LightintheWoods

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*note: uploading to slideshare changed the layout and design of the slides

Creation of Bear’s Birthday

The origin of this project lies in my interest in digital storytelling and my lack of having created many examples of quality or substance. A spark hit the paper when Karen, the instructor of my ‘Teaching of Writing’ course, introduced a story writing project for class. I had recently visited Dean Miezienko’s class with Dean Shareski, where Dean S. introduced the class to digital storytelling, naturally I came home with a few ideas for format. Unfortunately, I struggled with character development and the the topic of my piece. At this point, the project was moved to the back burner for a couple weeks.

My eyes are always open for teaching resources and at a Apple MacBook Training session, the rep John Maschuk*, shared a file of teddy bear pictures. He welcomed us to use the resource and the spark from my writing course took. I am a visual individual when it comes to these type of creations and I had worked with storyboards before. I was instantly inspired. I worked the slides into an outline of a story and then pulled the pieces together. As I built the sequence I naturally played with the story, character development and word choice. The visuals of this project were created in Powerpoint and I saved many files containing changes to the original drafts.

At the beginning stages of my revision process I shared early drafts with Sean White, a new friend from class. Between Shawn and my wife, Joleen, the story was enhanced by their trusted insight and suggestion. From their feedback I made some key edits to create a more patterned sequence, modified the sentence structure and played with general appeal of the slide design. At this point, I saved the slides as .jpg files, and I imported them into iMovie for narration, transition and sound. As I narrated the story I found more glitches in how the story was written. It is really interesting to reread something out loud and record it to get a different perspective of the voice of the writing. From this experience I had another revision stage and needed to make necessary changes to the slides in Powerpoint and then go through the importing process again.

I had a fun time recording and re-recording the narration as I tried to be vibrant and fluffy as required for such a piece. A point of suggestion is to make short sound bites, I read 2 or 3 slides at a time and then pieced the audio together. In this practice I avoided having to re-read the entire story when I accidentally mis-spoke.

While I was designing the slides I was thinking of adding Batmanesque onomatopoeia through visual sound bubbles and bursts of text. I decided against this because I wanted to keep the visual simple and uncluttered. Ultimately this idea still worked through the recording process as I ‘wrote in’ sound effects and music to enhance the story.

Version 1.0 of “Bear’s Birthday” is born on to the web

At this point I felt the story was ready to publish, but I decided to sleep on it. The next morning I reviewed the story and found another spelling error and changed the text color in a couple places. The story was then ready for publishing. I exported “Bear’s Birthday” as a .mov file and uploaded it to Youtube and disperse to an audience. I shared the story through numerous email, facebook, WebCT and Twitter. I may of been guilty of spam, or maybe it was my marketing background shining through. I told my audience that this was version 1.0 and asked them to participate in a networked revision. The audience grew and I recieved numerous comments through a variety of streams including email, Private messages, Youtube and blog comments. Karen Janowski, even took a few minutes out of her day to call me up on skype to share her interest, encourage me and other suggestions from a special education perspective. All of this feedback demonstrates the power of social media in creating quality web content and I really appreciate the attention folks gave to this piece. From the feedback, I made major edits, including a spelling error, a couple changes to the story and some slide redesign. Can you catch the edits?

After this batch of story edits to the visuals, I had an opportunity to visit Mrs. Lichtenwald’s Grade 1 class to share this story and get their opinions. They were into it and wanted to watch it a couple times. After the second viewing I asked them what could be changed or improved. I received some fantastic critique and feedback, one child even suggested that I add a character named “Mr.Noodle”. I chuckled, thanked him and told him I would think about it A few others liked the sound effects and suggested that should have more. I agreed and invited a few them for their best sound effect to add to the story. We all laughed and had fun.

