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.
You haven’t heard? You can win a FREE registration to MACUL 2010 in Grand Rapids? How? Just enter the 2009 MACUL Photo Contest. Details are below followed by a video of just how to enter:
2009 MACUL Conference Photo Contest
Please enter your best photo of the MACUL Conference 2009. Entries are limited to conference participants and attendees during Wednesday, March 18, and Thursday March 19. Submit entries before 7:00 AM Friday, March 20. All entries should be submitted online via MACUL Space (www.maculspace.ning.com) with the tag— MACULphoto. Those submitting photos for this contest grant MACUL the option and permission to publish the images on the MACUL website, MACUL Space and in the MACUL Journal. Judges will award prizes for 1st and 2nd place.• 1st place—Complimentary registration to the 2010 MACUL conference
• 2nd place—50% off the cost of registration to the 2010 MACUL conference
We are looking for a variety of creative photos that capture the excitement and uniqueness of the conference. Enter and display your best pictures!
As promised, here’s the video on just how to do it, or view the LARGE version right here:
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!
While navigating the various corridors of the Amway Grand today I wound up in the wrong session…and oh what a blessing. Sometimes all we focus on are tools and gadgets but we ignore what really makes educational technology work: the human side of things.
At Marquette Senior High School in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, teacher Eric Hammerstrom has created a bubbling media empire. MQTube.org is a product of Hammerstrom’s script writing class and broadcasts school events, especially sporting events via the Web. The beauty of today’s session to me was the fact that a site attracting 1300 visitors a day and sending programming all over the world is all accomplished with really basic equipment but truly runs on ingenuity.
“We jerry-rig everything,” Hammerstrom told attendees as he detailed stories about the benefits of having a metals shop across the hall from his studio. “I told (our shop teacher) that I needed some plastic spacers for a camera so he took the lid off of a Crayola marker, ground it down to size and drilled a whole in it. All of our plastic spacers are Crayola marker tops.” Eric admitted he couldn’t hook up a video camera to a computer but 2 weeks prior to his first class. With a little thought and problem solving, he figured it out and has since figured out how to create a phenomenal learning experience for students.
Besides “jerry-riggin’”, revenue generating was another area where this teacher’s ingenuity showed. His kids sell ads during morning announcements and local merchants sponsor various sports’ homepages. Assorted grants and some hometown networking have allowed MQTube to operate independently of school funding, thus allowing the site a comfortable bit of autonomy. The work Eric and his students are doing is a much a testimony to will power and ingenuity as it is testimony to the powerful things kids can do with video.
This post is notes and scribbles from the preconference workshop on Photoshop Elements with Leslie Fisher.
First, you need to note that these notes are for the workshop in today’s version. Leslie asked us lots of questions at the beginning to get a feel for our prior knowledge and adjusted throughout the workshop as necessary.
Adobe Bridge is great for keywords and metadata about your photos. But, wait for the next version – CS3 that comes with Elements 6.
PhotoMechanic is the tool Leslie uses for organizing photos, saving them into multiple locations at the same time, and adding metadata. It’s also required for all AP photographers.
The enhance menu has all the items for fixing photos. Leslie put the GE Reveal lights in her house to get better lighting for pictures.
“Save the pixels!” Every time you make a change, you hurt the pixels.
Principle: use layers to manipulate the photo, instead of hurting the photo directly.
Instead of fixing dark pictures by going to Brightness Contrast, go to Levels, add an adjustment layer, Levels. Drag the white triangle a bit (for dark pictures), and then if you want to adjust further, drag the mid tones (the grey triangle).
If all the info (the graph) is on the right, the picture isn’t recoverable. Pay attention to the histogram on your camera and that way you can take better pictures.
The beauty of layers is that you can now turn these adjustments on and off by “poking the eye” icon on the layer. I love how Leslie uses funny phrases to help us remember.
Did you know you can drag a layer from one picture to another? i.e. Leslie has a card example where the student is holding a card with a white, grey and black. Use Layers, Adjustment, Levels, then use the eyedroppers to fix it (white eyedropper clicks on white etc). Then drag that layer to the other picture(s). Very cool.
Let’s say you scanned three pictures crooked on a scanner (not touching). Then go to Image, Divide Scanned Photos. It splits them up! Totally awesome. Or if you have just one, Image, Rotate, Straighten and Crop. Totally cool!
Also check out Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Shadows/Highlights. Darken highlights is good for highlighting clouds and weather.
Now you have to think about it – does the picture need levels or does it need shadows/highlights?
When you sharpen the image, you lose pixels. So be careful. But it helps a picture for PowerPoint and printing. Version 6 will have a SmartSharpern option under Enhance. For now it’s under Filters.
An interesting thing in the workshop is Leslie’s obsession with saving. She saves before sharpening. Before hurting pixels. Anything that isn’t in a layer, she saves before. And always having a picture saved in “raw”.
Straighten Tool. You can draw a line for what should be straight and it will adjust. Then use the crop tool to fix it. You can also set the size (if you need a 5×7) etc.
Extra photo shooting tips throughout the workshop. The trick to being a good photographer is to take thousands of pictures and have a really long lens.
