A picture is worth a thousand words, so what’s a picture with words attached worth? How about if we add music?
If you haven’t yet played with Photostory, run right over and get it. Yes, it’s from evil giant Microsoft and it won’t run on your Mac (but you have iLife on your Mac, so no complaining!) but it’s easy, and it’s free. How easy? I’ve used it (with guidance) with kids in first grade. If you can browse for files, something everybody does, and have access to a computer microphone, you can use Photostory.
Basically, the program asks you to upload your pictures. Then you can add narration for each picture, add a pre-recorded audio file or some music, and save. It’s a little harder to get your video online that with Animoto (see below) but you have much, much, more control over your content, and no limits on length. Once you’ve saved your .wmv file, you can easily upload to Teacher Tube or to your own website or blog.
How could this be used? To record and share library or classroom events, to create narrated stories (just upload images of kids’ artwork instead of photos), to create slideshows without the hassle of all the “stuff” kids want to add to PowerPoints. I, for one, would like to see a student slideshow with no clipart and no flying text! With Photostory, the kids are focused on the images and the audio. Older students can add more sophisticated looking transitions, or alter the timeline to keep a particularly important image on the screen for a longer time. Titles and text can be added to any slide.
I did discover that Photostory has an annoying habit of “fading out” the last few seconds of your music or audio file, but I solved that problem by recording about 10 seconds of silence when I was done recording my voice. Worked like a charm.
It’s summer vacation, so I have been pretty slothful about thinking about the web, because I’ve been unrepentantly surfing, reading Lolcats, playing with Google’s new Lively (it isn’t very), and reading, reading, reading.
There have been some very interesting events in the media world in the last few months, even in the last few days. Everybody knows that nobody will buy anything they can get for free…right? Apparently, not right. In April, an award-winning novelist released a free version of his book at the same time the print copy hit the shelves. And in the last few days, a well-know TV director let everybody watch the first three episodes of a show online. Without commercials.
I’m sure every really connected under-30 person in the world beat me to reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, but if you have not yet had that pleasure, go at once to the literary source of your choice and secure a copy. Little Brother is the story of 17 year-old Marcus, a gamer and a hacker, who finds himself living in a United States gone security-mad after a terrorist attack. The book is well-written, intelligent, exciting, and thoughtful, but it’s ALSO available as a Creative Commons-licensed text, freely download-able. It can also be ordered from Amazon–where it is in the top 1500 for sales–or from your local bookstore. This raises such interesting questions about copyright–think about the rabid reaction of the conventional music industry to p2p music sharing. Is it possible to share media and still make money from it? Apparently.
Then there’s the pure fun of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, an internet show released in three acts. Whedon, creator of the legendary Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has done something very interesting–the show has aired, for free, on the internet before it was released on iTunes. (Do I still call it “aired” if it wasn’t broadcast?) The free look ends tonight at midnight (though on Twitter, viewers are cheerfully told that “Freebie time almost up! But we may lag a little on taking it away…’cause we can. And ’cause we love you.” That’s nice, but it’s even nicer that we had the chance to see something before trotting off to iTunes to pay. And viewers are buying–all three episodes are currently in the top five iTunes TV-show downloads. So not everybody made illegal copies, eh? (The show was a hilarious–though dark–sendup of the superhero/master villain genre. Not for everyone, I suppose. I gleefully await more!)
I just love watching the world of media being reinvented. I remember hearing in Library School that the book publishing industry was at first leery of the rise of the circulating library, fearful that the sharing of all those books would reduce the number of prospective buyers. There’s a great quote from an 1854 text: “I have been informed that, when circulating libraries were first opened, the booksellers were much alarmed; and their rapid increase added to their fears, and led them to think that the sale of books would be much diminished by such libraries.” That’s from the 1854 The Old Printer and the Modern Press, by way of Richard Roehl and Hal R. Varian’s Circulating Libraries and Video Rental Stores. Every new media faces suspicion and distrust from the creators of the old media.
(”You see, son, our family has been making cave paintings for generations. What can this so-called ‘alphabet’ offer us?”
“Awwww, Dad, cave paintings are like, so 15-minutes-ago!”)
Animoto is a web-based application that lets users create short 30-second videos with the look and feels of a music video.
There are a great many slideshow makers out there in WebLand. What makes Animoto worth a look?
It does a few things that will make educators happy.
–First, the interface is really easy to use. Browse for photos (even young students can locate a file on a computer), upload music, click “create.”
–The site is free when making 30-second short videos (a good length for a student project–especially if you have to watch a lot of them…) that can be embedded in your website, or just linked to.
–Animoto provides the HTML code you needed to embed the video in your website, à la YouTube.
–The site strongly encourages the use of Creative Commons music. Many–maybe most–web 2.0 sites bleat a bit about not using copyrighted materials, but don’t really go much further than saying, “please don’t do that.” The burden is usually put on the copyright holder, to discover the infringement and contact the site to protest. Animoto goes further, in actually maintaining a “music lounge” of freely usable music, providing links to Creative Commons-licensed music, and actually listing the creator of the music in the brief credits that appear at the end of the video. When you upload music, a little message pops up reading, “Love your artists. Make sure you’re using legit music or have permission to use what you want.” Animoto even runs a monthly contest for musicians; winners are showcased as “Featured Tracks for This Month.”
