Digital Stories from KIPP Bay Area Schools:

More KIPP Bay Area digital stories can be found on Streetside Stories' YouTube channel.

Looking for More Professional Development

Are you looking for more professional development? Check out these opportunities...

MacWorld for Educators, Jan. 5-9, 2009 in San Francisco (Moscone Center)

TRLD Conference (Tech, Reading & Learning Diversity)
Jan. 22-24, 2009 - Hyatt Regency in San Francisco

Also, you might be interested in a membership ($40 per individual) from Computer Using Educators. They have a local East Bay affiliate too, EBCUE, which offers grant funding for technology tools that enhance innovative, student-centered projects that are aligned with California Content Standards. http://www.ebcue.org/grants.htm

Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds

Curious to know how much time your students really spend on the computer, the internet and playing video games? Check out this article in Edutopia about media in the lives of youth and the importance of media literacy skills.
http://www.edutopia.org/media-literacy-skills

The article references a 2005 study called Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds.

Cool Tip: Trouble with movie file formats?

Do you sometimes have trouble playing certain movie files on your Mac, especially if they were originally created on a Windows machine? According to PowerMax, there are two free utilities that allow QuickTime to play a host of video formats:

• Perian
  The Swiss Army Knife for QuickTime
  (requires Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher)
• Flip4Mac
  WMV Plug-in component for QuickTime
  (requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher)

They suggest you download both utilities, which supposedly work great and are easy to install.

PowerMax is an authorized Apple Reseller and has a section on their website with relevant articles.



http://www.powermax.com/articles

I Stopped Drawing When I Realized "I Didn't Know How to Draw"

We give our young people plenty of opportunities to write during their 13 years of primary schooling. They write their names. They write sentences. They fill in blanks with words.

No matter what the writing we give them opportunity and techniques to practice.

Not so for drawing. So when we ask our young people to create with images they rely on their own knowledge and experimentation, unless they are lucky enough to have an instructor guide them with techniques to practice.

Fast forward to my working with teachers...these same students have grown up into talented adults who disparage their own art creation...because they haven't been given techniques to practice...and so they are self-conscious about their art...

HAVE NO FEAR! Creativity can be CULTIVATED and taught! You may not feel like DaVinci, but you can share making and using shapes, shading, perspective, colours, and placement to create images.

You also can play with photography where your art direction determines the image and the technology "draws" it for you.

There are lots of resources on the web to teach drawing for (you)th.

Explore for yourself and be okay with making messy projects or projects you don't deem successful. It's practice and helps you build your skillset. Then share your work and techniques with your students and watch them grow in their art skills as well as their writing skills!

Ning.com : Create Your Own Facebook or MySpace

How amazing would it be if you created your own community for your students or your school or your students' families?

Ning.com is a tool allowing you to create your own social networking site for your own community.

Set up events, connect to your flickr photostream and your youtube channel to customize the look and feel of your group.

Maybe your class creates a ning site together to talk about the cell or the timeline that lead to the Industrial Revolution. Your members can create study events for everyone or you can share notes with the blogging feature. One site JUST FOR YOU.

You have the tools. What can you create?

Teacher Tube

Ah...you've gotten your fill of YouTube. You don't want your young students to be distracted by the bling of something that doesn't directly have to do with your class material...however, you know that your young people engage with video and the internet at a pace that is dizzying.

Your students are VISUAL learners.

Enter TeacherTube. Never thought you'd see a dope video about improper fractions? Check out this rap.



See what other gems you can mine. There's a whole community of educators incorporating the media

The World is Your Classroom

Hooked on location-based media after September 27th's training at KQED? MIT offers some examples of how history comes alive by taking it off the page and bringing it into the hands of the learner.

I Don't Want to Be Tethered to Photoshop ANYMORE!

If you don't have the patience to edit your photos in one of those old-fashioned ON MACHINE applications, then don't.

