Wow, I’ve just browsed Teacher Tube and I think this is a really useful website with abundant resources which can help inspire us teachers to have more interesting ideas on teaching.

If you want to know how to engage our students’ attention in class, watch this video. 

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=448&title=Pay_Attention

From “Once Upon A Time” to “Happily Ever After”, every child knows the “proper” way to tell a bedtime story — and woe be unto the narrator that knowingly or unknowingly deviates from the expected framework. Some narrative frameworks have utility that goes well beyond soothing sleepless toddlers, though: these frameworks will form the focus of this session. We will also see how to integrate them into a digital toolkit, and how to use them as a basis for collaborative digital storytelling.

Joining this Webinar

• This webinar will be offered twice on December 3 — once at 3:15pm, and once at 7:15pm.
• To register for the webinar, please click on the following link: Registration.
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Copenhagen is a beautiful city that I first had the chance to visit, and subsequently fell in love with, in Autumn 2008. The Danish spirit seems to be eminently sensible, open-minded and forward facing. My cousin married a Dane and is now happily living in Copenhagen, and I’m quite envious of their social situation as working parents of young children; the state makes their lives considerably easier than our equivalent in the UK.

And the gaze of the world’s media now focusses on Copenhagen with the UN Climate Summit less than 2 weeks away, my thoughts are drifting back towards social activism for the environment. I’ve just very recently been hearing about two very different cases, and in both thinking that digital storytelling would help spread the word. And I know that citizen journalism is not without problems, but what about the voices of the people who are affected in a very real way day to day by policy and decisions…

The first is the protests in 1993 of Clayoquot Sound, Vancouver Island when the British Columbia Government actioned the ‘Clayoquot Land Use Decision’ to permit mass logging of the temperate rainforest. The story I heard was from someone who was there; Aldo de Moor’s written notes and media collection offer that insight first hand. The Friends of Clayoquot Sound website shows one example of digital activism, and I guess facilitates making informed decisions on the part of the activists much easier. Sadly, the logging continues and battles are still being fought.

The other case I’ve been hearing about is a new, rural community development south of Copenhagen. The collaborative nature of the community and participatory design of a communal centre has been quite inspirational.

Digital storytelling can be such a powerful technique with the right mandate, and these types of project just inspire me to want to head off into the wider world and work. Back in the real world, I am starting to think about what I’d like to do after my PhD is over. Any work I do will undoubtedly remain in the realm of community informatics, but I wonder if environmental issues are going to play a more prominent part.

And now that Barak Obama is set to attend the UN Climate Summit, and both the USA and China are reviewing cuts in emissions, I feel perhaps the future of environmental campaigning might be slightly more positive.

UN Negotiator Dessima Williams reminds us why now is the time to act, and sums it up nicely when she says “We’re all on the road to Copenhagen” in this media clip.

Photo courtesy of Rob Warde, Flickr.com

Main research interests lie in the area of Peer-Assessment and Digital Stories.

Have developed a web based peer-assessment system called CAPODS that permits students to view and assess the DSt’s of their peers.

Let me share more with you on digital storytelling (DST).

Ideas for the topic–You are Special!

I’m always interested in topics like “self-growth” and I think it would be a good idea to create a digital story on this topic so that people around me, especially my students can be encouraged, inspired and enlightened.  Of course, I would be the first one to benefit from my own work. 

The process towards my final story script

I think the process of making my digital story is quite smooth and straightforward since I just tried to reflect my inner feelings for sharing with others.  Actually, my ideas are inspired by the story You are Special by Max Lucado and therefore everything is quite in context.  Instead of writing the whole script, I jotted down key ideas in point form.  Then, I organized them a bit for the introduction and the conclusion parts and recorded them in a rather spontaneous way and that’s it.  For the story, i.e. the middle part, I just read the script directly from the story book; for the pictures, I scanned them directly from the story book as well.  What I really had to do was to search for a piece of background music that fits the mood of the story and my narration.  Finally, everything was integrated well within just an hour or two and my first digital story was created successfully. 

Apart from this, I’m thinking if my story is written without any pictures or recording, the process may be totally different.  The major difference is I’ll definitely have to draft the story and revise it until it is a refined one for publishing or releasing instead of just using point form for further elaboration and making my work. 

My Complicated Psychological Journey VS the Technical Process

Since Photo Story 3 is a very user-friendly software, I just need to undergo the trial and error process within a short period of  time so as to familiarize myself with the different functions of it.  I can say the whole thing is not really very complicated if you are willing to try, but ”psychologically speaking”, it’s rather complicated as shown below:

Nervous --> excited--> frustrated + annoyed--> happy + excited + satisfied + tired 

I felt nervous in the beginning stage because Photo Story 3 is absolutely a novel invention to me.  I’m so afraid that I could not grasp its use.  Then, I felt excited to add my voice, pics and different effects and hear my own voice.  However, during the process, I felt frustrated as I sometimes failed to achieve what I wanted like the fluency in my speaking, the proper tone of voice for the story, a better effect of the pics, etc.  I also felt annoyed when I had tried many times but still could not figure out what the problems were, like for the proper integration of the pics, my voice and the background music or the way to properly export my file to a link.  Nevertheless, I was satisfied when I could view my first DST product successfully in the end, of course, though a bit tired as DST can be quite an energy-consuming activity, I felt happy and excited as well. 

