized a man who had been a freedom writer
- he was a Congressman from Atlanta, Georgia
- he realized they had taken Freedom Writers as their name

If you teach 1, they will teach another

Yet again, just like the woman who had saved Anne Frank, the baton had been passed

So I wanted to create an organization that would teach teachers what they need to know, to reach and help each and every student that enters their classroom

150 teachers, from all over the nation, came to Long Beach and went through our boot camp
- Maria, Darius and others said come walk into our world
- doing bad things doesn’t make you a bad person
- if you tell a person they are dumb and stupid long enough they will believe it, imagine what will happen when you tell someone they are brilliant

THE POWER OF WORDS

last video in a virtual classroom with
- gave 150 teachers laptops from HP, software from Microsoft
- challenged them to tell their story
- we are underpaid, we are not validated
- help people realize our profession is a calling
- it could be a revolution, it is the only way to change society

These teachers realize education is not about a test, number 2 pencils, NCLB
- it is about reaching each child and believing each one can make it

Movie about the workshop for teachers, laptops provided by HP and Microsoft

THIS IS A TESTIMONY TO MANY THINGS. THE POWER OF WORDS. THE POWER OF HOPE. THE IMPORTANCE OF PASSIONATE TEACHING, LEADING AND LOVING. THE POWER OF STORIES. THE NEED TO ACT FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF TELLING OUR STORIES. THE POWER OF VOICE. THE POWER OF 1:1 COMPUTING IN THE HANDS OF PASSIONATE CHANGE AGENTS. WOW.

NOW I’VE GOTTA GO BUY THE BOOK AND READ IT, AND SEE THE MOVIE. ERIN’S STORY REMINDS ME SO MUCH OF MARCO TORRES. LIKE MARCO, SHE’S A PASSIONATE EDUCATOR WHO IS CHANGING THE WORLD BY LOVING, NURTURING, MENTORING, CHALLENGING, AND SUPPORTING KIDS.

I AM INSPIRED. LET THE STORYCHASING BEGIN.

Technorati Tags:
#necc09, education, inspire, iste, keynote, movie, necc, necc09, reform, school, story, transform, transformation, gruwell, erin, anne, frank, freedom, writers, freedomwriters, love, inspiration, expectations, hope, gang, gangs, diary, hp, microsoft, gangster

These are my notes from the last part of the NECC 2009 session, “:1 Laptops and Seamless Integration: Peek into the Frontier” by Howard Levin. Howard is with The Urban School of San Francisco. Howard’s presentation links are available, including his slides for this presentation and many of the video links he referenced in this session. FANTASTIC SESSION, WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN HERE FOR THE WHOLE THING!

discussing motion sensors in physics and the student’s own data
- there is real power in this, the relevance of the student’s own data
- students comparing and contrasting data from when they were on the trapeze

Paradigm shift we are living in now: we have the ability to record and share anything we want now
- the delivery of information no longer has to be syncrhonous

HE IS SO RIGHT! THIS IS A KEY SHIFT/CHANGE IN OUR LEARNING LANDSCAPE TODAY

Most schools in this country do NOT let students install new software on their laptops
- we do
- we have students sign an agreement, have

some of the best software being used in our school now is software that was discovered by students

iFlash is an example (flashcards, you can share virtual decks of flashcards)

the idea of locking computers down so kids cannot mess with them is so 20th century

I am passionate about software that helps with student production
- can be in many, many forms

Production is generally what teachers assess in terms of what they have learned
- too often we give kids 1 way to do it
- even with technology often we constrain their choices

what we see as we give kids more opportunities to express how they are learning, we are getting better information and data about what they are learning
- example: letting students do oral composition (instead of written compensation)
- in one example, a student was nervous communicating in class and was a horrific writer, but something magic happened when the student was in their room by themselves and able to record their voice
- is an example of a teacher who has found a way to reach the kids

Another of my mantras: apply the same tools and techniques that we use and apply to students who are defined as “disabled” and apply those for other students

There is magic for many of us as deliverers of knowledge as we verbally express it
- 1 on 1 in a small group it is harder for me to express myself with writing
- I am becoming a better communicator because of the ability to verbally express it

