Our next meet-up will be Tuesday, March 6th from 6-7 pm at The Div. (Register for free via Eventbrite) Last night we were NOT able to webstream live because of hardware reconfigurations at The Div, but we will be able to for March. If your schedule permits, come for our iPad App chat in person next month and plan to stay for the “Social About Social” at the Div which starts afterward at 7.

Technorati Tags: app, edmond, ipad, okc, oklahoma, meetup

Learning About Notetaking on the iPad at @thedivorg via @ipadwithwes originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 8, 2012.

I called AT&T and after discussing this, they added a feature to our phone package called “Purchase Manager.” Sometimes this feature is called “Purchase Blocker,” in either event it’s FREE to add. I think it should be a default account feature. Classactionconnect.com has instructions about adding it via AT&T’s Wireless customer website. We’re not sure how this recurring $10 monthly charge was added to her bill, but it could have been an online recipe site which my wife visited or something else. Buried in the “terms of use” could have been verbiage saying “by clicking download” (or “agree”) you agree to pay $9.99 this month and every successive month for a confusing “Mobile Purchase” which will be buried on your phone bill and will be extremely difficult to find or decipher. One of the lessons learned here is: Don’t give out your cell phone number on ANY website. You never know what the website owner might choose to do with your information.

By adding “Purchase Manager” or “Purchase Blocker” to our AT&T wireless account, no third party entity will be able to add a purchase or subscription to our phone bill unless we, as cellular customers, log into our account and provide a four digit PIN to authorize that billing addition. This is similar to the feature some cable TV or satellite TV customers can add to “pay per view” programs, requiring a PIN to be entered so children don’t accidentally or intentionally make program purchases with the family’s remote control.

If you’re not with AT&T in the United States for your cellular service, check with your provider and see what they call this “feature.” This seems like something everyone should have by default on cell phone accounts.

Today the AT&T representative was very helpful and in addition to adding this free “Purchase Blocker” service, also entered refunds for the $9.99 charged to our account in January and in February by this scammer. A web search resulted in several pages (here and here) where other people reported this same scamming problem with “BULLROARE.” Hopefully you haven’t run into this in the past. In any event, try and add a free “Purchase Blocker” feature to your mobile account to hopefully prevent situations like this from cropping up in the future.

Technorati Tags: cell, phone, att, bullroare, sms, subscription, charge, fee, scam

Avoid Cellphone Text Messaging Scams with free Purchase Blocker Feature originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 6, 2012.

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A 1 page PDF flyer for iPad App Coffee Chats is available via Scribd.

FREE iPad App Coffee Chats

Technorati Tags: app, edmond, ipad, oklahoma

FREE iPad App Coffee Chats start Tuesday, February 7 in Edmond, Oklahoma originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 5, 2012.

The past three weeks I’ve facilitated lessons with about twelve different 6th, 7th and 8th grade students about storytelling and puppet movies. The first two weeks we used Puppet Pals on the iPad, and last week we used real finger puppets to make some short skit videos. We published some of our work from both weeks to the multimediasandbox YouTube channel. This has been a worthwhile but challenging series of lessons. See my January 19th post, “Lessons Learned Using Puppet Pals on iPads in an After School Program,” for more background. We haven’t created any masterpieces, but we have had fun discussing the story arc and making short videos which (generally) attempt to present a coherent message. 50 minutes isn’t a lot of time to have to create and share stories, but we’ve done the best we could with the time and resources available.

One of the primary things I’ve wrestled with as I’ve considered what to teach these students in “Life Skills” lessons involving the iPad is this: None of these students own iPads or have access to iPads at home. What kinds of things should I teach them which can have immediate relevance in their lives, as well as potential long term relevance? Sure we’ve had fun making some short videos with digital and actual puppets, but these activities aren’t things they can repeat on their own when I leave with the three iPads I’ve brought to class each day. I have had the privilege of being with Kevin Honeycutt in the past when he taught incarcerated, Kansas youth short lessons (on behalf of ESSDACK) and used art as a way to both “reach” them and have important discussions about life as well as learning. I’m no Kevin Honeycutt, I have very limited drawing skills, and the kids I’m teaching in “Tiger Club” definitely aren’t incarcerated youth… but a talk with him on the phone earlier this week motivated me to share a lesson with my students on the possibilities for becoming a digital artist.

I started the lesson today asking who liked to draw, who considered themselves artists, and who thought they were creative. I explained we ALL are artists and have creative skills, but not all of us think about ourselves that way. I asked about how long people have been creating drawings and telling stories, and we discussed how that goes back to “the cave.” As humans, some of us have always been driven to draw and share stories through art. It’s in our DNA.

I shared a story with the students about our Storychasers logo, which we outsourced via crowdSPRING. 99Designs is a similar web community for graphic artists and folks needing design work.

I explained how our Storychasers group received 147 design concepts (low resolution digital art drawings) of logo ideas from 43 different designers from around the world.

Eventually, we selected one we liked which turned out to be the work of a graphic designer in eastern Europe who lives in Zagreb, Croatia. One of the designers we initially considered was coincidentally based in Oklahoma, but we had problems with them providing higher resolution versions of the logo draft they’d made. It’s pretty amazing we paid someone $500 to make a logo for us who we never met and lives all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in another country! This is a real story of outsourcing and digital creativity, and I wanted to share it so my students would at least be exposed to the idea that digital artists can now access a world of work possibilities via the Internet. It doesn’t matter where you live: Creative skills are needed and marketable.

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I showed students on our printed as well as digital handout where they could access links to FREE digital art programs like the Gimp, that have similar features as Adobe PhotoShop that costs $700 to buy. Hopefully some of them will check it out and pursue some digital art creative possibilities on their own following our “Life Skills” class series.

I next introduced my students to the iPad app Brushes, and showed them several recent creations by my 8 year old daughter, Rachel.

I showed students how the iPad Brushes app lets us “replay” a video of how Rachel made these drawings, and I showed them some other amazing YouTube examples of iPad drawings using Brushes as well. We watched these and discussed the techniques the artists used.

At this point I need to give a hat tip to Marco Torres, who was the first person to share the Brushes app with me several years ago in Maine. Although I haven’t become an acknowledged digital artist with Brushes since I learned about it, I have both played with it and shared it with many people. This is a specific example of how the opportunity to meet and hang out with creative people (which Apple specifically facilitated in my life via various means) has been life changing. “But for” my very brief chances to hang with Marco and learn from him, I probably wouldn’t have been teaching my students about Brushes on the iPad today. “But for” my opportunities to hang out with Bob Sprankle, I would know far less about podcasting, webcasting, and iPhoneography. I tried to communicate this idea to my students today: If we want to learn how to do something, we need to hang out with other people who know how to do it well. That’s how a lot of learning happens. It’s a big reason we need to choose our friends carefully.

In addition to viewing these examples of digital art with Brushes today, I also showed students this video of art created with Autodesk SketchBook Pro for iPad.

Before handing out the iPads to students, I demonstrated the basics of drawing with Brushes using an AppleTV which mirrored my iPad2 screen. Next, I introduced students to the free “Art Snacks” online community facilitated by Kevin Honeycutt and explained they would be drawing a Great White Shark today. We had paper and pencils available, and students took turns drawing on the available iPads (3) as well as my iPhone which had the Brushes app loaded. I had one stylus which students used, but unfortunately broke (the tip came off) during the lesson. Together we watched Kevin’s “Artsnacks Great White Shark” video on YouTube. I paused it several times for students to compare drawings and add to their drawings. As Kevin had suggested to me, some of the kids were really into it and were loving the chance to learn some new art techniques. Others were less engaged, but since everyone could at least draw with paper and pencil this was a lesson that was “doable” by everyone.

Here are some examples of drawings we made in class. The last one is my own. It is risky and takes some courage to share your own art with others, especially when (like me) you’re not very confident in your own art skills. I think this is a good way to model both creativity and instructional risk taking with students, however. We learn the most when we are “stretched” out of our personal comfort zones, and these are times when we try new things that we’re not entirely comfortable doing.

This lesson provided some good opportunities to talk about “important stuff” with students in addition to digital art and drawing skills. When I asked the students what they thought of my drawing partway through Kevin’s video, one of them said, “That looks horrible!” We talked about how those words might make me feel, even though the student quickly said, “I was just kidding.” We talked about bullying, and how important and powerful the words we choose are. I talked about how there are far TOO MANY people in this world who “use their words” to hurt and inflict pain on others. I told the students I sometimes mess this up, but I try to use my words as much as I can to build others up and give them POWER instead of tearing them down.

I don’t know what lessons from today’s “digital art discussions” my students will remember, but we never do when we teach… do we? I felt better about today’s “Life Skills” lesson than I have all year, and I know a big reason the lesson was a success was I used resources provided by Kevin Honeycutt and Art Snacks. If you haven’t shown Art Snacks to your own students, DO IT soon. Not all the kids in any classroom love art and will want to learn more about making art, but chances are high SOME WILL.

Teach your students how to be digital artists, even if (like me) you don’t consider yourself to have very developed drawing skills. We are all creative, and we can all be artists. To be an artist, we have to CREATE things. We need to MAKE stuff. Today, we have lots of opportunities to play with media and not only share digital art, but also sell it on sites like crowdSPRING and 99designs. Share these possibilities with your students too. Making and sharing art certainly has intrinsic value and isn’t all about monetization. Some kids may not have considered these possibilities, however. Your students could not only be outsourced digital designers for someone else, down the road they might also use digital outsourcing for their own projects like we did with Storychasers last year.

Who knows where that shared knowledge may take them and us? The possibilities are exciting.

Hat tip to Cody Birsner for sharing 99designs with me a few months ago.

Technorati Tags: creativity, edmond, ipad, oklahoma, art, brushes, create, kevin, honeycutt, artsnacks, essdack, fpce, tiger, club

Teach Your Students to be Digital Artists (and learn from Kevin Honeycutt) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 3, 2012.

http://yesdancan.com is the website Dan Lovejoy built by hand (not with WordPress) to get a job – and he got a job!
- build websites with iThemesBuilder and focused a lot on SEO issues

Other web links for other attendees tonight:
http://www.northideas.com
http://extremevirtualsupport.com
http://www.tandswebdesign.com
http://www.edmondbootcamp.com
http://jfdoes.com
http://social-ism.biz
http://thereproject.com
http://thomasperezphotography.com
http://ignitedmediadesign.com
http://www.alertinternational.com
http://newlookmedia.com
http://www.gfellerstudio.com
http://www.heliumscraper.com (.net webpage screenscraper)

(if I missed your link and you attended please share it via a comment or Twitter)

“It’s tough to be a professional photographer today, because everyone is a photographer”

I shared a presentation on “Go Mobile with WordPress.” My links are on wfryer.me/wp

I also recorded my audio from this presentation using Cinch on my iPad

Now hearing from Dan Lovejoy on SEO and WordPress

Lots of important things to remember when writing for the web
- also important to write SEO (search engine optimized) content
- CRO = conversion rate optimization

Writing SEO copy is hard
- writing natural copy is hard
- writing conversation optimized copy is hard

SEO is optimizing your page or site for specific keywords
- standard line from web masters: if you just build it and write a lot of content on it, you’ll attract the traffic
- “being a content thought leader is a higher calling than SEO”
- there is a scientific process of optimizing specific pages for specific keywords

Avoid using a period in your phrase, but you can use a semicolon, comma, and m-dash or n-dash
- when you define SEO targets you generally want to use phrases rather than keywords
- “the longer the tail” you have using the Google Adwords tool, you can try to find keywords people aren’t ranking for but there is traffic
- you want to look for keywords in the 3 – 7% density (as of now) otherwise you can get ‘thumped’ by Google (Googe either puts a penalty on your page rank or de-indexes you)
- SEO has changed a lot even since November 2011 when I stopped doing this professionally

If you are already in the top six of Google search pages, you’re good
- people are drilling down in Google searches more now (we used to say you need to be on the top 3 pages)
- it is better to be 11 rather than 9…

David Christopher was Google SEO-guru at OPUBCO who taught Dan a LOT

My question about Bing: It looks like optimizing for Google does the same thing for Bing search

WordPress is a GREAT tool for SEO
- all the tools are available
- we use All-In-One SEO WordPress plugin

Post tips:
- make sure post titles contain keywords
- make sure post title propagates to your page title
- write a click-optimized custom page description for each (human readable URLs are very important to Google)
- the META KEYWORDS field doesn’t matter

Watch out for duplicate content, it won’t ‘kill you’ like it used to, but it can dilute the power of your inbound links

Key: cross-posting is bad for SEO, it can dilute the power of your inbound links
- if using Posterous site, set it up to be NO INDEX (change robots tags to tell Google not to look at the site)

Post titles should use an H1 tag on the title
- don’t use multiple H1 tags!
- if your theme doesn’t do this, you need to get a new theme or change it
- make sure you use semantic markup (H2, H3, etc) for internal headings
- use only absolutely necessary plug-ins (page speed matters)

Google indexes keywords that are higher on a page

Good SEO Blogs:
- http://www.seomoz.org
- http://www.stompernet.com

Google tracks how good your inbound links, Google knows what your PPC (pay per clicks) are, your keyword density, your interlinking….
- that is how Google knows about how long people stay on your site
- human reviewers also go to sites for Google (mainly checking for spam and garbage on your site)

Comment from attendee: Google doesn’t put a real person on a site unless it has more than 100,000 inbound links, they don’t care about sites with 10K or 20K links

Any time you have a person creating a real link, that is ‘white hat SEO’
- there is a sea of garbage that people create, that stuff is way down on Google results…

JC Pennys got ‘slapped’ really hard by using ‘black hat SEO’ methods

I HAD TO GO PICK UP MY SON FROM SCOUTS AT THIS POINT, SO I COULDN’T STAY FOR MORE… GREAT STUFF FROM DAN!

Technorati Tags: blog, mobile, wordpress, seo, plugin, plugins

Going Mobile with WordPress and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 30, 2012.

wfryer.me/ota12

I hope this mobile-friendly conference session format helps you find great sessions at the conference, if you’re attending. This is the first year EncycloMedia (which has historically been held in the fall) has merged with the OTA conference. David Warlick is our keynote this year and it should be great!

I’m playing with a test installation of MobileAP to possibly create an iOS-friendly mobile conference site for breakout session info, but I still need to figure out how to import session data into the mySQL database. Not sure if I’ll figure this out or not but I’ll keep playing with it. It’s a very sweet, free academic conference app I wrote about in September 2009, developed originally at the University of Cincinnati.

Technorati Tags: oklahoma, otaem12, ota, encyclomedia, technology, library

Access OTA – EncycloMedia 2012 Session Info via a Google Spreadsheet originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 25, 2012.

Tyler’s description of GarageBand for iPad‘s ability to record songs and then make them available as transposable loops really intrigues me. I need to spend some time playing with it! Kudos to Tyler for sharing this fun project idea, and to the instructors and professors at UCO’s Academy of Contemporary Music!

I’m presenting a couple workshops at the Heartland eLearning Conference March 4-5, 2012, which will explore ways to use the iPad to record and share media. If you live in or near central Oklahoma, please plan to join us in Edmond for this great conference!

