Smart Scenes on Storyboard ThatStoryboard That (www.storyboardthat.com) has an awesome new feature for over 70 scenes in the Storyboard Creator. "Smart Scenes" are customizable background scenes with artistic effects, like time of day and weather. Now you can take the same scene and change it in many ways. Each scene has different options; sometimes you can remove/add furniture or objects, open/close doors, turn lights on and off. Some scenes have unique changes, like drawing stage curtains or turning bubbles on in the hot tub!   To see what the options are for a particular scene, click on the blue "Edit Scene" button on the image editing palette.A pop-up will show the options as well as a preview of the edited scene. In this example, you can change time of day, weather, street lights, and windows.  If you choose a "See-Through" option, you can layer other scenes and characters behind the main scene to appear inside the building. With these new capabilities, you have even more creative freedom than before! If you haven’t already, go check it out and see what you can do!Click here to create a storyboard now!

Choosito is a new search engine for education that I found out about from Technology & Learning.  This is a great way to search the web in a safe way as well as library resources.  Best of all, all search results display a reading level which makes it similar to Nettrekker and ideal for education.I highly recommend checking out Choosito by clicking here!!!Below is a brief demo...For my Pinterest board on Search Engines click here.

Quizalize is a fantastic learning tool for educators to create game based learning quizzes.  What separates Quizalize apart from similar sites is the detailed reports generated as well as how easy it is to differentiate instruction and see how each student or class is doing on any given topic.Also, Quizalize features a new dashboard integrating Zzish, which allows teachers to track student progress in real-time, while generating detailed reports and seeing exactly which questions were answered correct and which ones were answered wrong w/ their "given" response.  This innovative dashboard makes it easy for educators to integrate Quizalize into their classroom and can be used for any curriculum or subject.Finally, Quizalize allows for teachers to create "team" games where a classroom can be divided in half and students can answer questions anonymously while not having to worry about being embarrassed getting wrong answer.  This is a great way to engage students and introduce game based learning as well.I highly recommend checking out Quizalize by clicking here!!!*Quizalize is an advertiser of Technology Tidbits.

You'd love to come visit now, wouldn't you? It’s a Monday, it was a relatively uneventful weekend for me, but I did manage to create a little bit of ds106 art. The current incarnation of ds106 recently received a large influx of students from Japan last week, and they’ve been blogging, creating art, and accomplishing new assignments at an amazing rate, so I decided to take Michael Branson Smith’s advice to complete one last Visual/Design assignment for this portion of the course. Behold, the "minimalist travel movie poster" inspired by this assignment for ds106. Alright, in full fairness, it was actually inspired by some artwork from artist Justin Van Genderen, a graphic artist that seems quite fascinated, and masterful, with manipulating iconic images and scenes from pop culture, specifically science fiction cinema. I wanted to do something similar, and pay homage to cult-favorite "The Princess Bride", turning the treacherous fire swamp into a seemingly attractive tourist destination. I found the assignment incredibly challenging, as I forced myself to try to make this as minimalist as possible, with the end result still lacking in my opinion. I feel as though I didn’t strip down the image enough, and while I cheated and remixed the icon for the fire, and took the little bit of spanish moss from another image, the overall effect just isn’t what I was looking for. At any rate, the point to this post (if there is one) is that teachers need to PLAY more, and USE less. When we simply "use" tools that have been handed to us either physically or digitally, it can often become quite easy to become critical of their design, without any attachment to the actual creation process behind them. Whether it’s a new digital "whizz bang" interactive on the web, or a graphic organizer that’s been designed to help writers design and formulate better arguments for a persuasive essay, too often teachers can become discouraged with the limited abilities of a learning tool, and write it off as junk, without considering the hours, the research, the creativity, and the expertise needed to put together a working toolkit for instruction. It’s actually one of the reasons I was attracted to ds106 in the first place…..it’s forcing me to explore new tools, and surrounds me with a supportive community, that encourages me to create more. Case in point, this assignment alone went through 3 major revisions during the creation process, and several of the ds106 people pitched in to comment, inspire, and push me forward. Thanks Jim Groom, Michael Branson Smith, and Dr. Garcia! Oh, and the "magic" of the fire swamp? That it took the courage, fortitude, and teamwork for the protagonists to survive it, much the same way that educators come together to support one another’s creations and endeavors in the classroom.

It’s Friday, I’m burned out, and this video single handily restored my energy! It’s brilliant in its honesty, sincerity, and technique. I have a feeling that if you happen to be a student in Tricia Fuglestad’s classroom, you’re blessed each and every time you find yourself in a creative mood with a teacher that not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. Just take a look at her video for proper "glue safety" in the art room, something that’s near and dear to my wife’s heart as an elementary art teacher. If you want to see a teacher practicing great 21st century skills by opening up her classroom to the world, go check out her wiki, FugleFlicks, and check out some of the creativity that she brings into her teaching.

In my never ending quest to find an engaging way to bring the real world into the classroom, I captured some video of my children and I playing with one of those massive rolling granite sphere water fountains. I’ve never really been intriqued by the tiny little desktop versions of these fountains, where a small amount of water is able to "float" a tiny granite sphere the size of a baseball, and then allow it to rotate freely. The stones usually fit in your hand, and the entire effect seems clunky and obvious. However, when you come across a stone sphere that’s more than half your height, and most likely weighs several hundred pounds, you realize there’s no possible way any one person could cause it to move or rotate with one hand. Yet all it takes is a little bit of gurgling water to set it in motion, and that’s when I become curious. While most of the videos people have added to the video story channel on Vimeo involve math, I feel like there’s a compelling way to use inquiry to help guide and engage science exploration as well. As a science minor, and a former middle school science teacher, I always love to make science concepts hands-on, relevant, and interactive. This giant "floating" sphere fits all of those criteria as you can find many of them in large urban malls or gardens, where (as you can see in the video) people are welcome to touch and play with it. Although I added a few questions to the end of the video, I’m curious to know how someone else might use a video like this to spur discussion on the topic of water, friction, pressure, or forces in a science classroom. Check out more video story problems for math and science on the Video Story Problem Channel on Vimeo! You’re also welcome to start producing your own (or get your students producing some), and come join us!

