Repurpose

My friend Jody has this theory that you should never buy a new car. For one thing, buying a used one is so much nicer to the planet–why let one more car rust in a junkyard? But she also makes the point that it’s nicer to get behind the wheel of a car that you know has been driven successfully, and all the bugs shaken out.

Web apps are kind of like that. I tried a site called Glogster a few months ago, and was really hooked. The site has only gotten better and more educator-friendly over time. Glogster lets you make a “glog,”–think of it as a poster that you build online. Just imagine that old posterboard science fair tri-fold, now with all kinds of multimedia build right in! You can include pictures, video clips, audio, music, and text. There’s an extensive file of clipart and animated goodies free for the using, too. Glogster accounts are completely free.

It appears to me that the original target audience was teenagers, who jumped right on the social aspect of the site–you can comment on other people’s creations, invite them to be your friends, and send little messages about everybody’s latest work. However, the potential for educational use is huge: it can be used to build interactive web pages without the least knowledge of HTML; to feature a student project, as a student news website…and lots more. You can also make a glog and embed it in your own webpage, as you would a TeacherTube video.

If you have ever located a file on your computer, you’ll find Glogster easy. You can even try building one without registering. Click on the kind of element you would like to add, such as text, audio, or graphics, and follow the prompts to choose from Glogster’s library or to upload your own images and sounds. Click on any element to select it, change it, or delete it.

Here’s an example. Click on the little arrow on the “TV screen” to play the video portion.

I will confess that I had to look at the HTML code and change the “width” and the “height” figures in order to fit into my edublogs page, but that was an easy fix–I changed the height and width to something around 400, to fit into a blog post. Most of the time, the easiest thing to do is just provide a link to the whole page.

The site is not without problems–some school districts may look askance at the social aspects–friends lists, commenting, etc., and also at some of the graphics. Browsing the site, you can see one heck of a lot of copyright issues. Making glogs with kids would be an excellent opportunity for some brushing up on citations, copyright, and fair use. (Bring on those ALA 21st Century skills!) In an e-mail exchange with a friendly Glogster rep, he commented that Glogster was considering some educator features. We’ll see soon what progress they’ve made.

Here’s a glog (I know, the word is SO strange…just keep thinking “poster” or “interactive webpage!”) for professional development Here’s an interactive glog for kids, embedded in a PBwiki page. And a glog made by a seventh grader as a student project.

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.

Here’s my video.

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!”)