Forensic Science by Anita Cosby (An introduction to forensic science class)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Starbase 2011 by Pamela Sue Gilder (Video about a fifth grade class during their six week adventure through Strarbase)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Ben Franklin Science Academy’s Friendship Garden “The Green Patch” by Sandra Marie Riley (A story about the “Green Patch” that touched a community)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

It will be great to see the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) related videos our workshop participants create next week at OSU! More information about hosting and requesting a Storychasers workshop is available on the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page of our website.

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1. Helping your students become more creative?
2. Learning more about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers for your students?
3. Obtaining “digital backpack” equipment (including a new digital camera, digital audio recorder, headset with microphone, and more) you and your students can use to create videos for class assignments?
4. Learning how to successfully facilitate student video projects for class?
5. Learning how digital fabrication labs (FabLabs) can energize your students about STEM career fields?
6. Joining an educational community of digital storytellers in Oklahoma?
7. Obtaining a $500 scholarship to attend a three day workshop FOR FREE focused on these activities?

If so, you need to apply for the “Teaching Creativity and Innovation to Inventive Minds” workshop scheduled for Wednesday, August 3rd through Friday, August 5th on the campus of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. The application deadline is Friday, July 29th. This workshop is co-sponsored by the College of Education at OSU and Storychasers. Day one of the workshop will focus on ideas for student creativity, STEM careers, and “digital fabrication” labs which students use to design and create originally designed materials using special computer software and hardware. No prior experience with digital fabrication is required. Days 2 and 3 of the workshop are the “phase 1″ digital storytelling workshop offered by Storychasers for the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices oral history project. You will learn how to create a short, 3 to 5 minute video focusing on some aspect of creativity, STEM careers, or STEM themes discussed in our workshop and share it on the third day.

Please complete our online registration Google form to register and apply for a full scholarship to attend this workshop, or apply to pay with available professional development funds from your school district. Slots are limited, and a total of ten scholarships are available. A maximum of 25 participants will be selected for this workshop. Those interested in attending but NOT selected for a scholarship can participate for $499 or $249, depending if participants want to keep “digital backpack” equipment following the workshop. Selected participants are required to attend all three days of the workshop training, which will be held from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. Participants will also be expected to facilitate at least one student-created digital storytelling project in the six months following the workshop.

The online registration form link is:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dHQxSlowZnhlSHBaQVItb1VuX1lIZmc6MA#gid=0
or
http://tinyurl.com/storychasers11

This workshop will be led by Dawn Danker, a certified Storychasers lead facilitator and the CIO of Yukon Public Schools, and Dr. Susan Stansberry of Oklahoma State University’s College of Education. If you have questions about the workshop, please contact Wesley Fryer, Executive Director of Storychasers by phone, email or Twitter.

(888) 384-5953
wesfryer@pobox.com
@wfryer

A 1 page PDF flyer about this workshop opportunity is also available. Please forward and share this information with other Oklahoma educators. Past participants in Celebrate Oklahoma Voices (COV) workshops are NOT eligible to attend this special workshop on scholarship, but may pay to attend. Anyone is welcome to join our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices online learning community, which now has over 900 videos created by Oklahoma teachers and students:
http://lc.celebrateoklahoma.us/video

Videos and membership on our learning community websites are moderated by Storychaser project facilitators. More information is also available about hosting a Storychasers digital storytelling workshop for your school or in your area, in Oklahoma or other locations:
http://storychasers.org/faq/

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

I knew about some of these influences from watching videos about “the making of Star Wars” in the past, but the references to Joseph Campell’s book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” or the “The Hero’s Journey” referred to as a “monomyth” were new to me.

The idea of creativity as “standing on the shoulders of giants” as well as your peers is also clearly communicated in the 2007 Creative Commons video, “Get Creative.”

Are you encouraging your students to remix the media of our world, and providing opportunities for them to do that constructively for course credit?

Hat tip to Alec Couros for sharing the link to Kirby’s video via Twitter.

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We have discussed the possibility of creating a mobile application for Storychasers (particularly important as we expand into other states in addition to Oklahoma) and the application development environment Mobile Roadie looks intriguing. This short video explains how it works.

What do you think? Would a Mobile Roadie-powered app fill the bill for what a Storychasers mobile app should do? I’ve thought sharing / showcaseing submitted videos from our different learning communities, and providing opportunities for people to share comments / feedback on those videos would be the main functions of the app. Mobile Roadie could offer a lot more too, however.

