Chasing the Technological Dragon

           

Wildish Mountain Kids

             Technology is a magical dragon all flight and fire. We the users are often left running along on the ground far behind the beast trying to catch up with it.

 

As an elementary school teacher I try to incorporate multimedia into the curriculum. It gives voice to student’s work and shares it with a wide audience. To that end we have been successful. Cayoosh Kidz, our website, has just passed the 100 000 mark with visits and viewings. Not bad for a bunch of wildish mountain kids. Sometime next week we will have a party to celebrate that success, and set our new goals, but back to the dragon.

 

Video is the heart of new media. Its growth on the web has been exponential! When Cayoosh Kidz started a couple of years ago there were only a handful of places where a video could be posted. Six months after we started there were hundreds, now there are thousands.

 

This growth of the video phenomenon is not without problems. For every good video clip there are hundreds of bad ones. These are bad for many reasons: sexism, drugs, violence, or just ill-conceived worthless content. Some days Youtube  feels like the Wild West, not a place you would like to bring children. TeacherTube is a much safer bet.

 

As a teacher, creating worthwhile content is a huge challenge. However, there are resources we can learn from to improve the work that we produce. I was delighted with the instructional videos found at B&H this week.  B&H is the international candy store of multimedia. You might call it the dragon’s layer. You won’t be wasting time looking at the online resource Teaching Online Journalism either.

 

 We are in a time of incredible transformation of video technology. Everything is changing and will continue to change for several years. Video cameras are recording in formats that the editing software can’t yet decode.  And editing software is making power demands on computers that they weren’t designed for. This creates headaches and frustration at every level, and the solutions are usually expensive.  It takes several thousand, if not tens of thousands of dollars to be able to shoot and edit in true HD (high definition) video. This is an amount far beyond what the average school budget can afford. HD video editing can be done, but you are really running to catch that dragon. The practical solution is to shoot and edit in the more compact SD (standard definition) video format.

 

And what about Cayoosh Kidz’ next goal? We have been tossing around one million hits by the end of next year. It’s got a nice ring to it. Over the next few posts I will discuss how we intend to reach that goal. Hey, did you see which way that dragon went?

 

How-to-videos are always winners!

 

Instructional videos have enduring popularity. Not only are they viewer favorites but they provide opportunities for students to learn important storytelling skills.

 

This week’s video project is about making a diorama. Dioramas are powerful tools for learning and represent a lot of hands-on fun. The genesis of our diorama came from a class novel. My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, is a yarn about Sam who runs away to live in the wilderness. After reading the book, the diorama provided great opportunities for group discussion about the story. Place, characters, and plot came alive for many students for the first time.

 

Our video was filmed after the students had created their first diorama. They had become experts! We used Cayoosh Kidz’ patented technique for creating a storyboard, which is a popular how-to video in its own right (11 265 hits), to plan this video. It took about 40 minutes to deconstruct the process of making a diorama, and then deciding the sequence of scenes necessary to explain the process. Our storyboard included scene layout, screenplay, camera angles and talent. Because everyone had a concrete idea of what we would do, we found that shooting went very smoothly. This was the first time I had filmed with this group so I needed to take an active role in the whole process. The students are taking more ownership in their next production.

 

Quiet! Is there a quiet space in a school? You can hear the hum of the classroom furnace, kids moving in the hallway, and some traditional First Nations drumming in the back ground of the video. Our second technical filming concern was to get enough light on the set. We worked near windows, used auxiliary lights and reflecting boards to boost the visual quality of each scene.

 

The kids were very enthusiastic about the final product and are now keenly writing a mystery about cyber-bullying. From their first draft I can say it won’t be for the squeamish. Going through the process of telling a video story helped the students to examine all their writing for logical flow of ideas. They gained confidence, experience in public presentation, and a sense of worth as they watched their video on the internet and saw that hundreds of others enjoy it too.

I have seen the future and it is GY-HM100U and 5D Mark II.

 

 

 

Let me explain. I am writing about two very different but revolutionary cameras. They are extraordinary in a number of ways and while both are too expensive for your average classroom, they point the way to the future.

 

The Canon 5D Mark II that sounds like the name of a high end sports car is actually a professional level digital camera with all the bells and whistles. But its ability to record high definition video is what sets it apart. The video is stored on removable flash cards which also makes processing the videos a snap. Other revolutionary features include the ability to use an external microphone to record professional quality sound. The final feature of this camera is the fact that like all SLRDs its lenses can be changed for a wide variety of affects.

 

The other new piece of hardware is the JVC GY-HM100U. This might be called an affordable prosumer video camera with video features that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago. Two aspects stand out, the first is that instead of recording to tape it records to cheap removable flash cards, a boon for editing work flow. The other innovation is in the way this camera records data as a native Final Cut Pro file. This is huge! Video editing is a bit of a dark art and high definition video editing is even darker. I wish that I had a dollar for every time my editing projects crashed. Without going into a lot of geeky details recording into native Final Cut Pro means that video editing has gotten a lot easier and cheaper.

 

So what does this mean for the classroom? Well not too much for a little while, but down the road when these innovations move into the inexpensive consumer tools that teachers tend to use you will see professional level imagery, easily recorded and transferred from the camera and efficiently edited for distribution.

 

In short the near term future will see our ability to create video content and the telling of multimedia stories made better, easier and cheaper.

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