Technorati Tags: ipad, creativity, creative, music, garageband

Make a Song with Sounds from Your Kitchen on an iPad originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 24, 2012.

In this episode of “iPad with Wes,” author and digital learning consultant Wesley Fryer explains how to create a custom digital newspaper on your iPad using the free application Flipboard. The video is 9 minutes, 17 seconds long

Referenced links in this episode include:
http://flipboard.com
http://google.com/reader

Screenshot by Wesley Fryer, Flipboard photo from photography.nationalgeographic.com

Please follow @ipadwithwes on Twitter and “like” iPadWithWes on Facebook! Mark your calendar to attend monthly “iPad App Coffee Chats” the first Tuesday of each month either face-to-face in Oklahoma City or via a free webcast on Ustream. Please spread the word about my upcoming workshop “iPad Training for Productivity Training” in Oklahoma City on April 19, 2012, in Oklahoma City.

Technorati Tags: flipboard, google, ipad, training, newspaper, reader

Create a Custom Digital Newspaper on your iPad with Flipboard & Google Reader originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 21, 2012.

If you haven’t already, definitely check out Apple’s official 7 minute, 20 second video overview of iBooks Author. I think this was shared yesterday during the official event in NYC. As you’d expect from Apple, it’s highly polished and impressive. It even features an educational leader / rock star I know, Chris Lehmann: the principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia! Chris is the co-author of “What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media” (2011) and the Co-Chair of the EduCon conference coming up next weekend.

Make no mistake: I love Apple’s products and have been transformed in my professional career as an educator not only through the use of those products, but even more through opportunities Apple has directly provided to me to be influenced by other passionate educators. I AM very excited and positive about this week’s announcement about iBooks Author.

However, as we see corporate advertising messages like the video I’ve linked above, let’s keep a critically important thing in mind: TEACHERS make the biggest difference.

Yes our students need access to digital devices.

But TEACHERS make the difference.

Yes our schools need robust, smart networks with great connectivity to a world of content and a world of connections.

But TEACHERS make the difference.

Yes, we need to shift from “adopt on a 5 year cycle,” heavy and unsearchable paper-based textbooks and embrace dynamic, searchable etexts.

But TEACHERS make the difference.

We’re in the midst of some huge changes in our society as well as our schools. There are lots of opportunities we have amidst many challenges. As we face these disruptive changes together, let’s keep one thing crystal clear in all our minds.

Good TEACHERS make the biggest difference.

Technorati Tags: leadership, apple, ibooks, ebooks, mac, macs, change, schools, mobile

Remember TEACHERS Make the Biggest Difference, Not Devices originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 20, 2012.

It is absolutely fantastic to be able to teach students with an iPad2 using an AppleTV, an HDMI-ready flatscreen TV, and an open wifi network. The mirroring feature of the iPad2 to an AppleTV is hands-down, without question, the best way to teach a class using an iOS device. (The iPhone 4GS will also mirror to an AppleTV, but earlier iPhone versions won’t and the iPad 1 won’t either.) I LOVE being able to be “wireless” and untethered from the television/display and be anywhere in the room during our lessons.

Earlier today, I helped some elementary administrators setup for a presentation at the Oklahoma Association of Elementary School Principals (OAESP) mid-winter conference using an AppleTV, an iPad and a projector. In that case we used a $40 HDMI to VGA converter recommended in this iEAR.org post and everything worked great. The main lesson learned there was to bring and use our own wifi hotspot. We downloaded all the YouTube videos used in the presentation to a laptop in advance using saveyoutube.com, and transferred them directly to the iPad’s photo roll using the PhotoSync app and PhotoSync Companion software. We did this because when we tested the setup earlier, we found the wireless performance of video playback was slow and choppy at times. This could have been due to the way the conference hotel’s router was configured, and/or because of a lot of traffic on the router. Using a wifi hotspot we’d brought along worked well, even though it wasn’t connected to the Internet. All the videos and the Keynote slideshow were copied offline on the iPad2 used for the presentation, so no Internet connectivity was required.

Getting back to Puppet Pals and our lessons learned… I’m working with 12 students and we have 3 iPads, so they’ve been working in groups of four. Last week we discussed the basics of three act structure, which I’ve drawn and described as “the story arc.” This is the first time any of these students have worked with iPads or videography like this. While everyone has seen movies and has some movie literacy, their initial tendency is to want to have characters fight and zoom around the screen. Last week each group made an initial video (each about 60 seconds long) and today we started by watching and evaluating them. These first videos didn’t have much of a semblance of “story,” but we were learning the basics of the program including how to manipulate characters, how it’s helpful to move characters when they are speaking, how to pass the microphone and speak clearly into it, and how to pause recordings if needed to discuss a plan for the next scene. Different students served as scribes today as we discussed some strengths as well as ways the initial movies could be improved.

Here are some of our lessons learned.

DISCUSS APPROPRIATE LANGUAGE FOR THE CONTEXT
Both weeks we’ve had discussions about appropriate language, considering the fact we’re in a church for Tiger Club and that we’re hoping to share these videos with other people online. Even with these discussions in advance, it’s been important to facilitate both the planning and production of videos with students. Two other adults are available for our class to help the students, but their involvement has been minimal. We want to have fun and are having fun, but boundaries are important and this wasn’t a conversation I was initially planning on having with students before our first lesson started. It’s an important conversation. For one of our videos today I actually had to edit out about 4 seconds which had some profane words which ‘slipped out.’ Fortunately it’s easy to do that in iMovie. It’s valuable to discuss with students the importance of choosing their words carefully depending on their surroundings and context. Reminds me of Ruby Payne’s book.

AN iRIG MIC IS CRITICAL TO ELIMINATE BACKGROUND NOISE
Our first two meetings we’ve just had one iRig mic to share among three groups with three iPads. If you watch and listen to some of our videos from today which are embedded below, you won’t have any doubts about which group used the iRig and which didn’t. The iRig does a fantastic job filtering out background noise in a classroom. Since we have three groups of students working in a small classroom and many are laughing/having fun as they’re creating videos, the iRig is really a must.

REMEMBER YOUR APPLE TV REMOTE CONTROL
Last week I forgot to pack and bring my remote control for the AppleTV, and as a result I couldn’t configure it to access the local church’s wifi network. Don’t forget the remote. It is possible to configure an iOS device to use the Remote app to control an AppleTV, but the device and the AppleTV have to be connected to the same wifi network for this to work. That initially requires use of the remote control.

DOWNLOAD ALL CHARACTERS FROM PUPPET PALS DIRECTORS EDITION FIRST
Puppet Pals for iPad comes in two versions, one that is free (with only a few character and background sets) and the $3 “Directors Pass” version which comes with all the characters and backgrounds. Definitely spring for the $3 version, but download all the backgrounds and characters in advance so students won’t have to do that when they are in class.

PROVIDE SOME LIMITS FOR STUDENTS IN PUPPET PALS
Even if you just have a few character and background sets downloaded and available in Puppet Pals, the choices can be pretty overwhelming for students. It’s always instructive to see how often students will copy or mimic something you demonstrate initially for them in a whole group setting, rather than striking out on their own with novel ideas. (That dynamic is why some constructivist learning advocates discourage showing students examples, I think.) It’s good to model possibilities, but I think it’s also helpful to provide limits. I asked students both last week and today to choose no more than 3 or 4 characters, and no more than 3 different scenes. We have been working to build short, 1-2 minute videos, so this is plenty. In some cases students used more characters in their groups, but generally this limitation has been helpful and students have followed it.

LET STUDENTS DO ALL THE iPAD DRIVING
Even during the whole-group demonstrations of the Puppet Pals app, it’s worked well to have different students do all the clicking and swiping on the app: They’ve “done all the driving.” It’s very good to facilitate this with oral instructions, rather than simply “do it” for students yourself as the teacher. They learn more when they ‘drive’ and they are far more engaged. Most students want a chance to participate, and there are plenty of ways to do that in an iPad lesson with Puppet Pals.

REQUIRE STUDENTS TO DISCUSS AND CREATE A PAPER-BASED PLANNING DOCUMENT FIRST
With just about any multimedia project, getting students to plan, get organized, and in some cases WRITE is the hardest part of the entire experience. It’s also the most important, however, because it contributes the most to the eventual success and quality of the project. This week students did plan and write out more details about their planned videos and stories, so they each have more of a semblance of a narrative. Remember I’ve just worked with these students two times for 50 minutes each week, and it’s challenging to do that without any prior relationship or experiences together. I’m not claiming we’ve created any masterpieces here, but we ARE definitely having fun and I think the kids are picking up some things about telling digital stories. I’m learning a lot too!

I created a new, free YouTube channel tonight to share these videos. (multimediasandbox) Here are the student planning pages for today’s videos (very sketchy and simple, but more than we did last week) and the videos they created. I am particularly proud of this first group’s video, who came a LONG way because of the planning and storyboarding they did last week following our lesson time.

What does it say that two of my three student groups made videos which primarily focused on two groups fighting? We talked about the importance of conflict and tension which leads to an eventual climax/resolution for the characters in a story, but we didn’t insist it had to be about fighting. Next week I’m thinking I’ll have students draw some characters out of a hat that they’ll be required to include in their story, along with a sentence or sentence fragment they’ll have to use and build on for a novel plot. I’m thinking I’ll add an additional guideline that their characters can’t fight. Can you think of other or better guidelines to use next week?

LAND FIGHT

PRESIDENTIAL FIGHT

SHREK 4 REMIX

(no photo of the planning doc is available)

Technorati Tags: ipad, puppet, pals, lessons, learned, videography

Lessons Learned Using Puppet Pals on iPads in an After School Program originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 19, 2012.

The cost of activating an iPhone with AT&T is absolutely ridiculous. Since I have several kids, and eventually want all of them to be able to use smartphones, this is a real concern for me. Our family wireless bill now exceeds a monthly car payment, and I am not “OK” with this situation being considered “normal.” Because of these concerns, I recently figured out how to jailbreak and “unlock” an older iPhone 3G for one of my kids to use and put it on the T-Mobile network on a “pay-as-you-go” plan for $15 per month. This plan provides unlimited texting, phone calls for 10 cents per minute, and no cellular data. Since my kids primarily text and rarely make voice calls, this plan is perfect. It’s half the price AT&T would charge me to add an iPhone line to our existing family plan ($10 per month) plus activate the cheapest, AT&T-mandatory data plan ($20). Here are some of the things I learned getting that iPhone switched over to T-Mobile.

AT&T currently makes anyone using an iPhone on their network activate a data plan, and the cheapest one is $20 per month. There is a setting on more recent iOS versions to turn off cellular data entirely, and it might be possible to turn that off so AT&T never finds out you’re using an iPhone with a SIM card you activated previously with another phone. When I gave one of my kids my older iPhone a year or so ago, we activated it by switching the SIM card from their older RAZR phone and putting it in the iPhone. A few weeks after using it, AT&T sent my child a text message announcing they had recognized their phone was an iPhone and therefore activated a mandatory $20 per month data plan. We didn’t ask for that data plan, we didn’t want that data plan, but AT&T didn’t and doesn’t care. One of their objectives as a corporation is to soak everyone who is a customer for as much per month as they possibly can. This makes me angry and frustrated as a customer, and is a big reason I chose to figure out how to switch at least some of our family phones over to T-Mobile.

Different cell phone carriers use different technologies. AT&T phones use SIM cards because they operate on the GSM network. That is the same network used by T-Mobile, which is the reason an “unlocked” phone (including an unlocked iPhone) can be used with either AT&T or T-Mobile in the USA. That’s not the case for Verizon phones, because they operate on the CDMA network. The English WikiPedia article, “Comparison of mobile phone standards,” provides some good background on the relative advantages and disadvantages of these phone types. If you travel internationally outside the USA, you definitely want to use a GSM phone since about 80-85% of the world’s cell phones use GSM. If you have an unlocked phone, you can purchase a local SIM card in many countries and use it in your phone. This can be a good way to avoid “international roaming fees” which some carriers (including AT&T, depending on your plan) can sock you with if you use your ‘normal’ SIM card out of the country.

It’s remarkable and ridiculous at some level to see how “locking phones” has become normal in the United States, along with absurdly expensive rates for cellular data access. Countries including Lebanon, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Singapore require (currently) all phones sold in their countries be sold UNLOCKED. This means customers are free to use those phones with any available wireless carrier, without going through the tedious hoops I’m about to describe to unlock an iPhone 3G.

If you’re interested in unlocking an iPhone and switching to T-Mobile, I recommend you find someone who has prior experience both jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones to help you. This is something you can figure out how to do successfully using trustworthy websites as well as YouTube video tutorials, but there ARE risks as well as drawbacks to carefully weigh. Understand the following:

1. Apple does not support jailbreaking or unlocking your iPhone and doing so can void your warranty. (If you “just” jailbreak and don’t “unlock” you should be able to re-install the iOS firmware and restore your iPhone’s software to it’s original / non-jailbroken condition, but depending on circumstances this may not always be possible. Unlocking almost always voids your warranty.)
2. Unlocking can require overwriting / changing the “baseband” for your iPhone which can be an irreversible action.
3. It may be necessary to update your iPhone baseband to a version which disables certain functionality, like GPS. Weigh this carefully.
4. If something goes wrong during your jailbreaking and unlocking process, it IS possible that you might “brick” your iPhone. This means it could be unusable and essentially become an expensive paperweight. That’s why I recommend you work with someone with prior successful experiences jailbreaking and unlocking an iPhone if you try this.
5. There are a lot of iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking websites which are mainly seeking ad revenue. Some may have malware (bad stuff) they could install on your computer and/or your iPhone. Malware DOES exist for the iPhone, I have a friend who got some over a year ago via a jailbroken app he downloaded and tried. Be sure to use reliable, trustworthy websites to obtain jailbreak and unlock software.
6. According to a T-Mobile employee I interviewed, T-Mobile does NOT provide 3G or 4G connectivity speeds to any iPhone users on their network. T-Mobile limits all iPhone users to 2G or “edge” connectivity speeds as of this writing. This is a major disadvantage and bummer… It could change down the road, but at this point it might be a reason to stick with AT&T or another official iPhone carrier.
7. T-Mobile is NOT going to merge with AT&T at this point and go away as an alternative network to AT&T in the USA, thanks (apparently) to a confluence of circumstances. Read more about this from December 2011 articles in TechCrunch and Engadget. I think this is really good news for consumers. AT&T acts like a bully monopoly already, and that behavior would have surely gotten only worse if they’d been allowed to get bigger via this merger.
8. Pay-as-you-go plans with T-Mobile can’t roam outside T-Mobile’s network. That means if my child is in a rural area or out of town away from T-Mobile’s coverage area, it might not be possible to text or call.

To get an iPhone on T-Mobile from AT&T, you will need to several things for sure and possibly some others. For sure, you’ll need to:

• Jailbreak your iPhone so you can install programs not authorized by Apple on it, using Cydia
• Unlock your iPhone by installing a program which lets other carrier SIM cards work

In some cases, you also may need to install new “baseband” software on your iPhone. As previously mentioned, in some cases this could disable iPhone functions like GPS.

