Just back from my 24 hours in the Saugatuck Dunes state park reconnecting with my class and team mates from St. Augustine H.S.’s class of 1968. And, as was always the case, when I took my shoes off just now, there was sand. Back in the day, there was sand in the locker room, sand on the gym floor, some say even in the food. I’d come home to Chicago for holidays and summer and my mom would complain about sand in the washing machine. It was a constant presence and reminder of that idyllic place on the other side of Lake Michigan.
Reconnecting with guys I hadn’t seen since the day we graduated, people who stood up in my wedding, and the few who have stayed intermittently close over the last four decades was a lot like that sand: always there in varying degrees and turning up in the darnedest places and at unexpected times. Hair has changed color and disappeared, weight has come and gone (mostly come!), and eyeglasses are now part of everyone’s wardrobe. Except for 1/2 a brick a sharp eyed classmate spotted, our brand spanking new school and dorms are demolished and gone. The “old” building that we thought would dry up and blow away in time has been lovingly restored. The 600+ acres of dunes and Lake Michigan shoreline we had all to ourselves are now a state park. Yet it was like we had just rolled out of bed in the dorm, finished prayers in chapel, or completed our “house job” for the day (everybody had an assigned daily chore) and were released from evening study hall. A word, a phrase, a line from a song, a synapse fires igniting a chain reaction. Someone starts a name, a sentence or a story and another finishes it. Sand!
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.
No, not me. Both Vinny Testaverde and I have recognized that our best playing days are behind us. But fellow Niles West H.S. grad (I retired from there) Rashard Mendenhall returned to the school to hold a press conference announcing that he would not be in the University of Illinois’ backfield next year and instead would enter this spring’s NFL draft. I bring this up for two reasons.
First press conferences and interview formats can be a great vehicle for your students telling a story. Imagine Caesar explaining why he had to cross the Rubicon (maybe even in Latin), Columbus speaking Spanish (or Italian), General Lee under the scrutiny of the media after Gettysburg, Einstein or Fermi announcing the splitting of the atom. You can also fake a two camera shoot with footage of the interviewer asking a question and then a cut back to a picture of say Washington as another student voices the response. Kids get press conferences. Think of the recent series of beer commercials where actual footage of coaches is cut in with some under achievers asking off the wall questions.
Second, Rashard and his older brother Walter were regulars in our A.V. Media Lab. Walter and his teammates actually started it out by making an epic football highlight film of their season, but as they got comfortable with iMovie they asked their academic teachers if they could make videos instead of PowerPoints and other types of presentations. Then they also ended up mentoring other students with their video projects.
I did wangle my way into the press conference in the black box theater to get a feel for what they are really like. Of course, I also wanted to wish Walter well in his last school year and football season in Champaign, and to wish Rashard good luck in the NFL. I’d love to see him with the Bears…if they can rediscover their defense, and find a quarterback, and some blocking, and…
From my uncles who landed at Normandy a few days after D-Day to an old friend who was a POW in Korea and my classmates who served in Viet Nam, all I really know is that they were there. So I was very surprised when a couple of projects in my former school district got veterans talking. We actually have a WWII class and they sought out veterans who were willing to add their stories to a project for the Library of Congress. This was documenting and not really storytelling. If we had had more time, the students could have pulled a few experiences out of every interview’s 30-60 minutes, added archival footage or memorabilia, and edited it into a very small version of what Ken Burns’ recent “The War” gave us. Putting each student’s veteran’s clip together on a DVD would have made for a great store of primary sources. O, for more time…
On the other hand, when we invited senior citizens in for each semester’s digital storytelling workshop there was a gentleman who was more than ready to tell how his WWII unit just happened to be where the only remaining bridge over the Rhine was (see “Ludendorf Bridge”). And another man whose father was in the Army band between the wars lightheartedly shared how his father survived but the trumpet didn’t (see “We Can’t Toot his Horn”). And I originally forgot “Building Bridges” by a veteran whose WWII service time was spent preparing a route east from Burma.
A huge benefit of engaging your students in digital storytelling is their involvement in real world experience: asking their own questions, getting unexpected or very unique answers, and “seeing” through different points of view.
A search on “veteran” on Discovery Education streaming turned up about ten videos germane to Veterans’ Day. The first picture above is from Discovery Education, “Veterans and Veterans Day” and the second one is out of United Learning, “Return to Vietnam: Healing on the Hill,” both at http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com
On a personal note, I still don’t have a real good answer for my father-in-law’s annual question, “Why, when I was the one under fire in the Pacific for years, do you and your students get the day off and I don’t?” And he owned his own business. Sense of duty, I guess.
