Digital Storytelling Example

After my last post on Digital Storytelling, I decided to share with you a sample video I created at my Center for Digital Storytelling workshop. It is a short video with the script limited to 150 words.  I use Final Cut Express to create the movie and the soundtrack music is provided by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com/ under a creative commons license. As I mentioned in my previous post, digital stories are a perfect way to share or discuss a personal story.  I hope you enjoy.

Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is something unique to the individual.  I came across digital storytelling being used in the education field about 4 or 5 years ago. From my first experiences with digital storytelling I knew it could be a medium for students to really get excited about the writing process and learn some technology skills along the way. At the time I was a sixth grade special education resource teacher and worked with a co-teacher to develop a series of projects surrounding digital storytelling and the skills needed to produce a quality movie. Along the way I went to a three day training workshop on Digital storytelling organized by the Center for Digital Storytelling.  Their website has some great examples of digital stories produced by attendees of their workshops.

The first movie covers many things but gets the students to start thinking of how different components of a movie come together and how essential planning each part truly is to the final product.  Our first project asks the students to complete a one minute video using digital still images and music to describe an emotion.  I cover the basics of how to use a camera and upload pictures but extend their knowledge to copyright laws and fair use.  Teaching them how to create a movie starts with storyboards and moves into the collaboration of iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie. This past year we spent many class sessions on copyright and fairuse because more and more students are entering a digital world where issues related to copyright come into play.  We have also added the idea of Creative Commons to equation. (The links embedded in this description contain some resources we have used.) We gave the students five hours of production time to complete their project. Which for many students was not enough time and they barely finished. Who would have ever thought it would take five hours to complete a one minute movie? That question was heard over and over and no one could quite answer it.

Project two builds on the skills of project one but adding the component of narration.  The last two years project two has asked the students to narrate a poem either written by themselves or another person. We also give the students the option to use royalty free music or to create their own music using GarageBand. Students additionally have the option of taking digital still images or drawing and scanning pictures. Storyboarding is crucial during this process because the images that appear on the screen have to match what each student is saying in the poem. The students' creativity really begin to take flight during this project.

The third part of the digital storytelling project is the creation of a newscast with students writing their scripts in response to the questions, “What makes our school special? What can make it even better?”   The students build upon their skills to include editing digital video using iLife software. Students use conventional news broadcasts as a model. They work collaboratively in small heterogeneous groups, determined by us to ensure a balance of skills and to maximize individual student’s strengths.  The groups are organized around the themes of traffic and weather, sports, technology, business and community events. To produce their newscasts, the students first have to write their scripts. They schedule and conduct interviews with faculty members to enhance their news segments. Interview questions were formulated by the group and interviews are conducted by “reporters” and videotaped by “camera people”.  Upon completion of the interviews, students used the technique of “Claim – Evidence – Interpretation” to effectively integrate video clips of taped interviews into their news segments. The reporters make a claim about their topic, support their claim with evidence from the adults in their interviews, and then interpret the information for their viewers. In some groups, the students have to critically view up to fifteen minutes of taped interviews to glean the most relevant bits of information to serve as evidence to support the claims they were making as reporters. Each completed news piece was limited to two minutes in length and was analogous to a paragraph in a narrative piece of writing. Students audition to be the co-anchors whose script acts as the introduction and conclusion to the essay and the transitions between pieces.

The final activity of the digital storytelling project is a two to three minute video following the directive, “Share Your Story” This is modeled on the videos produced by the Mabry Middle School, Mabry, Georgia, Annual Film Festival that was one of the original inspirations for this digital storytelling project.  The purpose of the videos is to share with the audience something that is of personal significance to the filmmaker(s). Because the digital stories are short, usually two minutes in length, the students must be able to construct a concise story, which can still effectively convey its intended point and spur others to act in a positive way.  The images must enhance the storyline and help to show, rather than tell, the story. As a culminating activity for the digital storytelling project, the students  plan a “film festival” to share their videos with their families. At this final showing, the students  have an opportunity to show all four projects and to explain the processes they followed to create their videos. 