My project I am most passionate about, which is the pinnacle of student production
- Telling Their Stories: http://tellingstories.org
- entire interviews are recorded and transcribed by students using their computers
- you can click on any part of this story and listen to it
- there are now about 100 hours of video on this site
- this is an example of the far end of what you can do with these tools with vision, to enhance and extend what you were not able to do previously in the past

this is a community service to the world
- these interviews are being used across the country in history classes
- students are doing “authentic doing”
- publishing of Internet-based video is now essentially free

Example of a class who interviewed others and researched environmental issues, the audience for their report were environmental experts in the San Francisco area
- now there is dialog as a result of the research and interview work that was done by students and posted to this website

search for “greening SF” - very impressive student wiki

Technorati Tags:
#necc09, necc, necc09

Karyn Romeis posted a Russian langauge YouTube video to her blog today. Although I do not yet speak any Russian, the artist communicates a powerful story here in an amazing way which transcends language.

What is the backstory? Is this the German invasion of Russia during World War II? What ARE the words of the singers? I am enthralled and want to learn more. I need to reach out to Russian language speakers.

One of my USAFA classmates speaks Russian and lives here in DC. If I’m able to meet up with him this week I’m going to ask about this. Actually I think I’ll email him too.

If you have any further info on the backstory of this video, please let me know.

This is a phenomenal example of passionate, artistic expression. At times it reminds me of a multimedia Guernica.

Technorati Tags:
art, communication, creative, creativity, story, video, youtube, russia, war, passion

My son and I spent most of today at the Smithsonian Air and Space and Natural History Museums, and I was enthused to put my iPhone GS through its paces as a mobile storychasing platform capable of shooting video and uploading it directly to YouTube. The final conclusion I drew from the day’s storychasing was: The battery life on the iPhone GS may be improved, but it is still QUITE inadequate for a day of mobile videography and cell phone network uploading.

In addition to the reflections on the new UAV exhibit at the Smithsonian which I posted earlier in the day directly to YouTube and my blog from the museum over 3G, I shot two short (less than 90 second) videos which I posted to Flickr this evening.

The UAV video required almost 30 minutes to upload to YouTube over the AT&T 3G network here in Washington DC at the Air and Space Museum, and the battery on my iPhone GS was VERY sapped by the experience. After uploading that video, I received the following text message from AT&T. Note how low my battery level was in the screen snap! This was at 2 pm, when I had started the day with a full iPhone charge.

Apparently when our family visited our local AT&T store last weekend to switch the phone numbers on my old 1st gen iPhone with my wife’s newly upgraded line to an iPhone GS, the AT&T store staffer did not switch the data plans in the system. As a result, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with AT&T today from the Smithsonian FINALLY getting this straightened out. (At least I certainly hope it’s fixed.) I have NOT been at all happy or satisfied with the competence of AT&T phone support in the past several weeks, with either land-line phone support or wireless support. This phone call should have taken 10 minutes, it took 45. I’ve been on the phone two different times for over an hour each trying to get my home landline bill charges fixed, and they are still not resolved. At this point, if I had a choice for an iPhone carrier I would definitely give someone else other than AT&T a try. As it is, I can’t, and I understand the AT&T contact with Apple is for five years. Sigh.

The mobile video highlight of the day was likely the following sequence which Alexander agreed to record, sharing some of his reactions as well as learning points about the Hubble Space Telescope replica at the Smithsonian:

Since it took so long to upload a 5 minute video to YouTube over 3G earlier in the day and my iPhone battery had been sapped so severely by this activity, I chose not to upload Alexander’s video “from the field” but rather upload it this evening over WiFi. I’ve also posted this over on Learning Signs. I’m not going to leave my Sony GC-1 Netsharing Cam behind tomorrow, in fact I may shoot the majority of video footage from EduBloggerCon with it tomorrow.

We need scientists and engineers to devise MUCH more powerful and efficient batteries ASAP! The impact of those inventions and breakthroughs will not only be huge for mobile storychasers, like us today, but also for many other much more practical applications that affect our lives, societies and economies.

I’ll close with some comparative photographs.

March 2008, when Alexander and I were in DC for the COSN conference:

June 2009, in DC this week for NECC:

I see some noticeable, comparative height changes here!

Technorati Tags:
#necc09, iphone, iphonegs, iste, mobile, museum, necc, necc09, publish, smithsonian, space, youtube, air, recording, battery, disappointment

This is a mobile-recorded video at the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) exhibit today at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

This was recorded on an iPhone GS and originally mobile blogged on site (at the Smithsonian) with the free Wordpress for iPhone application.

