Digital Storytelling

       Since the winter gift giving frenzy is upon us and we all know educators use vacations to catch up on things, I thought I’d give the next few weeks over to advice about how to spend both money and time this holiday season. In the tradition of Kathy Schrock (see the archive of her webinar on the Discovery EdTechConnect page), I have a couple of shelves and hard drives full of goodies I’ve used to help turn out a story in one fashion or another.
     I’ve already tooted Audacity’s horn (and remember, it’s free!) a couple of weeks ago. Today I’m recommending a utility that is right under your nose and will cost you little, but every media center should have at least one copy of QuickTime Pro. The easiest way to see what it does is to see what it doesn’t. If you don’t already have a copy of QT Pro, just open up a QT movie and start looking through the menus at the top of the window. All those grayed out features with “Pro” in front of them are yours for just $29.99. And there’s no thing to buy. Once Apple has received your payment you get a key code that unlocks the features on the QT that is already in your computer. You can show movies full screen, record video and sound, edit, and save and export in a variety of formats. Lately, my most common use for it has been to take the edited QT movie files that I share through this blog and export them as hinted streaming movies. That way viewers don’t have to wait for the whole movie to download before it starts playing (and when, not if, I forget to do that, please remind me). In addition to everything else it can do, it’s a great piece of software to get sound and video web ready.

[photo - Jupiterimages Corporation. "Man in Santa hat, holding gifts, portrait from above." unitedstreaming: http://www.unitedstreaming.com]

For almost half of my life, on and off, I’ve lived in a four generation family. My birth in the middle of the last century of this recently passed millennium made my grandmothers’ mothers (both Irish immigrants born barely a decade after the Civil War) great-grandmothers. Yesterday the family clock turned again when my daughter gave birth to Adrianna, the beginning of our generations of the 21st century.

The oldest family picture I have is from 1896, three years before my father’s father was born. As I “read” the photograph, great-grandfather Brennan dressed his family up and hauled them down to a professional photographer’s studio to pose stiff as boards in order to commemorate the birth of his youngest and memorialize the passing of his eldest. You can see that they left a spot for my then recently departed great-uncle Martin on the right, behind the baby (who died of a fever just months before grandpa arrived).

Compare that to the image I captured of my son-in-law showing my mother-in-law a phone camera photo he’s about to send to augment the cell phone and text messages that already went out coast to coast and probably even to his relatives in Italy. All before the baby was an hour old!
Oh, the places she’ll go and the stories we’ll tell!
I just happen to have some pictures, moving pictures actually… Download AddieDEN3.mov

     I am just a bit jaded when it comes to digital storytelling presentations. I know I can and will always learn something, but it’s also something I’ve spent a lot of time on. So last week at our (Illinois) fall state EdTech conference, I was absolutely delighted to wander into “Digitelling for Educators” with Sue Black and Bev Frett of Robert E. Clow Elementary School in Naperville, IL. What sets this presentation and school’s program apart is that Sue is a professional storyteller. I unfortunately missed the first few minutes, but by the time I settled in Sue was asking for volunteers to give her one thought about dogs. She brought the five respondents up to the front, coaxed them with a few of her starter questions, rearranged them like they were sentences, and then when they each spoke their part, we had a nice mini-story about dogs. Since Sue is a traditional, oral  storyteller, she encouraged her dog lovers to re-think and re-phrase their lines with, “How could you say that to make us LEAN IN?” I like that “lean in” image! Check out the resources on the Illinois Storyteller’s page and don’t forget to watch the stories that Bev and Sue help the Clow students craft on their examples page. Sorry, Mac users. The videos don’t seem to be in a format that plays on Apples: audio, but no video.

      The last external microphone I’d like to explore is the “shotgun” or “boom” mic. This is a good device for recording in a group or picking up the surrounding/ambient noise. This soccer game clip (Download ShotBoom.mov) really doesn’t do it justice, but hopefully you’ll get the idea. The first time I ever used one was for an independent movie my son acted in. The mic was on the end of a pole and dangled just over the heads of the actors who were talking. They even recruited me at one point to follow my son through a field and pick up the sound of his footsteps because I had the longest stride and arms. This mic has a lot of surface area to pick up sound through and therefore needs a windscreen more so than the others to dampen that unwanted white noise. Surprisingly, the built-in mic did about just as well at my daughter’s soccer game and actually sounded better when it was protected from the wind. Since there was a steady breeze and the shotgun mic was exposed on top of the camera, it picked up a lot of wind in spite of its foam covering.

     To review, check out an enhanced podcast by Marco Torres and the students of the San Fernando Technology Team. Their FlickSchool page is a great resource for tips on photography and making movies to tell good stories.

