Our friend, Rodney, has sent forth his two movies — Letter L and Letter V — and both are very powerful in their storytelling and vision. Both have a very personal emotional center that draws the viewer in.

Letter L

Letter V

I continue to be amazed at the work being done with the ABC movies.

– Kevin

The videos are starting to come in!

First up is Bud’s moving tribute to nurses with his Letter N:

Next, is Scott’s Letter G and I won’t even begin to go into the hoops he has had to go through to get this up and running (do we really need sound?). But I think it is worth it, as his movie gives a real sense of place:

And I did a quick Letter C this week to show how my sixth graders and their second grade cooperative group members are making some claymation creations. We start filming our mini-movies next week (cross your fingers):

I am working on the Master ABC Webpage, too, and will update later this weekend.

It is very interesting how very different our three movies are, and how varied the emotional centers are, and yet they tell very succinct stories, I think. Keep up the creative work!!

– Kevin

Scott had a heck of a time moving his movie out of Mac in a format for sharing with our ABC project, but here it is and he wonderfully captures the childhood fascination (speaking as another father of three little boys) with robotic things.

Here is what he wrote as a reflection:

It looks as though I am finally successful. Let me share my tour of the tools to get to my destination.

I used iMovie to assimilate the pictures. I then shared it to Garageband to add and edit the audio. My next step was to share it to iTunes as a Movie. This is where things started getting tough for me. It shared as an MOV file. Not a problem other than I had no control over quality or video size (which was set to the highest levels) so each video was several hundred MB. I needed to convert it to 640×480 to lessen the size. I didn’t want to buy QuickTime Pro just for that (retrospect it would have been easier).

I then decided to share from Garageband as a video podcast instead. The file size was much smaller (about 14 and 25 MB). Unfortunately, the file type was m4v instead of mp4. Not sure why iTunes does that. Anyway, I could not find shareware/freeware software to convert m4v to anything. I even tried the online sources like Zamzar and one other I cannot remember the name of. Neither liked m4v (thanks again Apple). Google, TeacherTube, and Jumpcut gave me nothing but trouble trying to upload these since it is not a preferred file type for them. TeacherTube outright kicked it back while the other two acted like it was loading and never did. Jumpcut finally (after two days solid) accepted them.

I decided I had to go back to the PC for some tools I was familiar with. I used my Gig flash drive to move the large MOV files over to my PC. I used Kate’s Video Converter (free download from download.com), adjusted the QuickTime file type conversion settings to MP4 file conversion with a 640×480 size, and got busy converting. That worked like a charm. Since these file types are much larger than m4v video podcasts (43 MB and 84 MB compared to 14 and 25 MB), I chose to install Google Video Uploader (free from Google Video site for Mac or PC) so I can monitor the upload and see where the problems might be occurring.

Low and behold, no more trouble. It still took awhile to upload even on T1, but they are finally there. So, I am now finished with this portion of the project. My two videos, G and R, are loaded on Google Video with the tags ABC2007 and are also loaded to Jumpcut as well as added to the collaborative group there.

– Kevin

Gail has finished her wonderful letters P and E and they are wonderful on many levels, but mostly because P pulls at the heart strings so tenderly and E invokes the spirit of someone who wanted to make change through community service.

Here is Letter P:

Here is Letter E:

– Kevin

Here is my letter Z movie:

Z is for Zeitgeist.
So often we live only in the moment
and fail to see the realm of possibilities
until they have shuttled on past us
and we are left with the trailing shadows of what might have been
or could have been
or at least, seemed likely at some juncture before the hesitation.
Yet, perhaps, if we were to reach out to explore this terrain together
then our imagination might emerge as community,
a hive of interaction and learning.
Perhaps something new might unfold from this moment
when our fingers wrap around the features of these times in such as way
that we are guided forward instead of retreating back
into the comfortable tradition of how things have always been, forever and ever.
This compositional entry into the unknown is a strange pathway
that moves between the heart and the mind and the eye,
image under sound, stories told from some center inside of us
and then shared as a common experience on the vast digital page.
Your story becomes mine, and mine yours, and the sequence of how it is told
is how we traverses amidst the phonetic sounds of our shared tongue,
from the comfort of A to Z, and everything in between,
to the micro-films of narrative.
There exists a space for our stories here in this place where space does not exist,
and like little wooden blocks with symbols carved upon them,
we are balanced upon each other and dependent upon the whole.
The moment is now and the movement is us.
Z is for Zeitgeist.

Reflection: I joked that I didn’t know what to do with Z but even when I realized that I was going to be stuck with it, I had an inkling in the back of my mind. I wanted to capture the spirit of this experiment and zeitgeist seemed to be the perfect term. But how in the world do you visually represent that? And what do you say? I decided to go at it from two different angles. Instead of a story narrative, I wrote a poem in which I sought to go below the surface of what we are doing. Instead of photographs, I decided to use an online site that visually maps out words and the relationship among terms, definitions and meanings. I thought long about what words I would pick, and then how to sequence them. I am still not sure it works. It seems like it might get boring on the eyes (thank god for my time limit). I do hope it captures my thoughts about collaborating with others and moving forward in a new direction.

– Kevin

Jeff has just finished and posted his movie based on the Letter F and it rocks! (reference to the topic of his movie). He has also posted it to our Jumpcut site and Bonnie and I are hoping to get some more of the ABC movies into the mix in the next week or so.

Meanwhile, feel free to leave a comment here for Jeff — teacher by day, rock and roller by night.

