Playing with Digital Storytelling

So I've been watching Ben Rimes' posts for DS106 go by and I keep thinking I should give that a try. I was inspired by the Return to the Silent Era assignment, so after watching a couple other people's submissions I figured I'd jump in. One of the things keeping from trying any ds106 assignment before was a lack of expensive software. Ben always uses high end programs like Adobe Premier and Photoshop that I don't have. How could I possibly do any of the cool stuff he does.

Well, I decided to see if I could do the whole thing using only my iPad. It also gave me an excuse to buy Avid Studio, an app I've been looking at since it came out. Apps I used:

• Avid Studio $4.99 - For video editing
• Blux Movie (free right now) - I shot the movie with Blux.
• PhotoShop Express and SketchBook Express (free) - To create the placards. I added the text in Avid Studio
• iSuper8 (free) - Final aging effects added.

The only real problem I encountered while doing this entirely on my iPad was the audio track. There seems to be no way to share audio files between most apps. So in the end I had to download music and then sync it to the iPad using iTunes.

My Workflow:

• I sat in front of my TV and recorded the screen using the Hitchcock filter in Blux Movie on my iPad. Seemed like the best way to get the clip I wanted, plus the potential for bad camera work added to the effect. Blux is pretty cool. It applies the filters while recording, no rendering time!
• I found a silent movie placard online and saved it to my camera roll. Note, I probably broke copyright here.
• I took a picture of the DVD menu (everyone has this on DVD, right?) into SketchBook Express and then traced the Skull. Not my best work, but I wanted to finish the whole project before the end of the movie.
• I took the traced skull into PhotoShop Elements and cropped it down.
• Then back into SketchBook Express to put it on the placard (I downloaded earlier) and saved the resulting image to the camera roll.
• Then into Avid Studio to edit the movie. I used screen credits to put text on the placards, but this limited me a bit. It would have been better to create each placard in SketchBook and then bring them in, but I was being lazy and I still hoped to get it done before the Prok-Chop Express rolled on.
• Downloaded some royalty free music from Incompetech by Kevin MacLeod on my computer and plugged my iPad in to sync it over.
• Added the music into my movie in Avid and then saved the movie to my camera roll.
• Brought the movie into iSuper8 to dirty it up a bit and voila I was done. It made my black and white go sepia. I could have bought another filter to keep it black and white, but I think it looks fine this way.

Unfortunately I didn't finish by the end of the movie. I spent too much time trying to figure out how to get music from an app into my music library on my iPad. As near as I could discover, you can't. Which is really stupid. I mean you can't even create a song in Garage Band and then save it to your music library on your iPad without plugging into a computer first. 

The other issue I ran into was the need to save all pictures in progress to the camera roll. If I'd used a computer it would have been far easier. I could just have copied and pasted parts of pictures between documents and/or applications.

This was the first really creative process I've done using only my iPad. Overall I think it turned out well. It could have been better, after going through iSuper8 the edges of my wide screen video were cropped off making the framing a bit off on a couple of shots. I almost decided to try and redo it all on my computer when I remembered, I have grading to do.

But I think I may have just fallen down a rabbit hole. I may end up spending more time looking at ds106 and maybe I'll even try to join a class.

Blip.tv - Video hosting

In the past I blogged about sites like YouTube being a Killer App for Education. Lately I've shifted to Blip.tv. I've done this for a couple of reasons.

The first is that many other educators have told me that YouTube is blocked in their building/district. There are now many different video hosting sites out there that work as well as or better than YouTube and I'll bet these haven't been blocked yet.

Another reason I like Blip is that when you upload a video to Blip you can have Blip upload it to the Internet Archive at the same time. You will need an Internet Archive username and password for this. (for more on how to upload videos to the Internet Archive, check out one of my previous posts)

My other reasons include: there is no 10 min limit for videos as on YouTube, the original source file is made available for download, there is not as much cross linking and recommendations making it less likely that students will be led to inappropriate videos.

This is the time of year when my seniors are gone and my juniors taking physics do astronomy projects using Photo Story. This year I've been posting them to Blip.tv. You can check out the ones I've uploaded so far at falconphysics.blip.tv. Unfortunately, the files created with PhotoStory use a video codec that Blip doesn't recognize (ironically, YouTube can convert these files), so they can't be converted into the typical flash video format. However, you can still view the original video files in *.wmv.

I've embedded one of my students videos below, but since it wasn't converted into flash video it might not display correctly in your web browser. (Note: The student narrating this does not have a British accent. He just decided to adopt one for comedy value)

Click To Play

Star Wars - Eyespot MashUp!!!