Whether it’s in schools, large enterprises, or small businesses, far too often professional development or training with technology is relegated to a one-time "sit and get" workshop in which the participants are expected to absorb, memorize, and master often complicated software, routines, and workflows which may be completely alien to them (to put it mildly). Far too often, teachers are subjected to these "one off" workshops by the very people that are employed to help them make sense of the mountain of technological tools that are available today. As the K-12 EdTech Coordinator for my district, I too have committed this heinous crime, often putting technology ahead of the interests and needs of those sitting in my session. However, having come from 7 successful years of teaching technology (alright, so let’s consider them moderately successful), I’ve been able to reflect on training that I’ve conducted for teachers in my district, as well as scrutinize the training conducted by specialists we’ve brought in from outside contractors. Below are a few of my musings that I’ve come to realize have some merit in creating effective technology PD. The Buddy System The buddy system….faithful tool of summer camp counselors, boy scouts, and the United States military, is quite often the most overlooked aspect of technology PD. Whenever I conduct a training session, or put together a workshop, I’ve found that it’s important to think about "afterward" before you even start. When the workshop is over, and the people in your session are out in "the real world" again, dealing with new technology, or new instructional strategies using tech, it doesn’t matter how well they paid attention or how meticulous their notes are, they’re going to need a buddy! That could be me, but it could also be a teaching partner or co-worker, or even a small group or teaching team. If there’s no obvious mentoring happening within the group, or no clear relationships in which people can depend on one another for coaching, then I’ll try to clear my calendar and make myself available for the next few days or weeks at regular times so I can "check in", offer "just in time" help, and better explain confusion about the disparity of the isolated workshop environment and the real world application. For example, yesterday I led a day long "Mac OSX Basics" session for a number of people in our district’s central administrative office to prepare them to switch over from Windows to Mac this year. I encouraged them to switch their desktop iMacs from their Windows bootcamp to the Mac side this morning in order to start using what they learned in the workshop right away. I made sure that my calendar for today was completely clear, and the level of anxiety in the central office has decreased dramatically because I was here to help coach them through some of the little quirks they’ll have to get used to in the new work environment, reassure them when they hesitate to make a click, and generally encourage them; basically everything that I would have done in the classroom with my students to help them feel confident. Agendas Are for the Birds I’ll probably take the most heat for this tenet, but I’ve found that agendas can often cause and produce just as much anxiety (if not more), than the anxiety workshop attendees bring to the table themselves when learning something new that they’ll be expected to perform with some success the very next day. I’m not advocating that we eliminate agendas all together, but rather toss out the overly complicated, highly detailed, tightly structured agendas. Instead, provide workshop attendees with a simple list of the learning goals for the day. They don’t need to see all of my notes about how I’m going to help them understand iMovie or Gmail, they just need to know what they should be able to accomplish at the end of the workshop. In fact, if my agenda is purposely sparse, it allows the workshop to be much more flexible, providing time for attendee questions to be answered in more depth, and often when more appropriate than when "I think" they should pop up. Too often I see presenters make this mistake, of structuring the entire day, so that each tool or strategy they cover are presented in a linear fashion, ignoring whether or not the attendees are ready for it. Being able to "go off script" is a LOT easier if the script is more of just a guideline rather than a rigid script. Quite often, I’ll use a wiki to help with this type of agenda, especially for a multi-day workshop. It allows me to create just a few pages with some big learning goals, and then fill in as needed. Last year we had a large number of new teachers to the district, and I needed a way to help introduce them to all the technology in the district, but I didn’t want to bore them on simple things like how to use the phone system. I created a New Staff Technology Orientation wiki that allowed me to flow from topic to topic as dictated by the comfort level of the group. I was able to introduce all of the important pieces of technology I needed, while "off loading" some of the more mundane aspects (how to scan a document with the multi-function printers) through the use of video tutorials and documentation that I uploaded to the wiki. It also allowed me to easily make changes throughout the training, as people requested additional documentation or resources that I hadn’t initially provided. However, most importantly, it gave me a living breathing document that I could use to publish future documentation and resources (which I have done) as other issues and questions popped up, or technology changed. Work Backward to the Technology I’ll close on this last piece of wisdom, that while gleaned from spending far too many hours reflecting on my instruction, is a universal truth that has propelled corporations (including Apple) to great heights. The absolutely worst type of technology PD you can deliver to anyone, teachers included, is when you want to show someone all the "whizz bang" magic that you can do with a piece of software, rather than focus on what types of experiences or achievements are possible with said piece of technology. You don’t want to promise a group of learners that they’ll be able to learn every little advanced feature of Photostory, or every trick available in Google Docs. You can’t deliver on that promise, because you can’t determine what they will or won’t remember, or "learn". You can however, deliver an experience, a process, a product or project that will give learners a sense of accomplishment using just a few tools. you can create incredibly moving pieces of video by simply adjusting the speed of the video clip, or revolutionize meetings with a shared Google Doc and comments. The late Steve Jobs addressed this in response to a rather pointed, and venomous question about his "tech cred" at a 1997 conference dedicated to engineers developing software for Apple computers. He puts it much more eloquently than I can at the moment, so while the video is grainy, I encourage you to watch below with open ears. The point I’m trying to make comes about halfway through when he’s talking about all the awesome technology that’s available to us, yet doesn’t matter if you can’t show how it will remarkably make the user experience better. Start with the end goal, the experience you want teachers and students to have in the classroom, and then build your PD backwards from that. This is probably the hardest guideline for me to follow, as I often let really cool "look what I can do" moments sneak into my workshops, conversations, and dialogues, and that’s wrong! It’s not about what I can make the tool do, it’s about what those in the workshop will be able to accomplish with the tool. Closing Thoughts If you focus on that user experience, and orient your technology PD workshops based on how the technology will enhance what your attendees do, make sure they have support after the workshop, and remain flexible with your schedule, you may not cover every last menu item, every advanced option, but what you do cover will most likely be more beneficial, and longer lasting in the long run; a strong positive relationship with your attendees that will serve as a strong foundation for which to build future technological, and instructional expertise. image credit - HELP - http://www.flickr.com/photos/49889874@N05/5645164344/sizes/m/in/photostream/

