California DEN

One of the big buzz terms of the last few years has been “Digital Storytelling.” Teachers of all grades want to integrate digital storytelling into their curriculum to enhance student learning.  This has the added benefit of being fun and creating a pretty impressive final product  that can be published and viewed anywhere. You can’t escape digital storytelling workshops and seminars at conferences these days.

One thing I wanted to clarify is the difference between digital storytelling and simply creating a movie. I combed through an old issue of Discovery Education’s Classroom Resource Guide from November 2005 (sorry, I don’t have a link to it) and found an interview Hall Davidson did with Bernajean Porter, the author of Digitales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories. Porter describes a good digital story as having a personal angle. The author needs to connect with the story using a variety of media, not just give information using that media, such as a documentary would.

On Porter’s website, six elements for a good digital story are listed. Check out the complete website for more information on how to create a great digital story of your own. Documentarys are very valuable, but it is important that we, as teachers, recognize the difference between a documentary and a digital story. Happy filmmaking!

~Dave Kootman

This tip is for those teachers who occasionally write letters on their computer and then email them off without ever touching a sheet of actual paper. For instance, if you apply for a job and need to upload a letter of introduction or if you email a document to your office, it needs to be signed, but how do you sign it if you are just emailing it? The trickiest part is that you need to have access to an interactive whiteboard (Smart, Promethean…). You will learn how to create a simple image file that you can then insert into any document you want. This makes it look like you actually signed your doc!

Step 1-Sign your name neatly on the board in black. You may want to insert a nice horizontal line to level yourself.  You can always delete the line later.

Step 2- Save that signature or page as an image. Each whiteboard is different, but you can always save as an image.

Step 3- Open it in an image editor. You can do this with a Mac or Windows Vista without and additional image editor.  Now crop it so there is very little white space around the image.  Lastly, You may need to change the contrast  or brightness to make the image more clear or eliminate any difference in background color.

Step 4- Whenever you need it, just insert your new file as an image and drag the corners to resize it. I suggest keeping the original relatively large in case you ever need it.

BTW, if you have have the good fortune to use Microsoft Office 2007 on your computer, then you know that you can install a small add-on that will save your docs in .pdf format if you want.  You could also use Open Office.org and do the same thing. This makes some pretty fancy documents that can be read on any computer.

Sincerely,

~Dave Kootman

After recent posts about Firefox capabilities and tricks, as well as Microsoft’s latestversion of Internet Explorer, I thought it would be appropriate to provide a link to Google’s latest venture into the browser world. Check out “Google Chrome” here. They have some nifty new features not found in other browsers, like the ability to add application shortcuts and open them within your browser. Check out their YouTube tutorials for more info. Sorry to all our Mac friends, they are still working on a flavor for you

~Dave Kootman

I’m sure the folks at Microsoft read one of my previous postings about how I prefer Firefox and it inspired them. The newest version of Internet Explorer is out and has some pretty groovy new features. Check out IE 8 Beta 2 and read the review by EWeek here. I have to say that one of the most useful features of Firefox in education is still the integrated spell check. Does IE have this and I’m just missing it?

~Dave Kootman

I like to multitask. At any given time I usually have about 6 different application windows up and running on my laptop (not to mention all the items running in the background). So, it would follow that I similarly have a ton of tabs open in Firefox. Here are two tips for those wanting to get the most out of their browser.

First, when you set your homepage, why not set several tabs as your homepage instead of the usual one? I use email, Google Docs and my Netvibes reader. To do this just open up the tabs you want to use (no more, no less) and then click Tools and see the image to the right here for more info.  Notice the word “pages” is plural! Click and there you go.  The next time you open your browser you’ll have all your goodies open!

Second tip, If you have a bunch of tabs open about the same topic you can bookmark them all at once.  Just click Bookmarks and then  Bookmark all tabs. I usually choose to create a folder when I bookmark several at once.   Now they are all organized for me and I didn’t have to click for each one.  In addition, you can delete them easily because it just takes one click to delete the entire folder. Ever actually go through all of your old bookmarks?  That’s a task I dread.

Now the cool part.  Let’s say you are teaching a lesson on the solar system and you have several online resources (including Discovery Streaming of course), ahead of time you bookmark a bunch of appropriate pages and keep them in a folder. Then when its time for the lesson you navigate to that folder in your bookmarks and click  Open All in Tabs. Viola! I’m going to be presenting to an administrator shortly and I have my resources in a single folder which I will just open at once, no wasted time clicking on all of them individually.

Now I can’t tell you if this will work in Internet Explorer or Safari because… well I just don’t use them because I consider them inferior (just my take).

~Dave Kootman

Last Monday, my high school students couldn’t stop talking about the most recent Indiana Jones movie they had watched over the weekend. Normally, it would be one of those topics that I would have steer my students away from as we began our lesson, but this week I engaged it head on and integrated their opinions into my lesson. We discussed the shot styles and storyline of the film and a few students picked up ideas for their current assignment. What was I teaching, you ask? The Screen Education process from AFI, of course.

When I went through the AFI (American Film Institute) Screen Education course last year with several Star Discovery teachers, I knew it was something really cool, something I could use in a variety of ways and get kids excited about coming to school. This resource draws on the vast amounts of television and film that our students consume and allows teachers to apply knowledge drawn from media to core standard content. Over the last couple years, I’ve enjoyed using the AFI curriculum with my science students, who can’t seem to get enough of this stuff. They enjoy creating videos, even . . . (clear throat) educational ones. Currently, my classes are eagerly storyboarding a movie they’ll shoot next week - their own original episode of “Body Story” (a popular science series from BBC). Anyone else out there using Screen Ed to fight the end-of-the-year boredom?

