Beyond School

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday – after which I hope to be able to think clearly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering:  Celtx (click screenshot for full view).

From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media – film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.

All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process – write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file – eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.

There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness – and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect.  Just wonderful – hats off to Celtx.

It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)

Lesson learned: if you start a digital video, finish it quickly.

I started this months ago as part of the “Visionary Student Blogging” project for my AP Literature seniors. Some crazy introductory idea that I hoped would help them see how blogging could be an escape from school-as-usual.

I didn’t finish it the way I wanted to, and life got in the way. I spent a bit of time this morning making the attribution titles at the end so I could post it. A couple of people had seen it on our AP Lit Ning and told me they liked it.

I think it’s kind of vague, myself, and imperfect in more ways than one. But educational fantasies are always a bit vague, aren’t they?

(I used Zamzar to convert YouTube videos for import into iMovie, by the way.)

(If anybody can tell me how to make my YouTube videos show up in RSS readers, by the way, I’d be so appreciative. I know it can be done because I see others do it.)

After my first outing doing a rather “schooly” self-assignment for AP Literature, I got what I asked for: friendly and constructive criticism – “assessment”? – from Dean Shareski, Bud Hunt, AnneO, Diane Cordell, and my flat world team-teacher/blood brother Chris Watson – all whom I thank for taking the time.

So you’ll notice these changes:

1. No scrolling text. Instead, I used iMovie’s “Music Video” editing option. One bothering limitation in that option is a ten-second maximum duration for each block of text. Another is the slider for text size – a numeric text-size option would be nicer for uniformity’s sake. (Dean suggested no text at all, or subtitles. Since I want my students to have the option of reading along as they listen, I chose to stick with the text. But I didn’t like the scroll either. Subtitles would have taken forever to add, line by line. Thus the “music video” devil’s bargain.)

2. Less jumpy transitions. On my first try, I learned the time-consuming lesson that all text edits over images are erased if you put transitions before or after a clip. I also learned something about measuring the duration of some lines of recital first, and then adding images with those durations set. I also reduced the use of the Ken Burns effect, because that effect consumes a lot of time, and is often damaged when fades or dissolves are added to them.

3. (This one was tough:) I added some editorial and “teacher-y” stuff in there for my students. It goes against the opposing desire to make this an entertainment piece for all. (And it just occured to me I could have easily exported a straight recitation, then added the teacher stuff to a second schooly version. Damn.)

So here’s the next installment, this time on YouTube instead of Google Video (for you comparison shoppers out there):

Paradise Lost, Book 4 (episode 2): Satan Enters Paradise

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYgp7r_p0cI[/youtube]

This one is about four minutes long. It took me about four hours. Feedback still welcome! (And feel free to read my AP Literature students’ feedback on our open class Ning.)

To Reflect a Bit More:

I’m still wondering about the overall value of digital storytelling. I know that for me, at least, I record the readings over and over, never quite satisfied, discovering an inflection better placed here than there, and so forth. But I have to say, it does get tiresome. Maybe that’s the fault of the parameters I’ve set: reciting someone else’s work, limiting it to still images, voice-over, and text. Not what I’d call a very in-demand real-world skill. (Or am I wrong?)

(I’m also curious how many of you out there who have assigned a digital storytelling project have tried one – or more – yourselves. And what your impressions were after the attempt. Comments?)

I really want to start playing with actual filmmaking: scripts, shots, storyboards, the whole bit. That would be far less schooly, and surely far more engaging. Yet I look at so much “crap” when students (and others) are given a camera and told to make a real film, I don’t think I would assign that to students without some very tight scaffolding and staging. But somebody – was it Dean? – mentions the “Don’t give them a camera until they’ve given you a storyboard” rule in this year’s K-12 Online Conference, don’t they?

Dean Shareski and Cindy Barnsley gave me valuable (though tactfully veiled) criticism for my original “Cutting the Crap (from Student Movies)” video. To paraphrase, “That first part was really good.” I took the hint. I’ve divided the original into two shorter efforts, and added end credits attributing the Flickr photos I used to model that for students.

So now, Episode One is simply about finding legal images and videos for mash-ups using Creative Commons Search (with a quick Zamzar-to-download-YouTubes, etc, thrown in). And Episode Two is a re-mix of the Ken Burns Effect lesson, with an added intro: an example of how bad the Ken Burns Effect can look if not done skillfully, in the form of one of my own “crappy” iMovies of late.

I’ve put them both on a new page on my new WordPress home entitled “Cut the Crap,” so you can always find them there. But here they are anyway:

Episode One: Keeping it Legal with Creative Commons Search

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbVSYJ-I8×8[/youtube]



Episode Two: Still Photo Skills with the Ken Burns Effect

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJXK6Zpf_-E[/youtube]

For more posts on digital storytelling, see:

Eight minutes on how to 1) find content on Creative Commons, 2) use Zamzar to download YouTube and other videos for mashups. (It’s also posted on my “Teaching Gallery” static page.) [Update: Photos credited in final titles, plus CC licensing added.]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbVSYJ-I8×8[/youtube]

Coming in Episode 2: Still Photo Skills: Advanced use of the Ken Burns Effect.

[Welcome to Beyond School's new home, by the way. This is my first post since leaving Blogger. If you subscribed to the old "BS," please update your feed by subscribing to this new home on my own WordPress install. I'm excited to learn more about customizing WordPress by administering my own blog. You can expect to see many new things in the coming weeks.]

It’s only natural that the K12 Online Conference presentations feel uneven to some of us. Each presenter has a different background, level of experience, set of priorities, agenda, audience. Some hit me, some don’t.