A long time ago, in a pre-computer media landscape when copying and pasting meant you actually got to play with scissors and glue, teachers and students created multimedia projects with little regard to copyright law. Images from magazines, corporate logos, and other media were used with reckless abandon to create visually and aurally pleasing projects. Before the dawn of the internet, these types of projects were hung in hallways, classrooms, and refrigerators with great care, and for the most part, didn’t cause much of a stir with copyright holders. However, with the proliferation of dozens of social media sharing websites, many educators’ lack of clear understanding of copyright law and fair use (at no fault of their own, it can get complicated), and the ability for all of these wonderful projects to go digital and posted to the web, the battles and issues with copyright holders can produce paralyzing anxiety over what can be remixed, repurposed, and shared online. So I thought, what the heck, let’s make things simple today, and share 13 resources that host copyright free materials (images, videos, photos, music, etc.) for use in any project that you want to publish anywhere on the web, and not have to worry about any legalities. Audio   Free Sound Project What’s There: Big database of user created sound effects, foley effects, music clips, instruments, and more. Freedom to Use: All audio clips on the site have Creative Commons licenses, so while some can’t be used for commercial purposes, all of the sound clips can be used for educational projects with just an attribution to the creator. Why I like It: It has create short clips of instruments and notes that I can string together to create background music or effects. Also love that you can preview all of the clips in the browser before downloading, and use their large collection of sounds effects for great foley effects in my videos or podcasts.   JewelBeat What’s There: Nice collection of royalty free music. Freedom to Use: Once an audio track is purchased, it’s yours to use for ANYTHING, with just a simple attribution in the credits of the project. Why I like It: It follows the iTunes model of "pay per track", but unlike iTunes you can use the track you purchase for just about anything. While it’s not actually free (99¢ per track isn’t exactly breaking the bank though), you gain the right to use the tracks you’ve purchased for any of your projects, whether they’re commercial or not. You get the rights for 99 years, so chances are you’ll be gone before you need to worry about anything.   SoundCloud CreativeCommons What’s There: Growing collection of sound clips, sound effects, and audio tracks. Freedom to Use: All of the tracks in the Creative Commons section of SoundCloud are available for you to use with attribution, although some are limited to non-commercial projects only. Why I like It: SoundCloud has a unique media player that allows you to embed sound and music clips into other webpages. It also allows users to comment on the sound clips, directly on the media’s timeline, so you can leave a comment in time with the music at a particularly nice section of the clip. Like all good social media platforms, you can follow audio creators you like, so you can keep up on their creations.   Vimeo Music Store What’s There: Growing collection of background music for video projects on Vimeo. Freedom to Use: While there are many paid tracks in the Vimeo music store, searching just the Creative Commons or FREE tracks will reward you with a bountiful list of tunes using a Creative Commons license that only requires you to give attribution for the music you’re using. Why I like It: I already use Vimeo quite a bit, so it’s nice to have these tracks at my disposal from such a creative community. However, even NON Vimeo users can download the FREE tracks without having to login, so that’s an extra bonus! When downloading the track, a little pop up reminding you of the exact license of that track, so you know what you can and can’t do with it. Still Images   Pics4Learning What’s There: One of the oldest, and still growing,  collections of free images for education. Freedom to Use: The images found on Pics4Learning are all owned by the original photographers, but they’ve allowed Pics4Learning to share the images for use in any classroom, and shared in any media project, no matter where it’s posted, so long as the images aren’t used for any commercial purpose. Why I like It: Pics4Learning is the "great grandaddy" of free media resources for education. It’s easy to navigate through the categories of images, or search using keywords. As an added bonus, each image comes with a pre-formatted citation, so citing the images is as simple as a quick copy and paste.   Open ClipArt What’s There: A large collection of free clipart, all part of the Public Domain. Freedom to Use: All of the images on this site have been donated to Public Domain, so they’re all free for the taking. Why I like It: Since the entire collection is comprised of Public Domain images, you don’t even have to cite your resources if you don’t need to. Although I would certainly make sure students are still citing their sources, there’s no attribution you need to give, and you can take, remix, or change anything you want from this site. Extra geeky bonus! All of the images are available in the SVG and PNG format, so you can grab the PNG version for most uses, or the SVG format if you want to manipulate, or alter the images.    Flickr Creative Commons What’s There: A GIANT collection of free images to use, submitted by people all around the world. Freedom to Use: Everything in the Creative Commons section of Flickr is free for anyone to use. All of the licenses are very clear, and will tell you if you need to give attribution to the photographer, and whether or not you can change it, or use it for commercial purposes. Why I like It: As of the time of publishing on this post there are close to 30 MILLION images on Flickr that are free for anyone to use, for any purpose, public, commercial, or otherwise, and all you have to provide is attribution to the original photographer. Can’t get better than that! Video   Next Vista For Learning What’s There: Online library of free short videos for students, teachers, and learners created by students, teachers, and learners. Freedom to Use: These videos are all free for students, teachers, and educators. Why I like It: The videos are all under 5 minutes (one of the Next Vista’s main stipulations) so that you can find relevant video that fit well into a discussion and don’t abuse the attention span of viewers. Videos are all created by other learners, so students get to watch other students, not adults. Did I also mention that the entire site is free? Videos all include a handy download link for offline usage.   Internet Archive - Movie Archive What’s There: Hundreds of thousands of public domain video clips, films, community submitted clips, and older historical news reels. Freedom to Use: "Near unrestricted" use of the videos on this site is its main selling point. Some videos are only available for streaming, but all downloadable videos are in the public domain, and available for use in any media projects. Why I like It: I was first drawn to this site for it’s amazing collection of those old corny instructional films and public service announcements, but have used it for much more since then. There are thousands of great short video clips in the Arts category that would be useful for abstract video backgrounds during student news casts. From sports videos to animations and cartoons, there’s a LOT to dig through. Some of the content might be more appropriate for older students, so check it out before heading there with your class.   National Park Service B-Roll Video Archive What’s There: Public Domain video clips from a number of different U.S. National Parks and Monuments. Freedom to Use: Public Domain video means you can download, remix, republish, and use this video in any media project you want to. Why I like It: This site has great footage for shots of nature and famous landmarks, monuments, and parks around the U.S. so it would work well for video reports, video essays, or just some really nice scenery. All of the footage is professional quality, and available in H.264 format, so it’s highly compatible with lots of software. These are by no means an exhaustive list of sites that host copyright or royalty free media for special projects, but I find myself going to these sites quite often when looking for media to put into projects that I intend to publish on the web, and share with the world. When I don’t want to worry about seeking permission, and just need something fast that I can safely provide attribution for in the credits or notes, these are the places I head to. They’re great for use with students and other teachers that might be looking for some stock places to go to get media for special projects, video essays, or video production classes that need lots of media on a regular basis. More importantly, it’s great to share these resources with teachers and students that find themselves confused or apprehensive about copyright fair use, and want to start simply, with media that clearly states how they can be used fairly.