Technorati Tags:
washingtondc, uav, unmanned, aerial, vehicle, usaf, airforce, aircraft, plane, smithsonian, washington

We wrapped up another Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling workshop for twenty more educators today, and again I was blown away by the quality and themes of the 3-5 minute stories they chose to tell with still images and audio narration in the space of just 2 and a half days.

“Innocence Lost” by Andrea is the story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, with a superb introduction which really helps establish a good frame of reference for the context of this tragedy.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

“Oklahoma City’s Underground Chinatown” by Regina Hartley (RSHartley on Twitter) tells an amazing story about an underground world where Chinese Oklahomans lived during the early years of our state. I was amazed to learn that the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States was in effect from 1882 to 1943. Good grief. Racism is not new to us, is it?

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Regina noted that her video is an incomplete draft, but I think even this initial version is REMARKABLE. Add this video to the digital witness scorecard for Storychasers and Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, along with Kenneth Osborn’s video “Indian Jack Jacobs” from this week. (By the way, Regina is an elementary librarian. Woo hoo, let’s hear it for library media specialists modeling the way forward with digital literacy and 21st century skills!)

“Jack Applegate” is a video by another librarian leader (Perri) about the amazing experiences of her father-in-law as a member of the 101st Airborne Division in the Second World War. Can you imagine going AWOL with a broken knee cap so you could parachute into enemy-occupied France with your brothers-in-arms? This is a remarkable and inspiring story. Perri said it took 5-6 hours for her to write this script, and about 8 hours total to record and edit just the audio track for this video. What an effort! Those hours of work certainly paid off.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

“The Long Road to healing” by Lori Nelson is another veteran story, but this one discusses a return after 42 years to Vietnam.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

“…And Then There Were Nine” by Meisha Prince is an amazing story of how her in-laws ended up adopting four orphans from Russia. This video is certainly a “story of faith,” which is a separate digital storytelling project I’ve been working to start in the past year. This is really a touching tale.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Great job Oklahoma educators! Our digital storytelling efforts continue and are really just getting started!

Technorati Tags:
army, history, okc, oklahoma, oklahomacity, story, veteran, orphan, adoption, vietnam, worldwarii, 101st, airborne, chinese

“Indian” Jack Jacobs was a remarkable athlete. Born in Holdenville, Oklahoma in 1919, his exciting passing skills eventually led the Canadian Football League franchise team, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, to build the larger Winnipeg Stadium, now called Canad Inns Stadium. This week in a Celebrate Oklahoma Voices workshop on oral history and digital storytelling, Holdenville teacher Kenneth Ray Orsburn, Jr. created the following 2.5 minute video about Jack Jacobs. It’s a Winnipeg to Oklahoma historical connection. (Darren, I had no idea!)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Prior to seeing this video, the only Indian / Native American professional football player from Oklahoma I had read about was Jim Thorpe. This is a great example of a biography and story which SHOULD be in our Oklahoma textbooks, but isn’t! Now it’s accessible to every learner on the planet, as long as they have Internet access and the domains celebrateoklahoma.us and api.ning.com are not blocked in their location.

Chalk up another point for the digital witness program of Storychasers and Celebrate Oklahoma Voices.

Technorati Tags:
history, oklahoma, football, canada, cfl, unitedstates, winnipeg, holdenville

This weekend my kids and I visited our new lego store in Oklahoma City and explored the possibilities of mobile video blogging with the iPhone GS, as well as the latest offerings from Lego. The iPhone GS now supports video recording and copy/paste, with no jailbreak required, which are two key ingredients for mobile video blogging. The last ingredient is support for direct video uploading to YouTube.

I was able to record the following video, post it to YouTube, and post a link with some explanatory text to our family learning blog all from my iPhone GS on Saturday, using the available 3G network in Oklahoma City and the free Wordpress for iPhone application. Upload time for this 48 second video was about 4 minutes over 3G. It would have been faster over a WiFi connection, but one was not available at the Lego Store.

The only missing ingredient from this recipe was the free Wordpress plug-in Twitter Tools, which will automatically tweet new blog posts when they are published to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. I have this installed and functional on the team blog Eyes Right, but not on Learning Signs yet. I will most likely install and activate the plug-in here on “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” prior to NECC09, and on Learning Signs prior to our family vacation (which will be taken without laptops, but not without iPhones) later in July.

