You can view even larger versions of these by visiting our logo gallery page on CrowdSpring. (You’ll have to create a free account to view the actual logos.)

Please leave your feedback here as comments. We want to pick the best logo for Storychasers!

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A complete agenda for the CKV workshop is available. Participants will learn how to:

1. Plan and storyboard a short (3-5 minute) digital story
2. Record audio using a portable digital recorder and a headset/microphone
3. Edit a multi-track audio file using Audacity software (free/open source)
4. Find and collect copyright friendly images for use in a media project using homegrown/public domain sources, images licensed under Creative Commons, and images utilized under fair use provisions of US copyright law
5. Combine audio with images using free software (PhotoStory3 or iMovie)
6. Safely publish a short (3-5 minute) video online in our learning community

CKV is presented by Storychasers, and is modeled on the successful “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” digital storytelling project. Anyone is welcome to learn more about “Celebrate Kansas Voices” by joining our free, online learning community: celebratekansas.ning.com. Questions about CKV can be directed to Storychasers.

photo credit: Wesley Fryer

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To view the full proposal a free account on CrowdSpring must be created. Please share this with anyone you know who is a designer or wants to design our next logo! The proposal is open until May 22, 2010. View it on:

http://www.crowdspring.com/project/2284772_storychasers-logo

It’s going to be exciting to see the proposals which come in for our logo in the next ten days. CrowdSpring and the opportunity to tap the creative imaginations of a connected community of thousands worldwide is a very “flat world” thing to do. This has great potential to be an instructive experience for us all!

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storychasers, design, logo

1. Our COV learning community: celebrateoklahoma.ning.com
2. Our COV project wiki: sites.google.com/site/covsite/

We apologize for this inconvenience and have made the required requests with our Internet hosting provider / domain registrar to get this situation fixed ASAP. Once our domain renewal is processed, these sites will remain accessible from the above addresses but will ALSO be accessible from lc.celebrateoklahoma.us and wiki.celebrateoklahoma.us.

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Celebrate Kansas Voices is a statewide digital storytelling project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the Internet. Our project is starting in 2010, based on the successful Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project which started in 2006.

Visit Celebrate Kansas Voices

Cyndi Danner-Kuhn (K-State College of Education) and Dean Mantz (director of technology, Sterling, Kansas) presented this week at the Mid-America Association for Computers in Education (MACE) conference in Manhattan, Kansas, with me about CKV. The start of this pilot project, following the model of our successful (and ongoing) Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project, is well timed. In 2011, Kansas will celebrate its Sesquicentennial for 150 years of statehood. At MACE this year we were able to connect with Mary Madden, Director of Education and Outreach for the Kansas Historical Society, along with other staff members. Yesterday I heard KSHS staff member Michael Church present on “Kansas Memory: Real Stories, Real People” about their phenomenal Kansas Memory website.

The presentation we shared yesterday and today here at MACE is available as a Google presentation.

Dean also put together a great collection of digital storytelling links and resources using Livebinders, which is a free tool similar to ShareTabs.

We are tentatively (with 95% certainly) planning on conducting a 2.5 day Celebrate Kansas Voices workshop at the KSU College of Education in Manhattan this summer on August 4, 5 and 6, 2010. To stay updated about available workshops and the continuing development of this pilot initiative, please join our Celebrate Kansas Voices learning community.

Sharing the launch of this project at MACE has been wonderful not only to share this idea and opportunity with Kansas teachers, but also to learn about other oral history / community history champions in Kansas. Personal networking is SO important for facilitating projects like this. If you know of others interested in Kansas history, Kansas oral history, community history, etc. please share Celebrate Kansas Voices with them and encourage them to also join our learning community. This project is open to anyone, not just Kansas teachers.

It’s going to be exciting to share and extend the successful COV model we’ve developed in Oklahoma over the past three years here in Kansas!

Cross-posted to Moving at the Speed of Creativity.

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kansas, celebrate, voices, ckv, storychaser, storychasers, sesquicentennial

Please visit our 2010 COV Workshop calendar to view dates and available “open slots” in our workshops through August. If you are interested in attending one of these workshops, complete our online “COV Workshop Registration Inquiry” form, and you will receive further instructions via email from Stephanie McCoy, our administrative assistant.

NOTE: Teachers in school districts hosting COV workshops, whose districts have been awarded TitleIID grants, should receive a COV workshop registration link directly from their school TitleIID grant coordinator.

Everyone is welcome to join our COV learning community, to rate and comment on videos as well as participate in our discussion forums. Membership in the COV learning community is free!

If you have questions regarding Celebrate Oklahoma Voices or Storychasers, do not hesitate to contact us!

Our Google Calendar for Celebrate Oklahoma Voices is available, which includes all our workshops scheduled through August 2010.

