This is an interesting site that uses digital storytelling for social change and provides some interesting examples.

Head to Stories for a Change.

– Kevin

Some of you may take part in the Day in a Sentence feature. This week, we tried to move into some new technology by using VoiceThread for our sentences.

So, here it is:

– Kevin

I’ve been tinkering with quickfiction (or flashfiction) and using the use of my podcasting voice as a way to edit my writing. I am literally writing, then reading out loud, then editing, then revising, then recording, as I go along — trying to be conscious of how my voice might influence my writing.

Bonnie suggested that perhaps there could be some marriage between the use of short fiction and some techniques of digital storytelling — i.e, writing quickfiction and then presenting in movie-form.

Here is my first attempt. I used my podcast from this short piece — called Remote – an used a Creative Common search engine called FlickrCC to grab some images that can be used with attribution. This was not easy, as the images brought something new and somewhat disjointed to the storytelling process. Perhaps more experimenting will help.

Anyway, here you go:

This comes following a workshop I attended (as a helping hand) at Bonnie’s site that used poetry and photostory3 to make a visual poem of sorts. I feverishly wrote a poem that day while others were also writing and then I felt the digital poem come together in my mind (I had to wait to get home to work on it because I was too busy helping others in the workshop).

I realize that I need a better way to list the credits for the photos I am using in these stories. Any ideas?

Kevin

Our Collaborative ABC Movie Project gets released to the K12 Online Conference today and Bonnie and I are thrilled, nervous and wondering how our presentations will be received. We mixed up our formats a bit by:

• First, Bonnie created a powerful overview movie of the reasons why we launched our ABC Movie project

• Second, I created a podcast of my own. Take a listen.
• Third, we put together a Webpage presentation that features the various tools that we used in the project, plus some nice podcast reflections by
  • Bud
  • Cynthia
  • Gail
• And finally, in that Webpage, there is a hands-on collaborative story project that uses the letters of the alphabet and VoiceThread (please join in!)

The presentation also marks the true public showing of the various movies that we created in Jumpcut along various themes (thanks to Bonnie) and so here they are for your viewing:

Passions

Family

Place Inspirations

School Days

Oddballs and Ends

Thanks for joining on this journey

Kevin and Bonnie

I am experimenting with embedding Jumpcut movies and if it works, here is our ABC movie pared down to just the introduction to our letters:

Let me know what you think and if you are part of this project, you are invited to remix or re-edit the movies in any way that strikes your creative streak.

Kevin

Bonnie and I are honored to be sharing your stories with the world via the K12 Online Conference and we are collaboratively working on a presentation of the ABC adventure that will show other people who to embark on the the kind of journey that we undertook and then we are going to have folks take part in a smaller scale ABC project using VoiceThread.

I just found out today that our ABC presentation will take place on Monday October 22, so we hope you check it out.

What? You say you need more info about the conference (which is completely online and involves downloading presentations, online chats and self-directed activities)?

Here you go:

• The K12 Online Conference Weblog
• The K12 Online Conference Schedule

More to come in the next few weeks, including my podcast presentation, Bonnie’s new video overview of the project and much more!

Kevin

Someone pointed me this way (actually, a few people have pointed me this way) to a site in which the creators of South Park have taken speeches and talks by Alan Watts and turned them into animation stories (without the swearing). The site is called Fresh Minds and features an Alan Watts theater.

This one movie I found very instructive — on the theme of Life as a Musical.

– Kevin

PS — Hey, I found the clip on YouTube:

Bonnie and I have been so impressed by the work of our group as a learning community delving into video production and collaboration that we decided to submit a proposal to the K12 Online Conference and we were chosen to lead (I notice some other NWP friends on the list, too).

The blurb from the site says:

This year’s fantastic line up of keynote presenters will create an inviting and welcoming introduction in which the sharing of ideas among diverse learners working in diverse contexts continues. These distinguished folks will not only extend the conversations, but also invite each of us to stretch and grow as they share their expertise and wisdom in their respective strands. We are delighted they have each agreed to accept their roles as keynote presenters.