Here’s a quick step-by-step tutorial on mobile videoblogging with the iPhone GS. Some of these screenshots (taken on my iPhone by simultaneously holding down the power and home buttons) were from my first experimental iPhone video on YouTube, “Irrelevant Paper.” Others were from the Lego store. Both were taken and published on Saturday.

When selecting the “camera” icon on the iPhone, you now have an option to take still image photos or videos. Both videos and still pictures show up in the photo gallery.

After selecting a video, click on the “share” icon in the lower left corner to publish it. Choose “Send to YouTube” to publish it there for immediate access.

Log into an existing YouTube account, using the correct userid and password.

Enter the desired title, description, tags, and category for your new video.

After the video successfully uploads to YouTube, a screen like the following is displayed permitting iPhone video publishers to directly view it on YouTube, or initiate an email including the direct link to the video.

If you choose to view the video right away, most likely it will not yet be available on the iPhone. I think YouTube is now transcoding multiple versions of uploaded videos, including a lower-resolution version which is playable on mobile devices like the iPhone. Eventually the video should be transcoded for playback/availability on the iPhone, but this can take awhile depending on the size of the video and probably how busy the YouTube servers are at the time you upload.

To post a link to the video on our family learning blog from the mall, I selected the option “Tell a Friend” after publishing the video to YouTube. This opened a new email message, from which I was able to copy and paste the direct YouTube URL/website of the new video. I then used the free application Wordpress for iPhone to create and publish a new blog post, which included the video link. (I “pasted” it on the iPhone. How sweet!)

To make sure the post was published, I opened the homepage for our family learning blog and viewed the post.

I wish there was a way to view, copy and paste the actual embed code for the YouTube video in the blog post, but I don’t think you can do that yet. I’m betting we’ll see the Flickr iPhone application update soon to permit video uploads. For videos less than 90 seconds in length, I really do prefer Flickr rather than YouTube. Here’s a 71 second video overview of the OKC Lego Store, which I took with the iPhone Saturday and uploaded to Flickr this evening. The Flash transcoding on Flickr seems to result in a lower-quality video, but for shorter clips like this I’ll opt for mobile Flickr publishing rather than YouTube when it becomes available on the iPhone.

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, iphone, iphonegs, mobile, oklahoma, video, lego, store, oklahomacity, okc, mall, tutorial

Yesterday was release day for the new iPhone GS, and our family now owns two iPhones. We upgraded my wife’s “normal” cell phone to the iPhone GS, and are going to the AT&T store later today to swap SIM cards and register that swap with AT&T so our numbers will remain the same. She is getting my 1st generation iPhone, and I’m getting the iPhone GS. I was surprised that the new iPhone 3.0 software downloaded free to the 1st Gen iPhone, I was expecting we’d have to pay for the update. We would have to pay for the update ($10) to put it on our son’s iPod Touch, but the feature set doesn’t seem to justify it yet.

The first thing I was eager to do on the new iPhone GS was shoot a video and directly upload it to YouTube. Here is our first iPhone recorded/YouTube published video, taken by my 8 year old daughter. She was a little shaky holding the iPhone still, but overall I think the quality is really good for both audio and video. The key is, this video was DIRECTLY uploaded to YouTube! The title of this one minute commentary is, “Irrelevant Paper.”

iPhone GS owners: Welcome to the world of “publish at will” mobility to YouTube.

Technorati Tags:
publish, youtube, iphone, iphonegs

We wrapped up a week-long summer camp on StopMotion Film Making today at the Edmond Fine Arts Institute, and students showed off the results of their creative week of filmmaking during a “showcase” at the end of class. All told, each student pair created four films each. Day 1 was an experimental film learning the basics of the free SAM Animation software program. In day 2 we introduced storyboarding and the concept of dramatic structure. On day three students experimented a little with claymation / stopmotion with modeling clay, made a short claymation film, and started to plan their longer, final project. Final projects were actually created, with both stopmotion video and sound/audio effects, on days 4 and 5. Final projects had to be at least 30 seconds long, but students could decide what frame rate they wanted to use. Most used a framerate between 5 and 10 fps. SAM makes it very easy for students to change the framerate, which is nice, but this may have created some of the problems I had tonight when uploading these to YouTube. (See below for more details.) Students used microphones to record voiceover narration, and also used the PodSafe Music Network for music as well as Soungle and FindSounds.com for sound effects. All these sites for sound and music are listed on the music/audio resource page of our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project. Some of the music they used did originate on other sites, and (of course) this provided a good context to discuss copyright and fair use. In the case of one group, which used a clip of “The Imperial March” by John Williams from the Star Wars film series, I showed them how to edit and fade out music using the free program Audacity. For the first three days of camp, we started by watching and analyzing several sample stopmotion films. Most of those examples are listed/linked on our workshop wiki.