There are several excellent sources of information about jailbreaking and unlocking which I recommend. Beware of Google searches for “jailbreak” and “unlock iPhone.” You’ll find tons of ad-supported websites with those searches, and in all likelihood some malware sites too. Here are the jailbreak and unlock information websites I use and recommend:

• Official blog of the iPhone Jailbreak Dev-Team: blog.iphone-dev.org
• The iPhone Wiki: theiphonewiki.com
• JailbreakQA: jailbreakqa.com

In my specific case, I inherited (from a relative who had upgraded) an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2.1. The iPhoneWiki has a direct link to the IPSW (iPhone iOS installer package) which I needed to use to jailbreak, along with instructions that I had to update my baseband to 06.15.00. Those instructions are clear that the process will disable GPS on this iPhone permanently. In my situation that’s not a big deal, because my child who will be using this iPhone won’t really need to use Google Maps or GPS features of other apps. It would be a big deal for my wife or for me, however, and it’s definitely important to know about in advance.

JailbreakQA has a good list of jailbreaking tools which are available for different iPhone models running different versions of iOS. I ended up using two versions of redsn0w to jailbreak and update the baseband on the iPhone 3G. I initially tried using the latest version to jailbreak (posted by the Dev Team at the end of December 2011) but it kept crashing. I used the older redsn0w 0.9.6rc19 to jailbreak but disabled the option to also install something to show battery usage. redsn0w is one of several tools available to jailbreak your iPhone. Again the one you can use depends on the hardware model as well as the iOS version installed on your iPhone. In the past I’ve jailbroken my iPhone with the PwnageTool, the jailbreak.me website, and greenpois0n.

When you jailbreak, it’s vital you do NOT update to the latest iOS version when it comes out. Recently I waited to update my iPhone4 to iOS 5, because the “untethered” jailbreak for it didn’t come out until last month. A tethered jailbreak means you have to restart your iPhone by physically plugging it into your computer and using jailbreak software to start it again. Untethered jailbreaks don’t require this, you can restart your phone when it is disconnected from your computer.

While I had jailbroken iPhones before, until this recent iPhone 3G jailbreak I hadn’t updated iPhone baseband software or unlocked an iPhone. Both processes proved to be very straightforward once I learned what to do. Upgrading the baseband is an option in redsn0w, which I learned how to do watching this YouTube tutorial. (The accent of the speaker makes his English a little hard to understand, but it’s thorough and helpful.) You can opt to jailbreak and update baseband at the same time, but I did them separately. I jailbroke first with the older version of redsn0w linked above, and then used the most recent redsn0w to update the baseband. It’s a little confusing because in this case, the check box is to install ‘iPad baseband’ and I wasn’t using an iPad. The video linked above confirmed this is the right step, however, and the process worked for me.

After updating the baseband, it was time to actually unlock the phone. I did this by installing the application “ultrasn0w” in Cydia. I had to run Cydia twice, however, and run the available updates before ultrasn0w became available in the search interface.

I should mention also that all this software is available FREE and without charge. There is no charge for redsn0w or ultrasn0w. I have never paid for any jailbreaking software in the past few years, and I have jailbroken (at different times) an original iPhone, an iPhone 3GS, an iPhone4, and an iPad1.

Once these three steps were complete on the iPhone 3G for my child (jailbreaking and installing Cydia, updating the baseband, and unlocking by installing ultrasn0w) I was ready to head to the T-Mobile store. I had visited a few weeks ago with some employees to get information about the process and available pricing, so there were no surprises for us at this stage.

It is possible to keep an existing phone number you have with AT&T and “port” it over to T-Mobile even with a “pay-as-you-go” plan. When we activated the iPhone 3G on T-Mobile, we paid $10.45 for a SIM card and the activation. I had to provide my AT&T wireless account number to the T-Mobile rep, who had to visit with customer service on the phone to make it happen. It can take up to 24 hours for a phone number with another carrier to “port” over, and during that time a temporary number with T-Mobile is available for use. Once the number “port” is complete we’ll need to purchase some voice minutes for the phone, and we’ll be able to recharge those minutes in the future either online, by using a SMS code, or purchasing a T-Mobile minutes card. We’ll be paying just $15 per month for this line (instead of $30 to AT&T) and mainly using it to text. The iPhone 3G works great on wifi for Internet access, but it won’t have any cellular data access.

Assuming this T-Mobile iPhone experiment continues to work well, I plan to switch another of my kids who already has an iPhone with $30/month in AT&T add-on account charges over to T-Mobile. I’m not sure if at some point I’ll switch my own account with AT&T over, but I’ve thought about doing that. I might use the same $15 per month pay-as-you-go plan, but also activate a MiFi card which I could use for true 3G and 4G network connectivity not only for my iPhone but also iPad and laptop. I’d just need to make sure I had enough monthly bandwidth to meet my needs. Currently MiWi is my favorite and most important iPhone app because it lets my phone become a mobile hotspot for laptops, iPads, and other devices. This is an important function I want to maintain, but a MiFi card could do that as well.

I hope the information I have provided in this post is helpful to you. Again, please work with someone who has had prior successful experiences jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones if you want to try this yourself. Also be aware of the risks and don’t take them lightly. I understand carriers like AT&T want to keep us all “locked in” to excruciatingly expensive contracts, but am thrilled consumers have options like those described here to go with an alternative carrier like T-Mobile. I’m definitely holding off on a new iPhone 4S for now, and when I do purchase a new iPhone I’ll seriously consider just buying an unlocked version.

Have you had experiences, good or bad, with jailbreaking and/or unlocking an iPhone? If so, what are some of your lessons learned?

Avoiding AT&T’s Ridiculous iPhone Data Fees by Switching to T-Mobile originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 17, 2012.

More photos are available in this Flickr set. Also check out the ten minute video I posted from the weekend, “7th Regiment Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, Bushwhackers, and Jayhawkers (Kansas in 1861 – 1865)“.

What fun!

Technorati Tags: kansas, trapper, trappers, rendezvous, scout, scouting, campout, iphone, documentary, newton, troop

Trapper’s Rendezvous 2012: An iPhone documentary originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 15, 2012.

This afternoon my kids and I spent a few hours playing with the iOS application Collabracam, which permits multiple cameras to be used simultaneously in a video shoot. We found the application buggy and in need of an update, but the idea of the app is GREAT and we ended up creating a reasonably cool 3.5 minute video for “The Zebra Print.” In this post I’ll share some of our lessons learned using Collabracam.

Collabracam allows you to use up to five iOS devices at the same time to make a video. One iOS device is used as the base station, in ‘director’ mode. The other devices (up to four) can be remote cameras, connecting to your director base station device via wifi. We used two remote cameras and a base station for our video.

Initially we tried using an iPad2 as the base station, and another iPad2 and an iPhone4 as the remote cameras. The Collabracam base station / director app gave us errors, however, so we read some of the app documentation and learned it’s best to use the SAME MODEL of iOS device. We didn’t have 3 of the same device, so we changed to use the iPhone4 in director mode, and both the iPad2′s as remote cameras. Once you have the app installed a device can take either role (director / base station or remote camera.) While we got our setup to work, I want to test the app and see if the errors we ran into are eliminated if all devices are the same iOS model.

The screenshot below shows Collabracam on the “director” device. You can see the live video from both iPad2s.

We ran into problems when we started, stopped, and started over with the app. The director / base station device in most cases didn’t “see” the remote cameras when we started over. To fix this, we found closing every instance of Collaboracam on all devices (double clicking the home button, holding down a finger on one of the apps so they started to ‘jiggle,’ and then clicking the red X in the upper left corner) fixed the problem.

We found the connections between cameras and the director / base station device work best when you:

• Open the iOS devices which will serve as remote cameras FIRST, and select the camera option on both.
• Secondly, open Collaboracam on the device you’re using in “director” mode as the base station, and then you should be able to immediately connect to the remote cameras.

We ended up doing thirteen different takes, at least in part, for this 3.5 minute webshow. The episode we finally took was number twelve, but I had to edit it together on my computer. That’s not how Collaboracam is supposed to be used. After you finish shooting a video, you should leave all the remote camera app devices open. The director / base station app will transfer the videos from each remote camera to itself, so they can be put together in a final video file. For some reason, however, in our “take 12″ our Collaboracam setup recorded and saved one scene on both cameras. As a result, the app didn’t know which one to insert into the final video so it was omitted. (That’s the one I had to insert on my laptop using QuickTime Pro 7.)

The most confusing and frustrating part of using Collaboracam was figuring out how to switch between our different cameras during the live show, and having the apps malfunction. According to the documentation, on the director / base station device to you start recording you should:

• Click on the desired camera and press the REC button. It should turn red.
• Click on the secondary / standby camera you want to use next. It should turn blue.

When you want to change to the standby camera, on the director / base station you should click the REC button, and then select the next standby camera.

Perhaps because we used two iPad2s and 1 iPhone4, and not all identical iOS devices, our remote cameras did NOT change status from “recording” to “standby” as they should have when cameras were changed on the director / base station device. The colors (red and blue) changed on the director app, but for some reason that communication didn’t reach the remote cameras to display properly. The remote cameras recorded fine, but the “remote / recording” status light didn’t change as it should have.

Overall this was a good experience and I REALLY love the concept of Collaboracam. If you have a classroom cart of fourth generation iPod Touches or iPad2s, this would be a super app to use with students to create a recorded webshow. We tried using a Glif iPhone4 tripod mount initially when we were using the iPhone as a camera, but ended up not being able to use it since the iPads were our remote cameras. In the future I’d like to find and use some kind of iPad2 tripod mount, but I haven’t seen anything like that yet. It’s challenging to hand-hold the iPad2 for long periods of time shooting video, but switching cameras makes that a little easier on your videographers.

Unlike a television studio’s cameras, there are NOT red lights which light up on an iOS device when its camera is “live” with a Collaboracam setup. We tried having the videographer wiggle a finger to show their camera was in use, but since our “status” signs in the app weren’t working correctly I ended up just pointing to our actresses to show which camera was “live.”

Collaboracam is a $5 app, but its iTunes Store page indicated it is currently half price. I’d recommend waiting till the the app is revised and some of these bugs are worked out to buy and use it. (It’s in version 1.2 now.) The idea is GREAT, however, and if you have access to enough similar iOS devices to use it it can add a whole new layer of complexity and possibilities to your web shows!

Stay updated on new Zebra Print web shows by following @thezebraprint on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: webshow, Collabracam, video, playingwithmedia

Playing with Collabracam for The Zebra Print Webshow originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 7, 2012.

More classroom teachers and other educators are using Google Sites to create websites these days. Google Sites is free, flexible, and well integrated with other “Google Tools” like Google Docs and YouTube. Certainly Google Sites has limitations, but its FREE price tag combined with flexibility (especially when a school is already using Google Apps) make it an outstanding choice for “virtual construction” in schools. I used Google Sites for my “Technology 4 Teachers” and “Computers in the Classroom” courses for pre-service teachers in Spring 2010, Fall 2010, and Spring 2011. Google Sites doesn’t give us the creative latitude of a web authoring tool like iWeb, but it offers many other features (like collaboration) that make it a better choice for many educational contexts.

In this post, I’ll describe some techniques for optimizing a Google Site for mobile accessibility as well as gathering metrics / statistics about site visitors utilizing Google Analytics. Finally, I’ll explain how a Google Site can be “mapped” to a shorter address using an existing domain you or your school already owns and manages.

Anyone using Google Sites should choose to automatically optimize their site for mobile devices like iPhones / iPads / iPod Touches (iOS devices) as well as Android-based smartphones. This support page from Google explains how. The owner of a site, after logging in, can enable this feature by choosing:
- More actions
– Manage site
— General
—- Under “Mobile” click the checkbox beside “Automatically adjust site to mobile phone”
—– Save changes

This is a screenshot of my workshop/presentation handouts wiki (wiki.wesfryer.com) on my iPhone BEFORE I enabled this option. You can see the text is small and not very easy to read on the iPhone’s small screen.

After enabling mobile optimization, this is the same page on my iPhone:

This process does NOT require you to select or change your existing site template or page templates. This is a quick process and should be enabled (IMHO) for every Google Site. More and more people (including students) are accessing Internet websites on mobile devices. Anyone publishing information should do everything possible to increase accessibility, and this is an easy way to do it.

When it comes to WordPress blogs/sites, I use and recommend two different free themes which “mobilize” sites. The first one, and main one I use (on this blog in fact) is WPtouch. A pro version is also available, but at this point I’ve just used the free version and really like it. The other one I use on a few sites is Carrington Mobile. I use it on Learning Signs and Eyes Right.

In addition to “mobilizing” your Google Site, it’s helpful to create and add a free Google Analytics site code to gather metrics/statistics about your site visitors. These statistics are more comprehensive and insightful than information you can glean from a tool like ClustrMaps. (Though I do love and use ClustrMaps too.) To add Google Analytics to your Google Site, you need to first create a free account on Google Analytics if you haven’t already. After you create your main account, you’ll be adding a new “property” to it. This will use the web address of your Google Site.

After creating your “property” in Google Analytics, click to view your “Property ID.” Copy this number and use it in your Google Site.

After you enable Google Analytics on your site (this Google support page explains how) you’ll be able to view extensive and interesting metrics about where people are accessing your website, what kind of web browser they’re using when they access it, how long they stay on your site, and more. There are GREAT statistics included in Google Analytics reports, and this would make a great project for your students to analyze, discuss and share.

You might have noticed in the screenshots above, the web address of my Google site for presentation handouts is very short (wiki.wesfryer.com) instead of a longer version preceded by “sites.google…” (http://sites.google.com/site/wesfryer/). The reason for this is I’ve “mapped” my Google Site, for free, to a subdomain of a domain I own using something called a CNAME record. Of the techniques discussed in this post, creating a CNAME record in DNS to map a Google Site to a custom domain is definitely the most complicated, but it’s free and can make a BIG difference in the ease of accessibility for your site.

As an example, I’m doing a lot of work in Yukon Public Schools in Oklahoma this semester. Today we used this CNAME record / domain mapping method to shorten the address of the district’s professional development site from sites.google.com/a/yukonps.com/professional-development to pd.yukonps.com. That’s a MUCH easier / shorter web address to write on a whiteboard, include on a business card, put in an email signature line, or just remember. Relatively few schools using Google Apps and Google Sites are taking advantage of this FREE feature, and many more should!

The Google Support page, “Mapping your site to your own URL,” explains the steps for doing this. You can map a Google Site or a Blogger site to a custom subdomain with a CNAME record. If your district uses CPANEL, you should be able to use the “Simple DNS Wizard” to add a CNAME record. Enter your desired web address (like “http”//pd.yukonps.com” in the first field) and the address “http://ghs.google.com” in the second field. Then create the record. That’s step 1.

Step 2 is adding the mapping address in your Google Site. Again, if your school is using Google Apps you’ll have to request that your site manager do this step, but if you’re using a Google Site with a “regular” Google account you can do it directly. I LOVE the ability to create and map subdomains! A few of the ones I use now are:

wiki.wesfryer.com
wiki.powerfulingredients.com
365.wesfryer.com
audio.speedofcreativity.org
faithstories.speedofcreativity.org
eyesright.speedofcreativity.org
learningsigns.speedofcreativity.org
share.playingwithmedia.com
learn.playingwithmedia.com

Of those examples, only the first two are a “mapped” CNAME record subdomain hosted by Google Sites. The third site is a CNAME mapped Tumblr blog, and the rest are WordPress “add-on slot” sites I have with my web host. It is HUGE that mapped subdomain sites on Google Sites are FREE, where other wiki providers like WikiSpaces and PBworks charge for this service.

