Story Visualization

I was just reading Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to Change the World, when he referred to Garr Reynold's Blog, Zen of Presentation. I had never heard of this blog before but it is filled with Garr's reflections on "issues with professional presentation design." We talk about Visual Literacy in our classes but Garr is living it. He discusses how the media succeed and fail in using visuals to convey their messages. Looks like he has a book called Presentation Zen.

One of his postings that I found exceptionally inspiring was entitled "Beautiful example of the visualization of a story." He discussed the D-PAN (Deaf Performing Artists Network). This is an organization that creates "media designed specifically to serve deaf audiences through the use of American Sign Language (ASL). It would be repetitive to post them here, but Garr has embedded samples of videos the D-PAN created as well as a CNN new report. The message that they "have a dream" is beautiful.

Oh, well . . . I guess I will be repetitive by embedding the "Waiting for the World to Change" Video here.



P.S. I also found Guy's posting The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint This is where Guy says that no PowerPoint should have more than 10 slides, last longer than 20 minutes or use a font less than 30 pt. The first two were incontrovertible, but he got soft on the font rule by saying that you should take the age of oldest person in your audience and divide by 2 to determine your minimum font size. That would mean that I would cause you to use 27.5 fonts. Should be interesting. ;-)

Map Generators are Easy

My Travel Map*
Although I am not a worldly traveler, I saw Paul Glazowski make a reference to this Simple Map Generator on the Mashable blog and it suggested that I should map out the places I have visited. I did so and the resulting map is embedded above. It actually lists all 215 countries (yes, I counted them) on seven continents and all that I had to do was click on the checkbox to select a country. While simple, this utility has an incredible potential for allowing students to "color in" maps for a variety of applications.

This Google Maps/Earth hybrid that is hosted by 29 Travels can be used to chronicle one's travels or visually identify the groups of countries or create comparative maps that can be used to document chronological change. This is a simple though effective answer.

How do you envision using it in your educational setting?

*You might note that this map is not embedded in this posting. I tried it, but it didn't format properly and took too long to load. SOOOO, I simply included a screen capture of the map and then linked it to the original map.

Comparing News Articles from Around the World

I was just reading the EdTech listserv to which I belong (how's that for fancy writing? ;-).
A teacher was asking about how she could use Google to compare news perspectives from different newspapers around the world.

I was fortunate enough to have attended Alan November's presentation at the ITEC conference in Des Moines last month where he explained how you can do this. After a little experimentation, I was able to reconstruct these steps for finding news articles that are written in specific countries about specific topics.

Let's assume that you want to compare news articles about the President-elect Barack Obama. You want to see what they are saying about him in Poland. You can go to google.pl to use the Polish Google but it will only direct you back to the articles here in the US.

The best way to find articles published in Poland is to search only the Web addresses that end in .pl (Polish domain):

1. Begin by selecting the Advanced Search option on Google.
2. In the "Search within a site or domain:", enter .pl (this will limit it to URLs in Poland).
3. In case you don't speak Polish, select English or your native language in the Language section.
4. Enter Obama in the Search box at the top and you will have a huge list of Polish-published articles that are written in your native language.

Here is a link to an advanced search page that would achieve this.

This could also be used to compare articles on a specific topic that were published in the Los Angeles Times (latimes.com) or the New York Times (nytimes.com).

This could be a powerful tool for learning about the world peoples' opinions on thing that happen in the U.S. and elsewhere.

I am interested in whether you have ever used this in your classes? If so, how did it go? If not, how do you envision yourself as using this strategy?

photo: flickr.com/cikku

AECT Google Forms Example

This form was created using Google Docs Form. Please fill it out so that we can see what it looks like to have the information appear in the Google Spreadsheet.

Using Google Form for Surveys

As you may or may not know, Dr. Z and Garey G are giving a presentation at ITEC 2008. It is entitled Dr. Z and Garey G's Creative Cookbook for Collaborative Communication. During that presentation, they will be sharing the incredible opportunities available through using Google Forms with Google Docs.

Hopefully, they will have an auditorium full of laptop-toting folks so that they can enter their information into this form. If you would like to make your own contribution, no matter where on earth you are, please complete the form below. You might even tell us of your actual location in the last field.

It would be useful to have your input but it would EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE if you could add it between 3:00 - 33:0 Central Standard Time. That way the could see you doing it live.

Tools for Video Authoring

Ever create a video and upload it to YouTube? Everybody's doing it. Although the statistics haven't been openly available since Google acquired YouTube for $1.650,000,000 (in Google stock), Comscore estimated that in January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views.

Here is a video by Jon4Lakers about how to make a video using Macintosh iMovie HD and upload it to YouTube. It is not too complicated. You will note that he did this video while on a studybreak from "writing essays for business school" (note that it has been viewed almost 11,000 times - not bad for a studybreak.)

Jon4Lakers was also courteous enough to provide some instruction on how to use Photobooth on his Macintosh to create YouTube videos.

Wondering how to do this with Windows Movie Maker? It is a little more complicated, but JohnGregory08 from Australia provides a 10-minute video about using MovieMaker to create a video.

Want to know how to do specific things in Movie Maker?
Atomic Learning has a set of 63 free videos for Windows Movie Maker 2.

Screencasting
Wondering how to share what's happening on your screen? This is called a screencast. There are a number of programs that you might want to use: Snapz Pro X (Mac) or Camtasia (Windows)

Another option for screencasting is Jing. This is a free, on-line version of Camtasia by the same company, TechSmith. Dr. Z has already posted on Jing in an earlier blog posting. It is a powerful tool that will allow you to create an online video up to 5-minutes in length. Read his posting to learn more about it.

Here is a video that demonstrates and explains Jing.

The world is full of examples of educators using videos to involve k-18 learners in expressing and exploring new ideas. Here are a few examples. Those of you in the EIT class should have received invitations for becoming authors in this blog so add your own examples (followed by your name). If you aren't from this class but have ideas, add your suggestions as comments:

• A Vision of Students Today (Dr. Michael Wesch - Kansas State University)
• A Vision of K-12 Students Today (bjnesbitt)
• . . . your ideas? . . .

Photos: www.flickr.com/Aster-oid, jon4lakers. atomiclearning.com, jingproject.com

Resources for Building in Second Life

Now that my Emerging Instructional Technologies class is exploring Second Life and playing with the opportunities, I have been researching more into how to Build for Second Life. We have the good fortune of having a "Mansion in the Sky" over Iowa Island. The designer for our house is Spirit Finucane (see photo on the right.)

I was talking with Spirit yesterday after she helped me out of a jam. I asked her where would be a good place to begin learning about building in SL and she directed me to the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives (SLurl).
I had visited this place before, but hadn't spent much time there. It is a GREAT FIND for anyone who wants to learn about building. It takes you on a step-by-step progression through the process of building. Begins with defining the shapes of prims (primitive objects) and builds up from there. Each level of accompanied with a notecard that explains the concept. I learned a lot!!! Will have to return soon to continue with my education.

I have been looking for videos of "building lessons", but haven't found any overall resources. There are a few videos that I have added to the 10/2 posting of Readings/Watchings/Listenings/Doings for my Emerging Instrutional Technologies course.

What have you found for Building Resources. I plan to update this page as I learn more from my readers and as I explore the world. (I must admit that I am sitting at a coffee house right now that has a woefully slow wifi system so I can't explore SL much. Will update later.)