Movie and book reviews are a great way for students to structure and share their opinons. Here’s a quick challenge for 13 to 18 year old any student (they removed the age restriction, but minors MUST have guardian’s permission) from the American Film Institute’s ScreenNation site - review a movie in three minutes or less and upload it by October 10th. BUT you can’t use any clips from the movie or any other copyrighted material. So, this will depend heavily on good writing and reasoning, and a little creativity recreating scenes that you would like to illustrate. The winner gets a Flip cam. Don’t forget to visit the ScreenNation Learn page for production tips. This contest is hosted by that new YouTube star, Lisa Nova.
And coming up next on this blog - we may not be able to see Russia from Illinois and there is at least one whole state (maybe two counting Michigan’s U.P.) between us and Canada, but we have three opportunities coming up for students to show off their movie makin’ skills.
The 3rd annual DEN Streamathon is just about to get underway. TWELVE hours of non-stop presentations on getting the most from Discovery Education streaming and the Discovery Educator Network.
I’ll reprise my overview of streaming’s digital storytelling resources at 6pm EDT just before Hall follows that up with Ten Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Video and Two Things You Did and then Lance winds it all up with his State of the DEN address. Try to drop in at least once during the day.
I just finished “grading” the first assignment from my Wilkes U. digital storytelling students and it got me thinking (along with an iChat I had with Hall Davidson and his daughter last week). I needed to know what equipment my students have at their disposal to make the videos that will be the bulk of our assignments over the next 7 weeks. My reasons were ulterior, of course. I want to spot potential obstacles and head them off if I can. So here is my reflection on the class inventory. I welcome your thoughts on what you have access to, and what you would like to have.
FireWire (1394 or iLinc) ports: These aren’t necessarily standard on PC’s, especially the low bidder models that schools tend to buy. We Mac folk are spoiled; they’ve been standard since the original iMac. PC people need to buy a card for their desktop or laptop OR get video from a USB device like a still camera that can take movies, flash memory cameras like the Flip, or DVD and hard drive camcorders which also all seem to be USB.
Speaking of USB, I think all scanners are USB now because only the oldest computers have serial and SCSI ports. But do they get used like they used to? Helping an 8th grade class with their DVD yearbook last spring, I found they were very focused on video and digital stills. The few paper photos they had caused a temporary back up at the only scanner in the classroom. Sharing my senior citizen disdain for lines, they quickly figured out that the built-in camera could get a passable image with a lot less hassle and the scanner was soon completely abandoned. Does anyone import from a document camera?
Back to camcorders, the new DVD and hard drive models have been a pain in my workshops when people don’t bring along a laptop with the propietary software loaded. One of the few improvements I like in iMovie ‘08 is that it can import a hard drive camcorder effortlessly. I am thinking that flash camcorders will cause schools to leapfrog that technology all together, not to mention the Dembo/Davidson revolution of cell phone cameras in class.
Memory is another thing that suffers with low bidder computers (and age!) I have only one student with less than a gigabyte of RAM. I hope our modest assignments don’t bring her computer to the brink. I have to think a lot of the MovieMaker crashing complaints I hear are because of minimal RAM. We really just take for granted all the processing that goes on internally when editing video, but it is REALLY memory intensive. Pros used to regularly spend as much or more on RAM and expanded storage as they did on the actual computer. Now that both are so inexpensive, the ratio has fallen.
So, to paraphrase that recent TV commercial campaign, “What’s in your (digital storytelling) wallet?”
I know many of you are struggling with finding enough hardware to support the media projects you’d like to engage your students with. So here are a couple of quick tips on funding sources:
Best Buy’s Teach Awards will be distributing up to $2 million in $1-5,000 increments. Apply by October 12th. I got to spend a day with a district that won their $250,000 grant last year.
Tech&Learning magazine has a site with links to grants in addition to a few articles on funding opportunities.
Donors Choose lets you post your proposal and benefactors contribute to make it a reality. And speaking of that style of funding, you can be a venture capitalist yourself by investing in third world small businesses at kiva.org.
I find that the deeper I get into retirement, the more nostalgic I get for the classroom and coaching. It has been a real blessing that I have been able to keep a foot in the water between working with Discovery, presenting for Apple, working with schools and districts, and teaching a course for Wilkes University. But as my last day of school fades into memory and my baby granddaughter’s first day draws closer, the beginning of September brings a strange mix of feelings.
So, it was with great delight I traded emails with a former high school soccer player today. We have kept in touch the last few years because he is still in the area and he found out I had moved from teaching Spanish and coaching into an AV/Media position. Coincidentally, he was working for the Clio Awards that honors creative advertising in all media and does so internationally. I jumped on that (and him) right away and got him to volunteer and round up other volunteer judges for our local Chicago area media festival. He and his colleagues accepted the challenge and have been giving our student entrants quality evaluations for a number of years now.
Today’s email informed me that he had become the director of the Clio Awards and wanted to thank me and the many other fine teachers he had encountered at our school, “I have to give credit to the great education and drive I received from you and other educators at West. It provided me with the skill-sets necessary to succeed and advance out here in the real world. I sincerely mean that. Thank you again.” That will easily last me til next September, and far beyond…
You should visit the Clio Awards site and see what gets recognized around the world as quality digital/mini storytelling. Check the student work for sure, especially the “Snap” ad for Iberia and the PSA’s on global warming. That is the kind of story your students can tell in a minute or less and with very little technical expertise. Just a little bit of a caveat here though, I haven’t looked at all of the commercial entries for 2008, but I know from past experience that some of the international ads might be considered “R” rated by U.S. standards. Caveat spectator! And have a great school year!
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