If you use some of these suggestions and tweak your Google Site, please let me know with a comment or Twitter reply to @wfryer. Good luck! Encourage other educators you know to spend time in “digital construction” online using virtual spaces like Google Sites! Creating hyperlinked documents with digital text is an important part of Playing with Media!

Technorati Tags: google, sites, cname, custom, domain, map, tutorial, app, apps, school, education, wiki

Optimize a Google Site for Mobile Accessibility and Metrics originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 5, 2012.

Using this “Flickr Advanced Search” option, I was able to readily find photos I took each day for the past two months. There were a few days I didn’t have photos and had to use images from adjoining days, but for the most part this method allowed me to photographically re-represent the past sixty days. I turned off the “autopost to Twitter” feature of my Tumblr blog during this process, since I didn’t want to inundate my Twitter-stream with sixty image posts in rapid succession. This was a worthwhile and fun process, since it helped me identify as well as archive some of my favorite images from the past two months. I used Tumblr’s browser-based option to “use a URL instead” and directly posted images I wanted from their Flickr pages. Here are a few of my favorites I re-discovered.

For my Photo365 project in 2012 I’m planning to use Instagram instead of Tumblr. If you haven’t tried posting a photo per day with a smartphone (and you have a smartphone, which really streamlines these processes/steps) I strongly encourage you to give it a try in 2012! Photo365 projects provide great ways to regularly practice photography, further develop “a photographer’s eye,” play with a variety of smartphone photography apps, and document your life experiences for posterity. See my December 15, 2010 post, “Tumblr for my 365 Photo Project in 2011” for more background on how I got started on this project.

Update 5:20 12/27/2011: I’m pleased to learn Instagr.am permits cross-posting to Tumblr in addition to Twitter and Facebook. As a result, I think I’ll try sharing my 2012 Photo 365 images with the Instagr.am iPhone app and cross-post from the app to Twitter, Facebook, and my Photo 365 blog.

The app could also cross-post to Flickr, but instead I’ve created a task/recipe with ifttt.com for Flickr cross-posting which will add some custom tags.

Technorati Tags: photo, date, meta, flickr, photo365, tumblr, instagram

When Photo Date Meta Info is Handy originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 27, 2011.

Smartphones like the iPhone have ushered in a new golden age of digital photography. The best camera is the one you have with you. The higher resolution along with the editing/processing capabilities and uploading/sharing options of modern smartphones make iPhoneography a flexible as well as fun type of digital photography. In this session we’ll explore a variety of concepts, techniques, and applications related to iPhoneography.

Use the ADD TO CART link below to purchase via PayPal or Google Checkout.

This podcast is a QuickTime mp4 movie file which can be viewed on a laptop or desktop computer using free QuickTime Player software from Apple. It also looks great on an iPad!

All referenced links and resources from the podcast and videoconference are linked on wfryer.me/iphoneography.

If you are interested in having this workshop shared via videoconference for your school or educational organization, please request it via the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration.

Visit learn.playingwithmedia.com for more information about upcoming scheduled workshops supporting the eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” by Wesley Fryer.

Technorati Tags: howto, iphone, iphoneography, photography, tutorial

99¢ Podcast: iPhoneography originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 8, 2011.

Learn to shoot, edit, and publish a video on an iPad in a fraction of the time this process takes with a laptop computer and “traditional” video gear! Flash-based video camcorders on mobile computing devices (like the iPad) can empower learners to create and publish “quick edit” videos. In this session we will discuss example iPad videos, explore different apps for quick-edit videography, and learn to to successfully facilitate student-created iPad videos. We’ll also learn about options for puppet videography with iPads, including actual finger puppets as well as virtual puppets using apps like Puppet Pals. Prepare to have fun and unleash a wealth of creative ideas with your students during and following this workshop!

Use the ADD TO CART link below to purchase via PayPal or Google Checkout.

This podcast is a QuickTime mp4 movie file which can be viewed on a laptop or desktop computer using free QuickTime Player software from Apple. It also looks great on an iPad!

All referenced links and resources from the podcast and videoconference are linked on wfryer.me/ipadvideo.

If you are interested in having this workshop shared via videoconference for your school or educational organization, please request it via the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration.

Visit learn.playingwithmedia.com for more information about upcoming scheduled workshops supporting the eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” by Wesley Fryer.

Technorati Tags: ebook, ebooks, epub, howto, playingwithmedia, podcast, technology, tutorial, video, vodcast

99¢ Podcast: iPad Quick Edit Videography originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 8, 2011.

I recorded this audio using an iRig microphone. I’ve been thinking about creating some kind of animated video like this one for many weeks, so I didn’t actually write a script for it. This was a fun experiment in impromptu puppet videography… definitely an example of “Playing with Media!” I quite enjoyed the chance to be creative and a bit “out of the box” with different voices.

Enjoy! And viva la revolucion en las escuelas para mas libertad!

Technorati Tags: adventure, content, creative, creativity, filtering, fun, ipad, puppet, video, videography

Seeking Adventure in the Wide World (Puppet Pals video) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 3, 2011.

The free VoiceThread for iPad app has been available for awhile, but this afternoon was the first opportunity I’ve had to play with it at length. Rachel, my 8 year old daughter, just finished reading “Christmas in Camelot” (a Magic Treehouse book) this weekend and was VERY excited to tell me all about it. It’s been a few years since she last made a VoiceThread book report, so since the VT iPad app is now available I figured this would be a perfect chance to put it through its paces. We had fun and were successful making the VoiceThread book report. Here are a few of our lessons learned.

LESSON 1: THOROUGH PLANNING SHEET

This advice comes as no surprise to writing teachers. It’s essential to help kids / students create a thorough planning sheet for a digital book report before they go to a tablet device or computer. Kids often want to find pictures or record their voices first, but those steps always come AFTER planning what you’re going to say. This was the planning sheet Rachel prepared today.

LESSON 2: SAVE FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGE PAGES IN NEW TABS

I helped Rachel used the Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Only image search page to find extra pictures for her VoiceThread. She took the initial cover photo, but needed three more pictures. There are now over 30 million photos in the most permissive Flickr CC image category available online! We readily found great images to use for a “tree house rope ladder,” a “Christmas wreath,” and a “king crown.”

After we found an image online, I had her open it in a new tab on the iPad. She did this by holding her finger down on the image and choosing OPEN IN NEW TAB. Next, she clicked the ACTIONS tab above the image and chose VIEW ALL SIZES. After choosing a large version, she held down her finger on the picture and chose SAVE IMAGE. This saved a local copy to the iPad photo roll so we could import it later on VoiceThread. I had her leave the image webpage tab open, however, so I could copy the URL / web links to the image pages and put them into the VoiceThread as text comments later for proper attribution.

LESSON 3: BEWARE LARGE NUMBERS OF IPAD PHOTOS & VIDEOS

If you have hundreds of photos and videos on your iPad, as we did when we started this book report project this evening, you might run into problems. Every time we tried to add a photo to a new VoiceThread from our camera roll on the iPad, the app crashed. I asked my 13 year old to help troubleshoot this, and he identified the fact that we had almost 400 photos and videos on the camera roll as the possible problem. This proved to be the case. Alexander saw that photos from other camera roll albums imported to VoiceThread fine, but the camera roll images didn’t.

He deleted, with my permission, about 250 screenshot images our family members have created over the past six months. This brought the number of photos on the iPad photo roll from 390 to down to 138. This did the trick, and the VoiceThread app imported photos from the camera roll fine without crashing.

LESSON 4: USE AN EXTERNAL MICROPHONE FOR GREAT AUDIO QUALITY

Rachel used our iRig microphone to record her audio narration for each slide of her iPad VoiceThread. We LOVE using an external microphone with the iPad: It does a great job filtering out background noise and creates an exceptionally clear recording. This has been true for every iPad app we’ve used for recording. The iRig works immediately when you plug it in, it’s not necessary to make any settings changes.

Full disclosure: IK Multimedia has donated a new iRig microphone for me to give away this month in a drawing on SHARE: Playing with Media. All you need to do to enter the drawing is share ONE example of student work (with parent and student permission, of course) using the contribute form on the site.

Have you played with the VoiceThread iPad app yet? What are your impressions and recommendations? I really like how you can moderate comments directly on the app. We have a backlog of comments on many past VoiceThreads our family members have created, like “Getting a New Haircut” in 2006. I think access to the iPad app will make moderation of those comments a much faster process!

I added Rachel’s book report for “Christmas in Camelot” to the “Great Book Stories” wiki collection of VoiceThread book reports!

Technorati Tags: app, book, edtech, ipad, learned, lessons, report, technology, voicethread

Lessons Learned using VoiceThread for iPad originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 20, 2011.

The sixth grade Sunday School students I co-teach created a short, three minute “radio show” today in class using the free iPad app and service, Cinch. They recorded the five segments of “the show” using an iRig microphone. After class I published the audio recording to the Cinch website from the app, and visited the webpage it created for our new episode. Since we use WordPress.com for our class blog, however, the embed code for the episode can’t be directly used in a post. (I tried unsuccessfully.)

Instead of the Cinch-website provided embed code, I used this trick from the WordPress forums. I replaced the starting character for the code sequence with a forward bracket instead of a less than sign, replaced the word “embed” at the start of the code sequence with “gigya,” and deleted the ending “embed tag.” I also change the final greater than symbol to a closed bracket.

From a technical standpoint I’m not sure why this code change works with Cinch embed code, but it does! If you have a similar need to include embedded media on a WordPress.com blog post, hopefully this will help you too!

This is the original embed code suggested by Cinch.fm.
<embed src="http://cinch.fm/cinchplayerext.swf" flashvars="file=http:%2f%2fcinch.fm%2fcinchplaylist.aspx%3FRecordingID%3D316209&playermode=text&autostart=false&bufferlength=5&volume=80&callback=http://cinch.fm/flashplayercallback.aspx&width=300&height=200&volume=80&corner=rounded" menu="false" wmode="transparent" quality="high" name="316209" id="316209" width="300" height="200" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" allowScriptAccess="always"></embed>

This is the modified code I included in the edited post on WordPress.com.
[gigya src="http://cinch.fm/cinchplayerext.swf" flashvars="file=http:%2f%2fcinch.fm%2fcinchplaylist.aspx%3FRecordingID%3D316209&playermode=text&autostart=false&bufferlength=5&volume=80&callback=http://cinch.fm/flashplayercallback.aspx&width=300&height=200&volume=80&corner=rounded" menu="false" wmode="transparent" quality="high" name="316209" id="316209" width="300" height="200" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" allowScriptAccess="always">; ]

If you know other techniques for using embed code on WordPress.com, or have success with this method, please share your experiences in comments.

If you are using a self-hosted WordPress blog (your blog isn’t hosted on WordPress.com) you should be able to include unaltered embed code on posts when you use the HTML view and are logged in as a blog admin.

For more tips and techniques about creating media with students using digital text, images and audio, check out my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.”

Blogged on an iPad with WordPress for iOS. (free)

Embedding Flash Audio on WordPress.com with an iPad originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 20, 2011.

I accidentally recorded this video in portrait mode rather than landscape mode.

I used these instructions from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) to rotate the video on my laptop using Apple QuickTime Pro 7 software before uploading it to YouTube.

Spots are still available for the iPhoneography workshops I’ll be teaching on December 2nd as a videoconference as well as a face-to-face workshop in Oklahoma City.

Technorati Tags: iphone, mobile, texas, travel, video

You Could Only Make this Video on a Mobile Phone originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 20, 2011.

This is the slidecast (synchronized audio and presentation slides) for my final dissertation defense in Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University today. The title of my dissertation was, “Impact Analysis of Phonecasted Lecture Summaries.” My research question was, “Does the use of student summary lecture phonecasting relate to student academic achievement, controlling for the effects of prior academic differences?” I DID pass the dissertation defense today, so I’m officially “Dr. Fryer!” I am still making some additions to my final dissertation, so its publication will be delayed pending completion of those changes.

Many, many thanks for everyone’s kind words of support and celebration today!

Technorati Tags: curriculum, fryer, phonecast, phonecasting, research, tech, texas, wes, wesley, dissertation, defense, texastech, instruction

Final Dissertation Defense: Impact Analysis of Phonecasted Lecture Summaries originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 19, 2011.

The iRig microphone ($60) is my top recommendation and the only microphone of these three options I’ve personally used as of this writing. (Full disclosure: IK Multimedia, the creators of the iRig, donated an iRig and other iOS goodies for me to give away in monthly drawings on SHARE: Playing with Media.) The iRig does a great job filtering out unwanted background audio during recordings. It’s my favorite iOS peripheral, EVER. We’ve record multiple audio and video interviews on the iPad2 with the iRig, my favorite is definitely, “The Hobbit in 5 Minutes.”

Option #2 to consider is a $10 iPad Audio Adapter from Speech Recognition Solutions. Your total cost will be more if you don’t already have a microphone with an 1/8″ mono input jack. If you do have an existing external microphone that will plug into this adapter, however, this would be your least expensive iOS external mic option.

Thanks to Daniel Espejo for sharing this iOS audio adapter via Twitter.

Option #3 is a bluetooth audio headset for iPad, like the Logitech Wireless Headset for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. That particular model is a little pricey on Amazon now at $70. Hat tip to Nancy Sharoff for sharing this mic option via Twitter.

Have you found or tried other external microphone options for an iPad? If so please chime in with comments.

Technorati Tags: adapter, ipad, ipod, ipodtouch, irig, mic, microphone, touch, logitech

3 External Microphone Options for iPads (Nov 2011) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 15, 2011.

Update 11/16: Note the original title of this article has been changed, my intent in writing this is not to personally attack the reporter who wrote the article, but rather call attention to these issues which desperately need clarifying in our communities.

Update 11/17: After reaching out to the newspaper reporter via phone and email I have learned her quotations in this article came from the district technology director at a school board meeting. I am in the process of contacting the Assistant to the Superintendent for Operations for Parkland Schools for additional clarification. To address the reporter’s concerns about this blog post I have changed the title again. The initial title was, “Newspaper Reporter Marion Callahan Misquotes CIPA.” The title was changed on 11/16 to “Pennsylvania Newspaper Article Misquotes CIPA.” I have now changed the title to “Pennsylvania Newspaper Article / School Tech Director Misrepresents CIPA” and also changed this blog post permalink. The current Google search results for the reporter’s name which include “misquotes” in the title is her concern.

Sunday’s article, “Parkland students may soon take laptops, Kindles to class” in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, newspaper “The Morning Call” shares an exciting story about BYOD (bring your own device) computing plans in a local school district. The reporter, Marion Callahan, interviewed a school administrator at a recent board meeting. Her interview quotations may give readers a misleading impression about the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Those statements give the false impression that school officials are mandated by federal law to ban student smartphone use at school. While districts are obligated to implement and enforce a Internet content filtering policy on their school networks, schools are not required to outlaw smartphones at school which can bypass school-provided Internet access. With respect to current policy in the Parkland School District, Callahan wrote:

Smartphones, however, are off-limits. Until the district can find a way for its network to limit access, students are not permitted access to the Internet with phones during school hours. The Children’s Internet Protection Act requires that schools have a content filter in place and make every effort to block objectionable sites.

