Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

I love NFL Films. They can make the most boring, insignificant game seem like an epic battle. With great cinematography, authoratative voice overs (Gene Hackman, Alec Baldwin, Lawrence Fishborne, to name a few) using well crafted scripts and adding the perfect sound track, to me it’s storytelling at its best. Even if you’re not a football fan, you have to marvel at the mastery of their form.

Recently the produced America’s Game, chronicling the past 40 Super Bowl Champions. I didn’t miss one episode. Yes, I’m a huge football fan but when you look at the craft of storytelling, it just doesn’t get any better. I love the emotion of the individuals recalling events that happened years ago. In many ways the elements of these stories are quite reproducible. No fancy graphics or effects. Just a great story. I guess winning 92 Emmy’s should tell you something about quality.

If you’re a football fan but do not get the NFL Network, you might have missed this. I’d suggest buying the DVDs or buying them off itunes for $1.99 an episode. If nothing else, kids need to see examples like this to see what digital stories can be.

[tags]digitalstories,NFL,AmericasGame,NFLfilms[/tags]

This from David Jakes touting the beauty and power of Doritos latest campaign of using user-generated video for their SuperBowl commercial. This video is one of five finalists and it cost $12.79 and none of the creators was over 22 years old.

I’m sure we’ll see more and more of a trend towards validating user generated content. We’ve already seen this with blogging and journalism; this is a natural progression.

It also tells me that people are learning this stuff on their own. The tools used to be the hard part. Now the focus is on content and in a flat world everyone’s got a shot at success.

You can watch all five finalists here…you can also find them on youtube and probably a jillion other sites as well.

I uploaded my Extreme Makeover Video to Revver to compare. I think the quality is better but you be the judge.

Here’s a condensed version of a presentation that I’ve done on using PowerPoint effectively. I recorded it using Camtasia studio. I’ve been exploring it lately both as a pure screencasting tool with only audio but here as a presentation tool with Picture in Picture. Not sure what is most effective but you can decide for yourself. So if you have a free 20 minutes….(again, reading this in your reader won’t likley display the video)

Note: I have a director’s account in youtube which allows me to upload videos longer than 10 minutes.

[tags]powerpoint,makeover,digitalstories,digitalstorytelling,camtasia,screencast,youtube[/tags]

Ewan posted this and it provides a powerful message. I’d never heard of Bebo before but it would seem to fit into the myspace/social network sites of the internet. The video tries to look at what really happens in a social network. The good and bad are portrayed here. I think it really opens ups some great opportunities to discuss the implications of social networking with students. Even if you’re not fully aware of social networks, why not engage your students in this discussion. You’ll learn a great deal from them.
[gv data="ueRqGzwMjEI"][/gv]
PS. If you’re teaching somewhere where youtube is blocked, there are ways to download youtube videos to reuse.

Here’s one method:
STEP 1:
*Getting an FLV player/encoder.
http://www.rivavx.com/

STEP 2:
*Saving the FLV file.
http://www.keepvid.com/
*If you use Mozilla/Firefox, this plugin will help you bypass a lot of this step.
STEP 3:
*Playing the FLV file.

STEP 4:
*Converting the FLV file into something else.

I created a little story about geocaching using BubbleShare. BubbleShare is an essential in digital storytelling. I’ve used it before and also RockYou but the features in Bubbleshare make it #1 in photo stories online.

Start a class discussion with this video.

Campaign for Real Beauty

Recently I’ve tried to stop using the “integrating technology” term and simply talk about using it. Jeff over at The Thinking Stick provides a really nice example of this in his latest post, Technology: it’s what we do, not one more thing to do.

We need to get past the point that we need to understand how the technology works. We don’t! We just need to understand how it can be used in our classroom to enhance learning. The students will figure out the ‘how to’ part on their own. They live in this world, they are good at troubleshooting problems and finding solutions.

I’m sure I’ve said these exact words at least 3 times in the last month. Take an inventory of your classroom skills and interests and start using and building on the knowledge and expertise you already have access to.

On Wednesday, I’m spending the day working with 2 classes wanting to use video editing. Normally this would be a very easy day to plan for. However they are using software I’ve never used. I worked on a project today as a test and ended up using the help section for practically every task. I’m not planning on doing a whole lot more in preparing to use the software. The kids can figure it out themselves. I will spend the day talking and demonstrating the importance of storyboarding, planning and review the elements of storytelling. That’s what they need to know. Technology is the easy part. Learning is the hard part.

technorati tags:jeffscofer, technology