If you want to see an example app built with Mobile Roadie, check out the free Redeemer Church iOS app. It’s pretty amazing to see what can be done, and how it can be controlled / managed from a web-based CMS (content management system.) I’m pretty enthused about this possibility!

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Thanks to all our military veterans. Your sacrifices and the sacrifices of your families have given us the freedoms we enjoy today, and secured the blessings of liberty which we are well advised never to take for granted.

To learn more about these oral history projects, check out the wiki site we’ve created for Story Chasers Inc. Also follow Storychasers on Twitter.

OKLAHOMA VETERAN TRIBUTE VIDEOS

Of the 842 videos currently shared on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, 37 are tagged “veteran” because they are videos about military veterans. Here are a few of our recent submissions.

Howard Goins (1 min, 58 sec) – A Howe Public School student, Annie Shelton, created a video to recognize her grandpa, Howard Goins, a U.S. Navy Veteran.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Billie Krantz (39 sec) – A student, Dustin Osborne, creates a digital story of his Grandpa, Billie Krantz. Mr. Krantz is a U.S. Army Veteran who served in the Korean War.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

A Dedication to The Veterans In My Life (1 min, 28 sec) – A student, Phillip Bookout, created a video recognizing the U.S. veterans in his life.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

KaytlynB. (2 min, 42 sec) – A student from Perry, Oklahoma, shares stories of her grandfather’s military service.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Sasha’s Father (2 min, 11 sec) – A student from Perry, Oklahoma, shares stories of her father’s military service.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Veteran Keith Newton (2 min, 9 sec) – Lauren shares a story about her Father, Keith Newton, a US military veteran.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

KANSAS VETERAN TRIBUTE VIDEOS

These are three videos created by Vicki Sherbert‘s students in Wakefield, Kansas. Each of these videos were uploaded to YouTube and embedded on the CKV website.

A Time at War (6 min, 30 Sec) – Cayley’s father tells about his experiences in Iraq.

Living in the Air Force (5 min, 56 sec) – Abi’s great-uncle tells about his experiences serving in the Air Force.

A Soldier’s Story (5 min, 57 sec) – Siarra interviews a special soldier about his experiences in the army.

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Publishing Video to Celebrate Kansas Voices

If CKV workshop participants do not want to create or use their own YouTube account to upload their videos, we’re providing an option for them to upload to our Storychasers YouTube channel and then embed their videos to our learning community.

In addition to creating this new how-to guide and integrating it in the CKV participant handout, we’ve also made numerous changes and additions to our Storychasers wiki. For Image Resources, Music and Audio Resources, and Copyright and Fair Use Resources, that meant “mirroring” pages on our Storychasers wiki which we’ve previously built (and still have available) on our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices (COV) project wiki. We’re hopeful with grant support to scale this statewide oral history and digital storytelling model to other states in addition to Kansas and Oklahoma in the years ahead. Rather than create separate project wikis for each state, as we did initially for Oklahoma, it seems more logical to create a main/central wiki for all Storychaser projects. A listing of all the websites we maintain and have created in the past for Storychasers is now available on the “Community Portal” page of our Storychasers wiki.

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digital, history, kansas, resources, storychasers, storytelling, voices

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

We’ve only begun to share our stories with the world. Make way for the Storychasers!

Several videos from last week’s COV workshop are now featured on our learning community website. This summer Storychasers is presenting one or two COV workshops around the state of Oklahoma EACH week. Our lead facilitators will feature different videos after each workshop, so keep checking back for new content throughout the summer.

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Others argue that there has been a ratcheting up of meanness—that the changes in technology have made us nastier and more cynical. “It’s like a blood sport,” says Mr. Fink, who runs a crisis-management firm in Los Angeles. “It feels like everyone has their cellphone out, ready to take a photo that will hurt someone else.”

It’s as if all of us now have our own printing presses and our own television studios, and we can use them for good or for evil. The problem is that too many of us succumb to the anonymity of the Web, says Parry Aftab, a cyber-security attorney based in Irvington, N.Y. “We’re braver when we type. We don’t have to look someone in their eyes. It’s easier to be vicious, to cross the line between funny and cruel.”

photo credit: trix0r

Are you encouraging the students with whom you work to use their cell phones, laptops, and other interactive technologies for good instead of evil? We need to empower digital witnesses to constructively share their voices and those of others on the global stage. As Jeffrey notes, television and YouTube are full of “bad examples” when it comes to to digital media use.