Here are the students’ final projects! They did great and I think had a lot of fun learning about stopmotion. We met for three hours each weekday this week, from 3 to 6 pm. These projects represent about 5-6 hours of work for each student team. Students in the camp ranged in age from 9 to 14 years old. (If you listen closely in some of these videos, you may hear the voice of a guest actor whose name you know!)

The Final Fight by Uday and Ben (52 seconds)
This is the 3rd part of a fun trilogy they made using goldfish and other characters.

The Arcade by Ben and Spencer (32 seconds)
This is a movie about a character who falls into a video game and has to win at several games in order to get out.

The Three Sea Creatures by Supriya and Sarah (50 seconds)
This movie is a takeoff on “The Three Little Pigs,” where the villain is an evil goldfish.

The Alien Invasion of 92 by Cameron and Christian (50 seconds)
This movie is a brickfilm (stopmotion with legos) and uses some creative effects they thought of themselves.

I thought it would be very straightforward to upload these to YouTube, but for some reason a lot of frames were skipped in the initial Flash-encoded YouTube versions I uploaded. I’m not sure if that was a function of the original framerates at which these were encoded or something else. After reading several online articles about optimal QuickTime Pro export settings for StopMotion movies and YouTube, I adjusted the settings and used a fixed framerate of 10 for re-exported versions of these videos. That seemed to do the trick when I uploaded to YouTube, as the resulting Flash videos seem to have all the frames of the original videos included! The audio tracks are also in sync with the video track, and that was a problem with some of the videos for some reason the first time I uploaded them.

Parents gave very positive feedback following our “showcase” in which we watched all the films students created during the week. Several reported that their kids LOVED learning about and doing stopmotion, and couldn’t wait to come back to class each day this week! This was a lot of fun, but also quite a bit of work. I plan to share a lengthier reflection about “lessons learned” leading this camp soon. I may record an audio podcast with my 11 year old son, Alexander, who helped me facilitate the camp. He was a HUGE help, and it was great to see him sharing his expertise with other students as well as working to tactfully keep student groups on task. (Something which is often a challenge during cooperative learning, even when students are doing something fun and engaging like creating stopmotion films!)

We used all of our own equipment for this camp, except for several painter’s lights which were provided by one of the staff members. I owe a big thanks to the open source developers of maccam, since that driver allowed us to use two old, inexpensive webcams for student SAM projects. The big mystery of the week, which is still unresolved, is why my father-in-law’s Sony MiniDV recorder stopped sending video out the firewire cable after day 2. We tried everything to reset it, use different cables, etc, and nothing worked. Thankfully we had a portable iSight camera, 2 old USB webcams, and my old Sony Digital8 camcorder. On two occasions student groups had to try making videos with the built-in iSight on a Macbook laptop, and that was REALLY tough. An external camera/webcam which you can mount on a tripod or has its own support base is essential for stopmotion filmmaking.

I posted 70 photos I snapped with my iPhone during our workshop to Flickr this evening. Let’s hear it for creative filmmaking fun!

Technorati Tags:
animation, arts, creative, creativity, edmond, fun, learning, oklahoma, software, stopmotion, video, multimedia, art, SAM, webcam, camera

Today I helped leaders of Turning Point Ministries of Oklahoma create and upload about three hundred photos to a new Flickr Pro account for the organization.

I still need to switch the organization’s website from Drupal to Wordpress, and recruit some family help to upload/post past press releases about Turning Point’s work to the blog. I plan to get that process underway next week, following this Friday’s golf tournament / fundraiser for Turning Point.