1- Digital Curriculum
2- PD
3- Google Apps (Kern Kelly)
4- Q&A

See our wiki page for our Mobile Learning Collaborative for more information about recommended digital curriculum, PD topics and sequence, etc.

If you are interested in joining our collaborative in 2010, please join in our meeting and participate. This session will be recorded and made available as an archive following the meeting. If you have not already, please view archived videos of our December 15, 2009 presentation and discussion.

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google, learning, mobile, netbook, ok1to1, oklahoma

Part 1 of 2 (47 min, 24 sec)

Part 2 of 2 (1 hour, 9 min, 9 sec)

Unfortunately we forgot to bring a firewire cable for the DV camera we were going to use for this Ustream, so we had to use a backup USB camera for this video which was not as high quality as we would have liked. Fortunately our lapel microphone worked great, so the audio (except for some of the questions from audience members) is very clear in both these recordings.

Presentation slides from this session are available as a Google Presentation.

Based on these guidelines and goals, if you are interested in participating in this Mobile Learning Collaborative in Oklahoma please contact Wesley Fryer ASAP. Interested parties will be meeting again via an online webinar, most likely on Tuesday, December 22nd at 10:00 am CST. The deadline for districts to submit their grant application for the ARRA 1:1 proposal is 15 January 2010.

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A virtual attendance option will be provided via Ustream.tv. If possible, please try to attend this event in person.

STORYCHASERS OKLAHOMA LAPTOP LEARNING COLLABORATIVE
This proposed collaborative will assist interested districts in successfully writing for the Oklahoma SDE 1:1 Laptop RFP, designing and delivering customized professional development for educators involved in 1:1 learning, building learning communities involving MULTIPLE districts and schools within our state, and working with district leaders on the multitude of issues which are vital for 1:1 project success. The specific details of this collaborative are still being worked out, and your input can help shape the direction and focus of this initiative. We will build specifically on the work of the Open1to1 Project in Maine and the Maine Netbook Consortium, utilizing the open source / free Ubuntu operating system for student laptops. The free Ubuntu image distributed by Open1to1 includes over 100 free productivity and educational applications. Collaborative partners will make commitments to several leadership, instructional, procedural, and policy changes which will directly contribute to 1:1 project success. These will most likely include the following:

1. Superintendent and principal must participate in top-level administrative consortium meetings as well as educator professional development
2. Content filtering: Schools must agree to adopt, implement and support reasonable and relatively open content filtering policies (To be defined elsewhere in greater detail. Access is open to Ning, blogs, wikis, Flickr, websites used for COV workshops,etc.)
3. Teacher laptops: Macbook laptops
4. Teacher software suite: Includes commercial screencasting software
5. Student laptops: Netbooks at a minimum and laptops at maximum (menu of options)
6. Netbook/Laptop OS: Ubuntu Linux using an image customized from the Open1to1.org project (>100 educational and productivity applications included)
7. Negotiated service level agreement: Negotiated with hardware resellers for all members of the consortium
8. Digital curriculum: A package of commercial digital curriculum sites and services, negotiated for consortium school use on a per-seat basis
9. Google Apps for Education: All districts adopt and implement Google Apps for Education (free)
10. Educator leadership training
11. COV Phase 1 Workshop Training (for all in participating districts)
12. Google Workshop for Educators: Selected / volunteer participants from member districts are able to participate in 1 or 2 day GWEs
13. Administrative leadership training
14. IT Support staff leadership training
15. Online and face-to-face (blended) professional development training
16. Learning Community Collaboration: Members of the consortium publish and share lesson plans on the “open web” using collaborative, web-based tools

The above list is not finalized and is subject to change. We are most likely looking to work / collaborate with two to five Oklahoma school districts in this collaborative in 2010 – 2011. We aspire to build a sustainable and exemplary model of 1:1 learning which ALL Oklahoma schools can follow, whether or not outside / supplementary grant funding is available. To do this, member districts will have to “be on the same page” with regard to computer hardware, digital curriculum, professional development, and other issues. All our districts can’t and won’t look exactly the same, but we will require standardization on several key aspects of the project to support high-quality and sustained professional development as well as (ultimately) positive impacts on student learning / achievement.

For assessment of our collaborative’s 1:1 learning projects, we will most likely partner with experienced 1:1 project evaluators at the University of North Texas, who have extensive 1:1 evaluation resources as well as expertise in successful 1:1 project design.

