Digital Storytelling

My Digital Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG62Mka_OmE


Producing a digital story of my life was pretty challenging. That was one of the reasons I chose myself as the subject of my first attempt at a digital story. I also saw that some of the most amusing pictures that I had were ones from the past proving what a dork I was growing up. I found that I ended up focusing on the part of my life I remember most fondly and they seemed to work well with explaining who I am. What I found most challenging about this was locating all of the pictures that I wanted to use and then figuring out how much time I needed the photo displayed while I was narrating, but being able to record my narration while I was watching the clips allowed me to see how much time the photo had left on the screen made the narration easy on the iMac I Have at home with the built in microphone. Never any 'connection' problems with audio because when there's no line out detected, the iMovie program automatically uses the internal microphone.

I also made a digital story about me because I wanted to give it is an option to my students at the beginning of next year. I always have them write an essay about who they are and what they're interested in, sometimes students would even make collages and picture books, but this would be a perfect way for them to both work with new and emerging technology, but also have to constantly be writing and rewriting text is an excellent way to tie in an original class-created document into their everyday classwork. Most of my students may need help in learning how to use the tools to create a digital story, but between me and my students who would outdo me x10 (the geek I hug every week) the students who really wanted to learn how to do this would find a way to learn from me or a peer.  

I taught a recent lesson on mood and tone in photography to my students, and studying about digital storytelling made me want to watch all the Ken Burns PBS documentaries that I could find, and ending up showing each class a great 24 minute clip about his Nation Parks series (http://video.pbs.org/video/1132712651/) to find all the students amazed at what a photograph can convey. I think that digital storytelling would be a great way for students to express who they are to me as well as their classmates at the start of next school year. The most important part of this learning experience for me was in seeing the amount of time that it took some of the programs to 'upload' images and video especially. It took hours for youtube to import my file but I wanted to use you tube to host the video because it's now attached to my google account. 

Google Docs & Open Office

Google Docs Vs. Open Office...
Having used both platforms for a few months now, I think that both suites of productivity tools are excellent FREE resources. I think that the two work best together because of the one reason that sets them apart. Google Docs are saved to your google account (gmail, iGoogle) online in one of the many clouds whereas Open Office stays put on your desktop, where it (and the documents that you create and save from Open Office) will always be so even when you can't access the internet, you can still work on your Open Office docs. Since I have internet access at home, work and even grad school (all wireless as well) it makes sense for me to keep most of my active documents in Google Docs because I am able to get to them no matter where I was or what computer I was on. But lets just say that I took my laptop with me golfing at Tower Ridge, where I don't have a wireless signal, I would have to create a document in Open Office and just save the work while my dad was hitting out of the sand trap, and then if I wanted to later could easily upload it to my Google Docs when online. Easy enough for my students to remember as well: Open Office = work offline, Google Docs = work online. For students of mine that already have multiple documents on different computers at school and home have started uploaded them all to one place on Google Docs for better organization, and some 8th graders that I try help mentor about high school choices have uploaded essays and application questions to their Google Docs for future editing, use and reference.

Other than being free, the fact that both programs can easily read most files from new and older software makes platform compatibility a thing of the past. Even the oldest Microsoft Word docs that I have from 10 years ago uploaded fine to both. And since many of those big-name fancy software companies don't allow you to save as an older version or even sometimes open older versions of documents, think of all the headaches and hassles this would solve in schools where many of the computer equipment is outdated or just mismatched labs set up where the school could find enough space. Just by using Open Office and Google Docs, both students and staff could have the ability to share and save work that was accessible to them anywhere at anytime as long as they could get online and had what they needed uploaded or saved in their Google Docs. I also like how you can select more that one file at a time to upload to each program, making it easier for users to make a fresh start with programs that won't empty your wallet and create endless possibilities for collaboration in and out of the classroom. Open Office looks like it has a ton of templates and add-ons available, so that may take some time to see what other uses it could have in the classroom, or it may be worth having students start using both platforms and have them come up with some ideas to use the various programs in their courses. 

On a more personal note, Goggle Docs has been a huge help to me in organizing all my course work from the Ed Tech program after my laptop went down and I needed a place to quickly upload all of the documents that I needed to save that were created along the vast journey these past seven or so years. Here's to you! Google Docs!!!

