We welcomed Daniel Tillman from the University of Virginia and Daniel's expertise fit right into our evening's activities. Daniel demonstrated the Craft Robo, an emerging technology that shows promise for creating engineering and design activities for K-8 learners. He also shared his expertise in documentary film making with us and provided some guidance for our work with digital story telling. Evrim followed up with an activity designed to encourage planning and story boarding for digital stories. She made a strong case for the fact that storyboarding will save time in the long run.
Both resource reviews were from content areas---Amber reviewed a soil evaluation package and Stefan reviewed TI resources (usually for math, but Stefan demonstrated applications across content areas). Both presenters did a good job relating their specialized applications to the class as a whole. Amber handled a minor technology glitch well---all of us who work with technology have to develop the ability to keep on going if the technology does not do exactly what we have in mind. Amber modeled this ability effectively.
I will be changing our schedule a bit for next week, substituting wikis (a simple, yet powerful application) for podcasting. I don't want students trying to produce podcasts and digital stories at the same time. We will then introduce podcasting on March 10, the day we share digital stories.
Next week we will focus upon readings, wikis and setting up our online class for the following week.
I had a really good time listening and watching Daniel's presentation. I see a number of great applications that can be made, not just in the math classroom, but in all classrooms. For example, since these objects can be produced from metal, students in shop class can weld together n-gons to see what it means to go from 2-D to 3-D art. I see a number of great applications involving this topic.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I really do wish I had more time to talk about the TI; however, I know it is more a passion of mine and not that of my classmates. Nonetheless, thank you for your time in allowing me to speak.
Before this Tuesday's class I had no idea about how to start my digital storytelling. By using storyboard, all the pictures I selected have been put in order and given frame discriptions. It really saves a lot of time in planning this assignment, but still a lot of changes will be done on the "time on screen" and narration of each picture.
ReplyDeleteAnyway,storyboard helped me a lot.
I also thought this week's class was very informative. I am very excited to get going on my digital project and am currently trying to figure out where to access the latest version of Photoshop so I can "attempt" to do what Daniel showed us in his digital storyboard. I am also doing my resource review this coming week and will focus on surveymonkey and doodle.
ReplyDeleteLike Michael, I also want to learn the technique Daniel used in his digital story. Hopefully, he will show some tricks during my visit in Virginia and I can share those with you.
ReplyDeleteWow, would I ever like to play around with that Craft Robo. I kept thinking during the demonstration how much could be done to create a 3-D learning "space" when working with literature an writing. Especially when it comes to engaging with literature--for some students, reconceptualizing the text shifts the gears to handle the right learning terrain.
ReplyDeleteThe class was indeed very informative last week. It was interesting to see that fancy calculator (which actually looked more like a notebook to me) that Stefan passed around and to learn that TIs are so widely used in this country by school kids. I grew up never owning any calculator - all the calculations, even the most complicated ones, in Algebra and Geometry classes were done on paper. Sometimes when I start thinking about the way I studied and learned just a decade ago, that era now seems like the Stone Age for me :)
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ReplyDeleteThanks for the positive feedback. It was really great visiting Iowa State and I hope to be able to stay longer next time. For anyone interested in replicating the multi-plane effect I used in my digital story, you just need a basic photo editor, and any video editor with at least two video tracks. First, make a second copy of your image and delete everything but the foreground element you want to highlight (the person, the object, just about anything) making sure that your background is set to transparent. Next, insert the orginal image into the lower track of the video editor. Then place the new image into the track above. Right now, the image should look just like it did before since the transparent parts of the top image reveal the bottom image. Now enlarge the top image to between 120-140%, as this will give you some overlap to play with. The creative part comes in now, as you use the video editor's effects panel to move one picture in one direction and the other picture in another direction. Unless you've greatly magnified the top image, you won't have a lot of space to play, which is why this effect is best at creating subtle changes in perspective. An alternative is to have the background slide in one direction, while the top image enlarges, creating a nice zooming effect. If there are any questions please feel free to email me at dat8a AT virginia.edu and again thanks for the great visit! -- Daniel
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