Digital Storytelling

Just a reminder as you are packing (or have packed) up for the summer, there’s still another month left to enter the American Film Institute’s Hometown Claim to Fame challenge. Right now it’s looking pretty good for a town just a couple of suburbs away from mine. They have three entries in! Though my sentimental favorite would be the suburb next to my old neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, Hometown, IL. This could be a good chance to get your feet wet and get your junior hi and high school students thinking about learning and sharing on ScreenNation. I hear future challenges will be hosted by Sean Astin and Jennifer Love Hewitt! And, judging by Brett Harvey’s post on the California DEN blog, it looks like Hollywood’s home state is poised to join the fray. So tell us about your hometown or I may just have to PhotoShop a ridiculous pot onto YOUR picture.

P.S. Barely two weeks left to get your teacher or 5th-8th grade student entry in for the Discovery and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. There will be a special webinar with the Mythbusters next school year just for schools that enter.

Music, Maestro, please!

I hesitate to call this a video tip because it’s really just frosting. If or when you’ve registered, you will find a nice surprise on the page after you log in. No, it’s not the link to a page of pictures of Hall and me with links to our blog posts on the Discovery and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. There are more than 50 tunes from Discovery’s own music library cleared for your use in this project. They are even arranged in groups so that you won’t spend more time looking for just the right piece instead of polishing your scientific illumination. So, AFTER you have shed your light on one of the chosen topics, give some thought to adding a little musical touch. And don’t forget to credit Discovery for the music along with any other source you may have used. Remember, use these only for your YSC video submission and for nothing else. The rights to add this copyrighted music are for that purpose only. P.S. watch the volume on the sound track. Music should never overwhelm your voice and what you have to say.

And the Mythbusters wonder what you’re waiting for…, an invitation from them?

Fair Weather Entries

Don’t let this nice weather (unless you’re dodging tornadoes) distract you. There are just over three weeks left to get your 5th-8th grade student or DEN teacher video entry for the Discovery and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. To help you get inspired and get your facts straight, the fine folks at Discovery have put together a list of resources. And there are many great sites here that will be useful in the science classroom all year long. The list actually leads off with other competitions and celebrations that spotlight science in education. One that particularly caught my eye is Destination Imagination. It’s actually not just for science, but a multidisciplinary challenge, “Destination ImagiNation is a community-based, school-friendly program that builds participants’ creativity, problem solving, and teamwork in enjoyable and meaningful ways.”

Mission Possible
With just a month left (don’t tempt Murphy’s Law by waiting until June 15th to upload), here is another idea or two to help you put together a student or DEN teacher entry for the Discovery and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. There’s a new video on the “Get Started” page and sample scorecards for all the projects. Both should shed some more light onto creating an entry video. Let’s look at the new kid on the block first and then compare Judge Jake’s scoring for all the projects.

The last and most recent video in the window is “Air Pressure.” It starts out as a parody; always a good format for student videos. Agent James Blond has to follow a message a la “Mission Impossible.” He encourages you to pause the video to read that message. That is also a good strategy for your credits at the end. Save the screen time for your explanation. Black and white at the beginning gives a secret or surveillance camera kind of feel to the introduction. After the experiment, when the hard boiled egg slips into the bottle, he delivers a clever punchline to sum up the power of air pressure.

Now, let’s take a quick look at the scorecards. Remember the three videos with the Discovery backgrounds were filmed in the field as part of last year’s finals competition. There was no plan or reason to edit them. They are simply documentation of live demonstrations. The other two were put together by a couple of Jake’s Wizards in Training as examples of what an edited entry could look like. You’ll see that both the edited videos were outscored by “Solar Energy” and were just a bit higher rated than “Parabolic Reflectors.” And “Bernoulli” actually had the lowest score for persuasion because there was too much information. As much as the music added to the movie theme of the “Air Pressure” piece, I don’t see that it added to the final score at all. Remember Meets Ctriteria and Overall Persuasion Presentation (HT: AB, see comment below) are the heaviest weighted scores. So, make it interesting, but keep it simple. Good luck!

