My students are in the midst of creating digital picture books around a scientific theme. We are using Powerpoint in order to move beyond the flat page and include animation, audio and even video. The audience for the books are first through fourth graders and we will publish in a variety of formats. The kids are just loving it and are fully engaged in their projects!
As usual, as they work, so do I, and I have been writing and creating my own picture book story about decomposition (sound familiar? This is also a term that my friend Paul Oh has proposed for digital writing — haha!) As I move along, I have been sharing my process with students so they can see how I work.
Here is a video version of my book and it loses all of its animation in this version: Download: Posted by dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.
And here is a link to the actual Powerpoint file (click on the picture):
Cynthia just sent in her two movies (U and J) and both are incredible pieces of storytelling (I am no longer surprised by the quality of movies and stories being told, of course) about a musical instrument (ukelele) and settling a family score with humor (jacks). In this case, Cynthia ended up emailing me the movies after running into some upload problems and I did the uploading for her.
I just learned about this DVD magazine (which is a new emerging trend — I subscribe to a DVD magazine for short movies) called Aspect, which is designed to showcase MultiMedia Artists on a regular basis. This seems to be somewhat on track with our own exploration, although maybe slanted more towards fine arts than education.
Here is what they say:
ASPECT is a biannual DVD magazine of new media art. The mission of the publication is to distribute and archive works of time-based art. Each issue highlights artists working in new or experimental media, whose works are best documented in video or sound
PS — In a newspaper article about the magazine, there was a mention of an upcoming edition that is all non-English-language movies and I think this is an interesting twist to tech and storytelling.
A regular podcast in my Bloglines — The Podictionary — takes on the origins of the alphabet today and it seemed perfectly suited for our ABC project here.
Here is Charles Hodgson (no relation, but we have emailed each other) giving us a wonderful lesson about the alphabet: Listen to the podcast
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!!
Our friend, Chris S. of Utah, sent me this link of the band, Blackalicious, doing their own version of a hip-hop ABC movie. We need to bust some rhymes!
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.
I have used the site called Slideshare for uploading and sharing slide shows but I didn’t like that I couldn’t embed it here in my Edublog. But now we can.
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.
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.
