Instead of Flip cameras, which have been discontinued by Cisco and do not import video in a Mac-friendly format, Storychasers recommends student videography teams use iPod Touches or iPads for quick-edit videography. In addition, an external microphone is a MUST to improve audio quality. (A $60 iRig mic, available via the Apple Store, was used in the video above.)

Congrats to Mustang Elementary students and staff, and kudos to Mrs. Seemler for applying for and winning this student technology grant!

The Cherokee Language by Janice Ballou tells the story of family gatherings in ‘days gone by’ when stories were shared in Cherokee. According to Janice, “stories are always funnier and scarier when they are told in Cherokee!” Janice also interviewed kindergarten teacher Faye Ross, who explained how she teaches her students the Cherokee language to enhance their cultural literacy and pride in their Cherokee heritage.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Mom’s Pretty Boy Floyd Story by Tambra Dewey is an adorable interview with Tambra’s mother, who relates a story she was told as a child by her grandmother who used to cook and give shelter to Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang in the 1930s near Salina, Oklahoma.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kenwood Cultural Day Presentation by Wanda Wilson McBride describes Kenwood School’s 2011 Cultural Day which celebrated Cherokee culture. Her retelling made me want to bring my own kids to this special event next year!

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kenwood School Cherokee Choir by Faye Ross features an interview with music teacher Janice Ballou. The Kenwood Choir has traveled and shared the Cherokee language as well as songs in a remarkable number of places including Washington DC and Japan. “Through the music, kids can express themselves, and that is why I love sharing music in the Cherokee language.” I LOVE the music tracks Faye included in this video!

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Grandmother’s Story by Annetta M Bundy tells the remarkable tale of Annetta’s grandmother who “led a busy life with two husbands and twelve children (including a set of identical twin girls.” The hardships of the past can barely be comprehended by students today who are blessed with so many things as well as opportunities. Digital stories like this one can help us connect and remember.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

If you are trying to view these videos on an iOS device like an iPad or iPhone, I encourage you to use the Skyfire Web Browser ($3) to convert the Flash-format videos on the fly to a format readable on Apple mobile devices. We are in the process of working on a transcoding solution for our videos on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, as well as Celebrate Kansas Voices and Celebrate Texas Voices.

If you are in or near Oklahoma or Kansas, please register to attend one of our two day digital storytelling workshops this summer! Our opportunities to digitally create, learn and share continue!

Quickstart Guide to iMovie ’09

I’d estimate at least 90% of the teachers who have been participants in our Storychasers workshops to date (about 800 people) have used Windows-based computers at school and therefore used PhotoStory3 to combine their audio and photos to create videos. Our PhotoStory handout, as well as others we use in our workshops, are available on our COV project wiki. This week, for our initial Celebrate Kansas Voices workshop, almost all our participants are using Apple laptops and iMovie ’09. We’ve used several different iMovie handouts in the past, but none have been adequately customized to the specific steps we recommend teachers follow in our workshops. Hopefully this handout will make the process of learning and using iMovie easier. This week our video count on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices will exceed 800, and educators will publish our first workshop-created videos on Celebrate Kansas Voices.

Feel free to use this handout for your own professional development workshops and needs!

Learn more about Storychasers and our workshops on our Storychasers project wiki.

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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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Sister’s Story by Brad Logan (5:28)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Innocence Lost by Andrea (2:39)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Unsung Heroes: Oklahoma Responds by Geraldine Southern (3:06)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

A Day in the History of Oklahoma by Catherine Elizabeth Walling (3:20)

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Oklahoma City Bombing by Mallory-Randa-Jessica (2:09) – This was a student project

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum website features a wealth of resources and classroom activities related to the bombing.

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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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I’m spending several days this week in and near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, leading a Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling workshop for Storychasers at Lowrey School. Lowrey is one of just five public school districts in Oklahoma implementing a 1:1 laptop initiative, and is located about thirty minutes north of Tahlequah. This evening after I tweeted about driving to Tahlequah, Kelly Croy tweeted:

Tahlequah is where Billy Coleman picked up his dogs at the train depot in Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. Take pics pls.

