Digital Storytelling

Just got a press release from the American Film Institute announcing a major upgrade for the ScreenNation site. There doesn’t seem to be a hard date yet, so I’m guessing by the end of summer at the latest. Join me in posting some of your favorite moivemaking how-to’s and/or encourage your students to share their work with the world.

Dear Educators:

This summer, the American Film Institute will launch a complete redesign of AFI ScreenNation - AFI’s Web site dedicated to featuring the best teen filmmakers on the Web.

The big difference is that AFI ScreenNation has been re-tooled to fully integrate YouTube into its framework.

In fact, AFI ScreenNation is part of an ambitious overhaul of AFI.com to include AFI’s Digital Archive. This means that teen filmmakers will have an opportunity to be featured next to videos that include AFI Life Achievement Award winners, AFI television programming and featured films from AFI Fellows and Alumni.

Furthermore, AFI ScreenNation will still include helpful tips and tutorial videos, as well as the complete instructional series LIGHTS, CAMERA, EDUCATION!

Now is your chance to recommend teen filmmakers to AFI ScreenNation. If you or a teen filmmaker that you know has a YouTube link to submit, please send it in an e-mail to screennation@afi.com.

Most of us think of June 6th as D-Day, the Normandy Invasion. Well my neighbors and their teacher, Tricia Fuglestad, down at the Dryden school here in Arlington Heights, IL added their own “D” this year on June 6th as they won two first place awards at the Shortie Awards festival in D.C.

I had mentioned “Let’s be Green” in my re-cap of our state festival but had never seen Tricia’s own work about when red met green, “Complementary in Every Way” before. Leave it to an art teacher!

Complementary in Every Way from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.Check out all of this year’s winners in news, documentary, animation, and teacher created at http://www.shortie.org. Tricia, by the way, is an alumna of our Wilkes U./Discovery Education Digital Storytelling class (but not a section I taught personally- sigh!).

The latest round of winners have been announced in ISTE’s 30th anniversary, tell your technology story. But don’t dismay - you still have until June 15th to upload your story to be in the running for a trip to NECC Denver in 2010. Check out all the videos celebrating our journey incorporating technology into the classroom and ISTE’s 30th at http://www.istevision.org.

Kindergarten teacher Al Doss snagged an HP mini laptop for “Al’s Ah Ha Moment.” How can a brick and an Apple IIgs lead to a technology enriched classroom?

“New T-E-C-H-nology“  is a fun take off on a commercial done by engaged high school students who like learning in teams. Their effort won a Flip Ultra video camcorder.

Jack Tovey’s “Art for the Digital Generation” puts a new spin on Picasso and got him a copy of the ISTE book Visual Arts Units for All Levels.

Since NECC is just four weeks away and the deadline to get your impact of technology story celebrating ISTE’s 30th anniversary in, in time for this month’s drawing (an HP mini notebook or iPod touch, Flip video camera, and the ISTE book, Visual Arts Units for All Levels) deadline is May 31st, I thought it a good time for a little reminder. The grand prize will be a trip to NECC 2010 in Denver. You can see plenty of contributions already at the ISTE Vision website but might you not have some thoughts to add also? All submissions will be playing on special kiosks throughout the NECC convention center.

Graphic from ISTE’s site supporting your learning (and teaching) journey with a focus on digital citizenship.

The clock is winding down on this year’s Discovery Education and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. To add just a little more impetus to your students joining in or simply using digital storytelling to share what they know or care about in science, last year’s Young Scientist of the Year, Melissa Rey, will be doing a webinar Wednesday, May 13th. Whether you plan on throwing your hat in the ring or just want some ideas to get or keep your students interested in science, this should be an hour well spent with an exceptional young lady. Register here for the 1:00 PM EDT webinar.

 

FYI, just got this from the Center for Digital Storytelling:

Dear Friends of the Center for Digital Storytelling,

As we wrote last month, the 2nd International Day for Sharing Life Stories will take place this Saturday,  May 16th, 2009.

We are asking all of the folks on our mailing list to take 10 minutes this week to visit http://www.ausculti.org and join on our newly updated website.  Log in to add your name, information about your organization’s work, links about sites related to your work, or of general interest to our communities.

