Michael Hakkarinen took on the iMovie webinar duties on August 6th and diplomatically stuck with iMovie HD6, avoiding the iMovie ‘08 and ‘09 quagmire. I won’t stick my foot in that (or my mouth) right now except to say that if you have iMovie ‘08 in your school/district, update to ‘09 ASAP. It’s very cheap. A site license also allows for 50 home licenses. ‘09 is what I had hoped ‘08 would be (even though it’s a big change in the interface). In any event, Michael’s webinar is archived and available for download. He does a nice job showing how easy it is to find and add Discovery clips to a project, edit them and then do your own voice over. There is easy integration with importing from iTunes and iPhoto and exporting to iDVD. And I have to second his advice about keeping transitions unobtrusive, maybe even just limiting them to major changes in the story. His advice about adding transitions and then audio at the very end in order to not disrupt the timing of the whole project is golden.
There is just a bit of wishful thinking about being able to download HD6 from the Apple site if you only have ‘08 or ‘09. Apple did offer a free download of HD6 if you only had a copy of iMovie ‘08 on your computer. However, when iMovie ‘09 was released that download disappeared from the website
The downloads that Michael references at the beginning of the archive are just updaters if you already have the two previous versions. But he is right in his thinking - iMovie HD6 and iMovie ‘09 can be a powerful combination for editing video and creating great learning stories with your students. If you want to move seamlessly between the two programs use the Apple Intermediate Codec to export.
Suddenly no one is wearing white, so it must be after Labor Day! To much controversy and hoopla, the president has welcomed our students back and encouraged them to work hard. And we are all wondering where the summer went. So just in case you missed our back to school summer webinars that would have warned you school was about to happen again, they are all archived or in the process thereof. If you were especially absent during the first week in August like I was (Disney World with the grandbabies - I have a note!) and missed the best series (no prejudice on my part here), you can catch the Digital Storytelling Week webinars at the top of that archive list.
Let’s start with Lance Rougeux’s take on using MovieMaker and streaming resources since I just recommended that my Wilkes University students take a look at it before turning in their first edited video this week. You can download both a movie file of the presentation as it happened and Lance’s PowerPoint. Some highlights:
navigating the new DES website interface
copyright
replacing the narration with student voices
saving the file vs. exporting as a movie
exporting in high quality in order to import as a new project and get an extra audio track
Also archived (or about to be): “Thinking Outside the Slide,” PhotoStory, Animoto, and iMovie.
So here’s a little holiday present for you courtesy of our buddy, former AFI ScreenEd guru, Frank Guttler and his Lights, Camera, Learn! blog. I think Frank has found his true calling now and is teaching. As a matter of fact, he is dodging that frigid January L.A. chill to go and be part of the Flat Classroom conference is Qatar early next year. Anyhow, Frank shares a great lesson and some student samples about “reading” a photograph in his latest post “A Thousand Words - Storytelling and Editing.” And here’s Frank’s take on the set of historical pictures he chose:
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 suppose this is only tangentially related to digital storytelling, but it certainly seems handy enough to pass along. Thanks to an English Apple Distinguished Educator in my PLN, I have just started to play with this new online slide creation program, 280 Slides. Since I’ve only toyed with SlideShare (which I believe does not have a creation option), I don’t have much to compare it to. But I do like the look, feel and versatile options. You can publish on the web, send to SlideShare, embed on a site, and download as a PowerPoint. Also, it looks like it’s pretty darn simple to add media from the likes of Flickr and YouTube. Their demo presentation brings the new Batman trailer right up. So, take the tour and take it for spin. I think I may try to make my “Makin’ Movies” (minus all the copyrighted goodies) presentation available with this.
…you! As the summer “break” is a time to rest, recharge, and gather ideas for the upcoming school year, I thought I would take the next two months to reflect on the contests I have mentioned by looking at the winners and exemplary entries from each. Since imitation is the highest form of flattery and also a great way to learn about making student videos, I encourage you to join me this Tuesday at 7pm Eastern for a Discovery Connect webinar. In the coming weeks I will be attempting some in depth analysis of winning videos, but on Tuesday we’ll take a preview tour of just some of the sites. You can register here.
Here are the contest websites I’ve mentioned during the past school year. You can check my Contests/Festivals archive under “Categoties” for more details on each.
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.”
Got a chance to meet some new friends today and reconnect with old ones at “Technology & Learning” magazine’s Midwest TechForum. What started out as a shared digital storytelling student showcase with good buddy Jon Orech grew into a full Makin’ Movies presentation in order to cover a friend’s session when he suddenly became ill. So, as promised, here is what would have been in the handout.
The American Film Institute’s ScreenNation. Watch, learn, upload, participate in a challenge. Also, AFI’s ScreenEd website.
Compare “How Do Parabolic Reflectors Work?” to “Bernouli’s Principle” on the Discovery and 3M’s Young (and “Old”) Scientist Challenge. It’s the difference between simply documenting an event and making a few simple edit decisions to bring the learning home.
The International Student Media Festival “No PDA’s”
Great Minds - Healthy Living Challenge. Compare how two different student crews make some dry statistics about adolescent health come to life in “New Threat” and “Dr. Weird”
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Michael Hakkarinen took on the iMovie webinar duties on August 6th and diplomatically stuck with iMovie HD6, avoiding the iMovie ‘08 and ‘09 quagmire. I won’t stick my foot in that (or my mouth) right now except to say that if you have iMovie ‘08 in your school/district, update to ‘09 ASAP. It’s very cheap. A site license also allows for 50 home licenses. ‘09 is what I had hoped ‘08 would be (even though it’s a big change in the interface). In any event, Michael’s webinar is archived and available for download. He does a nice job showing how easy it is to find and add Discovery clips to a project, edit them and then do your own voice over. There is easy integration with importing from iTunes and iPhoto and exporting to iDVD. And I have to second his advice about keeping transitions unobtrusive, maybe even just limiting them to major changes in the story. His advice about adding transitions and then audio at the very end in order to not disrupt the timing of the whole project is golden.
