I'm Back! I'm Back! I'm Back!

Wow, what an unintentional blogging vacation that ended up being!

Between a new job and a new state (we're still unpacking!), trying to get the internet hooked up, a fence for the dog, not to mention the shock to the system of working full time again after a year "off" as a student....well. Who had time to think about blogging, beyond occasional guilt bouts!

However, life has now settled (a bit), and I'm definitely having food-for-blogging in discovering the contrast between theoretical librarianship and in-the-high-school-trenches librarianship.
But more on that later...

In the meantime, here's a cool new resource. Ohio State University has a Cartoon Research Database with more than 250,000 original cartoons, both historical and modern.

Everything but the Kids...

Wow, we've been in back to back meetings most of the week, but I'm so excited about the new library job! Because the school has never really had a teaching librarian, I get to build an information literacy program practically from the ground up. Time-consuming, but oh so challenging and fun!

However, there has been a concurrent slow down in the blog posting, as you've no doubt noticed. Not good, but that may last for a week or two, at least until I get the basics in the library up and running (and we get moved in to the house!).

I'm halfway through the final installment on the documentary series. Will post soon!

Later adduendum:

Joyce Valenza has put together a great wiki collection of copyright friendly sources for images, sound and video. A great resource for the documentary project.

Great Start....

I made the big move to Connecticut, and am blogging this from the hotel I have to stay in until we can move into the house next weekend.

Our first official day at school begins tomorrow, with the Grant Wiggins workshop, but I went in today to start acclimating myself to the library. It's about twice the size I remember, and suddenly I felt so overwhelmed at where to even begin, that I just started rearranging furniture!

So there I am, setting up a cozy reading corner, when this guy walks in and says,
"I saw you at the picnic yesterday. Sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you. Glad to see you're settling in." I smiled, said thanks, and ever up front about being bad remembering names asked, "Who are you again?" He kind of blinked, then said. "Bill. The Principal."

Apparently, that story is now making the rounds of the school....

Also had an eye opener when I tried to log onto my blog, and it was blocked! I wonder how open the school will be to loosening up on that, so students can start blogging in class? I suspect I should wait until I've been here longer than 2 days before I start making revolutionary noises!

I promise, promise, promise to finish up the documentary series soon.

And Now You Know Why You Feel Behind....

From the good folks at SimpleSpark, a directory of Web 2.0 apps that launched mere months ago, and has now indexed over 5,000 sites!

Penultimate Series Post! Documentary Resources

If you missed earlier posts, look here: Intro, Preparation, Planning, Videotaping, Script and Storyboard

I'm feeling some pressure to finish this series. I leave for Connecticut and the new job on Saturday; haven't even started packing yet...Thus, today I'll post the resources, tomorrow I'll discuss why I think it's so important we make time for this sort of project in the days of NCLB, and link the project to both NETS-S and Information Literacy standards. Then I'll be on hiatus for a few days while I deal with stacks of boxes and newspaper!

One very cool thing. For our in-service day, the school is bringing in Grant Wiggins (of Understanding by Design fame); I'm very excited to hear (and blog about!) what he has to teach us. I've been working my way through the book, and he validates what I've slowly grown to understand over the course of my 20+ year educational career: Teaching content is the least of what I do. More on that later. In the meantime......

At Last! Editing the Film

Thanks to iMovie (NOT the o8 version, for reasons posted here) and Windows Movie Maker, film editing, while time consuming, is actually a LOT easier than you think! In the bad ol' days when I just turned the students loose and said "Go do it; you've got a month," they actually did figure it out on their own. With lots of whining, of course. (and rightly so!) Now that I'm enlightened, I can teach them the basics in about 45 minutes by booking the computer lab, uploading a 5 minute segment of video and a musical selection to the server, then walking them through the basic editing steps:

• Importing video
• Using the Timeline
• Editing video
• Adding titles and transitions
• Adding still photos
• Adding/editing audio (music and voice)
• Subtracting Audio

With these skills, students can produce very professional and creative videos. (I've posted links to tutorials below) As they gain more confidence, they usually start playing around with adding effects. They'll run amok here if you let them, and suddenly you'll start seeing myriad effects :shooting stars, flying titles, you name it! Have a serious talk with them about professionalism, making their content and interviews the focus, not the special effects. It's the old adage: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should! Less is definitely more in this regard; encourage students to use transitions sparingly, if at all, and to keep to simple cross dissolves and fade in/outs if they have to use one. They need a very good reason for something more eye-catching, and need to explain what it adds to their documentary's message.

They should be able to put together a "rough draft" for peer review in about 4-6 weeks. If students have problems getting together to use iMovie or WMM, Jaycut allows students to upload video, stills and music and do very basic editing. While limited in what it can do (no titles, for example, only captions), students could certainly put together the rough draft here, then fine tune it later in a more advanced program. One effect it DOES have that you won't find in iMovie or WMM (without buying add-ons, anyway) is picture-in-picture. Students could show an interview subject in the small screen, adding footage in the larger screen to show examples of what's being said. Very nifty tool.

Other options include JumpCut and MuveeMix, though I haven't tried these out yet.

Resources

Rather than a huge list that you'll need to search for as I add new posts, here's a link to a wiki page of Documentary Resources. It's a work in progress, so I'll add more links and information as time goes on, including adding all the links I've used in this series.

Final post:  Why bother?