Dean Shareski hit me on this biting Seoul Saturday morning. If a lot of the more tech-oriented presenters are the Henry Fords of this Digital Revolution, Dean is more of a William Morris. Aesthetics is the focus of his “Design Matters” presentation, and if you only watch one K12 presentation, this is the one I’d recommend. It puts the ghost back into the machine.

Dean asked for feedback from his viewers, so I gave the below on the comments section of his K12 Online presentation page. I’m pasting it here because it’s the beginning of a new project for me: The Campsite Seminars, I’m calling it for now. Or maybe I like this better:

Walden 2.0

Here’s the comment:

Dean asked for feedback as we watched, and I assume that means feedback here, though it’s strange to be first. Anyway, here’s mine.

I like Dean’s opening point: much classroom-created content (the majority?) suffers from poor design – “cheesiness” in the worst sense (think Kraftt).

(Warlick’s keynote touches on the same idea with his “competitive information products,” though the worker-drone connotations of “products” still irks me, as it focuses more than I would like on economics and money-making, more than on aesthetics and character, I would argue – but anyway….)

Christian Long’s interview suffered from poor audio quality, so I couldn’t understand much of it (we’ve all experienced the wrath of the techno gods, so I sympathize). I did catch, though, the exploitation of simple walking distance and space between buildings as a learning opportunity, and that resonated. Our own campus is very restricted by its hilltop, woods-surrounded setting, which is the opposite of the example Christian used of having to walk a mile between buildings: we’re too cramped. But WE DO HAVE THOSE SURROUNDING WOODS. That’s fascinating in this new light. I’m picturing possibilities of assigning students – in small groups, so the discussions are not diluted by too many voices and not enough time – to take voice or video recorders of whatever sort into the woods to record conversations in that setting – I can’t help but hope that the setting would influence the discussions in interesting and more thoughtful ways. Have them discuss a theme from our reading of King Lear, for example, or whatever topic might benefit from the meditative openness of a wooded setting. Recording these discussions – video seems more desirable, when I think about it – would allay most fears of “unsupervised” students in the woods. Take the footage back into the classroom and quick-edit these “campsite seminars” into short films. I’ll have to try this. It’s literally “Beyond School”

Dr. Schwier: “Does it work? Is it beautiful? Is it powerful? Is it inspiring?” This is refining my “campsite seminars” idea above. I said “quick-edit” those seminars just now. Why rush? That way Velveeta lies.

Why not assign them to be voice-overs for iMovie projects that add BEAUTY and FORCE via film, stills, music, titles? Yes, yes, yes: let’s aim for brie and camembert.

In fact, I’m seeing now that two or three class sessions of this new mode of “class discussion” – sitting on the pine needles under the autumn trees – might be best, to give students time to adapt to talking in natural surroundings, in “nature’s temple.” Talk about “educational architecture” – how about the dome of the sky over a canopy of pine?

(I’m liking this very much, Dean. Thanks for this very innovative angle. Much of the K12 conference so far has been school-2.0-as-usual, if you get what I mean.)

At 12:00 now: Planning. I’ll play along with my Campsite Seminars whim above, and apply the rest of your presentation, when possible, to it. Consider this a “teacher think-aloud.”

So the Seminars – I think they’ll actually work better for something more relevant to my students than Shakespeaere (which they and I love). I think, instead, it will work for the classroom blogging “Capstone Project” I’m currently launching with them.

The idea of that project for my high school seniors – so close to the end of their 12 year sentence of infantilization in schools – is to help them learn about whatever their passion, and their possible future (a)vocation, is, by reading real-world bloggers who share their passion(s), and writing about what they read on their own blogs.

They’ve already created their blogs, and this weekend, are composing their “about” pages and searching for feeds about their passion(s)/interest(s) on Bloglines (I still haven’t found a better feed-searching engine than Bloglines’). They’ve claimed their blogs on Technorati, embedded Sitemeter and Clustrmaps. Now they’re ready to connect.

The problem I think I’m fighting, though, is that they don’t understand the magical potential this project offers them to make connections with people in the world of kindred passions. They’ve never linked to a writer in a blog post, and seen that writer turn up a day or two later in comments.

They’ve been too busy writing 5-paragraph essays – or homework-assignments-as-blog-posts, which is the New Abomination – about irrelevant subjects to tired teachers all their lives to write about what they love to real-world readers – so they just don’t get it. They don’t know how to dream, how to let themselves be visionary; and they don’t know how dreams and visions can become realities through connective writing.

So, in short, I’m trying to introduce them to the world beyond school, but they’re so “studentified” they seem unable to see this as anything but homework because, after all, I’m a “teacher,” and they are “students,” and all of this is happening in a “school.”

Sheesh.

So I think these Campsite Seminars are better suited to serving as a “retreat from school” in both the spatial and the psychological senses. I want them to think – possibly for the first time, since so many of them are so constantly addled by the pressures of “schooliness,” the homework, the SAT’s, the college applications, the school spirit jive, on and on – about which world they want to enter when they leave school forever – in seven short months.

So back to you, Dean: How do I plan for these 70-minute retreats into the woods to bear fruit? [Clicks “play”….]

“What’s the purpose of your movie?”
–Hm. In an attempted nutshell, to figure out:
1. What makes you tick.
2. What you want to become.
3. Which is what you will read about on blogs and other sites.
4. And what you will write about…
5. For an audience you want to attract.

Okay, that’s about as far as I’m going to take this here. I see Dean asks for feedback on his blog, and on the wiki he made for this, etc, and suddenly feel like my students when they’re dealing with my tendency to have a million sites for classwork

Dean, it was a very valuable presentation. You got beyond the tools and beyond the generic edublog talk.

Thanks for that.

For more on the quest for the student blogging grail, see these posts:

Photo credits:
Cheese Wrap by chrissam42
French Cheese by Zeetz Jones
Tokei-ji by Raiden256
Art Nouveau by Face It

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