The Competitive Voice

Photostory Help Desk-Use at Your Own Risk!

2007-04-14T17:49:00.001-05:00

With the publication of my tutorials and screencasts on Photostory 3 (both are available here), I've been receiving email requests for tech support on Photostory from literally around the world. It's been flattering certainly, and I really don't mind, but I'm pretty busy, so if I don't respond right away, that's why. If you have questions, and you would like me to take a look at your problem, email me at dsjakes@gmail.com. This certainly illustrates how connected we have all become.

Include:
Describe your problem as much as possible
Include any kind of error message
Include how many images you have used to build your story.

And just as a tip for two common problems:
Image names: no punctuation! Work with kids on properly saving files with correct nomenclature. Avoid spaces in file names (use underscores) and special characters.

Also, its a free program, and if you are building files with 200 images (and large ones at that), buy yourself a program capable of doing a video with that many images.

For the Flickr users out there, if you try and save a file that has All Rights Reserved, and no All Sizes button, and you download it, you'll get a file called Spaceball. Put that into a Photostory file and it's instant death.

Again, I'm willing, but it might take some several days to respond. I might be crazy offering this, but there is nothing worse than wanting to do something with technology, and having it go wrong, and not having access to some type of support...

Communicating Visually in the 21st Century

2007-01-24T21:00:00.001-06:00

I’ve seen quite a few posts coming through my aggregator lately about video, and the potential of this medium on many different levels. That, coupled with my interest in digital storytelling, prompted me to create a series of belief statements about communicating visually in the 21st Century.

There is a biological basis for visual communication.
The auditory nerve transmits sound to the brain and is composed of about 30,000 fibers. Contrast that with the optic nerve which sends visual signals to the brain through 1 million fibers (Burmark 2002). Basically, you’ve got a dial-up connection from the ear to the brain and broadband from the eye to the brain. Teach kids to take advantage of the connectivity, and then teach them that…

Emotion, depicted through visual means, sells the message.
Students must learn how to convey meaning emotionally. That’s why digital storytelling, when done right, can be such a powerful learning experience. Anyone that has recently seen 4 Generations: The Water Buffalo Movie can attest to that. How many of you wanted to pony up $250 after viewing that? And take the recent video obituary (called the Final Word) of Art Buchwald at the New York Times where he says “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died” and they go on to tell his life story. Bizarre, yet powerful because of the emotion. Then teach them that…

The most powerful producer of visual imagery is the individual, it's you.
Digital cameras, cell phone cameras, citizen journalism, photos of the London subway bombings, of Saddam Hussein’s execution, of the sinking of the container ship MSC Napoli and 368,533,947 million photos at Flickr attest to the capability and absolute raw power of the individual to produce visual material and bring the world home. But simply producing this is not enough, because…

Individuals must be capable of working in multiple mediums to create visual messages, in accordance with the principals of visual literacy. They have do something with that visual imagery and it has to be done the right way. Create. Remix. Mashup. Post to YouTube. Or use online content creation systems like JumpCut or Mogopop to create or distribute visual messages. Why is this necessary? Because….

Visuals, when combined with other multimedia, provide individuals with a competitive voice. One that can be heard. One that can be measured. One that says “here I am, and here’s what I think, here is what I have to contribute. Now what do you think?” Check out the three guys who did the AP Psychology Report on YouTube (via Will Richardson). How many teachers would be comfortable with this kind of product? And what would you give these kids as a grade? And producing videos like this becomes even more powerful, because…

Networks for sharing and collaboration extend that voice. When one says something, all have the potential to hear. It’s about amplification. Make it go viral. Look at this video (one of my favorites), Where the Hell is Matt?. It’s 3:42 minutes of uplifting dancing by one guy, all over the world, and its been viewed 395,736 times. Could our students have that type of impact? So..the upshot?

Being visually literate is just as important as reading and writing and should be considered a fundamental literacy of a 21st Century education.

Would you add or change anything?”

Burmark, Lynell. Visual Literacy: Learn to See. See to Learn. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2002.

Posted also at the TechLearning.com blog

Photostory 3 Screencasts

2006-12-09T12:11:00.000-06:00

I've finally finished the 11 screencasts for each step of the digital storytelling process when using Photostory 3. The screencasts are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Where the &%$%# is Matt?