Turning Point Ministries:

…is a non-profit ministry that assists in the housing needs of those in Edmond, Oklahoma living in sub-standard conditions. Turning Point is partnered with Habitat for Humanity of Central Oklahoma, and purchases lots in Edmond so Habitat can build homes. Without the provision of home lots in Edmond, Habitat would not be able to build homes in the Edmond community. Turning Point is a 501.C3 non-profit.

Technorati Tags:
flickr, turningpoint, turning, point

This evening I used DimDim for the first time to host and lead an online meeting, and the results were very positive overall. This was a “facilitator debrief” for our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project, discussing guidelines for co-facilitators and lead facilitators, as well as lessons learned from our summer workshops to date. The free version of DimDim allows you to have one person sharing video at a time, and up to three people using the microphone to talk. There was quite a bit of echo on the call when more than one person had their microphone activated, so it was important for me as the host to turn off the “hands free” microphone option when others were talking. We created the presentation deck for the call in Google Documents in advance of the workshop. I downloaded that as a PowerPoint file and uploaded it into DimDim just prior to our online meeting, and it worked GREAT to share that presentation file during the online meeting. Here’s the link to the recorded DimDim session, which was just over one hour in length and is 90 MB in size. The recording is a FLV file, which I’ve also downloaded to archive in case DimDim doesn’t host the presentation for us indefinitely. DimDim doesn’t provide embed code for this archived recording, but did email me as the meeting host following the conference with links to both the session recording and archived text chat.

We had eight people in the webconference tonight, and could have had up to 20 with a free DimDim account. We used the backchannel text chat feature quite a bit, and as I’ve found with Elluminate it was even more valuable to use than the shared microphone option. Here’s an archived version of our session text chat.

The only thing I might have changed was letting people know in advance that they should connect a microphone to their computer so they could verbally participate. All our co-facilitators have “digital backpacks” of digital storytelling equipment including a Platronics headset, so they all have microphones, but I hadn’t thought to remind people to have microphones connected when they joined the webconference tonight.

I hosted this free, online webconference in DimDim using the FireFox browser on my Mac laptop. When I clicked to stop the recording and was prompted to save it as an archive, my browser froze up for some reason and I had to force-quit it. The archived recordings and text transcripts were still saved, however, and I was/am able to locate the recordings following the workshop thanks to the follow-up email I received. There was NOT a link to the archives in my online DimDim account.

In the call I referenced the Creative Commons video “A Shared Culture”, the project “Unmasking the Digital Truth,” and the Texas STaR Chart.

Woo hoo for DimDim! I like it!

Visit Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Technorati Tags:
online, dimdim, meeting

I’ll hopefully be able to post more reflections on our first day of Stopmotion Film Making summer camp soon, but I want to at least share the following two AMAZING stopmotion video examples tonight.

This first one comes via a tweet from Oregon 5th grade teacher David Cosand. The stopmotion film “Sorry I’m Late” was created with an overhead camera. The “how to” / backstory is included at the end accompanying the rolling credits. WOW!

Sorry I’m Late from Tomas Mankovsky on Vimeo.

This second stopmotion video, “The Letter,” is a longer film (6 minutes) and a good example of:

1. A well-planned lego brickfilm
2. Creative use of background music
3. Good use of closely-cropped shots to add visual interest and show detail
4. Example of dramatic structure in a stopmotion film
5. Good use of supplementary sound effects

This video was shared by one of our 6th grade workshop participants today. I added this video to my growing “stopmotion” playlist on YouTube.

I’ve also made multiple updates to the Stopmotion wiki page we’re using as a curriculum and resource page for our week-long “camp” this week.

If you have links to favorite stopmotion videos which are not yet included on that page, please let me know with a comment here or a Twitter @reply to @wfryer.

Technorati Tags:
creativity, film, stopmotion, video, youtube

3 months of planning. 4 days of shooting. 6000+ post-it notes. A completed senior project by Bang-yao Liu at the Savannah College of Art and Design. 1 minute and 54 seconds, now on the global stage via YouTube.

Here’s the visual backstory.

I added this amazing example to my Stopmotion workshop wiki, not because I expect our 9-12 year olds next week to create something comparable, but because this video provides a glimpse into what is possible via Stopmotion. Hat tip to Susan van Gelder!

More great stopmotion examples on The Longfellow Ten. Hat tip to Kevin Hodgson.

Technorati Tags:
stopmotion, video