Helping students become aware of their digital footprint and the impact that can have on their lives as well as others’ lives is just the first step. Jeffrey writes:

At Indiana University, my daughter is taking a course titled “The Principles of Public Relations.” On the first day of class, the instructor, Lanier Holt, surprised his 104 students by telling them he had conducted a “scouting report” by Googling each of their names and checking out any photos of them he could access on Facebook.

Many of the students still seemed to have an untarnished Web presence. But more than a few were the subject of embarrassing postings—their own and other people’s. Mr. Holt found photos of his students with marijuana pipes or posing half-naked. He came upon photos in which students had shaved off an eyebrow of someone who had passed out from drinking.

Mr. Holt warns his students that future employers are Googling them, and that unseemly images of them “tagged” on some other person’s Facebook page could come back to haunt them. The most proactive step they can take is to assume everything they do may end up as part of the public record.

The solution is NOT to simply stay off the web. I don’t think the solution should end with simply maintaining your own digital footprint, either. Deep web search tools like Pipl (referenced by Joyce Valenza in her K12Online09 keynote, “The Wizard of Apps“) can help us better monitor our footprint, but not constructively shape it. “The solution,” if there is one, lies in defining ourselves as positive and constructive contributors to the social media conversations taking place all around us.

Words and images are powerful, and they can shape our perceptions along with the perceptions of others in lasting ways. Many of us today DO have “our own printing presses and our own television studios” in our pockets. We need more storychasers modeling the ethical and constructive uses of digital media in our schools and communities. All our schools need the student journalism class publishing content on an interactive, moderated website which can serve as a sand box for respectful social networking in the community. Where are the leaders in your community, sounding this clarion call for digital citizenship? “The T-Bird Times: The Northfield Middle School Newspaper / Multimedia Club” is one of the best examples I’ve seen to date of this idea in action. I heard Kevin Jarrett share about it at NECC last year in Washington DC.

Last summer I had an opportunity to share some thoughts at the Oklahoma RTNDF Multimedia Workshop. As the day kicked off, Carol (who was leading us, I didn’t record her last name at the time) shared a summary of the three most important rules for journalists to follow. Whether or not we are formally enrolled in journalism classes, teaching journalism, or employed as journalists, I think we can benefit from keeping these in mind as we use social media. Carol suggested we all remember to:

1. Be accurate
2. Be fair
3. Be clear

What kind of resources and support would you want if you were to start (or encourage others to start) a student Storychasers “club” at your school? This could be a club activity where students learned to use flash-based camcorders, digital cameras, audio recorders, and blogs to constructively document and share their views and perspectives on school and the community. Students could accept “assignments” and work to create multimedia online reports about them, at times working collaboratively with students in other locations. I’d like to build that kind of interactive community through Storychasers, borrowing some of the ideas from CNN’s iReporter community.

There’s little doubt it’s a challenge to not simply survive but thrive in this “age of humiliation.” We need proactive, rather than simply reactionary responses, to help all the learners in our communities become constructive storychasers.

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Sometimes people will transparently share their inappropriate intentions for wanting to join your learning community when they fill out their profile, as an individual did in the example above. More often, however, people who are NOT really interested in the “educational networking” purpose of your network will simply skip questions, and may choose all possible role options in the profile questions. These are “red flags” for people to keep OUT of your network.

photo credit: tiffa130

Sometimes membership applications fall into a “grey zone” when you are not exactly sure if the person is legitimately interested in participating constructively in the community. In these cases, we generally approve the request for membership and then monitor the person’s contributions. Alternatively or in addition, since we ask for an email address we can also email the person and ask follow up questions. That is generally more time than an administrator wants to commit to moderating membership, however, so monitoring the community and intervening if something inappropriate is said or posted is our general procedure.

To setup new member moderation, administrators in the Ning can click MANAGE – PRIVACY and then select a checkbox to moderate membership applications.

Once membership is moderated, a message in the right sidebar of your site will appear (for administrators only) whenever new membership applications have been received.

Moderating a learning community like this might sound like a scary prospect fraught with danger, but it has been a very positive and rewarding experience for us. Key to that outcome is the fact that we have membership applications moderated, and several questions (including some open ended questions) required before anyone can submit the form to join the community.