2006-08-02T16:32:00.000-05:00

From Presentation Zen, is the video from Where the Hell is Matt? which is a very interesting digital story, although it contains no voice-over. I'm not sure why I like it, and what it all means, but it is strangely uplifting. What it does do is make a very nice use of imagery which is coupled with a very nice musical choice. Everytime I watch it I see something new; I also find myself somewhat envious of all the places he has been.

I'll probably include this in my digital storytelling presentations and ask participants about the ability of visuals to convey emotion.

There are some additional movies at the YouTube site that are parodies which are worth a look, but what I think is more important is the format displayed in the story. I'd like to see kids give this a try-with a different name of course!

Be sure to check out the look the first dog in Germany gives him....

Flickr Searching

2006-06-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-06T21:51:00.000-05:00

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:

DST Fundamental 1: Visual messages are extremely powerful. Humans are hardwired for visuals-the optic nerve is a T1, the auditory nerve dial-up.
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.
DST Fundamental 3: Great digital stories have their genesis in high-quality writing.
DST Fundamental 4: Digital stories are personal and give students a competitive voice in a mediacentric, information-rich environment.
DST Fundamental 5: Digital storytelling is a value-added learning experience, and takes writing to a place it couldn't go alone.
DST Fundamental 6: Kids have stories. Important ones. How will you help them tell the stories of their lives?

Photostory 3 Screencast Tutorials

2006-06-01T21:44:00.000-05:00

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.

Jump Start your Digital Storytelling

2006-03-25T20:26:00.000-06:00

If you haven't seen the SITE digital storytelling blog, be sure to visit soon. There are a lot of great posts in addition to thoughtful comments which extend the value of the original posts.

FlickrLilli

2006-03-25T20:15:00.000-06:00

One of the advantages of using Flickr for digital storytelling projects is the ability to search by Creative Commons licensing so that students can learn about intellectual property rights. Of course, you can always use the Creative Commons search in Flickr, but you might consider FlickrLilli. With this tool, you can select multiple Creative Commons pools and perform simultaneous searches, which can be an advantage.

The Flickr Song

2006-03-25T20:12:00.000-06:00

If you haven't seen Jonathan Coulton's Flickr Song, check it out. Be careful if you plan on showing this to kids, it does contain pictures of parties, etc. along with a reference towards the end of the movie that may be inappropriate for the classroom.

Digital Storytelling and Flickr: An Entry Level Project

2006-03-25T20:10:00.000-06:00

Anyone who reads my blog knows I'm a big fan of Flickr and of digital storytelling. I'd like to share a project that one of our health teachers, Mr. Ted Glazier is doing with his sophomore health students. Ted's work has been featured before in this blog, and in David Warlick's.

Before I talk about the project, let me examine two criticisms of a digital storytelling project like this that takes advantage of the Web's best collection of digital photography.

1. it takes too long, and I don't have the time
2. Flickr is inappropriate for use in schools

Well, if you are concerned about time, especially as it relates to meeting curricular standards that are associated with high-stakes testing, go on to the next entry in your aggregator. However, you actually might want to stick around, because I'll be talking about basically a four period digital storytelling project, where a period is a 50 minute class.

And if you can't use Flickr in your district or you don't think it's appropriate, then you might want to move on. But wait-maybe not. I'll be talking about a resource of images, selected by the teacher, which students select from.

Okay, here's the project. It's called: Putting a Face on Statistics

Ted teaches about addictions and he talks about escalating drug use, and that entry level drugs (alcohol, marijuana) can lead to even more serious addicitions.

The project began with kids doing some Flicktion. If you don't know about this, it's the intersection of Flickr images and fiction (see the Flicktion images I have selected on my Flickr page at JOL). People post a starter sentence in the comments window of a Flickr image, and others continue the story through the addition of more comments. We didn't do that, we simply showed this image (if you can't get it at school, be sure to look at home-it's heart-wrenching and one of the comments indicates that this person may have been a teacher) and had kids develop a story about the image. We did this to help them understand how to interpret a digital image to tell a story, a skill that will serve them well in the next part of the project. And we got great stuff.