DST = reflection + creativity

Well, I think this DST activity is both a reflective and creative activity to me because before making the story, I needed to brainstorm ideas about how I can relate myself with the characters in this story so as to make my whole work in context.  Through reading the story, I’ve actually reinforced my own self-worth just like what is told in the story.  I felt like I were the protagonist, Punchinello, in the story that we actually share the same experiences in life.  I also felt like Eli speaking to me in the story.  I understand my personal strengths and limitations more.  Besides, I’ve realized how “child-like” my voice is and maybe I’m ONLY suitable for telling children’s stories!  That’s why the whole thing is reflective to me. 

For the creativity part, I needed to design a thought-provking introduction and conclusion respectively so as to convey meanings to the audience.  I also needed to put myself into the shoes of different characters and learn to express how they feel by using proper but different tone of voice;  Adding different effects to the pics so as to make the story more eye-catching and grasping the skills in using the power of silence to reinforce the mood of the story are all part of the creative work.  Last but not least, since a good piece of background music does matter to catch and trigger the audience’s attention and emotions respectively, I had to try which piece of music is more suitable for the mood of the story.  As a whole, DST is a good way to develop our creativity. 

Pedagogical implications of DST on language teaching and learning

After acquiring the basic skills in DST, I’ve started to realize that language teaching and learning can be like a vast space which should not be bounded by the wall of the classroom.  Through the proper integration of CALL, like the making of digital stories, not just students’ linguistic abilities, but also their other abilities or intelligences such as aesthetic, musical, intrapersonal, etc may as well be enhanced or discovered simultaneously which eventually help direct students towards a new learning experience, i.e. learning English can be fun with the mixing of visual and audio media technology outside classroom. 

DST– a good platform for shy language learners 

DST is actually a good platform for all styles of language learners, to practise fluency in speaking, demonstrate creativity and have fun, share their feelings and thoughts with others and so on, ”passive, shy” learners in particular because it offers them strong sense of security without the need to worry about making mistakes or being laughed by others.  

DST– a powerful medium for sharing feelings and thoughts & source as teaching materials

As a teacher, DST is a powerful, perfect medium for us to share our thoughts and feelings with our students as the mingling of visual and audio work can easily arouse students’ interest and trigger them to think more about different topics related in their learning. 

Moreover, as more and more teachers learn DST and more and more digital stories are produced, these stories will become a very valuable collection of materials for teaching and learning that benefits both teachers and students in the field of education, just like what Teacher Tube (http://www.teachertube.com/) has been doing.

Thanks for reading my feelings and thoughts about making DST.  You are welcome to leave me a word.

What are the most important things in your life?  Are you satisfied with the relationship and the things you have or do?How would you prioritize work, family, friends, play and so on?  Have you had the time to think about the importance of all these things?  Thank God that I now have time to reflect upon the priority of all these things and I’d love to share this with you in my second digital story.

Click here for my DST–>

I have blogged three times recently about the questions about whether and how storytelling will survive and thrive as journalism grows more digital (I say yes).

Katharine Hansen has joined that conversation with an interesting take (linking to one of my earlier posts on the topic) that I call to your attention:

Blogs … are wonderful venues for storytelling, providing a storied outlet for both writers and readers that didn’t exist 15 years ago. And while storytelling on Facebook may be flawed, millions more people are telling and reading stories than did before the age of social media.

If you think that amateur videos have little to no effect on society then you haven’t seen this one.  Today short videos edited or unedited can tell compelling stories, report live events and most importantly “level the playing field.”  If you are in any of the traditional media industries whether it is print, journalism, filmmaking, marketing or radio ignoring digital media can become a whirlwind dis-ease for your reputation as a media provider.

In this video Bill Wasik speaks about the growing ecosystem of the Internet and how it can provide a gateway for small companies, entrepreneurs and media producers.  When it comes to the free vs pay debate I think its fair to ask first what side of the fence you are on? The producer or the consumer?  This makes a difference because Wasik agrees that people “will not stop to pay for something” if they are multi surfing the Internet on various websites. Yet he mentioned that people are more willing to support something that satisfies their “niche passions.”  My personal experience with this took place almost 2 years ago when one of my favorite music groups decided to release a e-magazine for a $12 a year subscription providing the user a login code to read each monthly issues.  The magazine was not staffed by a group of editors, photographers or reporters instead it was a one man operation.  It gave the subscriber a uncensored inside scoop on the bands favorite reading list, new songs, tour schedule and random perspectives that could have been placed in a “free” blog yet they monetized it.  When I got a chance to interview the band they told me that over 2,000 people joined the first few months they started the e-zine giving them a voice unfiltered by popular newsstand publications that have to worry about placement, advertising and monthly relevancy.

