Modernize Your Summer Reading List!

I saw this on LM_Net today.  I've blogged before about the coolness of iBooks Author.  Here's a great library use:  Use it to create your summer reading lists, like this great example from the librarians at South Orange and Maplewood, NJ.

You can embed booktrailer videos,  Goodreads widgets, etc.  then host it on Bookry,  avoiding the "my kids don't have an iPad" dilemma.

I'm suspended...

Huh.  My Twitter account has been suspended for some reason. So bear with me while I sort that one out!

UPDATE:  I'm now reinstated and back in Twitter's good graces, but have lost all followers and following.  You'll need to "re-follow" me.  Very annoying.

Animating in Keynote

I'm putting together a four week Keynote Challenge the library is going to sponsor next fall, working through the IT and Film classes.  I've blogged before about how awesome I think Keynote is, and how under utilized.  Mike Sammartano's Keynote Classroom  YouTube Channel has some great examples of what Keynote can do.

Once the challenge is fully together, I'll post about it. In the meantime, I spent time today (never mind how much!) putting together this quick animation to show how teachers can use Keynote to demonstrate, for example, scientific principles. I still have a few timing kinks to work out, but you get the gist! Though it occurs to me I should add a little jingle to it.



You can download the file here if you want to see how it went together.
If you want to see something that will knock your socks off, watch this.  Entire story done in Keynote.  So add it to your digital storytelling toolbag!

UPDATE:  That blogger widget never seems to work. I uploaded to Youtube instead.

Unlikely (Jonah Ch. 1) from Robert Murphy on Vimeo.

My Camera: Sometimes, I Use It To Make Phone Calls.

I upgraded to an iPhone 4S last spring, and after a few months suddenly realized I was often taking better pictures using my phone than I was with my $800 Canon Rebel--without having to lug around pounds of lenses!  (If you want to see how amazing iPhonography can be, check this Flickr group).

Then I went to the ADE workshop, and Apple brought in Bill Frakes, one of Sports Illustrated's top photographers, to teach a workshop on iPhonography.  He didn't get much into the how's and wherefore's of taking photos with your phone camera, unfortunately, but we did get to see a lot of really cool shots and videos he took with just his phone.  Seriously impressive, high-quality stuff, and I realized I needed to get a lot more serious about my iPhone camera!

I even thought about replacing some of our library cameras with iPod Touches and Olloclip Lenses, until my (wise) library assistant pointed out that was just more parts for the kids to lose!

I can sometimes miss the obvious.

 But I may still order a couple sets of the lenses, along with the Glif tripod mount,  for people to check out to use with their own cameras.  I mean phones.

Thus, this is the first entry into a series of posts I'll do over the next month or so looking at various apps I'm finding very useful.  Because that's the power of the mobile camera--whether it's an iPhone or Android--you can shoot, process and share, all on one device.

As you can see from the photos,  I'm collecting quite a few photography apps, which is ironic from someone who has never managed to get her head around Photoshop. The one I'll look at today is a favorite: TrueHDR ($1.99).

The iPhone camera is basically a wide-angle (28mm) lens. That means when you're shooting long distance horizon shots (for example), you're going to lose a lot of definition. Enter True HDR.  Bill Frakes mentioned this is one of his go-to apps, and I'm impressed by the difference it makes. You use this instead of the built-in camera app; basically, it takes a series of 3 photos, which fills in much of the missed detail you would otherwise miss (see samples below).

As you would suspect, this means it doesn't work very well with anything that moves. You also need to have a steady hand, or the results can be blurry.

Here are two photos I took only seconds apart, the first with the camera app,  the second with TrueHDR.  The first one's OK, but you can see that there is more definition and tonal range in the second photo.

Once you take the shot and it processes it, it allows you to do some minor editing before saving. For only $1.99, well worth it!

Update:  BTW, I'm taking a fun Phoneography 101 course via Photojojo (it's only $5, and you get two quick photo lessons/assignments a week for a month).  And here's a tip I didn't know before:  You can use the volume up button on your phone to snap shots (it keeps your phone more steady than tapping the screen).  Moreover, you can do the same thing with the volume up button on your headset, using it as a cable.  How cool is that?

That's all I'll share from that. Come join me on the "course" and be my photobuddy!

Churnalism: A New Tool for Checking Sources

It's one of our biggest battles:  Getting students to check the source of their information.  If it's on Wikipedia, if it's on a news site--well, then, it must be true, right?

That battle just got a little bit easier with Churnalism, from the Sunlight Foundation, which allows users to check Wikipedia articles and news stories against other sources (read: press releases) for plagiarism.

Why is this good?  Too many news sources, hard-pressed for funds, cut corners by citing un-sourced press releases as journalistic facts.  So a "news" article about a new drug-therapy, might be sourced from a press release by the pharmaceutical company.  Not exactly unbiased. It also allows students to check quotations against the original source to see if they're taking out of context.

You can view their video tutorial below.  I think I may start adding this to all my pathfinders!

Keynote Book Trailers: Things You Do To Avoid What You Ought To Be Doing...

...but Still Look Like You're Working.

 My favorite tool lately is Keynote.  I'm on a one-woman mission to evangelize the Power Point heathens and spread the word of Keynote's total awesomeness.

I've been playing around with designing slides to look less, well, slide-like, and to mimic Prezi's cool feeling of lateral animation.  It's a great way to create booktrailers without having to mess around with video or finding 1,000 images for Animoto.

Here's the result.


It's all in how you layout the images.  They need to "bleed" off the edge, then you use a "Push" (not "Push Object!")  transition.  For example, in that opening logo, I bled the image halfway off the first slide, then matched it (in reverse) on the second slide.  You can't really see it from the second image, but it IS the same picture, so you can tell it's bleeding off the edge, even if you can't see it.  It took a bit of playing around to match them seamlessly, but not too much!

More importantly, it's  a neat trick to teach students, when you're teaching presentations and slide design.  Death to bullet points, I say!

(btw--I tried doing this in PP, and it doesn't work--though if you can figure out how to make it work there, let me know!)

Anyway, if you want to download the slides, to see how the rest of it went together, click here.

Illustrated Histories: Now in the iBookstore

The World War II: Illustrated Histories just went live in the iBookstore.  Very cool!