So, the kids have researched these addictions previously as part of another assignment and have written a short paper on these. From this paper they will distill a 6-7 sentence script, and use about 10 images from the pool Ted has selected and that are delivered via a shared class folder on our network. The pool contains about 40 images-we decided not to wait for someone to develop an educational app for Flickr, we just did this simple thing ourselves. They then will use Photostory 3 (absolutely no open source for us, we just use Microsoft stuff-wait, would you consider Flickr to be open-source? If so, then we do.) to build a very simple digital story where they will include two slides of statistics, 10 images from the pool, onboard music from Photostory 3, and their voice that will tell the story of the addiction and the statitics, but now with a visual face. It will be interesting to see how the same images get used in different ways.

The kids will then, as homework, be required to engage in a metacognitive evaluation of why they selected the images that they did.

All images selected for the shared photo resource have come from the attribution pool of Flickr. Ted saved the images, and when he did, he added the name of the photographer (Flickr screen name) so the kids can include an attribution image in their project. By doing this, Ted can also teach them about intellectual property rights and creative commons licensing.

We'll also be able to share them.

Writing. More writing. Critical Thinking. Composition. Visual Literacy. Empowering Creativity. Understanding intellectual property rights. Learning new software, that can be downloaded and used for other projects and for personal use to encourage the development of individual voice, and in fact, a competitive voice.

An appropriate use of digital storytelling that addresses the time issue? Yes. A safe use of Flickr that takes advantage of high quality imagery? Yes. A project filled with essential skills-YES! (don't look now-how many of these skills transfer to standardized testing?)

Good teaching? Absolutely.

The Storytelling Process Continues

2005-07-01T15:36:00.000-05:00

I just finished a workshop at the DuPage Regional Office of Education in Lombard, and had an opportunity to work with a great group of people. Each one completed a digital story, although many had their doubts that they would finish on time. Almost to a person, they saw the power and potential of the digital storytelling process to give students a voice, to create a compelling product, and create a competitive voice. Many of the movies they produced dealt with loss, and with their colleagues from Mt. Vernon with whom I worked several weeks ago, all dealt with a very deep and personal story. That's the power. Emotion. And I think any time we work with kids in the affective domain, we can really tap into engagement, and any time we do that, we have a great potential to create a meaningful learning experience. Additionally, when you watch the digital stories they created, you hear the beautiful writing. As was obvious, the genesis of any exceptional digital story lies in high-quality writing, something we worked on for two days (and they worked at home even more). So that's how we justify (as if we really need to but we do) to those who are skeptical about the process having value (that statement is almost laughable to those who have worked with students and digital storytelling) in the days of standards-based education...

The week would not have been as big as success as it was without the significant contributions of a educator and man I stand in awe of everytime I see him work and tell stories. Matt Formato has taught English at Downers Grove North High School in Downers Grove, Illinois and led the participants through the narrative and script preparation. So, here's to master writer and master storyteller, Matt Formato!

Two new tools

2005-06-21T20:23:00.000-05:00

Here are two new tools that utilize digital imagery. While not closely associated with the process of digital storytelling, I like them alot.

The first is Flickr Album, another application of Flickr.com, and it makes use of either a members user name or a tag to create an online album. The album can display up to 100 images-the user then actually grabs the curled edge of the page and turns the page by flipping it with the mouse. Very cool. Try my username, DJ1.

The second is Woophy.com, which is another photosharing site but displays a world map of photos. Drag a square around a portion of the globe to enlarge that area and zoom in to see it in greater detail. Click on a square to see the image. Clicking on any of the images in the thumbnail column enlarges the image. I think this would be a great tool to use in a geography class...

Check out my photo of a staircase in New Orleans and Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Mt. Vernon 101

2005-06-13T14:49:00.000-05:00

Thanks for a great day! We enjoyed your collaborative nature and working with you today. You're exactly where you should be-struggling with finding your story. This is natural and typical of every group, and it will be true of your students as well. How will you help your students overcome this, especially if you do not teach writing? Remember that this step is critical-as you saw today, great stories have their genesis in great writing. But keep the faith-the hardest part is just about over!

Creative Commons and Storytelling

2005-06-02T18:54:00.000-05:00

One of the most important aspects of digital storytelling involves enlarging the boundaries of the audience to include everyone, and in a digital world that's not difficult at all. New sites are emerging all the time to make this a reality (check out digitalstories.org) , and will continue to gain importance as venues for students to have a voice.