Dear Scott, I am quite often a rather proud, indignant, opinionated, and combative individual. Despite my best attempts to overcome my personal defects and character flaws, there are times when I am unable to present myself in a manner that is befitting a professional. Last night, in part due to a large amount of stress in both my personal life and professional existence, I lashed out and attacked you for seemingly petty and insignificant reasons. While The discussion we had during the EduNationCast was quite cordial, and rather agreeable, the argument that followed via Twitter was both unbecoming of me as an educator, and humbling as a human being. I crossed the line between discussing what may or may not be a serious difference of professional opinion, wrote veiled innuendos, and argued from a position that is beneath both of our stations. In short, I apologize for: Questioning your moral character Venting long held frustrations with the ed tech industry upon you Venting long held frustrations with cyclical nature of "the latest tech fad" in our culture Implicating you as an Apple "lackey" In truth Scott, I do not know you well enough to even begin to critically  question your professionalism, let alone your personal moral fiber (and even if I did know you well enough it would be deplorable to do so). I mixed equal amounts of skepticism, bitterness, and shear exhaustion, and produced a toxic brew of ignorance and vitriol that has done nothing but damage the budding professional relationship we have. My frustration with IWB skeptics long disillusioned with poor instructional IWB practice has produced an equally skeptical reaction about the coming wave of iDevices in our classrooms, but that professional skepticism should not have boiled over into the accusations and hurtful comments that I made about the direction of educational technology, and your involvement with Apple. I highly respect what you have accomplished both before your distinguished appointment by Apple, and now during your relationship with them. Much of my feelings about the nature of vendor and teacher relationships can be summed up in Tom Woodward’s post about the increased danger of  how a company might "use you". As an Apple Distinguished Educator himself, I have to weigh what Tom says about relationships with vendors, and what their ultimate motives are very carefully. That having been said, it was in poor taste, and completely unflattering of me to question you in such a direct manner last night, Scott. Please accept this open apology to my equally open tirade of bitterness and skepticism yesterday evening. No one deserves to have to endure what I wrote, spoke, and felt. In closing, I would like it to go on record that I am a fan of all avenues of technology being explored in schools, as long as the focus is on good pedagogical practice, and will strive in the future to be mindful of how bottling up feelings and emotions only leads to me lashing out against my fellow educators who are doing amazing things to help learners. Sincerely, Ben image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickkiteley/2907434143/in/photostream/

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sean Dardis, Dave Mills, and Betty Sundling to the Video Story Problem channel over on Vimeo! They earn the award for "most courageous teachers of the week" in my book for taking the first step in exploring how to make math a little more engaging, and a bit more relevant to students. The three are all 6th grade math teachers in Mattawan, and while they’ve always done a fantastic job of developing strong relationships with students, they’re exploring how they can use media to help connect with the more visual learners that are present in many schools these days. The main goal of this little video story problem project is to try and bring the real world into the classroom through math, and this brownie problem is a great first step towards that. It’s simple, direct, and tosses in a bit of cheekiness for the students to enjoy. More importantly, it will serve as a great model for when some of their students start creating their own video story problems (I’ve heard rumors of it happening sometime this year). They have a few more videos coming shortly, so please go check them out, and offer some comments on what works for you, and how the videos might be tweaked to offer other angles of attack for students to understand the basic concepts. I really love bringing these problems into the classroom as it shows the students that the teachers care about them enough to make something just for them, and opens the door for a larger conversation to take place about math, rather than simply solving the problem.

It’s no secret that I like to dabble with social and visual media. The majority of my posts in the last 6 months have revolved around using media for digital storytelling purposes, or as a means of professional development aimed at teachers. So it was with a bit of confidence that I submitted one of my "Wild Wild Web" videos to Tech Smith’s Screen Champ Competition. Notice I said that I felt confident in the submission, not that it would amount to much. The video is campy, unpolished, and clunky in my use of Camtasia, the screen-casting tool I used to create the Wild Wild Web videos. Imagine my surprise last week when I received an email that said I’d been chosen as one of fifteen finalists! I was thrilled that the character I’ve created, Wyatt "Hoss" Rancher, was deemed worthy enough to be up against some ed-tech heavy hitters like John Sowash and Reg Nakoneshny. There are plenty of other finalists with much more polish than I have as well from industry and other walks of life, so while I don’t expect to win "Best of Show", I’m terribly flattered to be chosen. Feel free to watch the chosen video below, and take a moment to click the link for voting! Click here to go vote for the TechSmith Screen Champ "Best in Show". You can vote every day until December 16th!

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson Half of our district received training from Apple this summer on the concept of Challenge Based Learning. While many educators are quickly overwhelmed by Apple’s take on the latest instructional trend of student-centered learning sweeping the United States, many teachers in my district understand the need to introduce more inquiry and real world based education into our curriculum. The problem is, many educators question how and where such necessary learning fits into an increasingly cramped and compacted curriculum, especially with more high-stakes testing coming down the road. Most, if not all educators, understand why we need to change education, we just have a difficult time seeing how we’re going to do it under ever-increasing mandates. My rather snarky reply is…."bring the real world into class discussion using social media!" If we are to take Jefferson at his word, and acknowledge that a great deal of our democracy is indeed mob rule at its most basic level, then why not help students better understand the mob, and perhaps help cultivate a more critical thinking mob for the future? I found the image above from an Occupy Wall Street protester via Facebook this morning, and while I’m not trying to advocate for one side of the debate over the other, what value could you have in using this image for an impromptu conversation in an economics or political science course? As an educator, I know that fantastic unplanned conversations still happen in the classroom, pushing back important curriculum. The challenge then is to create a "planned" unplanned conversation using "in-the-moment" images, videos, and other resources shared via social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. You don’t need to have the entire platform unblocked for students, and it certainly doesn’t take much to follow a few interesting resources on the social networking platform of your choosing to get this kind of great "real world" content. And best yet, it opens up some of the more sanitized black and white conversations in the classroom to a little bit of the real world "blurriness". Storify is an excellent tool to bring such details, opinions, and resources together: You can frame the entire challenge in a 30 or 40 minute conversation; The essential question has already been posed, and it would be quite simple to add the challenge of "how do we get people to communicate?" by asking your students some guiding questions such as "do you see any differences, or commonalities between following the rules in the real world and in the school building?". You could even make this challenge homework, and ask the students to come up with half a dozen more questions each, helping reinforce that learning is questioning in a meticulous fashion. Who knows, they might even hop on their social network of choice in the evening to dig around for more examples of the debate and controversy surrounding the topic you choose. It would then only be a matter of selecting the proper learning activities, resources, and guiding discussions that would help answer the common questions your students come up with; almost like a contractor selecting the right tools to add a new addition to a house after consulting with the home owner on what’s needed. Or am I being a little too "ivory tower" on this one? As an educator that always strove to integrate some aspect of social studies or civics in my lessons (where appropriate), I’m thinking this would be an effective, and practical, way to kick off a challenge or inquiry based learning experience.

