I haven’t heard Joe speak before…he’s back in Michigan having grown up in Saugatuck.
Handouts are online http://denblogs.com/digital_storytelling
Couple of resources…also linked off his DEN blog.
The first thing that Joe is showing is a clip featuring Sean Astin. It highlights AFI Screen Education, a program that encourages using video to create movies. These are the key terms, sound familiar? It what teachers want.
- Research
- [Script] Writing
- Storyboarding
- Filming
- Editing
- Exhibiting
Joe is highlighting The 21st Century Educator’s Handbook.
Why should students create movies?
To help all student have a deeper understanding of course content. It’s important for teachers to understand that they do not have to understand film theory etc. to make a good movie. It’s just like writing an essay. Start with the Introduction, move to the Body, and finish with the conclusion. Or, as Joe put it, “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em. tell ‘em what you told ‘em.”
What kind of videos can you create?
- PSAs…Public Service Announcements
- “Olds”…History told from a news perspective
- Reenactment of historical events
- Retelling a peice of literature…like Romeo and Juliet.
- Movie Trailers
Joe is highlighting a lot of visual aspects of the movie examples, easy techniques for conveying emotion as well as information.
Check out FOX Hilites. Student shot highlights.
If you’re a teacher, then Joe’s resources are very valuable. He has a lot of experiences working with students.
Steve Dembo is leading an Extreme Makeover: Education Edition.
Before I go any farther, let me just say that Steve is playing some funky music…what is it? Jonathan Coulton!
Here’s the link to his presentation. Oh boy, my connection just went to pot.
The point of Steve’s presentation is that there are tools out there that are quick and easy to use and you don’t have to invest a lot of time. You don’t want to get married to a specific site or tool, instead your married to an idea or strategy.
First tool: Crappy Graphs. Create graphs quickly without any data…just draw!
Blabberize is a fun tool that lets you animate an image and record audio. Browse through their gallery. It’s easy to use a tool like this to add 5 minutes of fun to a content-filled lesson. (Not that a content-filled lesson isn’t fun!)
So, these are good tools, but it’s important to have a place, a home base to keep it all. Steve recommends using Edublogs for creating a blog. Then you can embed all your creations right in. It takes all of 5 minutes…hooray! It’s not tricky…don’t let a mindset block you from trying out “the new tools.”
Keep in mind…don’t get hung up on the tools, the technology. The innovation occurs when the tools are applied in the classroom. Of course!
Man, people love Leslie Fisher. This room (W1-54) is filling up and there won’t be many seats left by the time it’s ready to begin. Leslie Fisher is invited back to the MACUL conference year after year…I think she’s on retainer. Her Gadget presentation is probably one of her most popular, but I know her sessions on iLife and Photoshop also receive rave reviews.
<buzzing room>
Here’s a link to Leslie’s handouts page, although I’m not sure it’s her latest presentation. I’m not going to list every gadget, but hopefully those that have a special level of awesome.
Check out Jack’s office…definately a certain level of awesome…in a goofy sort of way.
Leslie has a great point about Twitter. It’s not the tweets about coffee and birds flying by that are important to teachers. It’s the connections between educators about what they’re teaching that make a difference. It’s something that’s already been discussed on the blog quite extensively.
She’s covering a lot of sites that I’m covering at my BYOL session this afternoon…is that good or bad? It’s OK. 
Right now we’re looking at Evernote, which is an awesome tool that helps you manage information in the form of notes. The notes can be text, images, audio, whatever. One thing that’s awesome is that Evernote has an OCR tool that coverts images to text…and it works pretty well! Includes a desktop client for Mac and Windows as well as a web tool.
<wireless is bogging down a bit>
Teachers should love the Flip Video Camcorder. It’s a small camera that shoots good video and hooks directly to your computer via a built-in USB port. Quick and easy to use.
Make sure you check out the live blog post for more details of Leslie’s gadgets.
Had an awesome time in Leslie Fisher’s iLife preconference workshop today (hosted by SIG MM). Found the Faces tool in iLife iPhoto ‘09 which is totally awesome face recognition – and connects to Facebook! How cool is that?!
Also had fun with Garageband and made a little podcast, with pictures…
for your 30 second viewing/listening pleasure.
I know, not as exciting as the podcast interviews that Ben Rimes has posted, but it’s a flavor of the learning that happens at the MACUL conference!