This year, AFI added another component to the program; Screen Nation - where students and teachers can share their creations. Screen Nation is “a place where teen filmmakers can share their work, receive recognition and compete for prizes in ongoing challenges.” The Learn section features humorous tutorials from, Xander and Calvin, two young filmmakers who teach students the ins & outs of good filmmaking. Hopefully the recent episode I showed to my students on transitions will cut down the number of annoying zoom-outs and wipes in their current movie project.

Right now AFI has offered the first of many challenges. “Claim to Fame” gives students the opportunity to explore their hometown and see what makes it great. The challenge is to make a 5min. documentary video that includes interviews with at least 3 people. When you’re done, you upload it to ScreenNation. Deadline is June 30. Check out the pdf screen nation challenge1 as well as the video. What a great end-of-year project (not to mention principals love when students connection to community). And the winner will receive a Sony Handycam and tripod. Odds of winning right now are good - so what are you waiting for? What’s your town’s Claim to Fame?

This past February Google released a great new tool for educators, students, business’s and all around website needing folks. This new creation is Google Sites. Google Sites claims it fills the need of sharing a group website, which seems to be part wiki, part blog and part modular website.

I found Sites to be pretty easy to use, especially if you are familiar with Google’s interface for it’s other products, such as Blogger and Docs. There are several different templates, each with additional color and font themes that can give your site a customized look. You can easily upload/embed files of all sorts and create unique page templates or such features as announcements, calendars countdowns, links and other useful tools. Google pushes the Web 2.0 concept of sharing and collaborating by allowing multiple authors and owners. This is handy for a teacher wishing to allow other teachers, or even students, to modify the web page. However, this is also where I was both surprised and let down.

I indeed found Google Sites to be part wiki and part blog, but sadly, not enough of either to make it worth my while. I was excited to see that most pages included a “comments” section on the bottom. I soon found out though, that when I logged out, the comments section became locked. This essentially means that you can allow either everyone the ability to change the entire site or the inability to comment at all. I was hoping that viewers could simply comment on the bottom, without being able to tweak too much on the site. If anyone has found a way around this, I’d love to know. Other than that, Sites will be a great option for educators wishing to create their own site for free.

Check out the overview video here.

Additionally, perhaps some readers are familiar with Google Sites’ sister creation, Google Pages. Google Pages is a free website creation tool that allows the user to customize templates, arrange content and get a pretty professional feel to a simple website. Check it out too!

Final note, I hesitated on writing this article until now, as Google Sites was formerly only available to educators with a Google Apps for education domain. This week, it became public for all. If you still haven’t looked into Google Apps for Education though, stay tuned for an upcoming post about a great suite that transformed my classroom and can hopefully do the same for yours.

~Dave Kootman

Everyone loves educational games. Learn and have fun.  What a treat!

I love Jeopardy! There, I’ve said it; I’m one of them.  I even tried out for the show in Hollywood once (didn’t make it ).  Perhaps you’ve heard of the Jeopardy PowerPoint that has been floating around the internet for along time now.  It’s pretty neat, as you can create your own slides and everything.  The template is set up so that all you have to do is insert your questions and the program does everything else for you.  It even comes with authentic sound effects!  As cool as it looks though, I have to say that I’ve always been very intimidated with the template itself.

Enter TechFortress’ Flash-based Jeopardy game.  Good ‘ol Mr. Kries created a game from scratch that allows all the same functionality of a real Jeopardy game, but in a much simpler format.  Now  you can make a great classroom game in about 5 minutes.  Then start all over and create one for a different subject or chapter.  Perhaps you could take a video from Discovery Streaming and use it as a video clue (just like on the real show).

It would be extra nice of our lovely readers if you could upload your Jeopardy text files to the DEN site to share. Just tag them with your grade level and/or subject.  You’ll see what I mean when you check it out.

And if anyone wants to join me nightly at 7:30 or for a Saturday evening game of Trivial Pursuit, it’s ON! 

If you are using Google Docs (and Spreadsheets and Presentations…) you’ll be happy to hear about some of their latest changes and additions.  Some of the cool ones are the ability to create forms and have people fill them out.  Then when they are updated you can view the data in your aggregator.  Some people may already be doing this with Zoho’s online office suite.  You can also have email notifications sent to you when collaborators edit your documents.  There are lots of other cool features, such as the ability to insert new images and shapes.  There are way too many changes to list, but check out this list and see for yourself if anything interests you.  And by the way, if you are not currently using an online office suite, you are seriously missing out :)   Happy typing!

~Kootman

While these tools are great, please, please, check with your district’s/school’s teacher acceptable use policy before using them. Many districts block certain sites for many reasons. We don’t want any teachers “in trouble” for going around the system….

~DEN Management

I’ve had a lot of success using the online file conversion tool, Zamzar. I’ve used it to change sound file types, compress files, create pdfs and, most frequently, rip Flash videos from YouTube.

I hope many other DEN members had found this tools useful as well. One thing that never occurred to me though was how I could get videos from YouTube while at school (aside from simply converting them at home) . In the past, I had always converted them at home (being that YouTube is blocked at my school and most others).

It completely skipped my mind that I could actually do a Google search (or Google Videos) for a YouTube video and then copy and paste the URL from the results page into Zamzar! Now you can have your banned YouTube videos at school! I love finding ways around “the man.” Just make sure that Zamzar’s emails are not blocked by your system. Needless to say Discovery’s videos should always remain top priority