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danzen/105653250/in/photostream/ I was recently asked to create two "one-pagers" for a special project I had been involved in with Detroit Public Television. I was asked to write these documents as companions to the short video I helped create for a Fractions for 4th Grade App created by Study by APP. The idea was to create a digital learning tool that was brief, engaging, and incorporated a lot of visual elements, along with the typical multiple choice review questions. While the project ultimately didn’t go anywhere due to a lack of funding, it was quite an interesting experience (I got to work with some really amazingly talented video and television people), and I got to hold several bars of chocolate long enough until they were melted all over my fingers (only one way to clean that off, yum!). I tried to condense both papers into one, and while they have a bit of a disjointed flow (bullet points can do that), I had a lot of fun writing them, and even got a chance to interview one of Brian Bennett’s Honors Biology classes about how their they and their teachers use digital media to enhance the learning process. Special thanks to him and his students for helping me sort out my thoughts on the subject. The first one-pager revolved around tips for teachers on employing and creating digital media learning resources, while the second one-pager was aimed at parents, to help them support learning at home using mobile devices. As with most of my writing, there’s always room for improvement, and I’m sure other educators have a lot more to add to these points. Teaching and Learning with Digital Media Bringing digital media into the classroom is not something new, but has rapidly evolved in the last 10 years of education with the advent of social media, mobile devices, apps, and a host of other ways to access digital interactive content. The following list is a short collection of strategies to employ, and pitfalls to look out for when using digital media in the 21st Century classroom. Please take note that many of the strategies are employable even without the use of media, as many instructional strategies are universal in nature. Instructional Strategies to Employ with Digital Media Model the thinking process out loud - When using any type of media or interactive in the classroom it can be tempting to simply let the media tell the story. Sometimes the students still need the scaffolding of hearing the teacher "think out loud" as they process what’s being seen. Play with a purpose - When introducing new interactive media make sure to give the students time to play. Outline a few expectations or goals you’d like them to achieve during "play" time, but don’t be too rigid. Allow guided exploration. Avoid digital lectures - The lecture model does not always work as well in the digital learning space as it does in a traditional classroom. Students may suffer "lag time" between when they can ask the teacher about conceptual questions. Creating or finding short pieces of content can often be better than longer pieces of material if students are on the go or mostly using mobile devices. Choice - The power of digital media and interactives comes from the ability of learners to move at their own pace, skip around to find the information they need, and chose when and how to consume learning material. Make sure to give students a few choices of media or resources if possible, or at the very least try to extend the material with open-ended questions that gives them the chance to explore and reflect. Tips & Tricks When Creating or Employing Digital Media Publish in an open space - Whenever possible, publish or use resources that are available in as public a place as possible to make it easier for students to access content. Posting materials or resources behind logins can be cumbersome for students to access. Audio is key! - The quality of your video can vary depending on the camera being used, but if your audio is low quality and difficult to hear, the entire project will suffer. Make sure to have a good microphone, or re-record the audio in post-production. Put yourself and students in the spotlight - Students will respond much better to video and media that’s been produced and stars their very own teacher and peers. If they have an existing relationship with the people making the digital content, the authenticity helps drive engagement. Interact and Visualize! - The power of digital media is that it can be visual, aural, and interactive. Rely on text when necessary, but focus on the visual aspect of the medium. Supporting Your Child’s Learning with Mobile Media Mobile devices have come a long way in the last decade. Most are now always connected to the Internet, allow for two-way interactive communication, and serve as our primary means of how we interact with and make sense of the rest of the world. The following list is comprised of strategies and suggestions that you can employ to help support your child’s learning with mobile media. Load up on digital content before a new topic or unit of study - If you can look at your student’s syllabus or assignments ahead of time for a class they’re taking, try to load up their mobile device with podcasts, videos, and other digital media that pertain to the topic coming up. You now have a digital handheld library of content that serves as a good starting point for reference. Small "infobytes" can be just as helpful as longer content - Often all learner’s need are small pieces of information to help support their learning. Having longer pieces of media in the form of audio lectures and videos can be helpful, but often with a mobile device you just want a few minutes worth of an explanation or demonstration of a topic. Capture learning moments all around you - A lot of learning takes place in the real world, away from the classroom. Many mobile devices have cameras and microphones built right in, so you can capture audio, still images, or video whenever you come across a "teachable" moment. Students can use it later for studying, sharing with their classmates, or just as a valuable reminder of application of their learning in the real world. Play a little - When approaching the end of a unit or learning objective, students have much more to rely on when it comes to reviewing. Audio podcasts, videos, and apps are helpful, but increasingly games and other "play based" forms of review on websites and in mobile apps are playing a role in learning. Allow time for your child to play games and simulations related to the content on their mobile devices. Know when to put the device down - Although mobile devices are everywhere, don’t let them dictate every aspect of learning. Sometimes it’s good to put down the devices, get your hands dirty, or communicate with others face to face. Make sure to balance time spent "plugged in" with time spent communicating and interacting with others without the mobile device.

This past Thanksgiving break was one of the most relaxing, peaceful, and downright memorable holidays I’ve had in a long time. Among the highlights of the break were homemade cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving Skype session with relatives in South Carolina, crepes for brunch, driving around Chicago with my brother while car shopping in the rain, and raking the yard with my kids (who are both old enough now to enjoy the raking and the jumping in the leaf pile). As I reflected on this Thanksgiving break while sitting in front of the fire Sunday afternoon after saying good bye and well wishes to the last of our holidays visitors, I couldn’t help but feel the need to make another "Speed up Your Work Day" video assignment for ds106…only with a bit of a twist towards the end. While my two previous submissions for this assignment focused strictly on speeding up my work day in an attempt to tell a particularly mundane story about a part of my day, I wanted to capture that small part of the tedious task of raking leaves which almost all of us have fond memories of; the jumping into and crunching of the leaf pile when finished. I know my visual stories are rather simplistic, domestic, and typically a bit saccharine compared to the deeper and more thought provoking fare that comes across the ds106 airwaves, but there’s something just as exciting (for me at least) in seeing my children enjoy the same "Americana" and fall traditions that I enjoyed as a child. What would happen if you were to ask your students to capture 30 minutes of video over the upcoming Holiday break at the end of December, and ask them to try to tell a story with it using just music and changing the speed of the video? What if you challenged yourself to try and tell your own story using video and audio? Look at it as an assignment of anticipation and reflection, a way to share and celebrate the simple tasks that we accomplish everyday, yet take up so much of our time.

Ladies and gentlemen, quite rarely do you see such an excellent triumvirate of educational potential than NORAD Tracks Santa. The ability to engage young learners with the prospect of watching Kris Krinkle, introducing the concepts of latitude and longitude using Google Earth, and being able to tie in writing and storytelling is a huge win in my book. It was with great satisfaction then that on my very first day of "getting back to basics" and reading my RSS feeds, I found the announcement that the 2011 countdown for tracking Santa is now live! While the North American Aerospace Defense Command has been providing live Santa coverage on Christmas Eve via Google Earth for a few years now, it actually started more than 50 years ago as a complete fluke! Apparently a misprint in a Sears, Roebuck & CO. advertisement had eager young children hoping to talk to Santa dialing the operations hotline for CONAD, the predecessor to NORAD, instead of the department store. They were nice enough to keep doing it for the next 50 years, and thus the tradition lives on in the digital realm. I don’t spend as much time writing and sharing sites and tools like this anymore due to my shifting interest in putting instructional practice before the piece of technology being used to enhance it, but having the ability to scaffold some real learning goals and standards on top of one of the most exciting days of the year for many students is something I couldn’t pass up today. There’s just too many opportunities to learn going on here in this site; countdown clocks generate conversation about time and calendars, maps skills, storytelling, history, but most of all, there’s a strong relational piece here; You can talk about and use the site all you want with your students, but in the end, they have to take it upon themselves to follow through come Christmas Eve, perhaps with the help of an excited parent or two, and actually follow the tiny sleigh and reindeer as they pull Father Christmas around the globe. Enjoy the site, and enjoy the upcoming Holidays!