Hope that you can catch at least one session with Leslie Fisher this year!
As everyone prepares to make the journey to downtown Detroit and searches for just the right “traveling music”, consider downloading a few podcasts. I was was fortunate enough to sit down and have a virtual conversation with Steve Dembo, Online Community Manager for the Discovery Educator Network, and one of this year’s featured speakers. Always a crowd favorite, Steve brings a youthful enthusiasm to his presentations, quickly darting between web 2.0 tools, and practical applications for them in the classroom.
A former Kindergarten teacher, Steve understands just how important it is for tools that we use online to be simple and engaging. As a blogger, Steve shares his wisdom with thousands of educators across the Internet, and has a unique view on how students are using the web for both their personal and educational purposes. Steve had a chance to talk about some of his favorite “up and coming” websites for use in the classroom, and he gave some pointers on which sessions of his that would be perfect for first time attendees. Listen to the podcast below, or download it for later on your trip to MACUL09.
My apologies for any “static”, as the interview was done using Skype, and the connection fuzzed out a couple of times. During the conversation Steve mentioned a LOT of great websites, which you’ll find below:
Kerpoof (one of my favorite for early elementary)
Gary Stager again for Digital Democracy. This blog is more of a stream of notes jotted during the session.
Richard Dreyfuss is a proponent of civics education, and argues that our democracy is at risk unless we educate our students to participate in democracy.
Gary says his social activism is inspired by his 7th grade social studies teacher, who, every day, the students knew they might have to march on the school board so he could keep his job.
What’s possible?
- making sense of data (with tools like Google Earth, GIS Software, InspireData, TinkerPlots, Fathom, Mathematica). Use the vast amounts of data to make an inquiry of the data & look for the answers.
- mathematics of polling
- historical perspective
- propaganda creation
- effective communication
Social science applications of math that are really critical for our society.
Mathematica has access to huge databases of information.
50% of mathematics has been invented since World War II. It’s partly the social sciences demand for numbers.
Is Democracy Fair? The Mathematics of Voting and Apportionment
We need kids to be thoughtful and to be able to get answers from multiple sources. You don’t really know something until you look at it from multiple sources. The web makes it easier to look at topics from multiple sources.
We should be really careful at pointing a finger at wikipedia and the web when we’ve been allowing textbook publishers to lie by omission for so many years. The example was the whole speech of Dr. Martin Luther King. Most of us didn’t recognized it until several pages into it.
Primary sources ….
There are always controversial topics for discussion in a democracy.
Why aren’t kids taking the same raw footage and this side of the room make an ad for that person and this side of the room made an ad against that person. (or a consumer product). Every candidate has video online you can digitize and download and manipulate in this way.
One way to make informed decisions is to know how you’re being manipulated. The way to understand how your’e being manipulated is to create your own manipulations yourself.
What ways to use you to make someone look bad: slow mo, tight shows, black and white, testimony, music cut off to pay more attention, playing on emotions and ears, parody, the nostalgic autobiography,
For an example of the parodies, look at Swift Kids for Truth
Ask kids – what makes you feel positive or negative about someone? ask kids to make for & against commercials.
Political activism / citizen journalism
Kids press freedoms have eroded so far; why does it matter? how come it doesn’t occur to them to publish their own stuff?
It’s cheap and easy to worry about people far away (classroom projects for Darfur etc.), but do we care about being active in the local community?
Battleground Minnesota – Shakademic – an example of student journalism. Look at these: Media Rights News, Shakademic’s MySpace site, Get Battleground.
High school kids who have never talked to an adult – had an actual conversation – not just being talked at or bossed around.
If you send an email and ask “can you do this at your earliest convenience, people answer.” Kids can invite people someone to talk to the students – they need to learn that they can do this and how to do it.
They need to learn to interact with adults on a civil basis.
Kids could be looking at real problems in our community and trying to solve them.
“School is like an empowerment free zone for too many kids” why do kids just shrug and take it? we have to teach them they aren’t powerless, helpless and defenseless.
Another example of student work: Joey interviews a cutter:
Youth Radio Project also read more on wikipedia.
Very thought-provoking session as usual. Challenging to do these types of activities with kids, but essential to teach kids civics.
Hall Davidson
Joe mentioned it earlier, but Hall Davidson is very entertaining to listening to and not only that, has some great ideas. This Google presentation sounds like one he was going to do at the 2006 NECC conference in San Diego. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do it because there was some copyright confusion with Google. I vaguely remember how that was soon cleared up yadda yadda yadda, but not in time for his presentation.