I certainly will take photos in and around Tahlequah this week, but Kelly’s tweet reminded me of Amy Brookshire’s COV video about Wilson Rawls. It’s just over two minutes long, and gives an excellent (as well as personal) biographical snapshot of Rawls.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Students of Stilwell, Oklahoma teacher Andrea created another digital story about Wilson Rawls. (2 min, 10 sec) Rawls’ story of becoming a writer through persistence, despite his lack of formal education, is inspiring and may come as a surprise to many readers.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

It’s nice to compare these two videos as examples of teacher-created and student-created digital stories. If your students have read or will read “Where the Red Fern Grows,” consider using one or both of these videos as part of your author study about Wilson Rawls.

It’s been a few months since I led a COV workshop, and I’m looking forward to working with teachers at Lowrey this week who will create and share their own digital stories! We now have 567 videos in our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices learning community, created by Oklahoma teachers and students.

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“In Honor of My Grandfather” was created by Laney Miller, as a tribute to her great-grandfather who was born in 1929 in Shamrock, Oklahoma. He served in the Korean War, and wrote letters to his wife and family during his overseas military service to keep them updated about his life. Laney did a fantastic job writing and reading her script based on those letters, and synchronizing personal photos from her grandfather into her digital story.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Emily and Rheanna, 8th graders at Tenkiller Elementary School in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, created the video “Veterans Day 2009” to provide historical background about the celebration of Veteran’s Day in the United States, as well as a tribute to many the veterans who are family members of students in their school. This video was used as part of the school’s commemorative events to celebrate Veteran’s Day yesterday.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Haley Jones, a 7th grader at Tenkiller Elementary School in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, created the video “My Heroes” to pay tribute to both her grandfathers who served in the U.S. Armed Forces. She included interview audio for part of her video, which is 2 minutes long.

Find more videos like this on Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

Kudos to Pam Henley and these students for FANTASTIC work helping recognize and thank some of our Oklahoma veterans, and contributing these videos to our growing video archive (now including over 470 videos) on our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices learning community.

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Student media team members will create, prior to the Sep 29/30 events, a series of four to five short videos which will be used during the events as background media during and between sessions. These videos will include pans across high resolution images for relatively long takes (10 – 15 seconds) followed by shorter, juxtaposed images which complement and extend the videos metaphor or motif. These videos should function as visual tapestries during the event, and each should be:

1. Rhythmical, but with surprising variations
2. Meditative
3. Metaphorical (a feather is like a fern is like gear teeth on a bike is like classic wrought iron architectural detail is like tree branching systems is like a watershed is like neurons in the brain….)

The creation of these video / image montages will provide an opportunity for student media team members to play artistically with media and ideas, particularly those which reflect the work, interests, and ideas of Leonardo Da Vinci. While media team members are welcome to use their own photos to which they have copyright, members are encouraged to utilize openly licensed images such as those found using the websites CompFight, FlickrStorm, and Flickr Creative Commons. On Compfight and FlickrStorm, be sure to adjust settings/advanced settings to search for “Creative Commons images only” before searching. Student media creators should keep a careful record of photo source URLs, so proper attribution for images included in each video can be provided. We want to model good respect for copyright / intellectual property with these projects!

The first visual tapestry metaphor is “flight,” and the themes / suggestions are: long pans on feathers, close up birds, birds in flight, leaf falling, kites, hang gliders, airplanes, and helicopters. This is my initial attempt at a visual tapestry for this theme. It includes 47 Creative Commons images from Flickr, which were all located with FlickrStorm. I used iPhoto ’09 to create this video in 2.5 hours last night. This tutorial from Basics4Mac explains how to set custom Ken Burns effects in iPhoto ’09. By using FlickrStorm, we have a single URL which provides Creative Commons attribution for these images. I used tinyurl as a URL shortener so this attribution link could be included as the final image of the video. It is tinyurl.com/flight-vt.

Here’s the final video, “Visual Tapestry – Flight,” in an iPhone-compressed format. This does NOT include an audio track, and runs 10 min, 41 sec. I uploaded this to Vimeo instead of YouTube since it’s just over ten minutes long and YouTube limits videos to 10 min.

Visual Tapestry – Flight from Story Chasers on Vimeo.

I’ve linked the larger / high resolution M4V version of this file as well as this iPhone version M4V from our “Storychasing Creativity” website. Feel free to use this visual tapestry as well as the others we’ll be creating in advance of next Wednesday’s event for your own classroom activities, conference events, presentations, etc. Please just give credit for the Visual Tapestries to Storychasers and Storychasing Creativity.

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