Back in October I shared a few of my favorite videos from Vimeo, and mused about allowing your students to use them as visual writing prompts. The idea was simple. Rather than just give students a piece of text, or some script with which to base their creative writing, why not pull inspiration from another form of creative expression; digital media. To my delight, I actually got a few people that tried it! Daniela left a comment on the original post shortly after I shared the idea: I tried this with my students last week. I pulled the 1st, 2rd, and 5th video on our nine computers (three computers per video) and asked them to choose one of the three. After they choosing their topic of interest, we went to our school garden and, in between the trees and all the nature, my 6th graders began to write a short entry describing what they say and what they felt while the video was playing. I don’t know if it was the video, the outdoors or the combination of both, but students were still talking about this lesson during the week and asked me to prepare future activities with this rubric. I want to try it with a Science lesson and find ways to use it during Math as well… Thank you for this great idea! With that success story as ammunition, I hunted down a few more videos (one of which is one that I created), to try and help "push" the idea a bit more. If you end up using any of these videos as visual writing prompts in your classroom, let me know, I’d love to hear how it went, especially after the success that Daniela had with her students. Incorporating writing into Science, Social Studies, and other areas will quickly become mandatory for all teachers in Common Core states, so there’s no time like the present to start experimenting! The "how to lose $2400 in 24 seconds" is my favorite of this bunch

The push to make the teaching of Math a much more inquisitive process in education, an experience that mimics the real world challenge engineers, scientists, and even everyday "layfolk" come across in dealing with math, has an interesting and creative twist from Dan Meyer. His idea is based around taking a 60 second clip of video, or still image, and then presenting it to your students as though it’s a puzzle. No words are needed, no direction from the teacher, other than "are there any questions?" The idea is to nurture learners’ inborn curiosity and to pose questions without any prompting other than the media they’re presented with. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I’m quite smitten with the concept, and although Mr. Meyer often presents his "any questions" videos with a bit more creativity and flare than I have, I’m trying to be as cinematic as I can while capturing questions "in the raw". So it was with great excitement that my family discovered a new Christmas Tree Farm this past weekend, and I stumbled upon this Christmas Tree Baler (there’s an entire industry behind these machines). Everything about the function of this machine, from the spinning cartridge dispensing baling twine, to the way the tree is pulled through the baler screamed out to me "take video of this!" Even now, having watched the video at least 3 times, not to mention the actual "live" viewing while getting our Christmas tree, I still have questions pop into my head related to the experience: How many trees can be baled with one full roll of twine? If they sell 700 trees per weekend (I asked), how much twine will they need? How fast is the baler spinning? What’s the ecological impact of harvesting so many trees in such a short time frame? I’m curious to know, since the idea behind this approach to math instruction is for questions to be asked first, before leading students to the intended goal of the lesson, what questions do you have after watching this video? And would this idea play nicely in a science, social studies, or language arts classroom as well?

As a way of introducing more creativity into my daily routine, I decided to act on an impulse Wednesday night while making sugar cookies for a gathering at school the next day. My wife was helping me clean up from 3 hours of rolling, cutting, and baking up some of the best cookie dough we’ve ever made, and we looked down at two rather crisp looking cookie men. They were left over from the first batch of the evening, a batch that I had rolled out far too thinly, and thus had turned into crunchy little morsels of sugar and flour. Adding to their misfortune were misshapen appendages, pushed and pulled while still cooling into comical poses of surprise. As we washed the last dish, and sealed the last of the cookies into a tupperware container to keep the mice that live in our walls from enjoying our Christmas confections, we picked up these two cookies and rocked them back and forth in a crude dance. We both chuckled, and looking at my wife, I mentioned it would be fun to make a stop motion movie with them. She pondered the idea a bit, contemplating whether we could stay up long enough to actually make such a project (it was 9 pm, the unofficial bedtime of many tired parents), but I felt as though it was a good excuse to bring some of the digital creativity I’ve explored in ds106 to my personal life. A movie however, would require a story, and would be much too long to produce given the hour or so our sanity and consciousness could afford. Pulling out my iPhone, I fired up the GIF SHOP app, and mentioned something that all spouses and loved ones of those involved with ds106 are either loathe or long to hear, "let’s make an animated gif!" With a quick grin, my wife quickly went to her stash of art teacher supplies, and we began cutting paper, outlining the story, and deciding how best a care-free cookie boy could meet its demise. Thus was born the animated gif above, which my wife jokingly titled "nom, nom, nom, cookie!" While we’ve posted it to our respective Facebook pages, and even to my wife’s blog about our family’s daily lives, I thought it might make an excellent writing prompt to share here. While I did have an opportunity to practice my prose in writing up this piece, I thought it would be fun to write a short poem in honor of the brave cookies lost in the making of this digital art. So without further compositional delay, the following is my poem for today. sugar and flour roll and cut, yield to the heat nom nom nom cookie If you have your own poem for these cookie people, please share!