Google Earth is one of my favorite applications…visually it’s awesome…but besides just the satellite views, there are lots of ways to add content on top of that.
Here are Hall’s handouts.
Google Earth is a platform…one that you can add more information to…web cam, image, video, whatever. If you’re an educator, you can get a Google Earth Pro license. If you use it, just be aware that it is even more of a bandwidth hog than just regular old Google Earth.
Google Earth Tips
- Type N on the keyboard to put North at the top.
- Right-click on a placemark and choose Snapshot View to keep that same view each time you visit the placemark.
Hall highlighted the 3D overlays…there are tons of buildings, monuments, and landmarks available for anyone to use. Same thing with Layers. Most people probably use thse pre-made layers that are available for free. In Google Earth, look down on the left and you’ll see them under Gallery: Discovery, National Geographic, NASA, and more…
Route
Use a route “drive” from placemark to placemark. It kind of looks like driving along from a bird’s-eye view.
Ruler
Use the ruler to measure distances from point to point, or even along a route…and you can change the units on the fly.
Image Overlay
From any image on the Internet, copy and paste its URL and paste it right on top of Google Earth. You can change its transparency, size, rotation. It also will lay right over terrain if the Terrain layer is turned on.
There’s so much embeddable content on the web…sites like YouTube or Flickr or whatever that give you a URL…that code can be quickly copied and pasted into Google Earth. It’s easy to make a multimedia presentation simply by adding content on top of maps.
Last resource from Hall: Google Lit Trips.
Hall didn’t get through nearly as many items as he may have wanted to. Remember to check out his handout. Also, Ben Rimes is giving an 11:30 presentation entitled, “Google Earth for Tech Savvy Educators.” Very enjoyable!
by Gary Stager. Handouts Online. Recommended article. Who Should I Vote For?
Read Kevin’s post for a nice summary overview of Gary’s points and the 10 things.
Some of my favorite lines from the presentation.
- The Pentagon approaches the Internet with all the finesse and maturity as school districts. Regarding the Pentagon blocking 11 photo and video sharing sites. What about all the new ones created?
- I’m not at all sure we like democracy. Regarding wikipedia.
- Kids are the only abundant resource we have.
- Kids are persistent, resourceful, curious, patient. When they are engaged.
- A good prompt is worth a thousand words.
- We’re really bad at articulating the rationale for what we do.
My laptop battery died, so I didn’t get as many ideas written down as I wanted to. Be sure to check out Gary Stager’s website for additional challenging thinking. Don’t just eat up the most common thoughts being presented. Hear another side. Think deeper. Ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing.
I’m starting off today’s activities at Gary Stager’s presentation Ten things to Do With a Laptop. I’ve listening to Gary a number of times at various conferences…never the headliner, but as a quiet featured speaker. Some of the time I don’t agree with him, but I continue to listen to what he says because after the show is over and I’m sitting quietly by myself I can hear my brain changing, shifting, and growing. Gary Stager pushes…he kicks you out of your box.
So what are 10 Things to Do with a Laptop? Well, here are two questions…What will the world be like for your students 20 years from now? Perhaps even more importantly, what is the world like for the children who have not yet entered your school?
There are three types of laptop schools:
- Pioneers…they want to shake things up.
- Marketeers…they want their school in the newspaper.
- Their neighbors…the school up the street is doing it so…
Top Ten List
- Write a Novel
When students have laptops they write more and better. In addition, they can write for other forms of media like podcasts. - What Your Knowledge
Use sites such as Wikipedia because the information is current/instant. - Answer Tough Questions
For example, “Who should I vote for?“ - Make Sense Data
Use software like Google Earth, GIS, Inspire Data, Tinkerplots, and Fathom - Design a Video Game
Use Microworlds…Gary is very into student programming. - Build a Killer Robot
Gary likes to use Legos to build and invent. - Lose Weight
Keeping track of exercise…that’s not the point, but using the tools kids have to solve problems. - Direct a Blockbuster
Make a movie…writing, editing, shortening is the process that matters. - Compose a Symphony
Using Finale Notepad or GarageBand. - Change the World
Can we aim any higher?
Thanks, Gary, for setting the bar high for using the tech that’s in our schools!
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