We have also built the site so that each point on the map can include a media story.  You will simply need to  copy the embed code from the story (as with Youtube videos) and paste it into your post on the site.

About the International Day

Began last year as an opportunity to celebrate and promote life stories, as well as a way to encourage critical thinking, cultural democratization and social transformation. The International Day is organized by The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland and Portugal)

The chosen theme for this years’ Day is Journey for Justice – Migration and Refugees. The Human Rights Commission of U.N. estimates that there are currently 21 million refugees in the world. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are 200 million international immigrants all over the world. We want to hear the stories of people who have experienced migration in order to develop dialogue about this important matter in our societies and promote social change.

The day was chosen in part to honor Studs Terkel, the American writer, radio journalist and oral historian who passed away in October of last year.  Studs would have celebrated his 97th birthday this May 16.

Besides that, we could not leave aside the importance of any other person’s life stories. So, whatever your work with life stories is, join us!

The idea of the ausculti.org website is to show these stories and to promote a space for listening and exchanging experiences.

Post your stories, listen to other stories, and celebrate this day with us!

The deadline for your 5th-8th science students to get their video application in for the Discovery/3M Young Scientist Challenge is exactly 2 weeks away. In addition to the little pep talk from Will Smith on their main page, we’ve scheduled a webinar with ’08’s Young Scientist of the Year, Melissa Rey. You can get one last round of tips on how to polish that video entry and also hear from an extraordinary young lady who was tops in the nation last year. Register here for her May 13th webinar at 1:00 p.m. EDT and check out the four challenge topics that could make a difference around the house. Choose just one of them and make a video illustrating a solution to enter.

Don’t forget the Young Scientist Challenge. Watch his video on the website. Click on it as it cycles through or hit the #1 box.

Just 16 days and counting til the deadline for the Discovery Education & 3M Young Scientist Challenge 5th-8th grade video applications are due. The YSC site has a list of helpful links to presentations that Hall and I did specifically for this nation wide search. I haven’t seen any of this year’s entries yet but you can see, and your students can learn from, past young scientists in a couple of different ways:

   The Fall 2008 challenges at the Goddard Space Center.

And if you have a Discovery Education streaming account, log in and search on “young scientist challenge.” You will be able to view last year’s Science Channel special with the finalists and well as ’07’s show with the MythBusters along with a few other clips. I especially like “The Eye in Inspiration.”  And if you don’t have a streaming subscription yet, you might want to look into a free trial.

Also, the International Student Media Festival has opened it’s entry window. Your students have until May 31st (June 30th for International entries) to enter a project in a number of categories from still photos to websites to podcasts to videos just to name a few. P.S. there is a “request a deadline extension” link on their page but I have no idea what that policy is.

The last Friday in April has been a dilemma for me the last few years because both the Chicagoland Television Educators Video Festival and Tech&Learning magazine’s TechForum Midwest always fall on that same day. I feel a bit cheated because I only get a half day at each learning event. Add to it the DEN Virtual Conference on Saturday (archives TBA) and my Wilkes U. digital storytelling class’s final grades due on Monday morning, and I’m glad it’s a cold, gray, rainy Sunday for catching up (sorry golfers et al.).

You might enjoy perusing our CTEC site and its resources. This year’s winners aren’t posted yet but you can look over ’08’s best and get some great ideas for projects with your students (don’t miss the link at the bottom of the page to get to other categories like commercials and documentary). This year we had almost 400 entries in 18 categories. There are also some interesting lesson ideas posted at the bottom of our institute day recaps. Check out “Lollipop Interviews” where students interview each other and “What’s My Line?” easily adaptable for video and writing projects in your own classes.
I really can’t remember how long ago I connected with the Tech&Learning conferences and its energetic staff, but it was so long ago that they are the ones who introduced me to this “relatively unknown” guy from North Carolina named David Warlick. Since then, it has become an annual reunion of learning and great dinners with old and new friends from in and out of state. I missed Jon Orech’s Advanced Thinking in Digital Storytelling this time around but you can catch up on his thoughts at his Wiki page. As an English teacher for almost 25 years, Jon brings great insight to visual grammar.