It’s critical to “guard the gates” of our learning communities to keep spammers and others with malicious intent out.

photo credit: bortescristian

If someone DOES get “inside” who has malicious intentions, there are several administrative options which can be taken. If someone has posted something clearly “beyond the pale” or through their behavior demonstrates they are NOT in the right place as a member of your community, administrators can kick them out entirely. This deletes all past posts and comments they’ve made, deletes their profile, and prevents them from joining the community again with the same email address. In the past, Ning called this process for administrators “banning” users. Now the language is “Suspend for Spam” or “Suspend from Network.” These options can be made (by your designated administrators only) by viewing an individual’s profile page:

These “suspension” options also can be chosen by choosing MANAGE – MEMBERS:

Keep in mind Ning profiles / logins can be used on multiple sites, so if you “Suspend for Spam” I suspect Ning overlords receive notification that the account should be watched as a potential spammer account which should be suspended more globally.

If a member of the learning community has made a mistake or said something inappropriate, but does not appear to be a spammer or someone who has committed a “learning network felony” justifying suspension / banning, one of our administrators generally messages the person and asks them to change or remove the offending content. Sometimes we’ll (as administrators) directly remove it, but in these cases it’s often best to let the person make the change themselves. These situations personify the idea that we need “digital sand boxes” for learners to practice digital citizenship and responsible social networking. Our learning community is moderated and accountable, which are two key ingredients for a safe as well as constructive learning network.

photo credit: Grant Barrett

Like many others, I’m very interested in the policy changes which Ning is expected to announce May 5th for free and educational networks. We’ve been paying to remove advertisements and use a custom domain on our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Ning for several years, and I expect we’ll continue to do so. Hopefully Ning administrators will continue to make educational networking on their site financially reasonable for teachers, librarians and schools. There are a LOT of important lessons we all need to learn and practice as digital citizens, and Ning networks administrated as learning communities can be great places for that learning to take place.

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“Integration at Wagoner” by Sonya Farr tells the story of Coach Bill Benham, Sonya’s father, who led the first integrated basketball team at Wagoner. Wagoner is located about fifty miles west/southwest of Lowrey School, just north of Muskogee. It is wonderful Sonya was able to actually interview her father for this digital story, since this “history” comes alive so much more hearing it directly from him. It reminds me of a digital story a coach in Miami, Texas, created at a workshop I facilitated there around 2005. He told about what it was like to be a player on one of the first integrated basketball teams in West Texas. Stories like this which relate what it was like during the early days of desegregation are often powerful. These stories can be good catalysts for discussions about equal treatment, racism, discrimination, and human rights.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kevin Crossno, a social studies teacher at The Casady School in Oklahoma City who attended COV at Lowrey, created a digital story titled, “The Founding of BSA.” As a Boy Scout myself, I really enjoyed hearing Kevin relate this history and particularly the fact that the first Boy Scout Troop in the United States was chartered in Pawhuska, Oklahoma! Boy Scouting in the USA is celebrating its 100 year anniversary this year!

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

I love food and food festivals, and Rachael Ranallo piqued my interest to visit the annual Italian Festival in McAlester, Oklahoma at the end of May this year with her digital story. The music she used added so much to the story!

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Last of all, Jennifer Swafford shared the digital story, “Planting the Pines at Lowrey.” This is a great example of how teachers as well as students can help preserve their local, community history. Without storytellers like Jennifer, stories like this might not be shared online and preserved for generations to come. I loved seeing the current photos of these huge trees, and hearing the story about when they were planted years ago by Jennifer’s great uncle, Harold Terry. Jennifer’s dad, Benny Cassidy, tells the story, with help from his digital storytelling daughter.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

If you are interested in participating in a Celebrate Oklahoma Voices workshop this year, we have seven more workshops this summer which still have open slots available. A total of 16 COV workshops are scheduled at this point through August in different parts of the state. Our workshop model includes ten to twenty-five participants, and if a workshop is not full educators from other schools can register to attend. We will also be offering a Celebrate Kansas Voices (CKV) workshop in Manhattan August 4-6, and more information about that opportunity (including cost and registration details) will be forthcoming next week.

Anyone is welcome to join both the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices learning community (with 787 members currently, and 574 videos) as well as the Celebrate Kansas Voices learning community which is just getting started. Learn more about Storychasers, the non-profit which presents COV and CKV, by visiting and subscribing to the Storychasers blog and following Storychasers on Twitter. Complete details about the Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling model are available on the COV project wiki.

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