– Kevin

I am hoping that everyone is slowly making progress on their ABC mini-movies (fingers crossed) and so I have been thinking about an introductory clip into the eventual full movie on Jumpcut. I created this short video, in which I used the children’s ABC picture book Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom by Bill Martin Jr. as the basis for a poem called Flicka Flicka Zoom Zoom, and then went over to the comic-creating site called ToonDoo to create strips of a story, with balloon dialogue boxes, which I then voice-narrated through PhotoStory. Phew.
But does it work? I need some feedback, please.

Here are the words to the story:

Flicka, Flicka, Zoom, Zoom
(with humble apologies to Bill Martin Jr., writer of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom)

A told B

and B told C

“What kind of story will you share with me?”

D, E, F and tag-along G

They all jumped up into the video tree

and asked with excitement about H and I

who brought along footage that captures their lives

And J whispered to K, and K to L and M

that there is no beginning here, and no middle, and no end

Just one long story, to be mashed up into a show

But there is an N sitting with its best friend O

and P, and Q, and R all share in the glory.

Little bits of pieces of photos, voice and story

all brought together by the collective mind

Where S is something special and T is something fine,

And U remains safe and sound, waiting on the ground,

and standing right in between is courageous letter V,

while into the screen steps their friends: W, X, Y, and Z.

Flicka, Flicka, Zoom, Zoom, what will be created?

Something new, something strange, something integrated

with all the worlds of the Web and tapping our experiences;

We find our way into this room, regardless of our differences,

to share tale, to lend an ear, to write from within our heart,

and piece us back together as a place from which we start

to understand, to comprehend, to move beyond the text

and think about the way we think, and what can happen next.

A told B

and B told C

“What kind of story will you share with me?”

– Kevin

I am trying out VoiceThread and created a short piece about our ABC Project.

Edublogs won’t allow me to embed the project as a slideshow directly in a post, which is too bad (I tried the route told to Bonnie from VoiceThread folks), but I know that Edublogs people are wary of opening the doors to too many sites.

You can venture off to my VoiceThread Story and view/listen to what what I created there in just a couple of minutes. Please leave a comment or a voice narrative of your own, and add to my story (such as it is).

Kevin

As I create video for our collaborative project, I intend to share here, too. This is my Letter M Movie:

Here is my script:

M is for Music. I can’t ever remember a time when there wasn’t music in my life. My father was an accountant by day and drummer by night – working with dance bands on the weekends and teaching students in the weekday afternoons — and whenever he was home, the stereo was almost certainly on and the volume, up. The sounds of Weather Report, the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan and Art Blakey form the soundtrack of my childhood. I never took to the drums like my dad. I never had the dexterity. Instead, I gravitated to the saxophone, and except for an unexplained 10-year gap where my sax cases remained in a closet, I have been playing my instrument for the past 30 years. Yet my interests in music go far beyond the horn. I have composed music for our church and heard my notes sung by an entire choir and booming pipe organ. I have written more than 200 songs on my acoustic guitar, some of which never leave my guitar case but others which take on a life of their own in the hands of the rock band I might be in at that particular time. Through music, I have explored myself. Through song, I have entered the inner terrain of me and I have come out the other end with something unexplainable but powerful – music. There is an intangible quality to what the colors of music mean to me. I can sense what it is, yet I can’t quite explain it. The songs will have to speak for themselves. M is for Music.

Here is my reflection:

My dad has always been a strong influence on me so using the letter M to represent music seemed like a no-brainer. But what did I want to say? I wanted to move beyond just recognizing his impact on me and move more into what music means to me. The script came easy enough. The most difficult thing was trying to find the pictures that I knew I wanted to use early in the piece, with my dad on the drums on the background and me in the foreground. They were pre-digital camera, so after I found them, I thought about how to get them into my computer. I ended up just taking a picture of a picture — not the best method but the quickest one I had on hand. Once I had the photos in place, the rest came together easily enough.

Peace,
Kevin

Bonnie and I are co-hosting this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers program at EdTech Talk tomorrow night (Wednesday, 4/4) and we invite you to venture over to the Skypecast/chatroom. Here is the blurb about our show:

Teachers Teaching Teachers: Using Technology to Tell Stories

The concept of digital storytelling has been around for some time as people began to envision the impact that the visual and oral elements could have on the traditional writing process. Video documentaries, radio reflections and other experiments have blossomed with the Web 2.0 world. There are many publishing sources and many means of expression. But what does it all mean? How can the interactive web be tapped into to bring storytelling and composition to an even deeper level of meaning for the writer and for the audience?

Join guest host Kevin Hodgson, who is the technology liaison of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, this week on Teachers Teaching Teachers as he seeks to explore some of these questions. Kevin is a sixth grade teacher who has students create digital picture books (last year’s theme — math, and this year’s theme — science) and stop-motion claymation projects (in which his sixth graders collaborate with second graders). He has been exploring the intersection of the world of digital storytelling and the Web 2.0 frontier in recent months with NWP Colleague Bonnie Kaplan through a community Weblog and a new collaborative ABC movie project that features more than a dozen teachers throughout the country who are contributing video segments to a larger collaborative project that uses online tools to plan, produce and distribute a digital story.

The program will try to showcase some different aspects of storytelling and technology, brainstorm some ways that people can get started, and consider what the future holds for telling stories in a digital environment.

Our guests will include Tonya Witherspoon, who has run a claymation movie camp for kids; Gail Desler, who is part of the ABC Movie Project and a deep thinker on the pedagogy underlying the use of technology in the classroom; and others.

Please join us for the conversation this Wednesday evening on EdTechTalk.com (6pm PDT / 9pm EDT / 1am GMT (global times).

Bye,

Kevin