WebQuests

When I first started teaching 7th & 8th grade Language Arts at Quirk Middle in Hartford, It was 2002 and there was little to no technology available for teachers to integrate into their curriculum. The three computer labs in the building was all we really had to work with. I was teaching a poetry unit at the time that also included lyrics to popular Motown songs and designed an on-line scavenger hunt for the students that only included 2 different websites that they'd need to browse through in order to find the facts that would answer their questions. In 2002 I had never heard of a WebQuest before and was just trying to get through my first year of teaching while still keeping my 118 bouncy-ball students engaged and learning. Even without knowing much about the educational design and what specific standards I was hitting, I think I did a pretty good job back then considering the lack of tools I had at my disposal. Even setting up the lab back in '02 meant coming in an hour early just to make sure that all the computers were working, and had the 2 websites I needed bookmarked on each computer.....(I could go on and on)

Now that I've built a few WebQuests and studied up more on their power and uses, I can see how developments and improvements over the past decade on the web and with the new Web 2.0 tools, how WebQuests can incorporate more research and relevant information in a more streamlined manner. If Custom Search Engines were around when I built my website scavenger hunt assignment back in the day, I would have had a much easier time providing a path for the students to follow as they worked through their questions. CSEs are the perfect fit for webquests because of the control you have when building the CSE and what its capabilities will be for the student. While reading So Far From the Bamboo Grove (a novel about a Japanese family stuck in North Korea after WWII & their journey to make it back to Japan safely) I was using Google Earth quite frequently to zoom in from space to the North Korea, South Korea, Japan area to show them what the landscapes looked like in Nannam compared to Seoul and Pusan. I didn't see many actual photos thumb-tacked down on the maps to look at, but just being able to zoom down and in on the Imjon river and where it crosses the 38th parallel gives the kids that visual some of them so baldy crave now, so with those types of pictures, photos and sometimes even video available, WebQuests don't have to be just a simple journey down a pre-blazed digital trail. 

My students have already completed on a map/timeline of the family's journey back to Japan that has a 'travel line' with numbers along the line that explain important events that happened along the way. By using Google Earth with them now, they can go back to those actual places in North Korea, South Korea, Japan on Google Earth and create their own travel logs online with coordinates of where they think the certain events happen based on information they get from the book. They could even go out looking for pictures of certain cities, landmarks and important locations in North Korea, South Korea, Japan to help make the journey more real to them. If this assignment was done in a step by step process as the reading groups progressed through the book, I think it would have more of an impact as well as rope in some of the more reluctant readers right from the start.

CSEs (better late than never)

Now that I've stopped construction on the Ark, prevented my basement from flooding AND had COX Communications finally restore our cable/internet/phone to working order, I can finally jot down some thoughts and revelations about Google's Custom Search Engines and what a great tool they have already been to both myself and my colleagues. All of the 7th and 8th grade teachers at my school now have gmail account sand have a least been using google docs for a few weeks now, so I decided to give them a brief rundown about Google's CSE's at our team meeting on tuesday of last week. They were all so excited that all but the math teacher decided to use a CSE engine with the 7th and 8th graders as a whole class the next time they went to the computer lab. I asked both the science and social studies teacher why they were so excited about building CSEs, and both responses had to do with having "control of the content that students will be directed to on the web."

I also believe that the "control" aspect of CSEs is what makes them such a great educational tool. Not just for the teacher, but for the student as well. Using a CSE for the webquest that we're building is going to streamline the project for the student by directing them to the most appropriate information that will help them complete the tasks involved. The same could be said for the science teacher at my school that designed  CSE loaded with all the best middle school-based science fair projects: ideas, suggestions, science curriculum tie-ins and standards. He was able to keep the students from clicking off on tangents and staying in the "realm" that he wanted them in. I liked the way he used the word 'realm' and so did the social studies teacher, so much that he also built a CSE for students to use when they went to choose countries from Latin America that they would research. 

CSEs would also be great for students to use in making up their own webquests for classmates. Once they've been taught how to properly evaluate websites for educational purposes, having the students build their own CSE could be a powerful tool in helping them construct their own realms of knowledge based on what they found most interesting in social studies, science, or language arts class. 