A significant issue that stands in the way of sharing globally is copyright. Since the raw material of most digital storytelling projects are still-frame images, and most of these come from a variety of Web resources, repurposing those into a new story requires that students consider copyright issues, and how fair use applies to the use of those images in their personal story. In most cases, kids will build their project, not necessarily worry about copyright, and just keep the story for their personal use, locked away on a CD or network space for no one to see. That certainly defeats the purpose of one of the most valuable aspects of the process.

We certainly have access to music at freeplaymusic.com that can be used in projects without violation of copyright. But what about imagery? What I am proposing is a fresh look at new still frame imagery resources and this means Flickr (now a repository for over 17 million photographs, including my own), specifically the Creative Commons licensing that Flickr permits members to utilize to apply various levels of copyright protection to their photography. To facilitate this, Flickr has added a Creative Commons search on the Flickr site. Using the photography that has Attribution and Noncommercial licensing applied (this licensing would permit use withing a digital story-see the search page for more details on licensing), students would have access to about half a million images. This could go a long way towards utilizing digital resources properly, provide a teachable moment on copyright, and allow students to share their works online.

Anyone interested should proceed with caution. Flickr probably contains some inappropriate photography, although I believe there is some type of adult content label (I'm checking on this). But given imagery that can be found on Google, and the amount of inappropriate material that gets past filters, I'm not overly concerned...at least for high school students...but it still bears further research. So, when I get some time this summer, I'll produce several movies using Flickr imagery. Imagine using a collection of personal photos from multiple authors, and repurposing those to tell your own personal story...

Storytellers as Historians

2005-05-05T20:05:00.000-05:00

When I taught biology, people used to ask me how students learned science. My response was always: Students learn science by doing science. How can we use digital storytelling in that manner? One of the best teachers I know just completed a storytelling project with his students-the assignment was to tell the story of their parents as teenagers...what did they remember about their teenage years, what were the most significant "happenings" that they remember, and how did that time shape their lives. So, students learning history by doing history, by being historians, and recording their parents history. How cool. As can be expected, the projects were awesome, with some great 70's music as the soundtrack to the stories of their lives. Debriefing with the kids provided some interesting insights; they enjoyed talking with their parents (!!) and finding out that they weren't so different than they are now, they learned things they never new about their parents, and the parents, based on their emails to the teacher, really enjoyed explaining that aspect of their lives to their kids. Talk about connecting.

One project that was completely compelling done by a young man from Thailand. He had beautiful pictures of Thailand, beautiful Thai music and pictures of both his parents as teenagers, and the voice over was done in his native language. He put in subtitles, but being a kid, they were done in a difficult-to-read font with poor contrast. But they weren't necessary. His voice inflection, the music and the pictures told the story and communicated what he needed to. He started by telling the other students that he wanted them to see another perspective, he wanted to tell the story of people growing up in another country besides America. It was an amazing piece-the other kids loved it. In my previous post, I talked about learning vs accomplishment. How much did this kid learn; how much did he accomplish? Everyone in that class was mesmerized by that story and it was clear that he had accomplished his goal. The next student told of his father growing up in Columbia and I'm wondering as I'm watching how great this process and assignment is for understanding multiculturalism and appreciating differences and similarities in people that no standardized test will ever, ever measure. What a great learning experience for kids, and congrats Mike!

TechForum Chicago 2005

2005-04-30T12:23:00.000-05:00

Joe Brennan and I had a nice experience presenting to a group of about 45 people on digital storytelling at TechForum 2005. Most were beginners to the process which was good, several individuals had used storytelling in conjunction with student portfolio work. Unfortunately, we lost about 15 minutes of the presentation to the roundtables finishing late. One of the things we didn't get to was a thorough discussion of ways to enlarge the presentation to begin building a learning community centered on digital storytelling. Many of us are beginning (and some have known for a while now) about the power of community as a learning environment. I really like the way Ebay describes it as "the power of all of us."

Let me explain some of the resources available to not only the people at the presentation, but anyone who reads this blog. First, presentation resources for the TechForum presentation are available at Jakesonline.org, as well as a specific collection of digital storytelling resources.