This is very exciting news for us but also means:

• I better get going on making the big movie (gulp)
• We better figure out what in the world we are going to present
• And how to engage folks in a video creation process

No worries — Bonnie and I are a great team and we have all of you to fall back on (thus the importance of your reflective pieces) as a showcase project.

Here is the link for the K12 Online Conference Slate.

Adios

Kevin and Bonnie

(This is reprinted from my own blog because I think the software could be a good intro to storytelling with technology)

The other day, one of my sixth graders asked me if I had ever used Pivot for animation, which led to an interesting discussion about how this freeware software could be used with MovieMaker to create a little animated film.

So I figured I would try it out and now I am hoping to let my students try their hand before the school year runs out (soon!) and also to use this very simple, yet cool, software as an introduction to the Claymation Animation Camp that my wife and I are running this summer for the very first time (gulp).

Here, then, is the premiere of The Incredibly Crazy Clocks, using Pivot to create the animation (it comes out as an animated .gif file), then I imported the file into MovieMaker where I added some original music of mine, and a title, an I got a mini-movie.

// Peace (frame by frame by frame),
Kevin

Peter has sent forth this interesting examination of the world of Tolkien and how words and story have shaped his own experience. It brought back many memories for me, too, as I remember sitting as a very young teen, snuggled on my bed with Lord of the Rings, for hours on end. I await the day I can really begin to move back into the books with my sons (that day is coming soon, I can tell, and The Hobbit was great success).

Do you know what Oliphaunt is? Let Peter tell you:

His script:

“O” is for Oliphaunt.

The first mention of oliphaunt elicits a riddle in poetic form:

Grey as a mouse,
Big as a house,
Nose like a snake,
I make the earth shake,
As I tramp through the grass;
Trees crack as I pass.
With horns in my mouth
I walk in the South,
Flapping big ears.
Beyond count of years

The person who recites the riddle is Samwise Gamgee, a devoted, honest, working-class hobbit in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The verse comes to mind when the possibility arises of actually seeing an oliphaunt, a creature from the cryptozoology of middle earth. Sam’s child-like wonder at encountering the mystical creature, his open and artless approach to new experiences, always reminds me of the wonder I experienced when first I cracked Tolkien’s opus in 1973, when I was a fourth-grader.

Reading The Lord of the Rings became an annual ritual for me all the way through the 1990s; I still read it once every year or two. For the longest time, it was my Christmas vacation treat; I would anticipate the opportunity of having the free time to luxuriate in the world created by Professor Tolkien’s words. But occasionally, I would begin to read at odd times of the year, often because I wanted to relive the terrifying darkness of traveling through the deserted Mines of Moria. Even had I made a conscious attempt to leave behind Middle Earth, I doubt I could have found success. I had been–to borrow a term author Neil Gaiman uses to describe his own fascination with the fantastic–infected. Infected by the idea that an author’s words can change the ways that I think, the ways that I believe, the ways that I behave.

“Oliphaunt” is what’s known as a “nonce word,” a word that is not part of any existing language yet is easily recognizable by virtue of its phonic or semantic similarities to actual words. Cultural theorist Pierre Macherey once said that literary texts operate ideologically through a mechanism similar to the nonce word. Texts create fictional realities that bear enough semblance to our own reality, how ever far separated the two may be, that as readers we filter our interpretations of the real world through the fictions we consume.

When I read Tolkien’s work as a child, I mostly wanted the adventure. Frodo, the hobbit protagonist, seemed like the most interesting character since all of the action revolved around his possession of the magical One Ring. But as an adult, my attention has been drawn more to Aragorn, a human who, in the face of a desperately uncertain future, struggles to attain a destiny shaped by his heritage, fortitude, and personal desires. Collectively, the book’s reality and the characters who inhabit it have worked ideologically to shape my own understanding of the reality I inhabit.

“Oliphaunt” may simply be a nonce word standing in for our own tusked and trunked pachyderms, but we should remember that it is also a touchstone identifying ideological connections between fiction and reality.

“O” is for Oliphaunt.

– Kevin