      A lavalier microphone is a great way to zero in and pick up the sound from one person. It’s also a good way to “eavesdrop” if you want to keep the camera at a distance. The picture at left and the accompanying video (Download Lavalier2.mov) attempt to show this by recording a pre-game talk from the opposite side of the field and slowly moving in. Despite the shakey camera work, the sound remains consistent. The lav could also double as a hand-held. At the end of the video you’ll see that it picks up some of the players’ voices and another coach pretty well. If you unclipped the mic and put it close to each speaker as they offered their advice, you’d get the same sort of “man on the street” interview as you do with the hand-held option. Again, please make sure your camcorder has an input jack for an external microphone before investing in any remote sound devices.

     In my rush to show off my collection of remote microphones, I skipped a very basic step. If you’re going to upgrade your sound capability, the easiest and cheapest solution is to get a couple of external, noise-cancelling microphones for your computers/labs. My recommendation is to get a headphone/mic combination. Why? Because none of us likes the sound of our own voice and we like it even less when we are recording in public. We also want to avoid any background noise that may make it sound like those marketing calls we all receive. In a lab-like situation, the mic/headphone affords some semblance of privacy, both speaking and listening, AND returns a much higher quality sound. However, an external mic by itself can be just as good and less expensive. PC users can usually plug a mic right in to the mic/sound in jack. Mac users need a powered device. That power is usually via USB. In the picture at the top left, the mic on the left is 100% USB. The mic on the right has both the direct mini-pin option or connecting via USB. Digitales has a page full of advice and even some directions on making a spit guard to get the most out of your voice.

     I took a variety of remote microphones out to my daughter’s last soccer game of the season last Sunday and tried to get some representative footage of what situations they might be good in. Today we’ll zero on the traditional handheld mic. With a long enough wire, it could be connected directly to the mic input on your camcorder (WARNING - not all camcorders have a separate mic input, check before investing in an external mic!) In this video we are using the handheld plugged in to a remote transmitter. The clip is a “man on the street” type interview. But by placing the mic in a holder on a table, it just as well could be used by two news anchors or a group discussion. Whether in the field or in the studio, wireless or connected, this type of microphone lets you get up close and personal sound from a number voices.

(Purchasing note: I bought the handheld packaged with a lavalier microphone, a transmitter that connects with either mic, and a receiver that sits on the camera and connects to its mic import for about $139.)

     Click the link below for the interview.

Download HandHeld2.mov

     We interrupt this week on sound with an important message. About four months and forty degrees ago (here in the Chicago area at least) I was out in San Diego for NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference). The first presentation I attended on the very first day was by the American Film Institute and in it they previewed a DVD they had produced about using movie making to address core curriculum. In addition to the fact that the DVD is very professionally done, narrated by Sean Astin, features student work, and is based on years of AFI integrating film making into K-12 education, the video will also be available from Discovery Education through unitedstreaming! You should start with the  DEN podcast introducing
the program and then log in to unitedstreaming to view the clips and download the 88 page Educator’s Handbook. The handbook also contains instructions on joining AFI’s Screen Education Community free for a year. That’s a $100/year service underwritten by Best Buy Children’s Foundation.

     Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

     Since I’m just polishing up some things about recording sound that I will be adding to my “Digital Storytelling: Makin’ Movies” presentation on Friday, sound might be a good topic for the rest of the week. Now, my bold advice: get Audacity!
     It’s free. It’s powerful. It doesn’t cost anything. It works on Macs and PC’s. And you won’t be spending any money. Oh, yeah. You will need the LAME plug-in to export as MP3, but that’s free too. Go ahead. Go download it if you haven’t already. I’ll wait.

     Good, you’re back. Now, what can you do with this program? Steve Dembo will tell you that you can record and assemble voice and sounds for a podcast. And I will venture into podcasting as storytelling one of these days, but not right now. You certainly can record and you can edit the sound too, just like it’s a sentence in a word processor. But like that sentence, I’d rather you have some fun with the “fonts and color.” If you look back two posts, I mentioned Audacity as a way to get the mysterious voice of the future like the students from El Paso did in their T+L entry, “Today’s Generation.” First, you need to either separate the voice from the video in your editing software or record a separate voice track in Audacity. Once you have the sound in Audacity (you might want to save a copy of the original just in case), highlight it, go to the Effects menu, and play around. With the attached files, you have my untouched original, the pitch kicked up an octave in the Chipmunk version, and the pitch dropped and then the bass altered a bit in the Bass version. Import back into your video for a dynamic change in a character’s voice.
     Just one more piece of free advice, check out the Audacity Wiki for more ideas and help.
Download DENtest.mp3

Download DENtestChipmunk.mp3

Download DENtestBass.mp3

     OK, it may not be digital storytelling. But it is digital and it is a story that needs to be told. And though David Warlick’s scheduled topic for the next EdTechConnect webinar on November 15th is the flattening of the classroom in a world that we already know is flat, it’s still part of David’s overall observation/message that we need to get the word out to our communities that this isn’t your grandparents’ classroom or curriculum anymore. The jobs we educated the baby boomers and their parents for are going or gone or will be very different than they were in days past.
     So, sign up and tune in for this Wednesday’s webinar and prepare yourself to tell your new story.