INTERESTED SCHOOL DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENTS ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND THIS MEETING. If you are planning to attend without your superintendent, please encourage him/her to attend as well. What we are proposing and is proposed through this Oklahoma SDE initiative is NOT merely a “technology project,” this is a whole school / whole district transformational learning initiative. Our Storychasers team has superb expertise and connections to 1:1 educational leaders in the United States and around the world, organizations supporting 1:1 learning best practices, and blended learning models. We are focused on helping our partner districts be the most successful learning organizations in our state. We are serious about success, and top leadership in participating districts must be on board and be active participants throughout this process.

If you have questions about this event, please post them here on our blog. The Storychasers’ point-of-contact for this meeting and event is Wesley Fryer. Please register for this event as soon as possible via EventBrite. We look forward to collaborating with forward-looking and visionary Oklahoma leaders on this project. For more background and related links, refer to the 23 November 2009 podcast, “One to One Learning with Open Source Netbooks is Practical, Affordable and Powerful – Learn Why.”

WHO IS STORYCHASERS?
Storychasers is a respected and well-known provider of professional development workshops for educators in Oklahoma. For the past three years, the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Project (organized and supported by Storychasers, as well as other partner organizations) has helped over 500 Oklahoma educators learn to create and safely publish with digital media. Over 700 people are now part of our open/free learning community for COV, and over 500 videos created by Oklahoma educators and students through the COV project are available on our learning community website.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

No matter where you live in our great state, your community is unique. What can others learn from your area, your citizens, your resources, your culture, or your history? This purpose of this project is to provide students a unique forum to “stand and deliver” their acquired educational skill sets in an authentic environment. Their research, writing, speaking, history and technology skills will be leveraged to engage other students via live synchronous videoconferencing.

PROJECT REQUIREMENTS

1. Student Teams will research a topic in their community.
2. Students will develop a 30 – 45 minute informational program geared toward a specific audience educating them on the topic.
3. Each project team will be required to use the Program Posting Format as they develop their content program.
4. Each team will present their live videoconference to another school between November 1, 2009 – December 24, 2009.
5. Programs will be delivered using H.323 compatible videoconferencing equipment.
6. The project will be aligned to Oklahoma state P.A.S.S. objectives for learners.

TEAM REQUIREMENTS

1. Teams will consist of middle or high school students grades 6 – 12 and one teacher sponsor.
2. Teams will include a minimum of three (3) and maximum of six (6) presenting students.
3. Teachers wishing to include an entire class in the research and development portion of the project are required to maintain a team of no more than 6 students to make the final presentation.
4. Schools may have more than one team.

If you do NOT currently have H.323 compatible videoconferencing equipment at your Oklahoma school and are interested in participating in OKC3, please contact me directly. I have access to Tandberg videoconferencing equipment and would be delighted to make it available to you and your students, as well as assist in the development and delivery of your OKC3 project submission, in November and December.

This OKC3 project is precisely the type of collaborative initiative involving technology, creativity, and 21st century learning skills in which we need more of our students and teachers in Oklahoma and elsewhere to get involved. Please take me up on this offer if you are a teacher or administrator in an Oklahoma school and want to get involved in this digital learning opportunity.

OKC3 is based on the very successful KC3 (Kids Creating Community Content) project sponsored by the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC) and Tandberg the past two years. Students in Howe Public Schools won the KC3 project in 2008.

Last night, I facilitated a presentation for the 2009 Oklahoma Academy “Town Hall” on education and workforce development in Oklahoma, involving students from Howe Public Schools who participated in the KC3 project last year. It would be FANTASTIC to involve more of our Oklahoma students and teachers in projects like this, and OKC3 is a great opportunity to do so.

FULL DISCLOSURE: The organizer of the OKC3 project, Lance Ford, is a friend of mine and fellow Apple Distinguished Educator. Lance now works for Tandberg as an Education Advocate. I have an agreement with Tandberg to provide several free professional development workshops over video during 2009-2010 as part of their “Tandberg Connections Professional Development Program,” and in exchange for those workshops Tandberg provides me with access to one of their videoconferencing units. I have paid to be listed as a “content provider” and have several of my professional development workshops I offer over video listed on the CILC’s website. I do not stand to directly gain anything if educators and students in Oklahoma or elsewhere participate in OKC3 or get more involved in videoconferencing with Tandberg or other vendors. I am extremely passionate about the need to help our educators and student “Create, Communicate, and Collaborate” more effectively with digital tools inside and outside the classroom, however, and see the OKC3 project as a perfect opportunity to “walk this walk.” If I can help Oklahoma educators and students participate and have positive experiences in the OKC3 project, I want to do it.

For more about Lance Ford and some of the reasons he’s a phenomenal educator as well as change agent for our schools in Oklahoma and beyond, see my April 2008 post, “The Mac Jedi’s Homebrew Mobile Commander” and podcast, “Pimp My Ride (digitally) Southeast Oklahoma Style (An Interview with Lance Ford: Mac Jedi.)”

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