Lights, Camera, Take Action: Scripts and Storyboard

If you're entering mid-series: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

The Treatment

In Hollywood, most movie ideas begin with something called a "treatment," a one page summary designed to sell (or pitch) the idea to studio execs. To this point, students have been thinking about their documentary in relatively broad terms; now they start pulling their ideas together into a organized, coherent vision. I must admit, I go back and forth on how I handle this aspect. Sometimes I just have them write an actual outline. That works for content, but it fails to grasp many of the details needed once they write their script.

The summary should consider:

• Characters and what they'll add to the documentary (point of view, etc.)
• What the audience will take away from their viewing of the documentary. How will it affect their understanding of the issues?
• How will you develop both logical and emotional appeals? (In other words, how will you engage the audience?)

Once completed, students pitch their treatments to the class and elicit comments for improvement.

You can find a good explanation of a treatment here.

The Script (aka Screenplay)

The screenplay is a scene-by-scene map of the documentary. In it, students include several key elements:

• Scene Heading: Description of the setting, including whether it's interior or exterior, night or day, etc.
• Action: What the audience will be seeing on the screen
• Character Name: Who is speaking (don't forget the narrator!)
• Dialogue: What the character is saying, word for word (including interviews)
• Parentheticals : Words in parenthesis describing emotions or attitude e.g. (sadly)
• Camera Directions: e.g. fade, dissolve to, medium shot, close-up

It's important to stress format here. Student can be very sloppy about this, and they need to understand this is a different style of writing with its own conventions that need to be followed. They're still building a persuasive argument, but unlike an essay that uses only words, the screen play utilizes visuals, action, and emotional directions too, and needs to incorporate those. In the handouts, I've provided a sample from a short documentary I created about the Model United Nations, along with a link to the finished documentary.

The Storyboard

With a clear idea of their documentary in mind, now students create the storyboard. This is kind of like a comic book of the video, where student plan out their shots before they actually start shooting. You can find sample storyboards to share with you students here, here and here.

You'll find a blank storyboard in the documentary packet; a 10 minute documentary general takes about 3-4 storyboards, if students sketch the key scenes. The notes section should include short descriptions of action, camera angles, sound effects, etc. It does NOT include actual dialogue--that's in the screenplay.

The storyboard should contain enough detail that another group could use the storyboard to create a fairly accurate version of the original group's ideas.

For more information about storyboards, check this site, the Guide to Filmmaking and Adobe's Digital Storytelling Project.

Collaboration

There are a few places where students can collaborate to write their script. I mentioned both Zoho and Backpack/Writeboard in the previous post, and there's always the old standby, Google Docs. What I especially like about Writeboard, is that, like a wiki, it saves all the versions, so students can easily compare and revert.

There's also KidsVid. I mention it because it has great potential, though my students didn't have much luck with it, as it wouldn't save their work. However, they've upgraded the site since then, so maybe they've fixed the problem. The site allows students to use an online storyboard creator to, well, create their storyboard. It provides helpful graphical prompts for what to include and spaces to write their directions.

The site also includes myriad tips for other aspects of video production, so is well worth your students' time.

They're now read to go and shoot their footage! I also give them 4-6 weeks for this (they're usually finishing up interviews, too), with intermittent checks to see how they're doing and discuss problems.

Next time, while explaining the editing process is outside the scope of the blog, I'll give you some fantastic links to tutorials and other helpful sites, along with links to good general resources. Until then....

Part 5:  Resources

Student Research: It's Not What You Thought

First Monday has a very interesting report by Alison Head, who conducted a study focusing on the research habits of college students. If college students' search behavior reflect what they're learning in high school, there's good news and bads news for those of us teaching information literacy skills in secondary school.

According to the study, college students' first choice for information gathering is NOT Google, but either course reading or library-vetted sites such as databases (see diagram). Contrary to the much-quoted Pew findings that 71% of students use the internet as their only source for research, Head's study found that only 10% of students accessed Google or Yahoo! as their first step in the research process, and 20% as their second step. Intriguing, since the Pew study focused on 12-17 year olds, while Head studied college students. Can one draw the conclusion that students, or at least those who are college bound, actually do learn to seek better sources of information by the time they graduate from high school?

Unfortunately, the bad news is that while students recognized the need for "good, citable stuff," they had considerable trouble finding and recognizing it. I found especially troublesome the comment,

The issue of credibility came out in the discussion groups where students expressed their difficulty in determining authority and credibility of some public Internet sites. One participant, longed for what he called, “stamps of approval,” where none existed, and desired “some sort of symbol that all sites could use to show that their content is professor–approved and that the source is credible.”

To me, this sounds like a student spoon fed on NetTrekker, never learning how to critically analyze websites for authority or credibility, and adds evidence for the ever-increasing claims that filtering does students a HUGE disservice. Instead of creating confident, intelligent managers of internet resources, who are able to use and adapt information to their needs, they create students reliant on pre-vetted sites who lack the skills to a) find relevant information and b) determine its credibility.

Equally worrisome, "Students faced certain obstacles, including how to begin assignments, meet professors’ expectations from one class to the next, and narrow down a topic and make it manageable."

Where are we failing here? Where are the various research models not preparing students for independent research, whether Eisenberg or Kulhthau or whomever? Or is it that not enough schools are embedding these models across the curriculum?

Or, from another angle, are our research projects too teacher focused, rather than learner focused? Do we walk them through the steps, never allowing students to actively engage in task analysis and problem solving? Head's study claims that students consistently complained about not enough guidance on research projects. Have they become too used to the step-by-step handouts we tend to use in secondary education (much like the one I attached for the documentaries?)

These are questions I've been wrestling with the past few months, and they're important. We need to find the answers if we're going to prepare students not just for college, but for life.