I've mentioned Eyespot in passing before. Its an online video editor that allows you to share your clips with others and use their clips as well. You grab what you want, do some basic editing and then save your video. Videos are only viewable through a web interface, but it can be a lot of fun.

Eyespot often has lots of fun videos available for editing and runs contest periodically. Right now they've teamed up with starwars.com. If you go through the Star Wars website you have access to around 300 clips from the whole series. Below you'll find my first attempt. I don't know how I'd use this with my class, but it really is a lot of fun.

Web 2.0 at MACUL

OK, Steve Demob is going to be another one of those speakers I look for at these meetings. Steve went through about 20 or 30 different websites while highlighting his Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Sites. All his links are available at 10freesites.pbwiki.com, so I won’t list them all here.

Here are some of the cool new things I learned:

• Jumpcut - A free online video creation/editing site now allows you to do the Ken Burns Effect with your photos
• Picnik - This is a free online image editor. I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never used it. I will now. It does all the basic editing you need. You can upload photos or you can pull them directly from the web (including your Flickr). When you’re done editing you can save them, email them, dump them to Flickr, or send them to a number of places that will print them out for you.
• Vyew - Webinars free on the web. You can use your browser to host a webinar. The participants, who only need a browser, can watch your presentations or you can share a real time screen cast. There is a chat window available and you can share audio by having participants call into a phone number. Up to 100 people can call into the free version!

Steve talked about a lot of stuff more than I will mention here. His list of 10 Free Sites is great and you should give it a look.

More Video Instruction

Screen captures are nothing new, but I've been playing with a program called iShowU. It is a MacOSX only program and is not free. That said, it works great and it only costs $20. I've used Windows Media Encoder and Camtasia on WinXP for capturing movies of my screen previously. iShouwU is superior to both. The other popular Mac option is called SnapZ. I haven't used SnapZ because of its$70 price tag and so I can't compare it to iShowU.

iShowU offers many compression options (more than I'll ever likely need). You can easily set the capture window to the whole screen or a smaller portion of the screen. It encodes the video while you're working, so when you're done the video is ready instantly.

Below is a video I created showing how to add velocity vectors to a video in LoggerPro. I did the voice over in iMovie so I could redo the pieces I screwed up. But you can also record using the microphone, system sound, or a combination while capturing the video.



The youtube video doesn't do iShowU justice. The quality of the video I captured was perfect. The low quality of my youtube video is due to my not really knowing what I'm doing in iMovie.

Technorati Tags: digital, video, vectors, screen capture, education, falconphysics

When someone elses notes aren't enough

I don't tend to lecture much, so when I do it tends to be important. Invariably, there will be a handful of students out who will be forced to rely on the notes taken by other students. These don't often tell the complete story, because they have pictures that are finished products and don't show how we got there.

So, I decided to create a couple of short videos for my absent students (and those who just want a second chance). I wrote out my diagrams and formulas, taking pictures with my digital camera at several stages. Then I imported them into PhotoStory and narrated them. Once complete I uploaded them to YouTube.

All in all they didn't turn out that great, but I will definitely do this again. The main problem is the audio is really low. I'll need to invest in a real microphone at some point. Until then I'll have to figure out what went wrong and try to see if I can improve performance.





Technorati Tags: friction, motion, video, education, falconphysics

I need to get a life

I was playing around with a free program I stumbled across for my Mac. You can see the result below.



The program is called MorphX and as you can see can be used to morph one picture into another. It is really easy to use and can be a lot of fun. I'm not sure what you could do with this in education other than have a little fun. I'm sure a cool idea will present itself... Students could look at change over time by creating an evolutionary timeline morphing pictures of more primitive species into more derived ones or germination and growth of a seedling. They could also propose hybrid organisms and morph them half way and take a snap shot.

There may not be a lot of educational value in this program, but it should at the very least make a good hook to get their attention.

On an unrelated note, YouTube apparently changes the aspect ratio of uploaded videos. The video I uploaded was perfectly square. I'll need to keep this in mind in the future. I suppose I must have somewhat of a life, otherwise I'd go back and add black bars into my two starting images and re-morph them.

Technorati Tags: digital, video, education, falconphysics

Killer App for Education?

I listen to (or watch) a variety of podcasts. One of the hosts/pannelists, John C. Dvorak, in a couple of the podcasts I listen to mentioned something that got me thinking this week. Dvorak talked about the ease of use of digital still cameras being able to take short videos and then upload them to the web through YouTube. I've tried this before and it works quite well. You upload the video in any form you want and YouTube does all the converting for you (you just have to wait a while for it to be available). You can embed your video right in a web page or blog with ease. Dvorak feels this will be a killer app and I have to agree.