How could this be used? In myriad ways. Use it in a music class, to explore what visuals seem to match the music, the way the makers of Fantasia did. In an art class, do the opposite–have kids discover what music fits the work of a particular artist.
Of course, you don’t have to restrict yourself to music–after your students have written a poem, have them illustrate it with homemade art or photos, or with freely usable photos. Then record the poem as an mp3 (try the free program Audacity) and put it all together in Animoto. Or have them read any famous passage, prose or poem, and illustrate it.
Learning standards: NETS (National Educational Technology Standards) call for students to use “”digital tools and media-rich resources” to communicate ideas, and to demonstrate “digital citizenship” by respecting copyright and correctly attributing sources. ALA’s learning standards similarly call for the ethical use of source materials, and to “use technology and other information
tools to organize and display knowledge and understanding in ways that others can view, use, and assess.”
The weather in upstate NY is dreadfully hot and humid this week. I remember similar days when I was a kid, when we’d retreat to my grandparents’ lovely cool basement room, where my grandfather would show us family pictures on his slide projector. Years later, I still have a soft spot for the slideshow.
The web seems overflowing with slideshow apps, but VoiceThread is easily my favorite. To be more precise, Ed.VoiceThread, which is a dedicated K-12 / educational version of VoiceThread.
A “VoiceThread” is a series of images–still images or video–to which users can add narration, their own audio files, hyperlinks, or hand-drawn “doodles.” PowerPoints and .doc files can be uploaded,too. The end result is a multimedia slideshow. The site will generate the HTML code you need to embed on your own site for a lovely YouTube kind of look.
Here’s a VoiceThread my preK class made before going to the zoo.
I uploaded the pictures–though of course, older kids would be able to do that part for themselves, since it’s as simple as browsing your files for the images you want. You can also upload pictures from a URL or from other VoiceThreads you’ve created. Then I handed the microphone over to the kids. At age 4 or 5, they’re not writers yet–but they sure can make noise. That’s the sweetest-sounding polar bear roar I’ve ever heard!
The preK teacher told me that the kids were really excited to see the gate to the zoo–Holy cow! It was the same gate they’d seen in Library time! (Isn’t Flickr’s Creative Commons pool great?)
There’s a social aspect, too. Once you’ve created a VoiceThread, you can allow other VoiceThread users to add comments, too. This would work nicely in a classroom setting; students could collaborate on a project, or review each others’ work. A VoiceThread called Mr. G’s Shakespeare Page shows the possibility. The teacher created a simple, two-slide presentation. The kids then recorded their own reading of the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Clever–the teacher has wrapped up his Shakespeare unit with a multimedia show that serves as a collaborative student project and an assessment piece, all in one nice package. The sense that they’re performing for a larger audience encourages the kids to do their best, too. School Librarians can seize the opportunity to talk about copyright–and copyleft–and the ethical use of other people’s media.
VoiceThread (without the “Ed.” in front) accounts are free, but K-12 educators are going to want to be part of the “Ed.VoiceThread” network. There are several pricing levels, but you can jump right in for a one-time $10 fee. Their customer service is excellent–when I’ve had problems, I have had e-mail responses from VoiceThread in as little as 15 minutes.
Even the New York Times is agog: there’s a valid, educational use for logging in to Twitter, the very popular “microblogging” service.
Twitter, a sort of lowest-common-denominator social website, has a very simple interface. You sign up for an account, and then you’re presented with a box that says, “What are you doing?” You can write in that you’re about to go jogging, you’re cooking dinner, writing your Pulitzer acceptance speech, etc. You can also “follow” other people’s twitter accounts, so that you can find out what all your friends are doing, too. Some people post to their accounts every so often; other folks post what they’re doing all the time. That’s pretty much it.
Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, created a Twitter account to keep the public up-to-date on every part of the Mars Phoenix Lander’s travels on the Red Planet. Twitter readers can find out what the Mars lander is doing all time, and read Ms. McGregor’s posts, written amusingly in the first person. Here’s a sample post: “I’m sitting on very flat surface here. Tiny rocks around my foot pads. The horizon is flat and looks perfect for digging!!!”
So now astronomy buffs, NASA fans, teachers & students can all keep track of what Phoenix is up to. This is a pretty cool use of a web 2.0 tool–and plenty of other people think so, too. When the NY Times reported on the Twitter just yesterday, the MarsPhoenix Twitter account had about 9600 followers. When I started “following” the Lander today, it had over 14,000. You can follow MarsPhoenix, too: http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix.
Twitter, as a “microblogging” service, is probably blocked by school district internet filters. But it’s probably worth it to unblock this Twitter page, so the kids can find out what’s up…up there.