Photo-editing software has increased in sophistication, availability, and decreased in cost.

I'd like to list out 5 free user-friendly sites for you to play around in. Most let you just upload and edit! A lot of them work well with Web 2.0 (i.e. social networking sites) really well!

• http://www.picnik.com/

Works well with Flickr, but requires an account.

• 

http://fotoflexer.com/

• http://pixenate.com/

• http://pixer.us/

• http://www.lunapic.com/editor/

Ever wonder how those MySpace pics get so fabulous?

• http://www.splashup.com/

Check 'em out. Play. And now you never have to be tied to your computer again to edit your images!

Web Monkey!

For all of you teachers ready to move your media arts to the web, Web Monkey is a great resource to introduce any budding techs to how to program in Drupal or craft their own javascript, in addition to optimizing images for the web or doing more with web video!

Great curriculum to walk through your first programming projects and your first image compression for the web.

Get your Webby Tech on!

Digital Photography

Creating images for print or your digital stories can be a production-heavy process. If your project has a tight deadline, consider introducing digital photography into the classroom. Students can take pictures and upload them onto their computers in less time than it takes to scan artwork onto the computers.

Fodors does an excellent job breaking out techniques for photography for you to share with your students! For a quick overview on photography check out these sections on:

• Getting Ready,
  
• Lighting,
  
• Techniques, and
  
• Composition

Video 101 with Professor Monkey

Your students are itching to do video. We know...and you may not consider yourself an expert in video techniques... but each one of the MacBooks has a camera and you KNOW you want to play.

In trolling the web a search revealed Professor Monkey, a quick overview of basic video techniques and vocabulary to take your video editing to the next level.

The site is REALLY easy to follow. Professor Monkey makes it EASY!

2008 KIPP Film Awards

Another year of hard work brings another year of celebration! We're excited to announce that our end of the year celebration, the KFAs, will be held at Zeum, San Francisco's hands-on arts & technology museum for kids and families.  On May 31, KIPP students, staff and parents will convene for a morning of interactive fun coupled with an awards ceremony to honor students' and teachers' efforts at digital storytelling over the past year. We're assembling a panel of community jurors to select outstanding films to be recognized. Here's a shout out for all of those incredible digital stories made in your classrooms this year. And the nominees are... STAY TUNED!!

Tell Me More, Tell Me More…Was it Love at First Sight?

Someone first mentioned Digital Teachers to you... a colleague, your school leader, or perhaps it was Digital Teachers staff. What are your thoughts about what you've heard? As you prepare for training, tell us what you are looking forward to with this exciting and innovative professional development program in media arts. While you experience the process firsthand, share your reflections here too.

Teachers from our last training... in their own words stated:

"Training was fun. Fantastic. Very informative!"

"Absolutely awesome! I wish I could do this more than once a year."

WHOA... Watch Out for These Roadblocks!

We've all experienced a bit of chaos in our classrooms, especially during the creative process. Sure, it's natural, yet how can we make the times you wanted to pull out your hair more manageable? What roadblocks have you encountered during implementation? Have you avoided any pitfalls that almost derailed your project? Got any tips on classroom management for this type of integrated technology lesson?

Please do tell... so that others don't make the same mistakes. The beauty of this experience is that one teacher's challenge becomes another teacher's good fortune - lessons all of us can learn!

Wake Up, Students, WAKE UP!!

Hey you, sitting in the back of the class... yes, you, with your head down on the desk, WAKE UP!!!!

The ability to get your students' attention has been one of Digital Teacher's greatest assets. Teachers have consistently reported high levels of student engagement throughout the digital storytelling process, especially from the ones you wouldn't ordinarily expect. You know them - the ones who have given up on school and usually disrupt your class, the ones who usually fall asleep while you are teaching, or never open their mouths to participate. 

So, c'mon folks... share your favorite student anecdotes with the non-believers out there. Remind them that, "you ain't seen nothin' yet" from these shining stars.