The video from my digital still camera is not as good as from my mini-dv camera, but it is far easier to deal with. With my mini-dv camera I have to capture the video to my computer before I can edit it. Which means I have to plug the camera in, find the part of the video I want, and basically record it in real time to the computer. If all I want is a short video clip this is not very time efficient. With my still camera, all I need to do is plug the camera in (or pull the memory card and put it in my card reader) and copy over the file I want.

I can film a short demo in class and upload it to YouTube in just a few minutes and the video should be available to watch by the time my students get home. The more I think about this the more excited I get about the possibilities. I will definitely be playing with this over the next few weeks to see how useful it is.

I will probably also upload my videos to ourmedia at the same time. This is for two reasons. The first is that the videos on ourmedia are not compressed like they are on YouTube so are higher quality. The second is that everyone keeps talking about how much money YouTube spends to support all the videos but no one knows how long YouTube can afford to keep doing it.

Technorati Tags: digital, video, education, falconphysics

Digital Storytelling Again

I'm finally getting around to posting one of the Astronomy Presentations from my students. He did the Andromeda Galaxy. I decided to host it on ourmedia.org. Ourmedia is really slow, but it does offer free hosting of video and audio files (and images and text for that matter). I've had lots of trouble using Firefox and had assumed the site just didn't work well, until I tried it in Internet Explorer.

Ourmedia relies on ActiveX. If you don't know what that means, that's OK. Try your browser of choice, if it doesn't work, well then just jump over to Internet Explorer and it will work (but it is slow). Ourmedia offers much higher resolution and detail than YouTube or Eyespot. Here's the Fireworks video I did on those sites previously. It looks much better (as you might expect for a 10MB video file).

The other factor worth mentioning is that you will also need a login and password for The Internet Archive. Once you've set up your account at Ourmedia you will need to go to the edit tab on your "my page". Scroll down a little and you will see a place to enter your archive.org password (note this is just below where you can change your Ourmedia password).

Another site I just found out about from Eduwikipedia about digital storytelling has some potential. The site is RockYou. It allows you to put together slideshows of digital pictures. It's really easy to use. It took me less then five minutes from first visiting the site to creating the slideshow you see below. The biggest downside is it does not allow for narration or music. However, you can easily add text to your slides.


| View | Add Favorite

Technorati Tags: video, education, falconphysics

Clip from Eyespot

I'll blog about Eyespot another day. I seem to have written a bit too early about the ease of YouTube. I uploaded two clips this morning and they are still not available.

Here's one of the clips I tried with YouTube.

Astronomy Project Progress Report

We're in the middle of the astronomy projects now. I first have students create a quick presentation about some object in our solar system so they can get used to using Photo Story and learn its limitations. Most have finished their solar system object and are beginning the more involved Universe Presentations.

Things to point out/teach that have nothing to do with content knowledge:

• Image Size: What is a pixel and how many should I have?
• Microphone Use: How close is too close?

Here are a couple examples of what I'm talking about:

• Io -Good microphone use some pixelation of pictures
• Saturn - Very pixelated images and poor use of the microphone.

I'm going to go back and check how small is too small for images. I told my students to watch out for small images, but apparently I need to give them actual hard numbers so they know what "small" means.

Astronomy Webquest

We're near the end of the year at my school. Our seniors are done and our junior physics students are climbing the walls. I've had the most success when I give them a project of some sort to do and lots of class time to work on it. Load them up with meaningful and fun work and there are a lot fewer headaches.

While taking a class in teaching with technology at the University of Detroit-Mercy I created a webpage as my final project. I use a part of the webpage with my junior physics students this time of year. The assignment I give the students is to create a presentation on some aspect of astronomy featuring cool pictures. Full instructions can be found at http://home.comcast.net/~mrdickie/astro_web/quest.htm. I also blogged about this a couple weeks ago. Just check out my entry on Digital Story Telling for a brief description of the software the students use for this project.

The main idea is to get them looking at and learning about some of the cool science being done in astro-physics today. Once all their presentations are done we share them with the class allowing students to learn from each other.

The final product is a narrated movie consisting of cool pictures and/or video clips found on the internet. The students must create their own script and record a voice over narration.

When the presentations are done I'll share some of the better examples. I can't really share last year's presentations as I didn't tell them not to include their full names in their narration or credits.

MDE/COATT Workshop

I don't tend to do traditional handouts when I give presentations. My handouts are typically digital. Here is the list of ideas and links I talked about at the May 5th workshop.

Porbeware - Allows you to collect actual data in real time. This often allows for experiments that would not be possible otherwise and allows for a greater deal of precision than previous methods would have allowed.

