Flickr Searching

Flickr is a great repository for photographs that can be used in digital storytelling projects. I checked tonight and it currently has over 168 million photographs indexed (it was just over 100 million in March)! So, with that in mind, how do you find that proverbial "needle in a haystack?" Flickr has recently improved the search capabilities of the site in a major way by adding Boolean searching, phrase searching, including and excluding terms, as well as several methodologies for reorganizing search returns. The new search capabilities also apply to the Creative Commons pools, which is a decided advantage for storytelling projects. I've created a Flickr search page at Jakesonline that explains it all, as well as a pdf document that contains the same information for downloading.

The Fundamentals of Digital Storytelling

I'm working on a presentation that I will be giving at Texas Tech next week, as an introduction to digital storytelling workshop that I will be leading for three days. We'll go on from there to take participants through the entire process, where they will use iMovie to create their own digital story. With this intro presentation, I'll be setting the stage for the remaining three days. I've got examples of digital stories interjected throughout that illustrate my points, but here are the 6 fundamentals I'll be illustrating:

1. DST Fundamental 1: Visual messages are extremely powerful. Humans are hardwired for visuals-the optic nerve is a T1, the auditory nerve dial-up.
2. DST Fundamental 2: Digital stories have a universal theme such as loss, accomplishment, challenge overcome, etc. Because of this, every viewer can relate, it's not my story, but I've experienced that.
3. DST Fundamental 3: Great digital stories have their genesis in high-quality writing.
4. DST Fundamental 4: Digital stories are personal and give students a competitive voice in a mediacentric, information-rich environment.
5. DST Fundamental 5: Digital storytelling is a value-added learning experience, and takes writing to a place it couldn't go alone.
6. DST Fundamental 6: Kids have stories. Important ones. How will you help them tell the stories of their lives?

Photostory 3 Screencast Tutorials

Many of you have asked to use my Photostory 3 tutorial in your workshops on digital storytelling. I've taken the tutorial thing one step further, and have created screencast tutorials of the process of creating a digital story with Photostory 3.

The first four are present, with the remaining four to be finished soon. Additionally, the screencasts correspond with my original tutorial, so teachers can watch how to work the software, as well as have access to the printed document.

Here is what I have so far:

Tutorial 1: Beginning the Digital Storytelling process/adding your images
Tutorial 2: Removing black borders from imagery
Tutorial 3: Adding text to images
Tutorial 4: Adding your voice-overAccess the tutorials here.

Coming soon:

Tutorial 5: Customizing motion with pans and zooms
Tutorial 6: Adding transitions
Tutorial 7: Adding background music
Tutorial 8: Rendering your project

The screencasts are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivative license.Let me know how you like them.