That’s what 5th graders from STAR Discovery Educator Tracy Selock’s E2T2 classroom were doing at the Discovery office in Evanston last Friday. With a little help from SMART who brought a board in just for the Kankakee students’ presentations, Mike Bryant, Steve Dembo, me, and a few Discovery employees who could spare a couple of minutes now and then were treated to a wide variety of ways to share a learning story with technology.

• There were MovieMaker tours of Chicago’s Art Institute (they liked the Egyptian things best) and verbs in action.
• A SMART Notebook tour with interactive questions about famous NY city landmarks.
• Blabberized historical figures telling their own story.

Their news show used green screen to put the anchors into a major network set. Then their in the field report showed balanced journalism as they started to investigate the environmentally unfriendly use of plastic sporks in all lunch meals. After research and interviews, they came to understand how economical, safe and sanitary sporks are compared to conventional metal forks.
We saw haikus written right on the student created photographs that had inspired the words.
And there was a quick look at Google’s Sketchup for designing a school court yard.

…not to transition? That’s not much of a question unless you’re going for a cheesey, 1950’s kind of B movie trailer look. Keep yourself safe from PPTS (that’s “PowerPoint Transition Syndrome” according to my old buddy Ken Wiseman). And my new buddies Xander and Calvin make just that point in their latest ScreenNation learning video aptly titled “Transitions.” Watch a commercial, a TV show or a movie. How many transitions do you actually see? Any? Not many for sure. Cuts and dissolves, that’s about it.

Makin’ Movies in Oz Here’s a great learning opportunity from Apple, whether you’re a Mac user or not. Follow Baz Luhrman’s (Moulin Rouge!) production team through the summer as they discuss filming “Australia” in Australia. The Set to Screen Series offers podcasts, lesson plans, challenges, and prizes for high school and college students. The current challenge is to design a movie poster. You can use any or all of set photographer James Fisher’s shots or be completely original with your own.

Just do it by May 26th. There will be regular podcasts to explore many aspects of the movie storytelling process and the current one deals with set design. All this may seem beyond any school’s budget - money or time. But the strategies for visual storytelling are the same, whether you’re creating reality from scratch or shooting the school play on the stage in the gym.
Check in often to see what’s new and don’t forget to say g’day.

(Pictures are from James Fisher’s Australia Publicity Stills folder downloadable from the Set to Screen design page)

So you understand you can’t use Discovery Education streaming clips in your entry videos for the Discovery and 3M Young Scientist Challenge, right? But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them or Discovery Education Science as well for that matter. While we expect your footage to be completely original, we certainly don’t expect you to rediscover these theories on your own. Actually, the expectation is that you UNCOVER them in an interesting way to make the principle accessible to an uninitiated viewer.

If you don’t already have a subscription to DE Science, this might also be the perfect time to take advantage of the 30 day free trial. And you are always welcome to visit the DE Science blog for tips and discussion.

The last live overview webinar with Hall Davidson is this Tuesday at 6pm Eastern. Though it specifically targets the DEN teacher part of the challenge, it’s applicable to the students’ entries as well. The archived webinars for both students and teachers will be up soon and the overview PowerPoints are available on Hall’s Media Matters blog.

The American Film Institute’s ScreenNation first challenge is on and it should be right up your alley, or your main street at least. It’s called Home Town Claim to Fame. I wouldn’t know where to start with the city I grew up in - Chicago and I’d have to learn a lot (maybe the point?) about this village I’ve lived in for almost half of my life - Arlington Heights, IL. Middle and High School entrants should include interviews with at least three people and run no longer than 5 minutes. Upload your video by June 30th. Winner gets a hard drive camcorder, bag and tripod, AND the very unique title of first ever ScreenNation challenge winner. Of course, I can’t tell it like Xander and Calvin, so watch their invitation at the ScreenNation site.