Callahan’s statements in this paragraph misrepresent the requirements of CIPA for schools. Students as well as staff at U.S. schools receiving federal E-Rate funding are NOT prohibited by law or mandate from using their Internet-capable smartphones at school and accessing the Internet through their privately-paid / cellular company provided Internet access. Too many school leaders use CIPA and other legal requirements affecting computing to maintain draconian content filtering policies which make China’s firewall look like a benevolent Santa Claus. This must change, and change starts with the truth.

If wireless Internet access is provided by the school receiving E-Rate funds, that school-provided wifi access must have some kind of content filter in place. The school is not obligated to provide wifi access, however, and certainly is not obligated to ban student use of smartphones or ban students from accessing the Internet with their own carrier data plans. The project wiki, “Unmasking the Digital Truth” highlights the requirements for CIPA:

CIPA requires schools and libraries using E-Rate discounts to operate “a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with Internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors…”

See the May 2011 post on BalancedFiltering,org, “Do your school administrators REALLY understand CIPA?” for additional information including clarifications on CIPA requirements provided last spring by Karen Cator, the U.S. Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology.

Misunderstandings of CIPA like the one highlighted by Marion Callahan in this article might seem like a minor detail, but they are not. Widespread misconceptions about CIPA abound in in our schools today. The last thing we need mainstream media outlets to do is further confuse and obfuscate ‘the truth’ when it comes to content filtering in schools. This is the reason the “Unmasking the Digital Truth” project highlights the facts, laws, and court decisions behind eight primary reasons school leaders in too many U.S. schools today over block the web far beyond their legal mandate to do so. These reasons include:

• CIPA – The Child’s Internet Protection Act (mandates basic content filtering – U.S.)
• e-Discovery – Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) requiring email archiving under some circumstances (U.S.)
• FERPA – The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (U.S.)
• COPPA – The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (U.S.)
• Bandwidth – Often a concern the school does not have enough to support a particular website/tool
• Control – Educational leaders sometimes want to limit potential user behavior
• Liability – Concern that website access will lead to lawsuits from and litigation with parents
• Fear – More generalized feelings that web 2.0 sites and technologies are bad / dangerous

I applaud the district leaders in Parkland School District in Pennysylvania for embracing a vision for digital learning which will support BYOD (bring your own device) computing for students and staff in the near future. I hope, however, local newspaper reporter Marion Callahan will clarify her misleading statements about CIPA so all community members in and around Allentown can gain a better rather than a murkier understanding of CIPA requirements. While the school district (which receives E-Rate funds) clearly has a legal obligation to provide a basic level of content filtering on its network when students, staff, and community members access the Internet through it, the district is NOT obligated by law to ban Internet-capable smartphones for students or anyone else or ban smartphone Internet use through commercial cellular providers.

All schools in our communities need policies which support balanced content filtering. All our schools need “smart networks” which can enable both flexible access as well as accountability for network users. It sounds like leaders in the Parkland School District are on the right road forward. Hopefully we’ll see more BYOD initiatives in our U.S. schools in the months ahead, as well as state-funded digital learning initiatives providing mobile computing devices for students who cannot afford to bring their own to school.

For additional guidance and information related to digital literacy and school leadership I recommend “What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media” by Scott McLeod and Chris Lehmann. (Steve Dembo and I co-authored chapter 3 on “Podcasts and Webinars.”)

Hat tip to John Maklary for sharing this article.

Technorati Tags: block, cipa, filter, filtering, internet, iphone, pennsylvania, school, smartphone, requirements, marion, callahan, allentown, parkland, ban

Pennsylvania Newspaper Article / School Tech Director Misrepresents CIPA originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 15, 2011.

The students conducted their veteran interviews using iRig microphones and the free Cinch app on their iPod Touches. Earlier the teacher created a single, shared account in Cinch and logged in each iPod Touch’s Cinch app so they were ready to go. Cinch web-posts audio into customizable “albums” to a single account, and provides mp3 download links for shared audio. It’s entirely free and unlike AudioBoo, there is NO LENGTH LIMIT to Cinch recordings. From a management standpoint, it seemed like an easier plan to immediately label and upload audio interviews rather than use an app like iTalk Recorder or Voice Memos since Cinch files can be readily shared online.

With the audio interviews conducted, the challenge now becomes helping students edit those interviews into short segments they want to include in a video (narrated slideshow) on an iPod Touch. For our Storychaser workshops in the past we’ve always used Audacity software and either PhotoStory3 (on Windows) or iMovie (on Macs.) The biggest challenge here, from what I can figure out, is editing an audio file on an iPod Touch and then making it available within the iPod (music) app on the iPod Touch WITHOUT syncing the Touches to a computer again. I’m not sure this is possible: If you know how, please let me know.

My suggested apps and workflow for this same process on an iPod Touch are as follows:

1. Create a free Dropbox account to share files among students – save each veteran interview in mp3 format there (using a laptop computer: downloading mp3 files from cinch, then uploading to DropBox)
2. Use the free app Hokusai to have students import their audio on an iPod Touch from DropBox, then edit just the part they want to keep/use, and add a short audio narration intro (they would need to write this first as a script, it would introduce the project and their veteran briefly) – export the final audio back to DropBox
3. Add the edited audio files to iTunes on the computer which syncs to all the iPod Touches in a new playlist, and sync the touches (so the new audio playlist is available)
4. Have students find and save 5 to 10 photos to use during their audio interview video. If they took photos during the interview, those can be used. Photos can be emailed to a free class Posterous blog, and photos copied on the student’s iPod touch from that website to their own photo roll.
5. Use the free app Splice to import the photos for the video and import the audio, and create an exported/final video

My favorite app for creating narrated slideshows is SonicPics, but the free version (Sonic Pics Lite) is limited to just 3 photos. Splice seems like the best free app option at this stage.

Have other ideas or suggestions? Please let me know!

Technorati Tags: app, audio, interview, ipad, ipod, oklahoma, project, touch, veteran

Creating Oral History Interview Videos on an iPod Touch originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 13, 2011.

Of all the photos I snapped during the two day adventure, this one of the Statue of Liberty facing the rising sun is my favorite. I took this with Pro HDR, an awesome app Dean Shareski shared on a Seedlings webcast back in January 2011.

Of the 10 iPhoneography capture apps listed in my July 2011 Appolicious list, Pro HDR and Pano are the only ones I actually used this weekend in NYC besides the default iOS camera app. Both Pro HDR and Pano are also available for Android, btw.

For at least the past year or so, I’ve traveled with only my iPhone as a camera. I own a fancier and higher resolution camera with a better lens, along with a more capable digital camcorder, but I simply don’t want or need the bulk of those devices anymore. I’m a mobile storychaser. From time to time I’ve taken some video with my iPad, but generally it’s far less convenient to use on the go (since it doesn’t fit into my pocket) than my iPhone4. There was one person on our ferry ride to Liberty Island on Saturday shooting some iPad video. This is the first time I’ve seen someone else doing this in a public venue.

On Saturday I shot five different short videos on my iPhone visiting the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and edited them together into a single 9 minute, 50 second video I posted to YouTube. I used iMovie for iPhone to edit these together “quick-edit” style. I didn’t bring my iRig mic with me on this trip (accidentally leaving it at home) so these were all recorded with the built-in iPhone mic. I was very pleased the audio quality turned out pretty good. A little wind noise in a few cases, but not bad.

One of the biggest highlights of my visit to Liberty Island was a seventeen minute conversation I had with Glenn Stoops, a character-actor who convincingly plays Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi on Liberty Island. I posted this last night as a podcast on “Moving at the Speed of Creativity Podcasts.”

Auguste was the original designer of the Statue of Liberty. This podcast is good enough (thanks to Glenn’s terrific interview responses) that American history teachers could consider using this with students as free, digital curriculum. (I’m going to submit this to Curriki soon.)

It was very meaningful and memorable to see the new “One World Trade Center” under construction on the site of the former World Trade Center buildings. As I reflected at one point in the video, it’s been a thought-provoking fall (to say the least) visiting Shanghai, Doha, Qatar and now New York City. Lots to consider regarding politics, economics, and faith in these three amazing places.

I enjoyed recording some ambient audio in New York and posted several files along with photos to my sounds blog. These included Approaching Grand Central Station, Disembarking at Grand Central, 5th Avenue Walk, Beggin’ Change on the Street, and Enroute to Liberty Island.

I found both my visit to Liberty Island and Ellis Island extremely thought provoking and meaningful. The audio tours on both were a huge part of my experience, and the fact that I was alone (which I didn’t prefer… I would have LOVED to bring my family with me, but it wasn’t in the cards this time) allowed me to listen to a LOT of tour audio. One of the best parts of the Ellis Island museum was the “Peak Immigration” exhibit which isn’t part of the ‘standard’ audio tour. The room in the panoramic photo below was pretty amazing as an example of visual storytelling. Check out the full version (8691 x 859) and pan across to get the full effect. This made me wish for a classroom wallpapered with “Electric paper.”

Images of the pograms against Jews in eastern Europe, Russia and central Asia in this exhibit were tragic and heart wrenching. SO much to think about and juxtapose in this area with current events.

My visit Friday to Times Square was a very different but also memorable experience. Digital screen and billboard overload, as expected.

The only similar experiences I could compare to Times Square were sitting at a restaurant on The Bund in Shanghai, overlooking the Huangpu River and Pudong, watching the skyscraper-sized billboards and advertisements come to life after sundown in September.

My thoughts spending about an hour Friday evening people-watching at Times Square definitely colored the thoughts I’d planned to share with my sixth grade Sunday school class today. The messages of how “the world” wants us to think and act are pretty overpowering in NYC. It’s always challenging to “think different,” but perhaps more-so in such a media-drenched environment. Times Square isn’t as unique in that respect as it once was, I suppose. Screens and media messages are everywhere.

If you’d like to learn more (including specific skills and tools) to be a “mobile storychaser” I encourage you to buy a copy of my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.”

Technorati Tags: history, newyork, storychaser, storychasing, tourism, travel, nyc, statue, liberty, storychase, ellis, island, manhattan

Storychasing Times Square & Lady Liberty in NYC originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 7, 2011.

Today I wanted to view a video on ABC News’ website on my iPhone, but the built-in Safari web browser wouldn’t show the content since it’s Flash-based. ABC suggested I download and install their custom app.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Puffin Web Browser for Flash Movies on iOS originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 6, 2011.

When everything is setup, the Apple TV mirrors EVERYTHING on the iPad. The frame rate for games is even pretty decent. With this feature, Apple will likely cause many schools to purchase Apple TVs in upcoming months. This appears to be the most seamless way to share iPad content wirelessly with a class. Being untethered has BIG benefits over using a cable and iPad VGA connector, which “tethers” the presenter to the front of the room.

To get this setup to work, you’ll need an iOS device running iOS 5 and an Apple TV connected to a TV with HDMI. (Obviously that’s not the standard video port in most K-12 classrooms today.) Double click the home button and swipe left to show the volume controls and alignment lock options. If you have the same Apple ID entered on your iOS device and the Apple TV, An option to share with Airplay should show up. Click to turn on mirroring, and it’s showtime.

Unlike Airplay for videos there does not seem to be a guest mirroring option yet. This is good from the standpoint that others (like students) can’t readily hijack an Apple TV via mirroring. Other than entering a shared Apple ID on the student device, however, I’m not sure how a teacher could mirror/share student iOS devices on an Apple TV. Is there “an app for that” yet?

Update: Dean Shareski reports mirroring via Apple TV does NOT require a common Apple ID.

I’m glad to see this iOS 5 / Apple TV option “in action” personally. This has me thinking a lot about implications for watching live sports over the holidays via MobiTV, since we don’t subscribe to a cable provider any more. For more on my experiences with this in December 2010, see my post, “Watching Live Bowl Games on MobileTV.”

Mobile blogged on my iPhone with the free WordPress for iOS app.

Mirroring an iPad with iOS 5 & Apple TV originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 31, 2011.

iAnnotate PDF is $10 on iTunes, but it’s worth every penny. I generally use my free Dropbox account to upload PDF versions of documents to “the cloud,” then download them to my iPad with the free Dropbox iPad app to open them first in DropBox. Then I open the file in iAnnotate PDF. Just click the arrow icon in the upper right corner, and after it’s installed iAnnotate PDF should appear as a destination app option.

I love how iAnnotate PDF supports highlighting, adding notes to pages, and also freehand writing. My writing would look neater if I used an iOS stylus, but today I was just making notes for myself so neatness didn’t matter as much.

Goodreader is another iPad app I’ve used for annotation, but iAnnotate PDF is my favorite since it lets you save notes and annotations you add into a new PDF file you can share with others. Last March when we were closing on our home in Oklahoma City, I was in an Alabama airport and needed to sign a PDF document for our realtor. I had my iPad and iAnnotate PDF, so it wasn’t a problem!

I like to convert my Word files to PDF format when I proof them on my iPad. At this point, iAnnotate PDF is my favorite app for these digital editing tasks. If you’re an iPad user, definitely check it out!

You have another iPad app you prefer for digital annotations? Please share about it in the comments!

All our family’s iOS applications are linked in my Appolicious account library.

Technorati Tags: app, edit, ipad, annotate, annotation, highlight, save, PDF, goodreader

Annotate, Correct and Edit Documents on Your iPad originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 25, 2011.

First we heard from Traci Blazosky, sharing her presentation, “The Monster Mash-Up.” Resources from her preso are on her wiki, files used for the Batty Mashup project are on: http://ge.tt/9JxVoy8

First example of a mashup video we saw about dolphins, created by teachers in the summer 2011 DEN institute

Kids love writing scripts, gets them writing and writing creativity
- kids get reading and writing skills during script writing work
- also good for collaborative learning
- great for reading with expression!

Blabberize is a great tool for media mashups
- doesn’t let you directly download creations as videos, however, you have to capture a screencast of your Blabberize

Voki is also great, however, and does allow you to download creations as videos for remixes / other videos

Next example we saw: Paper Slide video about where milk comes from (by teachers)

Traci did a great job describing the process she uses helping kids create media projects: dividing into groups, using a rubric, etc.

Next we heard from Nancy Sharoff sharing her preso, “No Tricks, Just Treats.”

IPEVO camera: just $70 for a document camera!

Echo Livescribe pen
- records audio as you write
- 3 types of pens: 2 GB $100, 4 GB $150, 8 GB $200
- strongly recommend the 4 or 8 GB because it gives you access to “live Scribe Connect Premium” so you can upload those “pen casts” and then embed them onto webpages, Google Docs, etc.

Great writing activity: Wordless picture books
- students see images and have to write the text for the story AND record the audio for the book
- these can be shared with students in lower grades
- Livescribe pen can be used by students to create these

iPod Touch and iPad are in my digital backpack

EyeFi Camera Card is great for digital cameras to directly share/upload
- replace your standard SD card in your digital camera with this one, configure it for your wifi network and it will directly upload images
- Best Buy is running a current sale on these in my area
- you can add up to 32 different wifi networks on the card
- Also an app is available from EyeFi if you own a card

iHome Capsule Speakers are GREAT for presentations ($30 on Amazon, even come in purple!)

my Smartphone is in my bag too!