For those of you who haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, and aren’t consumed with the various benefits and drawbacks of the myriad of Twitter clients available for the popular social networking service, these reflections may not be of any value to you. For those of you who ARE using Twitter, and are familiar with Tweetdeck, then you might already know about the huge shift that the application has taken with it’s most recent update. Native apps can be overrated I use a LOT of different devices to perform my job, and as I bounce around between iPads, laptops, PC machines, Macs, and more I’m increasingly dubious about the benefits of native apps over well written and executed web apps. I come across teachers asking for good "image search apps" or "math apps", and they’re surprised when I point them towards a website that I’ve been using for years, that’s available on all platforms via a web browser. As an added benefit with the recent update to Tweetdeck, it used to consume massive amounts of energy and processing power from my computer thanks in large part to having Adobe AIR installed in order to make it run. The new client runs as an HTML5 web app, which makes it play nice with almost all devices now, and my laptop’s battery doesn’t take such a hit. My ADHD is both a curse and a boon to my job I’ll admit, I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but my work patterns would indicate I exhibit many of the symptoms of the disorder. Being able to be connected to a dozen Twitter streams at a time via Tweetdeck feeds my brain in a way that both hinders some of my more contemplative job duties (for which I’ll often have to turn twitter off), yet also gives me a river of information that usually provides me with several timely & relevant resources and information that I can then share with others that don’t have the time to be rocking half a dozen hashtag chats on Twitter. I’m beginning to fear change Perhaps this is a function of aging, empathizing with those I’m serving, or increased stress in my personal and professional realms, but I’ve begun to grow more and more attached to the tools that I’m using on a regular basis. The methods I use are generally always shifting, and I’ll occasionally use new tools in a deliberate or playful manner, but I’ve found myself increasingly resistant to letting go of established tools and applications that have become an integral part of my workflow. That having been said, once I do accept change, I often do it with reckless abandon (those of you still lamenting the death of iMovie 6 need to LET GO, iMove ’09 and later ROCKS!). I have become the 20th century educator’s worst fear Along with my fear of losing my beloved tools, comes an increasing awareness that I function best, and almost exclusively, when I’m working with others. I find myself feeling more creative, the feedback I receive is immediate and actionable, and when I fail, I have a network of support to lean upon. When I’m forced to complete tasks in isolation I feel as though one of my limbs has been tied down, and I’ve been left to figure out to scale the cliff face with only one arm; it’s doable, but it isn’t going to be pretty.

This morning I discovered one of the most ridiculous, over the top, and just plain head scratching commercials from Burger King thanks to one of my twitter friends. It appears to be a Russian produced video for Burger King, and while I’m not sure if it’s intended to be an actual commercial or just some rap gone horribly wrong, it turns the "wacky" meter up to 11. Now, I’m not one to quickly dismiss another culture’s take on what is a quintessentially American form of communication; over the top commercials for fast food places. If anything, I appreciated the fact that while this video did have some sexually charged references, it was actually quite tame compared to many American produced commercials with scantily clad women, including the following commercial for Burger King starring Darius Rucker (Dallas Cowboy cheerleader’s giving me a shave, really?). After watching both of those I was curious to see what other countries and cultures were putting out there for Burger King commercials (my mind works in strange curious patterns like this all the time), and I was rewarded with a commercial apparently from Korea. While it was refreshing to see that the advertisement didn’t settle for the "sex sells" model, it was equally strange from the standpoint of seeing a grown man "snake" his way across a room to eat an entire burger in one computer-augmented bite. My curiosity for watching other culture’s take on the common fast food commercial filled, I then pondered how you might use media like this in a classroom. Provided you have YouTube unblocked in your district, or have the foresight to download the videos ahead of time, I started to think about the influence that media has on myself, and those around me. It’s a question that I remember being asked of me by teachers throughout my K-12 experience, so I decided to pay a visit to ReadWriteThink to see what sort of lesson plans and ideas they had for dealing with the influence of media and advertising on society. I was rewarded with an excellent mini-unit of lessons about the influence of media and commercial advertising by Laurie Henry. She put together a four session activity that gets students reflecting and analyzing their own media consumption (print and video) to identify any hidden messages or attempt to interpret the messages being broadcast or printed. While her lessons seem a bit dated (they focus on print and television watching), it would be very easy to adapt her guiding questions and discussion points to web video, product placement in movies and video games, and a other forms of commercial media. What I really didn’t enjoy about the lesson was the culminating activity for the unit, which asked the students to write a reflective piece on how advertising affects our culture. When dealing with visual media, whether it’s print, video, still images, etc. I think it’s important to respond to it with a similar form of media. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t write about it, in fact I would require the writing portion myself, but it would only serve as a reflective piece to then build a media response to the commercial messages in question. In other words, let students respond to covert commercial messages with their own commercials, or create their own print or digital advertisements in response to those found in magazines and websites. It’s time to adapt good lessons and reflection to the reality of today, if not for the sake of being media savvy, but at least for the humor and curiosity to be found in the way other cultures and individuals attempt to manipulate others through commercial messages.

The science teacher in me knows what’s going to happen in the video above before the cannonball is dropped into a vat of the silvery liquid metal, but the curious learner in me still squeals with delight when the cannonball actually floats! I’m a HUGE fan of trying to provide discrepant events for my students, whether it’s science based or not, and while I also advocate that it’s best to have a live demonstration of some phenomenon that challenges learners to question what they may already know about simple concepts, there are times when a live demonstration isn’t practical. In this case, students may think, "wow, a vat of liquid, I know that heavy things like metal tend to sink in liquids". They’re then hit with the starting revelation that some liquids are in fact so dense that even something as heavy as a cannonball can float, which begins to generate questions almost without fail, "what else could float in mercury that can’t in water? what else will make a cannonball float? how dangerous is a vat of mercury like that?" On a simliar chord, here’s a "magical" anti-gravity machine made out of nothing but a copper tube! Rather than ramble on about providing discrepant events, and hitting you with dozens of more examples, I have a challenge for you today. I challenge you to share one piece of video that allows you to challenge your students’ pre-conceived notions or understandings of a topic as a way to engage them at the beginning of a unit or lesson. All subject areas are welcome! Comments are always welcome, but simply sharing with a colleague is great too!

It’s been awhile since I created a video story problem (almost 2 months since the last one), but I’ve been thoroughly enjoying all of the video story problems being created and shared by students over on the Video Story Problem Channel. I have a few ideas in the works for how to take the videos and create a more easily replicable and practical way of integrating them into math and science instruction, but for now it’s time to get back on the horse and start creating anew. At least that’s what all the motivational blog posts and articles about starting off a new year tell me; work, work, work! I actually stumbled across this story problem while spending a lunch with the 5th grade teachers in our district, and noticed the almost obscene amount of syrup they had left over from their holiday parties before break. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing; when you have more than 300 students, teacher, and parent helpers eating at once you need plenty of sweet topping for your pancakes and sausage. I was curious though, with so many bottles, how much syrup actually had been used, or how much was left, either question is interesting to me. Have fun estimating, and if you have ideas about how to tweak the presentation, let me know, I’m not "stuck" on any pre-conceived notions of how to present this problem.