• Vernier - Lab Pro: One of the Standards. They produce high quality products and have a wide variety of sensor available. The Lab Pro sensors are compatible with the CBL and CBL2
  
• iSicence Project - HOBO: Offers a small, relatively inexpensive data logger for collecting environmental data. iScience project offers the chance to borrow HOBOs for classroom use and evaluation, There are also numerous opportunities to win free HOBOs.
• Make Your Own: I've begun investigating other cheap/free probeware ideas. The focus around two free programs: Audacity and Visual Analyzer. These programs can be used with a microphone or solar cell to teach many concepts in sound, light, gravity, and periodic motion. I'm in the process of fully developing this idea. Once I do I'll make it widely available. For now you can look at previous blog entries on the subject: Sound, more sound, speed of sound, using a solar cell, solar cell part 2.

Video Analysis

• Doane Physics Videos - A great source of physics videos in quick time format. The site also allows for the collection of position and time data from the movies using Flash.
  
• Data Point - Data Point allows for collection of position-time data. These data are put in a text file that can be opened in Excel (or other spread sheet) to be graphed or manipulated. Works with *.avi files only.
  
• LoggerPro - If you have Vernier Probeware you have this program already. You need at least version 3 in order to do video analysis. If you have a previous version of you can buy an upgrade for $50. If you are buying it new it is $159. The price includes the Site License which allows you to install it on every computer your school owns and every computer your students own! With LoggerPro you can analyze avi, mov, or mpeg movies. It will graph position and/or velocity. You can easily plot the slope of a line to see acceleration. You can show velocity vectors in the movie (need the free upgrade to ver. 3.4). It's really easy. An average freshman whose never seen the program will be up and running in under 10 min.

Digital Story Telling - Not just for Social Studies or English. Great way to create multimedia presentations to get out of the Power Point hole. You can do this with iMovie if you're lucky enough to work in a building that uses Macintosh computers. If you're like me you're stuck in Windows and iMovie is not an option.There are commercial solutions in Windows, but I'm going to talk about the free ones. You need WinXP (sorry)

• Windows Movie Maker: Easy to use, drag and drop video clips and transitions. Will capture video from a camera if you have Firewire (IEEE 1394) or USB with some cameras.
• Windows Photo Story: Great program for doing slide shows. I've had students use this for solar system and universe presentations. If I taught biology I could see using this to show change in biological systems over time (growth of a plant or emergence of leaves and flowers in the spring for example). It is easy, allows for voice over narration and a music track. You can also zoom in or pan across pictures. For some more info and links to tutorials check out my post from a couple weeks ago.

Out of this World Freeware - Check Back in a couple of days for links, I've run out of time.

Digital Story Telling - Free and Easy

I mentioned Microsoft Photostory in my post about iLife envy last year. Photostory is a great program for creating digital slide shows. The best part is that it is free if you have a legitimate copy of Windows XP (yes, it checks). Unlike many slide show programs, Photostory allows you to pan across a picture or zoom in or out. This allows you to use still images to create a movie.

I've used this with my Physics students to created astronomy movies. In the past I've had students create powerpoint presentations from the massive amount of cool images from the Hubble, Spitzer, and other telescopes to explain some astronomical object or phenomenon. The problem was that students included more slides of text than the cool pictures. My intent was to have students talk about their pictures during their presentation, but they would just put all their info on their slides and then simply read they slides while presenting.

With Photostory I have them narrate their slides. The result is exactly what I wanted the students to do with powerpoint in the first place. Which was to tell a story with really cool pictures, not simply give an astronomy lecture.

Photostory is very easy to use. You only need to give about 5 minutes of instruction and your students will be up and running and probably finding cool stuff you never even noticed.

Cool Features:

• Ken Burns Effect: This is the panning and zooming bit. It will do this automatically for you or you can take complete control of it.
• Narration: You can narrate each slide and if you talk longer than the duration you set for the picture then the length of time the picture is shown is changed to match your narration.
• Music Track: You have the option of adding background music. You can import music or have Photostory generate music for you.
• Slide Transition: There are lots of cool slide transitions.
  

Potential Problems:

• Export as *.wmv files only.
• Students will often choose low resolution pictures and then zoom in too far and all detail is lost.
  
• Slide Transition: There are lots of cool slide transitions. Many students will try to use them all!!!
  

Other Stuff:
You can import your clips into Windows MovieMaker (also Free) if you want to use the cool panning along with actual video clips.

Links:

• Windows Photostory - Download it here
• Papa John's Newsletters - This is a great site for Windows Movie maker tips and also includes some for Photostory.