What’s In A Story?

Everyone loves a good story. Think of your favourite story. What is it? Why do you like it? Tell me more.

Image c/o Scholastic.ca

When asked this question in #eci831 last week, the first story teller I connected to as a child was  Robert Munsch. I fell in love with almost all his books, especially The Paper Bag Princess, Love You Forever & I Have To Go.  These books are great read aloud and audio books, since most stories were created as an oral tradition in during Robert Munsch’s daycare working days. I was fortunate to meet Munsch during my 2nd year of undergrad when he visited my Children’s Literature class at the University of Guelph. Although the audience was older than his usual reading groups, Robert was still able to keep these “kids” on the edge of their seat.

Alan Levine shared some interesting & useful resources for using new media for Digital Storytelling. In both his presentation (you may need to download Cooliris to view in Firefox or Safari) and 50 Way Wiki there are numerous tools to explore for effective online storytelling.

Here are a few examples of digital stories we shared & discussed:

Amazing stories of Open Ed

• 1 Minute Forest Gump

• Last Day Dream

• Tony vs. Paul (stop motion)

• The Pen Story

• Inspirational/Motivational Videos (Stories that Make you Cry)

• Free Hugs

• Scary Mary (remix)

How do you share your story online? Check out a few tools to support your digital story telling:

• Ahead
• Sketchfu
• VoiceStrip
• Voice Thread
• Jing Project – Screen Casting
• Prezi – for a creative alternative to Power Point
• Blabberrize
• Alan’s (MANY)  Story Tools

Easy Online Tools for Visual Teaching

For many educators, the use of multi-media is a regular function in the classroom.

I went to an excellent workshop hosted by Carolyn Guertin from the eCreative Lab @ UTA about Moving Teaching Online: Screencasting.  This is one of many in their digital workshop series they offer.  It was  a great (free) workshop for faculty & staff to gain more knowledge about slide & screen casting to best support educational practices.

The wealth of media resources available online is overwhelming.  If your objective is to enhance instruction and learning, here are a few tools I use, and a couple new ones I have just begun to play with:

• Screen Capture tools
  • SnagIt – screen grab tool for Window users; purchase required (test out the 30-day trial version)
  • Grab – a tool included in Mac computers to get screen shots/images
  • Jing – great for screen capture for image or video for any platform, able to do voice-overs & it’s FREE!
• Slide Casting
  • SlideShare – online community forum to share slides (& audio) with students and others; able to match audio recording with slide content easily [I use this website the most.]
  • MyPlick
  • Sliderocket
• Slides
  • MS PowerPoint
  • Impress by OpenOffice
  • Google Docs or Zoho – great free online tools, but will often have to convert presentations to PPT format for slide casting
  • Keynote – need to convert to PPT format to use on slideshare
• Audio
  • Audacity – get a solid microphone with headset & start recording and editing tracks for your presentation
  • PodcastPeople – record your audio & get a link to an mp3; downside: there is no post-production editing feature
  • GarageBand – Mac users can get this free application to record & edit audio tracks
• Screen Casting
  • Camtasia Studio – record, edit & share on screen activity; costs $
  • Camstudio – FREE streaming video software for screen capture
  • Captivate by Adobe – for those who are serious about their online learning and visual screen capture; purchase required (pricey even with education discounts, but worth it if used often)
  • Windows Media Maker – able to create videos for the screen cast; not part of the new Vista package (down grade OS)
  • Snapz Pro X - high quality imaging; able to use video, images and save the in a smaller format; time lapse editing,  audio voice-over and great editing options
  • iShowU – records audio & video; tagline = “when words aren’t enough”
• Video Content Storage Online
  • YouTube EDU – YouTube videos posted for learning; great for archiving teaching material for your students
  • CaptionTube – new feature from YouTube that allows for adding captions via a sophisticated video caption editor – this means that the  text transcription sits beside the video
  • Recommendation:  use institutional web portal or closed site if you are using any copyrighted material or content

Have fun!

Successful Virtual Communities

Here’s the latest video post from Howard Rheingold who writes about cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (term he coined).

Here is the full video: http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/18022009/rheingoldlargevideo/

It’s pretty straight-forward and summarizes a great deal of what is being discussed and shared by adminstrators & educators within higher education. He presents his thoughts about social media and facilitating online collaborative communities in this clip, which I find very interesting.

Other learning pieces and items by Rheingold that you should check out include:

• Social Media Classroom: http://socialmediaclassroom.com/
• Electric Minds archives: http://www.rheingold.com/electricminds/html/
• Digital Jounalism (Berkley): http://socialmediaclassroom.com/digitaljournalism09/
• Community/Social Media (Berkley): http://socialmediaclassroom.com/vircom09/