Flick & Digital Photography

If anything, my new flickr.com account will give me a place to keep all of the photos I use in my class, and plan to use with my class in the future. I have a ton of photos on my iMac and a ton as well on my laptop. After my wedding a couple years ago I took a month of that summer archiving all of my photos and videos collected throughout the years, and backing up all that info was very time consuming. But it also gave me a chance to reconnect with many images I hadn't seen in years, and now that I can easily locate all of my old photos and video clips, I have a place to upload the ones that I'd like to share.
I've also recommended flickr.com to the 8th graders at my school working on a yearbook. They had been taking photos on their digital cameras and emailing their shots back and forth to each other. But as you could imagine, with 8 or 9 people taking pictures, that was alot of emails, alot of images on already slow-running computers. Making sure that the site wasn't blocked on the school computers, I told them if they each got an account at flickr.com they'd be able to share their photos with each other the instant they're uploaded to the site. I also explained that if they were nerdy like me and labeled the photos well when they saved the file that would be uploaded to flickr it would make the pics much easier to label once they were done being uploaded.
I was pleasantly surprised when I uploaded my first photos how the file name I saved them as was automatically in the description box for that photo. I also liked the ease of flickr to organize and label all of the photos individually and in sets as well. There are so many possibilities for the use of the Creative Commons photos in the classroom, and the countless ways students can tag and label their own photos, or find photos that are interesting to them as well from all over the world is pretty powerful. My students would have a great time taking the information they collect in science or social studies class to annotate a picture for other classmates to learn from.
I've only had time to upload some photos from my home computer of my family to give the students and example of my home life and what's important to me. I will be asking them to do the same with pictures they really love of their family. The kodak photo program I used exported the pictures in a form the program called, "best for the web." I think they look a bit dull, and blurry even, so I'd have to say the next batch I upload will be saved at a higher resolution. Check out my first album at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/herman75/sets/72157623638963422/

Social Bookmarking

After using delicious.com for almost a week now, I'd say that its capabilities and powers far surpass my uses. I am always on one of either 2 computers, both with the same bookmarks. When I combine that with the fact that I', able to spend less and less time on the internet with a growing family and added responsibilities at home, delicious was something that kept me online longer than I should have been a few too many times this week.
The most productive time I spent surfing the links of other delicious.com folks was after I bookmarked Discovery's United Streaming.com and teachertube at delicious because I wanted to see what others who bookmarked unitedstreaming.com tagged as 'educational' or 'language arts' and so forth. It was much easier to flip through another teachers bookmarked pages, and what they thought was was good content out there online, much more helpful then just a list of sites (no matter how well organized google, bing, yahoo, and the likes can make those lists) which is all those search engines really are, lists. What I was most intrigued about during the reading last week was the new folksonomy tags that help categorize related information. It makes the bookmarking of a page much more involved, giving you the ability to choose key words that you think are most important in describing the content of the website and/or the purpose that its serves. These tags act as a lingual-web that connects you to others who tagged the same site, use the same tag words. The idea of a folksonomy made me think of my students and how many of them struggle to see deeper relationships between information rather than what's apparent of the surface. This tool would be able to help the see connections between their personal interests as well as educational connections if used for researching certain topics in each discipline. The science fair starts next week at my school and I've already told the science teacher for 7th and 8th grade how well delicious.com would work to locate related pages to the specific science fair project that they choose. Telling a student to find 3 or 4 pertinent websites about increased heart rate dependent on music genre (a popular topic the last couple years) it may take them up to a half-hour. If you tell them to find the best site they can about the topic, and the delicious.com can point them in the direction of 3/4 other related sites it would make the task less daunting to the student as well as giving them the chance to mentally sift through more related information.
Having all my bookmarks in one place to reference wherever, whenever is good, but the power of this application in education and research will play a much more important role as I teach my students how to use this and the many different ways it can be useful to them.

Week 5: RSS and Google Reader

What a great TOOL!!! I can't believe how much easier RSS has made my life online. Having all the webites that I frequent in one place like 'bookmarks' is one thing, but being able to organize the feeds that you get into your Google Reader saves so much surfing time that I have more real life time with my family.  What I like best about the Google Reader is the ability to build and organize folders for all of the feeds you subscribe to becuase what I found after a week of finding RSS feeds, was that they all fell into 4 or 5 categories. Even if the page didn't have an RSS option, just by cutting and pasting the URL into the 'Add a Subscription' button in the upper left hand corner of the screen had Google make a feed for that page to notify you of any changes to the pages.
Musical artists, online streaming concert sites and concert touring sites went into one of my Reader folders, so if any updates were made to pages of my favorite artists were made, I was pushed the info right away. The same went for all the other sports, language arts, even united discovery streaming sites that I frequent at home and at school were all there in my Reader. If I didn't want to keep the feed, It's easy enough to delete. I really like the way that Goggle makes up nice blocks of information for you in the Reader, complete with headlines, graphics and links right at your fingertips. Even for the pages without true RSS feeds, Goggle does an amazing job at creating great, reader-friendly previews of the updates made to your favorite sites.
Having students organize there own interest through RSS feeds and Reader pages could really help me bring their literature circles to cyber-space. ALl it would really take would be for the students to create a gmail account, then create a Blog on Blogger about the book their group chooses. Then, each of the group members could subscribe to their other group members to answer questions about the novel, share ideas, and offer insight at their own speed. Even if it was something that only a few students could do at first to try out, it seems like a medium that would appeal to all of them.