Now applications from Nancy:

I use Evernote on ALL my devices
- supports searchable text from an image, it’s wonderful!

I use Quickoffice Pro HD ($20) on my iPad to create and edit MS Office files, if you store them on your Evernote account they merge seamlessly

Evernote brings along URLs
- is free, premium account is $45 per year
- the free account has been sufficient for me

Dropbox is fantastic free app
- I love how it transfers just the parts of files that change, not the entire file when you update something
- great for sharing large files with other people
-
- Box.net gives you 4 GB instead of Dropbox’ 2 GB currently

PDAnet lets you tether your Android-based smartphone for FREE to your other devices (computers, tablets, etc)

Jing is my go-to app for screen casting
- great to take short videos of what you see on your computer monitor
- Pro version of Jing is $15 per year, can upload to YouTube and there aren’t ads… also you can add a webcam to your mix of video

Jing has a free iPad app: Screenchomp
- ShowMe is another great screen casting option on the iPad (free too, some different options)

Bump is a great free app for smartphones and i-devices
- not just for contact sharing!
- you can share images from device to device, even between your own apps (Droid phone to iPad, for example)
- you can share a LOT with Bump!

Goodreader for my iPad ($5)
- basically a PDF reader but so much more
- can highlight and do all kinds of annotations
- can zoom in up to 50x on Goodreader
- I have all my user manuals for all my devices in Goodreader
- all the PDFs I have even for software I’ll put in there so I can access/use them when needed

Instapaper saves webpages for offline reading
- great for me because I’m in a rural area and don’t always have connectivity
- can download up to 500 articles

iPad Browsers:
- Duet Browsers: it’s 2 browsers on 1 screen ($3)
- my 2nd favorite is Side by Side Browser – free (also supports taking notes directly on webpages)

Other browser options (from webinar participants) are iSwifter (free) and Diigo Browser – free (supports annotation and offline access)

SymbalooEDU is another great tool
- I used this for photo apps for the summer institute

BrainPop is great, my district subscribes to BrainPop Junior
- the iPad app is free, but for $1.99 per month you get a featured movie plus several more related to the focus concept

Great iPad apps for images for your students:
- Guardian Eyewitness (free)
- 5,000 Amazing Photos of the Day – free (National Geographic)
- GeoWalk HD – $3

Great iPad apps for digital storytelling:
- Coolibah – - – Skrappy – $3
- Album App – 42
- ScrapPad ($5)
- Smilebox – free
- Demibooks Composer – free

Remember all of Nancy’s GREAT session links (more than I captured here) are on https://sites.google.com/site/nancysharoff/tech-or-treat
- follow Nancy Sharoff on Twitter: @nsharoff

Technorati Tags: discovery, edtech, education, learning, denvirtcon, techtreats, integration

Great Ideas from the Fall 2011 DEN Virtual Conference (part 1) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 22, 2011.

A large percentage of excitement over “cloud computing” these days focuses on content consumption, not creation. AT&T personified this in their advertising campaign a few years ago, “Your World Delivered.” That tagline isn’t included in the AT&T ads I’ve seen lately, but it’s interesting Microsoft is using that idea (“Cloud computing on our platform means you get to ingest your digital content more places”) but calling it “creating and sharing.”

I definitely enjoy consuming digital content whenever and wherever I want, which is increasingly possible with mobile devices and high speed cellular connectivity. I’m also a big advocate for (and enjoyer of) content creation and sharing, however. Since I finished writing my first eBook this summer, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” my wife has often declared as she watches Netflix on our iPad, “Look honey! I’m playing with media!” Watching a pre-recorded movie or television program doesn’t qualify as “playing with media” in my book, however, and I don’t think it should qualify as “creating and sharing” for an advertising campaign for a company like Microsoft, either.

As we see, support, and use a wider variety of computing devices in our schools and homes, it would be interesting to study the amount of time we spend actually CREATING on these devices versus CONSUMING content. My own informal observations of my children indicate MOST of the time, we’re consuming. My 8th grade son has recently started playing Minecraft on my laptop, since the processor on his netbook isn’t nearly as fast, and that activity (while still a game) DOES seem to fit into the definition of “creating.” My girls, however, don’t seem to create much on the computer without encouragement from me… They’d rather watch something on Netflix or play a game.

The Kindle Fire appears to be a device 99% dedicated to content consumption. I’m guessing it will let users check and send email, but I don’t know about word processing or blogging. Are people really going to want to word process on a 7″ tablet device? I doubt it. At $200, however, I’m expecting the Kindle Fire to sell like hotcakes in advance of the December 2011 holiday shopping season. I’m even contemplating one for my wife, to update her “aging” 1st generation Kindle. (It still works great and she loves it, however, so there’s no guarantee we’ll do this.)

In our classrooms, as we see in the consumer electronics marketplace today, I think most teachers and students are FAR too focused on content CONSUMPTION rather than creation. Many of our classrooms are worksheet factories. What would many teachers do today if the copy machine was removed PERMANENTLY from the teacher workroom? Here’s the announcement the principal could read over the PA system:

Attention teachers. Starting today, a copy machine will not be available in the workroom. Our days of supporting a worksheet-driven learning culture at school are over. From now on, create your content digitally and encourage your students to do the same. Student digital portfolios should reflect student learning on a daily and weekly basis. No mass-copied notes will be sent home to parents anymore, all communication will be via in-person conversations, email, text messages and phone calls.

I know, the digital divide is real and not all parents have access to email. So this is a pipe dream. But perhaps it isn’t too far off for schools which have made the 1:1 computing plunge.

It’s worthwhile to consider how much we’re using digital tools for content CREATION versus CONSUMPTION. Left to their own devices, many students (and teachers) would likely choose consumption. Watching movies is far easier and less intellectually challenging than making a movie. Many of us are addicted to information flows on the web, and it’s far easier (in most cases) to sip from those rivers of information and contribute piecemeal (click a “like” button or write a 140 character comment) than make a more thoughtful and time-consuming digital creation.

Are educators in schools or academic researchers measuring this respective mix of content consumption versus content creation activities? I think that would be a worthwhile avenue of inquiry for research and evaluation.

H/T to Barb Darrow in her article for GigaOM, “iCloud snafus point to dark side of consumer cloud,” for linking to the Microsoft “Airport – To the Cloud – Windows 7” video.

Technorati Tags: academic, ad, advertising, cloud, computing, consume, content, create, microsoft, research, share, sharing, survey, video, youtube, creation, measure

Cloud Computing Excitement for Content Consumption originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 17, 2011.

This week on Tuesday my daughter’s second grade class took their fall field trip to the Oklahoma City Zoo. I brought my iPhone and iRig microphone, and the girls in our group used the camera along with the free app AudioBoo to record some reflections during our visit. We recorded nine AudioBoos (all less than 60 seconds each) and three videos. Here are the “digital artifacts” we created documenting our field trip. This kind of mobile storytelling and archiving is exactly the sort of mobile media use by students I want to encourage through my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” as well as website SHARE: Playing with Media. These are all examples of “no-edit audio recording” and media creation following “the ethic of minimal clicks!”

If you listen to ANY of these, check out the first one about the flamingos. Rachel had some misperceptions about them “easily having some of their legs cut off” which we were able to discuss because of this AudioBoo recording! If she hadn’t recorded and shared her perceptions, I don’t think the adults in our group would have realized her misunderstanding. Great example of the value of having students explain their perceptions and ideas with an audio recorder! Check out the Audio Page of playingwithmedia.com for more links to free, no-edit audio tools.

Flamingos at the Zoo (AudioBoo)

Turtles and Koi (AudioBoo)

Head-butting Goats (AudioBoo)

Cool facts about California Sea Lions (AudioBoo)

Clown Fish in the Anemone (AudioBoo)

The Giant Anteater (AudioBoo)

Galapagos Turtles (AudioBoo)

Baby Elephant (AudioBoo)

3 Month Old Baby Tigers Playing (AudioBoo)

We also recorded three movies during our field trip.

Technorati Tags: audio, audioboo, learning, oklahoma, oklahomacity, playingwithmedia, record, school, share, sharing, student, voice, zoo, field, trip, fieldtrip

A Second Grade Field Trip to the Zoo with AudioBoo originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 12, 2011.

All the apps in this list are free with the exception of iRig Recorder ($5), SonicPics ($3) and StoryRobe ($1). Note free versions of iRig Recorder and SonicPics (iRig Recorder free and SonicPics Lite) are available in more limited but free versions. The audio app list I created tonight on Appolicious is “clickable” so you can use that version to check out the different app features.

Since I’m not sure Appolicious has all my recent app additions included in my library, I also took some screenshots tonight of the current app folders I’m using on my iPhone for Audio Recording and Sharing, Photo Editing, Video Editing, Uploading Apps for Photos and Text, and Photo Capture or iPhoneography.

Are there any iOS apps in these categories which you’re using and absolutely LOVE? I’d love to know about them, and I bet Lorelei would as well. Please share them in the comments, along with direct links to their websites or iTunes pages if you can / feel so inclined.

Full disclosure: Humbledaisy, the creator of SonicPics, is a current advertiser on my blog.

Technorati Tags: app, apps, audio, education, ipad, iphone, iphoneography, ipod, ipodtouch, journalism, learning, photos, school, share, sharing, video

Favorite iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch Audio Editing Apps (October 2011) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 11, 2011.

Thanks to teacher Brad Wilson for sharing this great example of “mobile reporting” and media use by students on the SHARE: Playing with Media blog. Check out Brad’s outstanding class blog powered by Posterous on stewart4.posterous.com.

It’s very important for students and teachers to communicate with elected state officials and let them know about the positive, powerful ways technology tools can enhance the learning process. Brad has set a great example not only for other educators in Michigan, but all of us no matter where we live. Today it’s common for negative headlines about education and schools to dominate, and we need to “tell our stories” as learners with social media tools and technologies. Like the wonderful project, “Nebraska Loves Public Schools,” we need to help shape perceptions in our states and countries about the TREMENDOUS value outstanding teachers bring to our students, our schools, and our communities each day.

Brad was the winner of an iRig Microphone in the September SHARE: Playing with Media promotion. The giveaway in October will be an RCA VR5320 1GB Digital Voice Recorder! To enter the drawing, you simply need to share ONE example of student-created media (with student and parent permission, of course) on share.playingwithmedia.com/contribute. More details are available.

Also remember to check out other GREAT examples of student media projects created with digital text, images, audio and video on SHARE: Playing with Media. This is one of the websites I’ve created to support ideas in my eBook, Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing. Recent submissions in the past couple weeks include “Notes on Marco Polo” (an “interactive notes” example from Alison Anderson using the iPad app “Show Me”) and Envirofest (a short video by grade two students taught Brette Lockyer about taking care of the environment made with the iPad app “Puppet Pals.”)

Technorati Tags: cinch, education, example, interview, ipodtouch, learning, playingwithmedia, school, student, students, pscholka, michigan

4th Graders Interview Michigan State Representative Al Pscholka originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 10, 2011.

Full disclosure: HumbleDaisy, the creators of SonicPics, are paying advertisers on my blog. (I loved their app long before I started accepting ads on my blog, however.)

Here are a few photos from my travel day. I love the in-flight map which shows the plane’s location, altitude and speed over earth. International air travel amazes me!

I recorded and posted two new audio files to my “Sounds of My World” blog tonight as well:

• Arabic Upon Arrival
• Italian Guitar in Doha

If some of these media shares from the Middle East inspire you, be sure to check out my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” where you can learn more tools and techniques for sharing digital text, images, audio and video. If you have not already, mark your calendar for the free webinar, “Fall VirtCon 2011: Tech or Treat,” on Saturday, October 22, sponsored by Discovery Education. I’ll be sharing a spotlight session during the virtual conference about the ideas and techniques included in the book.

Check out more photos from today in the Flickr set I created. I’ll be posting more this week!

Technorati Tags: edtech, education, media, sonicpics, travel, qatar, doha, narrated, slideshow

Oklahoma City to Doha (narrated slideshow with SonicPics) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 5, 2011.

Not only is it enlightening to learn more about the FOUR new eBook / eMedia devices Amazon announced that day, it’s also very instructive to contrast the presentation style AND presentation content of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with the past style/content of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Today will be the first big Apple PR event without Jobs, since he stepped down in August this year, but I’m sure the “Apple style” of presentation and product “wow factor” will be preserved. I’m also predicting we’ll hear far more about “cloud services” in this presentation from Apple folks than we’ve heard previously. (Given past announcements about iCloud, this isn’t a huge stretch for an amateur futurist.)

So here’s your assignment, if you choose to accept it. Watch Jeff Bezos’ keynote on the Amazon Fire and other eBook devices from September 28th, and then be ready to contrast that “performance” (paying particular attention to style) as well as the keynote content with the Apple presentation forthcoming later today.

I was really amazed there wasn’t more applause and audience reaction during Bezos’ September 28th demonstration in New York City. The audience must have been compositionally different than the ones typically attending Apple events. Obviously there were lots of press reps at both, but in the LACK of audience reaction I think it’s plain to see Amazon has a different “fan following” at this point than Apple does. This was an incredible set of announcements, both because of the price points AND the functionality offered by these new Kindle versions from Amazon. I thought the crowd should have reacted MUCH more enthusiastically to these products. I think Jeff’s demeanor and style as a presenter must have contributed significantly, however, to this lack of a response. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure… but his style was less inviting of applause during the presentation than the ways I’ve seen Steve Jobs present in the past. Sometimes this is just a use of pauses. Bezos didn’t use a presentation style that invited audience applause, even though it was very deserved.

Jeff’s most poignant use of graphics in his multimedia presentation on September 28th was this slide contrasting Amazon’s sales growth of print versus electronic books. Who says “the book is dead?!” (Hint: It was Steve Jobs in 2008. His actual quote in the New York Times was, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”)

From a content perspective, the key message Bezos wanted to share with his audience on September 28th was, “We’re building premium products at non-premium prices.” This was a DIRECT dig at Apple’s approach selling the iPad at a steep price. While this may be a good message for Amazon to leverage and a potentially powerful one with consumers, I don’t think Bezos pulled off his presentation with the flair and impact which Jobs regularly did as Apple CEO. You can tell from the LACK energy in the room, conveyed in the YouTube video version. Bezos is far less of a showman and accomplished presenter than Jobs was or is.

One common denominator I predict we’ll see in both the forthcoming Apple presentation later today and Jeff’s presentation from September 28th is a focus on CLOUD-based services. The fact that MobileMe sync and backups are now going to be free to all Apple customers (via iCloud) is HUGE. Web services “in the cloud” are a significant and growing part of our computing present and future. It’s VERY exciting to see companies like Apple (which has traditionally had a more client-based, “your computer is your media hub” approach to computing) as well as Amazon embracing it.