After publishing the first version of Bear’s Birthday, this story saw a more indepth analysis and polishing. My participatory audience included related professionals from a variety of backgrounds including graphic design, teaching, music recording, ESL teachers, experienced digital storytellers and best of all, the children. This collaborative exercise has many potential applications in my future classroom. The relationship with audience gave me a sense of ownership and mastery with the writing and creative process. I wanted to created the best possible piece and my network of friends, family and acquaintances help make this a reality.

With out further ado, I present “Bear’s Birthday Version 2.0″

I am still welcoming feedback on this story and welcome suggestions for improvement. Enjoy.

Note: I would like confirm John Maschuk’s identity, thank him and link to any web presence he may have. So if you are out there John, leave me a note.

This is my first uploaded draft of this children’s story. This piece has seen much trial & error many edits to get to the stage it is at. I am still not totally satisfied with the final product but am posting it here regardless. It is my hope that some will view the story and decide to offer suggestions on my writing and the design. Together with your input I hope to make this story better and more refined.

A more detailed post on my reflections and procedure for preparing this story will follow. I have had a lot of fun creating this story from the photo’s of John Maschuk (whom I haven’t found an online link for yet, but will).

*NOTE: Please click through to the YouTube Page. The pesky You Tube image embeded on my video within the blog detracts from the graphics and covers my writing.*

As part of my writing course, we participate in mock writing lessons. Yesterday was letter writing, and the assignment was to write a simulated letter from the perspective of a grade 5 student. This letter was in response to a new intern inquiring about student advice for new teachers. Here is my simulated response.

Dear Ms. Adams,

Hello Ms. Adams, thank you for writing. I think we have a lot that we can learn from each other. You seem to be very eager about your training to become the best teacher possible. You have already nailed one of the things so many teachers miss, you asked for student opinon. I really believe that more teachers need to listen to the students voice to really be able to facilitate optimal learning.

My favorite subject is Science, but I really enjoy when the teachers relate all subjects to a common theme. I also like being given choices about the types of information that I want to learn and how I am going to learn it. Sometimes I get bored because lessons are not very interesting and seem to be all lecture, all the time. I want a teacher that inspires me to learn and facilitates that process. A teachers that prepares me to make connections and links between different topics and subjects. I also must share that I like when I can collaborate with students from our class but also from around the world. I think that in order to make learning fun and engaging you need to empower the students. Yes, sometimes this means trusting us more. We need our teachers to guide us to learn how to learn. My advice is to use tools and lessons that engage your students, provide them with skills to find relevant information and conduct personal learning journies.

My advice for you is this commit yourself to being a life long learner. Model learning for your students. Relate classroom learning to real life experiences and connect students to experts in the field. Find examples of other successful classroom experiences, we learn well from other models. Connect us with other students, guide us, give us the strategies and skills to be effective learners.

Sincerely

Kyle Lichtenwald

I composed this letter and then read it to my class as part of the authors chair. Their eyes bulged out, they heard the student, they understood him. I am trying to share the idea of shifted learning with my real life network, including this second year class of soon to be teachers and this was a great opportunity.

Do they know how marketers watch?

In an effort to make website privacy policies kid friendly, The Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Blog shared this neat story out of Ontario. Val Steeves (University of Ottawa) and Jacquelyn Burkell and Anca Micheti (University of Western Ontario) researched students abilities/willingness to read & comprehend online text. Now the they have come together to draft child friendly privacy policy consents for websites.

Their guidelines provide advice on word choice and phrasing (avoid double negatives; keep sentences simple and paragraphs short); information structure (arrange information in a logical order; start paragraphs with topic sentences); and design consideration (use 12-14 font size and typefaces designed for the web or preferred by kids; leave enough white space).

Turns out that a simpler version of privacy policy is coming to websites near you. I hope they continue collaborating with students and youth nation wide on this issue. I wonder how Canadian classrooms could get together to create this policy together? It will be interesting to see what comes of this initiative. I think this is another movement for the childs voice. Might make it easier for adults too
More from Val Steeves

How children’s sites see your kids as marketing goldmines

My apologies to Lee Lefever and CommonCraft for the play on words.