Aligning a Galaxy

After syncing mulitple computers using Liquid Galaxy and Google Earth, I attempted to add another row and tile a set of projectors to see if I could possibly expand our projection of earth.  Unfortunately some of my calculations were off and my abitious plan to use six computers and six projectors became too overwhelming for me.  Thankfully some of my coworkers help me hooking up the projectors, that was more of a challenge than expected. The first attempt came out looking like a jumbled mess of images. 

The bottom row, after some tweaking, I was able to get pretty well lined up. The top row proved to be more of a challenge and due to some time constraints I tossed in the towel for that day. Before giving up completely though I took some video using my iPhone of three computers and three projectors alomost lined up. There are more changes to make to keystones and yaw, pitch, and roll.

As I was working on this little project I had a few students watching me set up and they wanted to play with the flight simulator, of course I let them.

This project is far from over but the potential was clearly seen by my colleagues and myself as I was setting the projection system up.  Now its back to the drawing board to figure how to get all the calculations right.

My Dog Daisy

This past Sunday we celebrated the one year adoption of our dog Daisy. This past year was full of joy, surprises, and various costs I didn't know a dog could incur. Daisy warmed our hearts the first time we saw her on petfinder.com. She was at a local shelter who had rescued her from an abusive home. She had already suffered through many hardships and surgeries by the time we had adopted her at young age of six months. Daisy's loving personality never will let you know what she has been through in her short life.  All she asks for is love, a chew toy, and of course a place to swim.

Now I know you must be asking yourself, why am I writing about my dog and not something Apple related? Well here it is, the act of looking over this past year was made easier by some Apple products. Much to my surprise iPhoto '11's face recognition can actually pick out a dog's face with some accuracy.  Now it is always a good laugh to see what or rather who iPhoto picks out as Daisy but more and more it continues to find Daisy's face in our pictures. Though the tricks of iPhoto are not what I really wanted to write about here.  Recently Apple updated it's iLife suite and added some great enhancements to iMovie.  The new added feature that I really enjoy is the movie trailer templates.  The templates range from a variety of movie genre such as Action, Sci-fi, and Romance. The best part is the trailers included professional orchestra soundtrack to perfectly fit the genre. Within 20 minutes of opening the templates you can have a professionally scored movie trailer that rivals some independent films. 

The one frustrating part of the templates for me was the limitations I had in creating my trailer.  Each clip is a predetermined length and the soundtrack is also preselected.  Now I find this frustrating but only due to the fact that I still regularly use Final Cut and the old iMovie HD.  The latest version of iMovie has given more control in the editing of clips, I still miss some of the features I had in iMovie HD.  With that being said, the latest versions of iMovie do offer many opportunites to individuals who don't want to spend much time editing video footage, but still produce a high quality movie. iMovie '11 offers easy sharing to various social media sites and also to your devices such as an iPod or iPad. This latest update to the iLife software continues to provide easy ways for novices to create stellar audio-visual works with intuitive designs and controls.


Now without further ado, our dog Daisy starring in her first movie trailer.

Liquid Galaxy

During my usually ramblings through the internet a few weeks ago I stumbled across Liquid Galaxy.  Liquid Galaxy is a project developed by a few Google engineers that enables Google Earth to be sync'd with multiple computers. After finding a quick start guide, I was off to figure out how I could get my Mac to talk nicely with another one (or six) to create a panoramic Google Earth tour for my students.  The quick start guide found here, was easy enough to follow and within minutes I had two Macs talking wtih each other.

Seeing the earth spin across two screens was fun, but getting the earth to spin across three was even better.

Liquid (mini) Galaxy

Over the last few days I was able to figure out, with some help, how to add a second row of monitors to the image. Learning about pitch, roll, and yaw were not on my to do list but were interesting none the less.  I plan on using projectors and three portable projection screens to create an environment where the student will be completely immersed in the Google Earth Landscape. Using tours created by Google Lit trips and myself, the students will experience a book as a traveling member of the book exploring with the characters as we read. I am starting off with a target audience of students in Kindergarten to Second grade range and perhaps expanding to older students.

Depending on how that works, the sky, moon or Mars might be the limit with Google Earth. Iwill post more pictures once the projectors are setup and running.

Here are some videos of Liquid Galaxy. My bet is elementary kids would love to see the aquarium!