This six minute video about Amazon Silk, touted as “Amazon’s Revolutionary Cloud-Accelerated Web Browser,” was definitely one of the most significant ideas Bezos shared on September 28th. The assumptions we may have traditionally made about “mobile computing experiences” may be redefined by cloud-based processing power. Just as Google Fusion tables can bring incredible power directly to any web browser, running on a RAM-laden desktop or an ultra-thin browser client like a Chromebook, this new web browsing approach from Amazon promises to usher in a new era of transformative, mobile computing experiences.

From a consumer perspective, and specifically the perspective of an educator, it’s great to see companies like Amazon and Apple continuing to innovate as well as compete. Some of your students are sure to be discussing Apple’s announcements later this week. Take this as an opportunity to have a “compare and contrast” moment. What was different stylistically between Bezos’ announcements on September 28th and Apple’s announcements today? How about content? What do these products and offered services tell us about the direction of not just computing, but COMMUNICATION in 2011? How are our classrooms embracing these possibilities? How about our schools? How about us as individuals?

Lots of great food for thought and ideas for good conversations! Please chime in with comments and your own views. If you talk about this with your students, please share what you discussed and what the kids said.

Technorati Tags: amazon, apple, cloud, fire, ios5, ipad, jobs, kindle, steve, annoucement, silk

Contrasting Amazon and Apple’s PR Event Style: Bezos v Jobs originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 4, 2011.

In October 2011, I’ll be giving away an “RCA VR5320 1GB Digital Voice Recorder” to an educator who shares an example of student work on share.playingwithmedia.com. For more details, see the playingwithmedia.com post, “Win a Digital Audio Recorder in October 2011.”

Technorati Tags: audio, cinch, irig, playingwithmedia, student, recorder, example

Congrats Brad Wilson: iRig Mic Winner for Sharing Student Media in September originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on October 2, 2011.

What happens in 60 Seconds on the Internet (April 2011)

“What Technology Wants” by Kevin Kelly (a great book to read or listen to on Audible)

The Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire TV Commercial (30 sec)

Google Chromebook

“You had me at 8 seconds”

Chromebooks for Education (2:13)

See resources for digital text, image, audio and video sharing on playingwithmedia.com

See examples of shared student projects on share.playingwithmedia.com

Purchase “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” as an eBook or paperback

Google Sketchup software (free)

Scratch software (free)

Green Cities – New Businesses

Green Cities – New Businesses from DeerfieldCS on Vimeo.

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman Book Trailer by Alec G.

The Great Book Stories project (examples of student-created VoiceThread-based book reports)

Roman Weapons In Plain English

Technorati Tags: blog, book, edtech, education, inspirational, inspire, new, playingwithmedia, report, school, schools, share, sketchup, student, technology, video, vimeo, youtube, nhste, hampshire, newhampshire, work, bookreport

Reach for the Stars Using Media in Your Classroom originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 29, 2011.

Digitizing Student Portfolios with an iPod Touch [video] originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 27, 2011.

The increasing availability of flash-based video recorders, or camcorders, continues to fuel the explosive growth of online video. “No edit” and “quick edit” videography has many advantages, but editing is still important at times and can be necessary in many cases. Fortunately, available tools continue to grow in their capabilities alongside hardware for capturing videos.

Google announced last week YouTube now supports enhanced video editing for clips you upload to the site. Unlike the previous online editor, which created NEW videos, you can now edit the same video you uploaded– even later, and not change the website link/URL or lose views/comments. This 40 second video explains how. Think “Instagram effects” for videos, but without an application. All the editing takes place in “the cloud.”

The video effects remind me of my favorite iPhoneography editing application, Camera Bag. (Hat tip to Marco Torres for sharing this back at ACTEM in 2009.) Even more exciting than those effects, however, is the ability to TRIM a video right on YouTube in your web browser! I used the new YouTube video editor tonight to trim some extra footage from the start of a clip I recorded back in November 2010 of David Glover explaining how “The Square” lets anyone accept credit card payments with an iPhone.

This capability is very exciting, since it eliminates the need to perform these “quick edit” video trims on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch before uploading to YouTube. The trimming can be done afterwards in a browser-based post-production process. It’s also great to see the YouTube editor provides the option to SAVE or SAVE AS when you make edits, so you don’t have to overwrite your original video if you don’t want to.

For people wanting to do even LESS work editing together video clips so they can be shared online with others in shorter versions (even with an included musical soundtrack) the website Magisto is here to help. I learned about Magisto today via Jennifer Van Grove’s article for Mashable. This two minute video cleverly explains the problem Magisto can help us solve: Breathing “shareable life” into video clips from trips and other excursions which are too long and boring to put online “as is.”

What is Magisto from magisto on Vimeo.

I gave Magisto a try tonight, uploading six video clips from our family’s visit to Disneyland last March which I’d never uploaded to YouTube or Flickr previously. The site has a limit of uploading a maximum of 16 different videos, or videos which total 600 MB in size at one time. My six videos (shot with an iPhone4) were about 480 MB. I selected the videos to upload just like email attachments, gave a title to my video, and chose a song. I could have uploaded one from my computer, but I opted to go with one provided by Magisto. I’m wondering if Madonna is earning a royalty for this?!

Here’s my finished video on Magisto. I also cross-posted it to YouTube right from the site. It took about 40 minutes for this to process and finish. It’s 1 minute, 40 seconds long. Magisto sent me an email message when it was complete. I’m not sure the “Holiday” music by Madonna exactly fits for the Star Wars / Darth Maul scenes, but given how little effort I had to put into making this video, I’m not complaining. It IS fun to see these video clips online at last with “new life!”

I elaborate further on the benefits as well as procedures of “no edit” and “quick edit” videography in my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” If you’re not creating and editing flash-based videos yet, it’s time to get started! It’s exciting to see these new, cloud-based options for editing and enhancing videos. These complement mobile apps for video editing like iMovie, and provide even more choices for storychasers and iPhoneographers!

Technorati Tags: cloud, edit, editing, playingwithmedia, video, youtube, magisto, quick

New Video Editing Options with YouTube’s Browser-based Editor and Magisto originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 20, 2011.

Soundcloud is an excellent website and smart phone application offering the ability to not only record and share “no edit” audio recordings (similar to AudioBoo, Cinch, and iPadio) but also add “timed” comments. A timed comment is linked to a specific minute and second mark in a sound recording. I interviewed my 13 year old, 8th grade son tonight about his recent English project, “Living in Oak Ridge.” He created a Glogster site for the project with photos he’d obtained from his grandmother (my mom) who lived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II. I used the free iOS application for Soundcloud to record this ten minute interview, using my iPhone and an iRig microphone. If you play the embedded Soundcloud audio recording below, notice how comments appear as the audio file plays back in your web browser. I LOVE this feature! As far as I know, this is unique to Soundcloud at this point.

Discussing Oak Ridge Glogster Project at Oklahoma City, OK by wfryer

Comments to a Soundcloud recording can be added using the iOS application, but those comments are not “timed.” To add a timed comment, you need to use your web browser. After logging in with an account to Soundcloud, click in the blue space below the audio “waveform” to add a comment.

Mouse over a comment and click REMOVE (if you are the owner of a Soundcloud recording) to delete unwanted comments.

It’s possible to include hyperlinks in timed comments as well as regular text. This is a great way to provide additional information as well as website suggestions relating to a recorded audio file. Links are clickable in the “hovering text boxes” which appear over the audio waveform as the recording plays in your browser, and also clickable below the sound recording. People can also reply to specific comments. Those appear as Twitter-style “@ reply” messages, however, rather than threaded / hierarchical comments. Soundcloud does not appear to currently support comment moderation, or to offer an education-specific version of its product.

The Soundcloud iOS app doesn’t appear to currently show comments. Users can add “untimed” comments to a sound recording, but not view or listen to any comments– just the original recording. The app is a great tool for creating “no edit” audio recordings, however, and I highly recommend it. SoundCloud supports “the ethic of minimal clicks” for student and teacher media projection, which I discuss in my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” Soundcloud provides users with 120 minutes worth of free audio hosting, and older files can be deleted to make space for new ones if desired. Premium Soundcloud accounts offer more features, including the ability to download each track more than 100 times. This complete Soundcloud account feature overview shows what can be added if you’re willing to pay money for the service. Other platforms like AudioBoo, Cinch, and iPadio provide free, unlimited accounts, but don’t currently offer the “timed commenting” feature of Soundcloud. Soundcloud recordings are not limited in duration for individual episodes, either, as recordings are on AudioBoo. (AudioBoo’s limit is 5 minutes each.)

Check out additional audio sites and resources on playingwithmedia.com/pages/audio. I’ll continue to keep that site updated in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks to Sheldon Bradshaw for sharing Soundcloud during our “digital storytelling” cohort sessions at the Learning 2.011 conference in Shanghai last week!

Check out examples of student audio projects on SHARE: Playing with Media. Remember you still have a couple of weeks to contribute / share your own example of a student media project (audio or text / image / video) on the site and possibly win an iRig microphone!

Technorati Tags: audio, edtech, learning, media, play, playing, playingwithmedia, playwithmedia, recording, school, soundcloud, technology

Share “timed” comments on Audio Recordings with SoundCloud originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 19, 2011.

For specific instructions about using the Podcaster app and a download link to my current podcast subscriptions, see my January 2011 post, “Manage Podcasts WITHOUT an iTunes Sync Using Podcaster.” For additional suggestions for educational podcasts, check out last week’s post from a Learning 2.011 Asia “unconference” session in Shanghai, “Finding and Downloading Educational Podcasts.”

I love using Podcaster. I actually deleted all my podcast feeds from iTunes this week and also deleted the archived shows I had saved. Now I can download podcasts “on the go” with Podcaster, and much more readily “purge” or clean out my podcast archive using the app. I LOVE not having to sync my iPhone to my computer to download and listen to podcasts!

Do you have another favorite app or technique you’re using to download and listen to podcasts on the go? If so please share it!

Technorati Tags: ipad, iphone, ipod, ipodtouch, itunes, podcast, podcasting, listen

Enjoy Podcast Fast Forward and Rewind Options with Podcaster.fm originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 19, 2011.

1. Hat tip to Dan Schmidt for sharing the term “podfader”
2. Sounds of My World: Ambient Audio Recordings by Wesley Fryer
3. Chinese Flute Music - Recorded September 11, 2011, walking near Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai, China. (35 sec)
4. “Life Sounds Like This,” a Posterous-powered sound blog by Jess McCulloch
5. YouTube Playlist: Videos from Learning 2.011 (18 videos)
6. SHARE: Playing with Media (examples of student media projects)
7. Share Student Media in September: Win an iRig Microphone!
8. Fuel for Educational Change Agents Podcast Channel
9. 2011 K-12 Online Conference – FREE, world-class professional development videos
10. The Seedlings Webcast on EdTechTalk (Seedlings on Facebook)
11. NOW Generation by the Black Eyed Peas (YouTube)
12. Disintermediation (English WikiPedia)
13. Kindle Direct Publishing
14. Comparison of eBook Formats (English WikiPedia)
15. EPUB format information from the International Digital Publishing Forum
16. Apple Pages Software (commercial)
17. Calibre Software (free / open source)
18. eBooks and ePub Format Digital Books: A #tltechforum Roundable (6 May 2011)
19. Oodles of eBooks (podcast) by Carolyn Foote (@technolibrary on Twitter) – Session resources
20. Working with Free eBooks on Kindle for iPad NOT from Amazon.com (24 May 2011)
21. Reading the Fine Print: Considering Different eBook Publishing Options for the iBookstore (25 Jul 2011)
22. Publishing eBooks to Amazon and iTunes iBookstore: Learning Curve Continues (29 Jul 2011)
23. Validation errors in a multimedia or enhanced EPUB eBook (5 Aug 2011)
24. Lessons Learned About Enhanced or Multimedia EPUB eBook Validation (15 Aug 2011)
25. Audio and Video in EPUB: Straight to the Point Miniguide #2 ($5 ebook)
26. Apple ePUB Template with recommended stylesheet
27. Lulu.com
28. Approved Apple Aggregators (companies) for the iTunes iBookstore – as of July 2011
29. CreateSpace (publish print books on demand, Amazon’s official partner / channel)
30. e-Junkie (sell digital content online)
31. ePubBud
32. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown
33. Brushes app for iPad (Rachel used this for the book illustrations in Playing with Media)
34. Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing (links to 3 eBook formats and print version)
35. Supplementary resources: playingwithmedia.com
36. Contact Wesley Fryer
37. Wesley Fryer on Twitter: @wfryer

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Podcast380: The Summer of Podfading is OVER: Let’s Talk eBooks! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 17, 2011.

I love the idea of having a “sound blog” for sharing ambient recordings of unique sounds in our environments. Of the five I’ve posted so far from my trip to Shanghai this month, “Chinese Flute Music” is definitely my favorite.

I recorded those five audio snippets from Shanghai using the free iTalk Recorder app on my iPhone. I transferred these files over wifi from my iPhone to my computer using the free iTalk Sync application. Since the app records files in a relatively large, uncompressed AIFF file format, I converted the files to 64 kbps mp3 files (which are smaller) using free Switch software.

I uploaded each mp3 file directly to my WordPress site using the browser-based posting options, and copied the direct URL / link for each audio file to use with the PowerPress Podcasting plugin. The plugin creates a nice flash-based browser player for the audio files, and also provides a direct download link. The download link is useful if viewing the blog on an iOS device (iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch) which does not support Flash. I installed the free WP-Touch plugin to make the site more mobile-friendly.

In addition, I added a photo I took in each location where I recorded audio. I’m thinking this will enhance the value of these audio recordings if they’re used in the classroom, since they’ll provide some visual context for each recording. All content on the site is licensed under a permissive Creative Commons, attribution-only license, which means you and your students are free to use / remix any of this audio if desired for media projects.

Now I’ll just need to remember to record more audio when I’m “out and about” in interesting places. I’ve added Jess’ “Life Sounds Like This” sound blog as a new example on share.playingwithmedia.com, and added a new category under “Audio” for sound blogs. Remember if you share just ONE example of student-created media on share.playingwithmedia.com by September 30, 2011, you will be entered to win a free iRig microphone!

Consider starting your own audio blog! Audio recording technologies are one of the most UNDER utilized capabilities we have on our smartphones and computers. There’s lots to learn and share when we record ambient audio around us. Just be sure to get permission from others you record if anything which is said is personally identifiable or potentially a confidentiality issue.

Technorati Tags: audio, china, digital, digitalstorytelling, learning2, playingwithmedia, record, shanghai, storytelling, sound, sounds

Sounds of My World – My new sound blog originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 15, 2011.

Shanghai Adventures (September 2011) (20 minutes)

A twenty minute narrated slideshow of my adventures exploring Shanghai, China, on September 11, 2011. There are 48 images in this slideshow.

Shanghai Museum Coins (12 minutes)

A narrated slideshow about the coins and currency exhibit in the Shanghai Museum. I toured the exhibit on September 11, 2011.

Not Your Typical Airport Menu (3 minutes)

A narrated slideshow about some interesting items on the menu at the Pudong Airport in Shanghai, China.

I also edited together a couple video clips I took riding in Shanghai taxis on Sunday and Monday. I turned off the audio on the second half of this clip because of wind noise, but hopefully it will still provide a good feel for what it was like in this city of 23 million people. I’ll insert that tomorrow in this post after I upload it, as my luggage has all arrived here in the OKC airport and I’m keen to get home.