72 pix per inch on a 5 megapixel camera will have a huge picture that prints on a bunch of pages. 180-200 pix per inch will give a smaller picture but that’s better quality. The more megapixels you have, the bigger pictures you can take and the more you can crop and get away with it. The more you crop tho’, the less you have to print. So bigger megapixel cameras are good for sports and paparazzi so you can get a picture from far away and throw away as many pixels as you want.
Printing photos – 180, 200, 220 pixels per inch. SLR cameras let you make changes. Check what the setting your camera has. Set it to the biggest size possible (small, medium, fine etc.) – this setting changes the size, not the resolution.
If you’re changing the resolution on your picture, Image, Resize, Image Size. Make sure the resample is unchecked.
This is why the Walmart/Walgreens/Target etc. little photo booths (or online services) sometimes say that this picture can’t be printed.
Another cool thing: File, New, PhotoMerge Panorama, and then it merges the pictures into a long panorama. Really neat. It figures out where to join them. I need to run this on our Yellowstone pics. To take these pics, stabilize the camera and hold as close to you as possible. 30% overlap or go by “big bulky things”. Check out this 13 picture panorama Leslie did. What you’re not getting in my notes are all the great stories that go along with these tips!
Layers, Adjustment Layer, Hue & Saturation. This changes overall color and brightness of that color in the image. Play with the sliders. Colorize is the easiest way to overlay a color of the whole image. Good for collages or text.
Nice tip, with the brush – the left and right brackets [] make the brush bigger and smaller. (any adobe application).
Principle: Layer masks. If you paint black on the layer you can mask the effect you did with Hue & Saturation. Paint in black to hide the effect and white to bring it back. Then you can add another layer and fix another color (blues, then whites). Look at the layer to see where you’re painting. You would use this to fix a few things or bring out a few colors. You black out the things you don’t want as part of the change.
Layer masks are really cool. Instead of using the eraser and paintbrush, you add a layer mask and paint in black and white to turn it on and off in different parts of the picture.
Another really cool thing: getting rid of a white (or solid color) background. Hold & click the eraser, choose Magic Eraser, click the background. Viola! To keep the transparency when switching to PowerPoint. File, Save for Web. Save as PNG to keep the transparency, plus the quality. (GIF loses quality this way).
Healing brush (under Spot Healing Brush). To get rid of wrinkles, choose the Healing brush. Then hold down alt/option to sample. Make sure you sample from the right place. (Make sure you’re doing this on a duplicated layer). Then brush the fixes. For wrinkles, it’s good to change the opacity to 60%ish to leave a little wrinkle but not too much. This would be a great lesson on advertising. Then Diane Zoellmer next to me shared this link for the Dove Commercial. Check it out.
Red Eye: just click the red eye tool, click in the middle of the red eye. Voila. Just for kicks, try it on a tongue or smile.
File, Picture Package, for creating some 5×7s or a bunch of wallet size, etc. This would be great to use with Marilyn Western’s idea of printing a bunch of pics of your students and then using them in their drawings about habits, careers, etc. I’m teaching Technology in the Early Elementary Classroom right now and the ideas in that class are all by Marilyn Western.
File, Web Photo Gallery to make a set of web pages with themes for your pictures.
File, Process Multiple Files to rename, add the date to the filename. Leslie doesn’t like the autocorrect & resize because it’s messing with those precious pixels!
Finally Leslie closed with a quick demo of version 6. For all my years at MACUL, this is the first one of Leslie’s preconference workshops I’ve had time to attend. It was definitely worth the time! Before this workshop all I did in Photoshop was pretty much resize and crop pictures. Now I have a much better understanding of how I can tweak with my pictures! Thanks Leslie!! Also thanks to Diane Zoellmer for contributing the photo from the workshop.
This was the first year that MACUL had a official “tag” for the conference. A “tag” is a keyword that is adding to a blog posting or photo that helps people search for photos or blog entries about that topic. This year bloggers and photographers were asked to add the tag macul07 if they created a podcast, posted photos or wrote a blog entry about MACUL. Guess what? It worked. If you got to Flickr.com and search under tags for macul07 you will find 70 pictures that were taken at the conference. A search of Technorati.com. You will find all most 90 blogs entries. Not huge numbers, but it is a start.
At MACUL 2008, I’m sure the numbers will get higher as more people learn to use tags. Tags are a great way for groups and individuals to share information.
Jim
macul07
macul08
OK, Steve Demob is going to be another one of those speakers I look for at these meetings. Steve went through about 20 or 30 different websites while highlighting his Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Sites. All his links are available at 10freesites.pbwiki.com, so I won’t list them all here.
Here are some of the cool new things I learned:
- Jumpcut – A free online video creation/editing site now allows you to do the Ken Burns Effect with your photos
- Picnik – This is a free online image editor. I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never used it. I will now. It does all the basic editing you need. You can upload photos or you can pull them directly from the web (including your Flickr). When you’re done editing you can save them, email them, dump them to Flickr, or send them to a number of places that will print them out for you.
- Vyew – Webinars free on the web. You can use your browser to host a webinar. The participants, who only need a browser, can watch your presentations or you can share a real time screen cast. There is a chat window available and you can share audio by having participants call into a phone number. Up to 100 people can call into the free version!
Steve talked about a lot of stuff more than I will mention here. His list of 10 Free Sites is great and you should give it a look.
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