What a great opportunity it is to get to listen to and interact with the people who make the shows we watch on the Discovery networks. And Wednesday was no exception as Mick Kaczorowski, Senior Executive Producer for Animal Planet, shared his insights working on “Meerkat Manor” and the upcoming feature length film based on the life of the Meerkat star, Flower. Of course, any time he mentioned story telling I was on full alert. Some things that I’d like to hold up for review…
- The Meerkat team rolls the tape and shoots and shoots and shoots from before dawn until the family calls it a day at dusk, for months at a time. The closest we in education might come to filming like that is setting up an unmanned, stop motion camera to catch a plant growing or a butterfly emerging. To make the most of valuable educational time and limited equipment, shots need to be well planned and kept short.
- Extracting/finding the story is key. In addition to the exciting photography, someone has to glean the moments and the personalities out of all those hours of footage so that we care and maintain interest. And what (even occasional) viewer didn’t care about Flower? It has taken them four years to gather Flower’s story and only now do they have enough for a full length motion picture. Imagine how much thought and writing has gone into that project
- What does it take to tell a good story? Mick says READING. Get to know literature. Understand the classic conflicts. Harold Ramis (“Caddy Shack,” “Groundhog Day,” etc.) came to speak to our students a few years ago and said almost exactly the same thing. Students were asking questions about preparing to be actors or writers or directors and he told them they had to understand the human condition first. And that understanding didn’t come from talk and reality shows. Read… and write was his message.
In short, the technology plays a very small part in good digital/visual storytelling. It’s still all about telling (writing, planning, preparing, organizing) a good story.
One of the (many) basic, fundamental, and very important things I’ve picked up from the Center for Digital Storytelling’s philosophy is finding/extracting the story in a flurry of thoughts and facts. I got a graphic reminder of that this weekend when my wife and I traveled out to Grand Lake, Colorado to see our son perform in a Frank Sinatra review. The “kids” (the four of them were still in high school when Ol’ Blue Eyes passed on in 1998) begin the show by threatening to sing all 1300 plus songs that he recorded. Since that would be about a 192 hour show with no intermissions, the writers had to trim things down to a doable two hour performance and then choose and group the songs into some semblance of a story. We got to see the show twice. The first time through, I just mainly watched and enjoyed our son. But the second time I was able to appreciate the job the show’s creators did. They took quotes from Frank and his friends, pieces from about 50 of his songs, and put them in “chapters” that illustrated the Chairman’s life and career. There was a city and travel song segment, one for love songs, another for sad and philosophical songs, and so on. Just like our student storytellers, the writers of this musical tribute had to become familiar enough with facts and details to boil them down to their time constraint and then string them together in a narrative that shares their knowledge and insight of the subject matter. No digital here, but good, concise storytelling.
I wonder if my mother would have been as excited to see her grandson singing all those Sinatra classics and soloing on “Chicago” as she was when she was a screaming teenager at a Chicago theater in the 40’s listening to the real deal?
As I wind up my last trip of the summer, my third to California in just over a month, I marvel at what a great and appropriate end to a season of learning and sharing that this one has been. It has stretched me differently than the others (waistline and intellectually).
It started out Sunday night with an exceptional visit and dinner with a high school classmate who settled out here in San Diego more than twenty years ago. When I spent a week at his house last year during NECC, I came in just in time for his annual 4th of July cookout extravaganza. This year, by sheer dumb luck, I hit a “cook-off” they have a few times a year with several other couples. Each household prepares a dish for every course. This round’s menu theme was Asian. Everybody was assigned a couple of countries to find recipes from and away they went - four plus chefs cooking in the same kitchen at the same time. Good thing I was there to supervise and maintain order! Exotic beverages, fresh herbs and tomatoes from our hosts’ garden, “squid’s knees,” satay, several variations on shrimp and pork, and I won’t even get started with the desserts. I almost forgot that I came out here to work.
And “work” I did, though it was more like Christmas in August for this old A.V. guy. The DEN brought me out to do a digital storytelling day with the San Diego Unified School District who won this year’s $250,000 grant from Best Buy. Yes, you read that right - a quarter of a million dollars! And knowing it’s not just about the stuff, the core group of teachers is meeting for the next few days to engage in some professional development and project preparation. Santa Claus, in the form of district edtech resource teacher Dennis Cowick, started unpacking his bag of goodies just as I began setting up before the first teachers came in: MacBooks, DV camcorders, still cameras with spare batteries, tripods, headsets, and a plan to document the unsung heroes in this community.