When I was still in China, I posted two additional videos as video blogs from Shanghai as well and another narrated slideshow. Those were:

• Reflections from the Bund in Shanghai
• Hot Pot in Shanghai
• Hello from Shanghai!

Technorati Tags: china, learning, playingwithmedia, shanghai, sonicpics

Documenting Adventures in Shanghai on an iPhone [video] originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 12, 2011.

UPDATE: The audio podcast is online / available.

At the outset I want to say I’m a huge fan and witness for the transformative power of iPads to support student learning and engagement

Sale of 2 million devices:
- iPod: 1092 days
- iPhone: 114 days
- iPad: 59 days

As you look at deployments, the model is important
working the numbers

1:1 BYO (bring your own) or school-owned?
that model is very different from a Shared / school-owned model

the iPad does NOT have student accounts / profiles

Most of our experiences at Western Academy of Beijing is with the shared / school-owned model

Question: To 3G or not 3G
- convenience / flexibility
- with those connectivity issues, you have challenges with bills, traceability, security

Suggestion: use “Mi-Fi” personal hotspots
- 3-6 people can connect
- Those are 300 RMB here in China, can provide field trip connectivity
- you can turn off the connectivity at the end of the day on your field trip when you use personal hotspots

Configuration
- iPhone configuration utility gives a base configuration, basic setup only
- great for BYO deployment
- it’s more like a business development tool
- not as much: make the iPad an educational tool in the classroom

There are 3rd party configuration solutions
- Casper, Absolute Manage are examples
- more are on www.apple.com/ipad/business/integration/mdm/

We’ve purchased into the Casper suite, but it can’t push out applications to iPads
- it’s good for basic setup stuff

2 iPad cases we wanted:
- Otterbox: otterbox.com – $70
- www.goballisticcase.com – $90

We calculated our break even point for losing iPads, figured we would have to break 25 percent of our iPads to justify the expense of those expensive cases

We went with thin neoprene covers, and bought local market covers

shared option model means you need to be able to store, lock, charge, and sync your iPads

Bretford cart is not available in mainland China

We bought carts that are about 10,000 RMB each
- new cart available in China now for 30,000 RMB which also supports syncing

Average USB ports do NOT have enough power to sync and charge an iPad
- Apple didn’t follow USB 2.0 standards for the iPad
- this raises issues which need to be addressed
- this means standard USB hubs will let you sync multiple iPads, but won’t charge adequately
- this is a power consumption issue
- choice is spending big $$$ or split charging and syncing to two separate processes
- iOS upgrades are 1 by 1, you can’t sync them all together

Remember iOS5 is coming with promises of more wireless updates, we have seen dramatic function updates from iOS2 to 3 to 4.

Syncing
- only 2 companies build infrastructure for charging and syncing at the same time
- company in UK is building them and others are buying their boards

We use D-Link 7 port powered hubs for syncing

Things to consider as you reply

File Management
- getting files on the device: via iTunes, wirelessly, webdav, etc

Apps are sandboxed: same file ends up on multiple apps, other apps don’t see the same file you have on your device
- depending on what you want to do in your environment drives what management issues you face

remember there is NOT a folder structure on your iPad like you have on your laptop
- this means a complete change with how we think about file management

Sharing options: email is one of the best options

User accounts: they don’t exist now for iPads
- this means student work is on the device when it’s shared

Direct to printer: software needs
- I like the fact it’s challenging now to print (moves us closer to paperless classrooms!)
- check issues for your network
- we are focused with our iPad deployment on lower elementary students, so that makes these issues a bit more challenging
- we want students to be able to independently share there work

Classroom Management
- many schools like Remote Desktop and LAN School
- there are not a lot of options for monitoring software
- keys are engagement and interactivity
- depending on how you control apps on your device
- you know for sure there are not any flash-based browser games!

App considerations
- What store?
- we have chosen to live within the spirit of agreements rather than line item agreements
- on issue is: “The iTunes Service is available to you only in the United States, its territories, and possessions. You agree not to use or attempt to use the iTunes Service from outside these locations. Apple may use technologies to verify your compliance.”

We have made peace with using the U.S. store and dealing with it, the Chinese store has far fewer apps and isn’t nearly as good a fit for our student population

We created iTunes accounts with gift cards, purchased in the USA
- no one used a credit card for apps

Volume Purchasing Plan (VPP) is the answer to many of these questions
- lets a site administrator have control over iPads and iOS devices in the school ecosystem
- this is only available as of today in the United States (not in China)
- is coming to other countries, the legal issues are being worked out

Until then, terms say you can sync 5 devices to any 1 account (so 40 licenses need 8 accounts)

Suggested management solution from 1 of the vendors present at this session:
- create a separate iTunes account for each iPad you have
- then have 1 account to hold the money: that account then “gifts” money to individual iTunes account (gift certificates)

So now as things exist, we buy large ($100) cards for our main, master iTunes account
- we also purchase smaller cards ($10) for innovator teachers to try different apps

I don’t like there are not trial or demo versions of apps (this is especially painful for $12 apps)
- use the rating sites out there
- look for similar folks: pay attention for home versus school users
- look for ‘lite’ versions of apps

We have found charging and syncing is a pain, but app management is really a bigger pain (especially when apps are purchased which don’t get used much after buying them)

We are trying to set criteria for our staff when purchasing apps
- are you: interacting with content, making your own content, using a utility?

Gets complicated when you have a few hundred apps on a shared computer, when reviews are for different versions
- we have used a large spreadsheet which multiple people access

How do you find apps?
- iEAR.org – all educator reviewed
- momswithapps.com
- etc.

Bottom line: no firm answers
- make it fit for you

Technorati Tags: apple, china, edtech, ipad, shanghai, deployment

Here Come the iPads – Now What? iPad Deployment originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 9, 2011.

Pixlr-o-matic (free) lets you add multiple filters simultaneously to the same photo taken with an iPhone, iPad2 or 4th generation iPod Touch.

Photo Booth Classic (99 cents) is similar to the PhotoBooth app which comes with every Mac computer, but it’s available for iOS devices. Think photo booth at a carnival, but the camera’s in your hand. The app creates a “filmstrip” of multiple images, merged together as a single file.

Juxtaposer ($2.99) lets you combine multiple photos to create “photo montages.” This reminds me of Color Splash, in the way you use your finger to “paint” over the image on the screen. Instead of changing pixels from black and white to color, however, with Juxtaposer you “reveal” or “hide” pixels to make your montage.

Super Camera 2 (99 cents) is a filter app with 25 included, preset filters, but also includes different options for shooting / photo capture like anti-shake, burst mode, self-timer, etc.

In addition to these apps, Sheldon and Tim shared two more which facilitate photo sharing directly to other iOS devices connected to the same wifi network. PhotoSync ($1.99) will synchronize photos AND videos on your iOS device with a folder on your computer or other iOS devices. Those devices need to also have the PhotoSync app installed. Students and teachers at Sheldon’s school (Western Academy of Beijing) use this app on their iPads to share photos during collaborative group work. Tim shared the Color app (free) which enables immediate photo sharing with other iOS devices connected to the same wifi network. He’s used this with some Apple teacher meetups. This also can open good possibilities for sharing photos when students are working on group projects.

For more iOS app recommendations, for iPhoneography and other purposes, see my curated lists on Appolicious. I’m eager to give these new apps recommended by Sheldon and Tim a try!

Technorati Tags: app, apple, apps, digital, iphone, iphoneography, photography, learning2, #learning2

New iPhoneography App Recommendations in Shanghai originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 9, 2011.

On our way up to Kansas this weekend, I was thinking about the song, “Vienna Calling” by Falco. It’s an old song from the 80′s, and I think it came to mind because I’ve heard it recently on an 80′s channel I made a few years ago on Pandora and really enjoy. Riding with my family through Wichita, Kansas, (with my wife driving) I thought, “I’d really like to buy that song.” Since Wichita has good 3G cellular data coverage, there was no need to wait. From our car moving 75 miles per hour on the Interstate, a quick search on iTunes on my iPhone showed the song was available for 99 cents. I clicked to preview it and make sure it was the version I wanted. It was.

Over AT&T’s 3G network over east Wichita, the 8 MB song downloaded to my iPhone in about two minutes.

Less than five minutes after I had the thought, “I really would like to own that song,” I’d spent 99 cents and was listening to the complete song on my phone, connected to our car stereo.

Since Apple has improved the mobile playlist management features available on the iPhone, I was also able to add the newly purchased song to an existing playlist I have. All without the need to sync my phone to my computer. Wow.

Not so long ago, in 2004 or 2005, I remember my wife and son using my new Palm Treo smartphone in the back of our van on a trip back to Texas from Kansas. We were driving on I-40 down that LONG stretch of road between Oklahoma City and Amarillo. I remember how amazed and enthused we were that it was possible then to conduct simple, primarily text-based searches on a smartphone from our car on an Interstate highway. It is mind boggling to realize how far we’ve come with wireless data connectivity in just six or seven years. Certainly these faster wireless data “clouds” have not yet arrived in many rural areas, but make no mistake… In most places they ARE coming. What will we do with our newly-encountered bandwidth?

For me this weekend, the answer was simple. “Falco on demand.”

It’s a very different world.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Falco on Demand originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 3, 2011.

The book is available in three different eBook formats and shortly (within 3 days) will be available in paperback / print form via CreateSpace. All purchase links for “Playing with Media” on all eStores (Amazon, B&N, and my blog directly) are available on www.speedofcreativity.org/ebooks as well as playingwithmedia.com/pages/about. The photo below shows my 7 year old book illustrator, Rachel, holding the CreateSpace “book proof” we received and reviewed this week. I tweaked this photo on my iPhone using SigNote. (A bit of “playing with images.”)

“Playing with Media” is not yet available on the iTunes iBookstore, but I’m not giving up. I’ve been working for two months now to get the book both formatted and approved by Apple. It’s not a simple or easy process, unfortunately, and I still hope to figure out how to properly “tweak” my EPUB eBook code without selling my soul to a third party, Apple-approved eBook “aggregator” service. For the past two months when I’ve shared presentations at educational technology conferences and in school districts, I’ve sold copies of the eBook on CD which include the enhanced version. To make the enhanced/multimedia book available worldwide, however, I needed a way to create an electronic shopping cart with a service that can host content and provide secure download links. I am using the website e-junkie.com for this purpose. I originally learned about e-junkie from PFDebate’s advertising page, and used their site as a model for my own blog advertising page I created this week. (More on that later.) At some point I may create a more integrated “shopping cart” / store experience on my blog, but for now I’m giving this a try. My research both online and talking to Oklahoma City area developers about e-junkie.com suggests it’s a good site, and their fees are relatively low. I configured my account with e-junkie to accept both PayPal and Google Checkout payments.

If you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, I HIGHLY recommend you try out the enhanced/multimedia version of “Playing with Media.” Alison Anderson’s August 7th tweet about the enhanced/multimedia version of my ebook summarizes why better than I can. She wrote:

reading #playingwithmedia I think Al Gore’s ebook is cool but your book is EXACTLY what an ebook should be! Great PD to end summer!

Tomorrow I’ll be announcing a special website I’m VERY enthused about for sharing student project examples using digital text, images, audio and video. (Following the chapters of the ebook.) If you read my new eBooks and Books page carefully, you can find it and preview it. I’m planning to offer a monthly raffle there for educators who submit examples of their own “playing with media” examples and those of their students. Everyone who shares an example will be eligible for a digital tool drawing at the end of each month. I’m excited to see what YOU’LL be sharing with media in the months ahead!

Technorati Tags: #playingwithmedia, digital, ebook, edtech, education, learning, playingwithmedia, technology, ebooks, sale

Enhanced / MultiMedia version of Playing with Media eBook Available originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 31, 2011.

Today was “Follow Me Sunday” at our church in Edmond, Oklahoma. This meant during the Sunday school hour, people of all ages were invited to our “great hall” to visit with different people involved in a diverse array of outreach ministries in our local community as well as around the world. I brought my iPad2 and iRig microphone, and with the help of my son (who was my videographer) conducted nine interviews with different outreach / ministry / mission leaders. Here are eight of the interviews! This kind of “quick edit videography,” which I discuss at length in my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing,” supports “the ethic of minimal clicks.” Since these kinds of videos can be recorded, edited in minor ways, and shared online with a minimum of required clicks, it’s far easier to share this kind of media than it has been in the past. One result is we can record and share MORE media like this than we have in the past. I posted these as separate posts on “Eyes Right” from my iPad via a Posterous “cross-posting” blog, and also linked them on our church’s Facebook page.

Uganda Mission 2011

An interview with Tom Langdon who helped lead a summer 2011 mission trip to Uganda from Edmond, Oklahoma. Learn more on:
www.fpcedmond.org/international

Team Kenya 2011

This is an interview with Robert Menja who helps lead Upendo Kids International, a mission outreach program to Kenya from Oklahoma. Learn more on:
upendokidsinternational.org

The Importance of Student Ministries

An interview with Brian Wagner, Director of Student Ministries at First Presbyterian Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, about the importance of student ministries. Learn more on:
www.fpcedmond.org/students

Turning Point Ministries: Building Homes for Single Moms In Edmond

This is an interview with Bob Turner on August 28, 2011, about the work of Turning Point Ministries in Edmond, Oklahoma. Turning Point works with and builds homes for single mothers in Edmond, Oklahoma, who otherwise would not be able to own their own homes. Learn more on:
http://turningpointoklahoma.org

Edmond Community Thanksgiving Dinner

For 30 years, people and churches in Edmond, Oklahoma, have come together to provide a meal for others at Thanksgiving. This ministry and outreach project is The Edmond Community Thanksgiving Dinner. In this interview on August 28, 2011, Mike Laska shares the background of the event and how people can get involved this year to help.

Cooks Night Out In Edmond, Oklahoma

Cooks Night Out is an outreach ministry of churches in Edmond, Oklahoma. In this interview from August 28, 2011, Sarah Montgomery explains the regular dinner is somewhere between a soup kitchen and a church potluck. It is for needy families in the Edmond community, but also for anyone seeking fellowship and a shared meal together. First Presbyterian Church of Edmond is one congregation which supports Cooks Night Out, and anyone is welcome to join in the work and service!

Coffee Creek Riding Center Of Oklahoma: Therapeutic Horsemanship

Coffee Creek Riding Center provides FREE opportunities for children with disabilities to participate in therapeutic horseback riding. In this interview from August 28, 2011, Don Schiesz explains the work of the center and how volunteers can get involved – even those of us who haven’t been very “horsey” in the past!

Redeeming the Family: Connecting Families Separated By Incarceration

In this interview from August 28, 2011, Holmes and Cheri Fuller explain the important work of the nonprofit Redeeming the Family. By providing opportunities for parents in prison to record encouraging messages on video to their children, the organization is helping Oklahoma families and striving to overcome the challenges faced by the children of incarcerated parents.

Technorati Tags: #playingwithmedia, christian, edmond, education, imovie, ipad, ipad2, irig, microphone, mission, outreach, playingwithmedia, presbyterian, record, storychaser, students, video, mic, storychasing

Storychasing Follow Me Sunday with an iPad2 and iRig Mic originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 29, 2011.