Additionally, anyone who is interested can subscribe to my digital storytelling feed from del.icio.us. If you are not familiar with del.icio.us, it's a social bookmarking Web site. Get an account, add your favorite Web sites, organize them by tags, and syndicate the list by using the RSS feed that the site produces for your Web links. If you are not familiar with social software such as del.icio.us and Furl, as well as RSS and tags, please read my very simple article about these tools.

Finally, there is an opportunity to contribute to StoryWiki, a set of Web pages constructed by collaborative thought. I've created several pages for various topics; these pages are for public view and public edit. That means anyone can edit the pages...go to StoryWiki, click on a topic and start adding your content or editing someone elses. It's the Web at its finest, complete collaborative Web page construction through a simple type and submit interface. A sideline-I would challenge you to try StoryWiki and think of creative ways to use Wikis with students-add those comments to the section of JakesWiki that focuses on Wiki ideas. By the way, my Wiki is published through EditMe and costs $4.95 per month-all that capability for less than I pay for a lunch. Amazing. Also, if interested, you can get a free Wiki at SeedWiki.com.

The Power of All of Us. Think about it. In Steve Dembo's posts of today at Teach42 about TechForum, Steve talks about having a room full of creative, intelligent people, who are being lectured to and are sitting as passive learners, certainly not 21st Century learning. Perhaps we can begin taking a first step towards changing/adding to conference effectiveness by contributing additional resources that serve to extend the conference and connect people and ideas in a way that helps individuals actually practice and become comfortable with 21st century open source thinking and learning.

Accomplishment vs. Learning

2005-04-21T21:25:00.000-05:00

I am constantly challenged about the worth of digital storytelling as a learning process. That's okay-I should be able to supply a set of reasons that are educationally sound. Not a problem. We can begin by linking the process of digital storytelling, which I think is the most exciting educational technology process that I have ever seen (more on that later), to the skill set known as 21st Century Skills- the process satisfies about 80% of the standards. That's pretty good but that's for a later discussion.

What I would like to talk about in this blog entry is not what students learn, but what do they accomplish? I have had a students produce a number of wonderful stories and surprisingly, many are therapeutic in nature. I've had a student who never talked in class and was the type of kid not many other kids would approach, write about the true friends he found online, and how he didn't want to be the way he was, but that's who he was. What did he learn-probably a little about technology, probably some more about writing and you can probably make a strong argument that this student did not learn that much, but what he accomplished was amazing because I saw the reaction of his classmates when we showed the story. This kid would have never given this as an oral presentation, but the medium of digital storytelling enabled the kid to have a voice, to explain who and what he was to his peers, and I could see that they definately had a different perspective of who he was.

How about another student who has a disability that makes him a selective mute-and as a result has difficulty communicating (as would be expected). How much of a breakthrough is it for that kid just to record the voice-over component of the story? How much did the student learn? How much did the student accomplish?

What if a student had a baby brother who died and told a story of what it was like to have a brother for two days. And what if the student's other brothers were not alive when all this happened, and what if that student had an opportunity to make a digital story to introduce the deceased brother to her other two. How much did the student learn? How much did the student accomplish?

Could these students have accomplished the same thing in writing? Perhaps. But digital storytelling enlarges the boundries of who we touch, with whom we share, and with whom we impact. The potential audience is world-wide.

I have many more stories like this. Our kids have stories that need to be told. Digital storytelling allows them to do this. When we stop giving kids the opportunity to accomplish, rather than just learn, we have truly failed as educators.

The Competitive Voice

2005-04-18T19:42:00.000-05:00

Several years ago I saw David Warlick speak and I don't remember the topic, but David was talking about providing students with a competitive voice in a mediacentric world. So, I've borrowed his phrase (I don't think David would mind) to title my new blog about the process of digital storytelling. I've been using this technique with my teachers and students in my school district with very gratifying results-the process truly does give young adults a platform for discussing, composing, and sharing what they think. Much has been written recently about blogs and the ability of this medium for constructive thought-no one will argue with the sheer ability of a tool where people can be publishing for a potential global audience, all within about 5 minutes. But digital storytelling takes all that several steps further, with the message now composed of voice, video, imagery and music-way beyond just text and hyperlinks. The message becomes a blend of thought and music and imagery that can extraordinarily powerful. In my next post, I'll discuss what students actually accomplish-please note that I did not say learn...