And that’s where the stretch came for me. We compressed the AFI “Lights! Camera! Education!” door scene into just a morning activity so we could spend the afternoon working on interviewing and making a documentary type visual story. Where we usually demand a storyboard and script before filming, these San Diego students will tape an interview and have to extract the story from that. Since the students will be using iMovie, we spent some time on the “Paste over at playhead” feature under the “Advanced” menu. This essentially gives you a second video track. While the interviewee is talking underneath, a still picture or another video is playing on top to illustrate his words.
This can also be an effective technique when taping a concert with two different cameras or on two different nights. The first camera is the base track: a medium to wide shot taking in most to all of the stage and maintaining the continuity of the music. The second camera (or same camera at the next performance) gets close ups or tighter group shots of the performers. Highlight a tight shot, SILENCE it, copy it, then drag the play head to an appropriate spot, and paste it in. For a play on the other hand, you’d probably want to cut the close ups right in, sound and all.
I’m looking forward to these students’ final videos and their stories honoring the unsung heroes in their community.
Well, I’ve chuckled as I’ve seen friends "tagged" with a meme. I figured/hoped I was just low enough on the radar not to get named, but Heather from Joisey got me. She also tagged a lot of my usual suspects, but I managed to come up with 8 folks you might enjoy looking in on. It was a little harder coming up with 8 "facts." (Why 8 ?)
First the rules:
Post these rules before you give your facts.
List 8 random facts about yourself.
At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.
My eight facts:
1. Life has been good to me. I have enjoyed each and every stage, but I am just loving being a grandpa!
2. Latin was my first "second" language.
3. I’m going to learn bluegrass banjo one of these days.
4. I have coached soccer, basketball, track, football, and hockey (drove the Zamboni mostly).
5. The first new car I ever bought was a Gremlin. Should never have sold that Beetle!
6. While running the scoreboard for Chicago’s indoor pro soccer team, I dropped my pen just as the second half was about to start. I ducked down under the control panel to retrieve it and when I popped back up the game had started without me and the clock. The ref had to start the half all over again - on ESPN!
7. When people ask me if I golf, I tell them I’m a defensive specialist.
8. My fantasy job was to play pro basketball in Spain and work on a degree in linguistics. While studying in Spain, a "connected" fellow was going to get me a try out with the Real Madrid basketball team because he and his buddies were disappointed that their American big man was fading. Never got the try out and as it turned out "their American" eventually became a Spanish citizen, played and coached for Spain’s national team, and is generally still a legend in European pro basketball. I did get that M.A. in linguistics, in Illinois.
So now I’m tagging
Ken Wiseman
Howard and Dave Shepherd
Paviter Singh (in Singapore!)
Bernajean Porter
Sarah Lieberman Weisz
Gary Stager
Lori Twiss
The Louisiana DEN (Brad Fountain?)
Got to spend a couple of hours sharing my “Makin’ Movies” take on digital storytelling with the Illinois Golden Apple Teachers digital storytelling workshop at the University of Chicago Lab School yesterday and I think I missed a golden opportunity. One of the facilitators was Syd Lieberman, a noted storyteller. He was hard at work assisting people with their narratives when I came in and set up. And he was just as busy helping folks as I was packing up to leave and the teachers were breaking for lunch. I did find some stories at his website and on iTunes. You might want to give him a listen.
Back to the workshop and regrets aside, I did enjoy getting to know the Golden Apple program a little better. I’ve watched the honorees’ ceremony every year on the local PBS station and been delighted to see good, dedicated and creative teachers recognized. I also met a lady who was from my old south side Chicago parish and was working on a story about a little nun who terrified us all (God bless her soul!) What great memories recalling lining up without a sound for everything and moving two by two to our assigned destinations. Though we were a few years apart, all it took was the mention of a couple of infamous trouble makers’ names to bring us both back to the “blacktop,” the “wall,” and the park that defined the property and our world for eight grades.
The workshop is also connected to the Teaching Excellence Network and you might enjoy exploring some of the digital storytelling resources listed in their July 30th blog post.
Or did my wife say institutionalize me?
I’ve traded the warmth of the Bahamian Atlantic for the cool marine layer of northern California’s Pacific. I’m in Monterey, CA at the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute (we used to call it “Apple Camp” but some ADE’s university administrators wouldn’t approve funds for such frivolity). This is my fourth institute of the summer (two more to go) and the only one that I’m an attendee at and not a facilitator for. It’s back to the future for me as I’m sharing a college dorm suite with five other ADE’s and we’re in the midst of decorating our room door for this evening’s contest.
I’d like to claim that our door tells a story, but other than the six of us getting to know each other and dusting off some of those arts and crafts skills, we’ve just been enjoying our “creative” time together and the other rooms’ doors. The rest of the week will be pretty busy as we have a full schedule of presentations, workshops, off-site visits, and final team projects to share. So I’d better sign off here before the R.A. comes around…
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