TED talks are passe, TEDx events are small potatoes, and TED-ED hasn’t really taken off yet. So why not create your own Fantasy TED Talk? Well, you can at least visualize your own ideal fictionalized TED Talk with the help of a few images and your favorite image editing software (like Photoshop or GIMP). Created as a ds106 visual assignment, making your own fantasy TED Talk can be as comical or solemn as you want it to be. The idea for this freshly created ds106 visual assignment came from a rather interesting take on TED Talks by cosplay artist and photographer David Dorn. For those not in the know, cosplay is the Halloween-like ritual of dressing up as your favorite cartoon, movie, video game, comic, or other fictional character while at a large convention or gathering to show your "fandom" for your fiction in much the same way "cheeseheads" and other sports fans paint and dress themselves in support of their team. David created a fictional TED Talk as delivered by Samus Aran, the heroine of the Metroid video game franchise. Apparently, she’s espousing on the revolutionary ability to turn oneself into a ball for more energy efficient and protective travel. you can view the original Samus TED Talk in it's full size glory here - http://daviddorn.deviantart.com/#/d4l4n17 The original creation by David was marked with a Creative Commons license, encouraging people to share. However, he restricted his artwork with a "no derivatives" license, so I had to create a completely new one from scratch rather than simply Photoshop over his, which was a great experience as I learned how to turn any image into a black and white version in Photoshop, and broke the rust loose on my clone stamping skills (although they are still very rusty). I choose The Big Lebowski because I figured it would have a pretty comical effect on the whole TED Talk script, which is usually to pontificate on some mind-blowing, yet startlingly simple truth that has the potential to change the world for the better. The first few TED Talks I watched were quite inspirational, but after watching a half dozen or so, I became a bit dissullusioned with them. Platforms for motivational speakers are typically in good supply, and when good intentions start becoming derailed by corporate money (Bill Gates HUGE support for Khan Academy), it takes the magical "I could be next" feeling out of the lectures, and starts me to looking in other places for inspiration. This assignment doesn’t necessarily have to be used for comedic purposes though. While "The Dude" lectures on about his "dudeness" and bowling, you could very well use something similar to this for students to create visual representations of important themes and settings from a narrative being read in class, or for students to highlight and single out an achievement of some famous mathematician, scientist, or poet that is being studied in class. The point of the TED Talk is to focus with laser-like accuracy on one profoundly articulate idea, and it serves as a great way for people to connect, relate, and understand many topics which would otherwise be much more complicated and convoluted. TED Talks have a tendency to strip away the complications, the "grey" areas, and bring a better understanding to the world’s more complex systems (for better or worse), and with a few strokes of a keyboard, and a couple of images, you could do the same with your students to help bring visual clarity to more complicated understandings (the importance of quarks in particle physics, Shakespeare’s use of meter to convey feeling, or why estimation is such an important skill). Perhaps I’m stretching this idea a bit thin, but for good measure I’ll attempt an actual example. What if J.J. Thomson, the man who discovered the electron, had been able to command a platform as big as TED and the internet to spread his idea? Would it have looked like this? His idea of the "plum pudding model" for how atoms worked was flawed, but followed the basic format of a TED presentation in that it took something terribly complex (particle physics), and tried to apply common place understanding to how it worked in an attempt to better understand how the world works. If you’re interested in creating your own Fantasy TED Talks with your students, or just one for yourself because you happen to be geeky enough to want to try it out, you can download a PSD format file that includes the template I created with the stage, a blank screen, and the crowd looking on eagerly. Fantasy TED Talk Template (Photoshop format - PSD)

To say that ds106 is a massively open online course designed to help learners explore new ways to create digital stories through a variety of media is akin to keeping a feral wolf pup as a pet. They both sound like cute and cuddly ideas, but after spending a bit of time with both, chances are you’ll realize you’ve gotten yourself in way over your head. Cogdogblog Sat, Jan 07 2012 14:50:21 It’s not that ds106 is a monstrous beast of a course that can threaten to occupy every single free moment of your life, it’s just that if you’re not careful, it can…and most likely will if you let it. Because ds106 isn’t just about learning how to stitch video clips together in iMovie, or how to successfully use Photoshop or Audacity to create visual and audio art. ds106 is about creativity, carefully observing the world around you, and manipulating media to produce a story that helps others see the world as you see it. It’s about finding ways to tell your story, create opportunities to get passed the feeling of "what I’m doing isn’t good enough", and surround yourself with an amazingly supportive group of creative thinkers. DS 106 Distressingly Simple chickadeeacres Sun, Jan 01 2012 19:00:00 ds106 is a commitment to "make stuff", share it with the world, and discover how your inner creativity can empower you to "push past disappointment." Ira Glass can explain it much better than I can: Ira Glass on Storytelling David Shiyang Liu Fri, Jan 06 2012 21:33:17 That’s not to say ds106 is all wine and roses. There are certainly challenges and obstacles to overcome, especially the healthy dose of role-play that smudges the line between reality and make believe. News on the March - Target: Jim Groom alancliddell Wed, Jul 06 2011 13:52:48 Many newcomers to ds106 are often startled by the unabashed egos and alternate realities that are created during the course of a typical ds106 semester, and quite often the narrative role play can lead to some interesting scenarios during the semester. I was actually banished from the course mid-term the first semester I participated as an open online participant, and the course itself teetered on the brink of fictional destruction. " @techsavvyed BANISHED from #ds106 for cahllenging my power. BANISHED!!! Jim Groom Wed, Jul 06 2011 12:24:53 ReplyRetweet But I digress. While a heavy dollop of role-playing can occur throughout ds106, at its heart is a desire to explore media in all of its forms. Throughout the semester-long journey that is ds106 you can expect to create a variety of stories, art, and media, including: VISUAL ASSIGNMENTS Fantasy TED Talks - The Dude techsavvyed Wed, Jan 04 2012 19:00:00 WRITING ASSIGNMENTS You are so lazy catWhen I’m working really hard at schoolYou are sleeping at home VIDEO ASSIGNMENTS Tokyo Commute Ericinikebukuro Sat, Oct 29 2011 19:11:14 AUDIO ASSIGNMENTS Ds106 Radio Ad Final by beach-wood SoundCloud MASHUP ASSIGNMENTS Transformers vs The Fox And The Hound (Movie Trailer Mashup) MrOscarucho100 Mon, Dec 05 2011 09:32:42 DESIGN ASSIGNMENTS I Can Read Movies chelseatufy Fri, Jan 06 2012 21:32:25 In short, ds106 will challenge you, confuse you, and forever change the very notion of what an online course can and should be. Completely student driven, ds106 is the epitome of "you get out what you put in". All of the assignments throughout the course are submitted by the learners themselves, and those in the course decide which assignments they want to complete; it’s a veritable "choose your own adventure" approach to learning that will always challenge you to push yourself further. Mix in a healthy dose of Twitter, blogging, and community support, ds106 is a trip that you need not take alone, nor would you want to, because as the course’s unofficial motto goes, "ds106 is for life!" #ds106 #4life cogdogblog Fri, Jan 06 2012 21:33:18 DS106 Course Links Ready to venture down the rabbit hole with ds106? Follow the links below for course information, objectives, and how you can participate as an open online participant for Spring of 2012. DS106 Course Site - All participant’s blogs get aggregated here, so the conversation blends together during the semester. About DS106 - Course objectives, the emerging definition of digital storytelling, and some crazy art. Welcome to DS106 and how to get started with the Spring 2012 Term