As far as Wasik mentioning the “short stuff for free” I agree that companies should release a short version of their work to give the user a reason to pay for more content or accept the free stuff.  He said the best way to avoid this “click away” customer is to have an innovative device that the user must use to keep, delete or share the content on their device such as the ipod, Kindle or the Nook.  As a Disc Jockey for over 17 years my early experiences with personal branding was in competition with local radio disc jockeys and band DJs who were associated with radio stations or a record labels with marketing budgets that dwarf the little guy’s entry.  Today that playing field has been leveled for DJs who have a decent online following with a consistent reputation can now create their own community of listeners through various channels like podcasting, applications or streaming their live performances while responding to listeners worldwide at the same time.  As more people carry mobile devices daily this gives a DJ in Italy an opportunity to be heard in Australia or you can watch a live studio session with another DJ all on your itouch, mp3 player, laptop or cell phone.  Why is this important and how does this help solve the issue of free vs pay online content?

The question of relevancy again depends on what side of the fence you on. Producer or consumer.  If you are a content producer and you want your material to be distributed, you can identify a target audience faster by going straight to them or open the settings for them to come to you at any moment they choose.  The choice is up to you whether you want to charge them a fee or give it to them for free.  With a for profit business model you can also cross promote a sponsors product or service in return for advertising fees to subsidize your production cost.  Either way the choice is yours based on your time, motivation and goals.  In the eyes of the consumer they only want to be entertained or educated which gives them the unique experience of informing the content producer on whether or not their approach is working.  The consumer will let you know if this is something they would pay for based on the interaction and feedback they give the producer using social media tools.  Both the consumer and the producer are the deciding factor on whether something should be free or charged.  This Web 2.0 business model and engagement is what has Hulu, newspaper corporations, television networks and upcoming entrepreneurs deciding what’s next.  My suggestion is to ask the person you are wishing to gravitate towards your content.

Here are 3 Ways a Company Can Engage with its audience:

1)  Listen and learn.  By monitoring conversations about your brand, product or service on various social media websites you learn what people like and dislike about your company.  Is there something that we can improve on?  Why did that last video only get XYZ hits compared to the other one?

2)  Identify the influencers.  Find who are the main people influencing your target market and what do they think our company’s product or services.

3)  Ask for feedback.  Before Twitter, blogs or social influence marketing people had to write a physical letter or make a phone call to a company customer service to send a complaint or suggestion.  Nowadays customers, viewers or influencers can create communities behind their experience whether it is was a good or a bad one.   If you have more negative commentary than positive then maybe your organization should find out why people are putting such effort to say why they dislike something. If you notice it early then you can correct the problem or you can do a YouTube video for the CEO.

I have been looking a different ways for Year 8 students to present some work at the end of the year. It is going to be part of an “Immersion week” of activities. Students will undertake various tasks that they will work on for the day. Different faculties are working on a range of topics for their areas and some are undertaking cross-curricular work. The Personal Development  teacher came up with an idea for her area. The option is called “Summer Fun” and the idea is for students to come up with suggestions for activities that could be enjoyed by other teenagers during the holidays.

AIM: 

• To have students research what activities are available in the Manningham/Whitehorse C C over the summer holidays. 
• To have them suggest interesting, worthwhile, inexpensive activities to keep young people active during the summer.
• To have them research the ‘dangers’ which young people could encounter during the summer.
• The final product they come up with may take the format of a pdf of a brochure; or digital poster using glogster; or website; or comic format -  advertising safe, interesting activities for young people for the summer.

Comic life  is one option that has been used by a number of classroom teachers this year. It is a great tool. This may be a good tool for students to use for their entire final piece or as an instructional part of the overall work. There are  numerous examples of the creative use comics to tell a story, explain a concept, etc.

However just the other evening I again heard other teachers discussing various digital tools and it was clear that they are still not sure about the benefits of using many such tools and comics are not considered highly. 

Comic Life is not free tool but there are plenty of free sites that can be used as well as . They are many and varied in their level of difficulty and how the final product looks and is shared. Some tools for creating cartoons and comic strips are here.

The following slide show by S. Hendy offers a good explanation of the benefits. This might be a good way explain how/why comic strips might be used in classrooms. She also has some other good slide shows worth looking at on SlideShare.

Another useful site those that offer a number of rubrics the teachers have shared that might be a useful for teachers just beginning. One that I found useful in another context was ReadWriteThink: Lesson Plan: Book Report Alternative: Comic Strips and Cartoon Squares  A website for teachers to use in lieu of writing a book report, students create comic strips to illustrate facts. Includes a template.

Voicethread is interactive digital storytelling at its finest – and easiest! Create a slideshow with images, documents, videos, and audio, and comment using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Users can also annotate and “doodle” directly on top of the presentation. This is a great website for tricking students into using language and narrative.
URL: http://voicethread.com

Last week in journoland we had a visit from Daniel Meadows, documentarist, photographer and all-round charmer. I’ve never seen the lecture room so captivated – it was just fantastic to be hearing from somebody who was genuinely excited about telling stories instead of obsessing about how the internet is taking over.

For those who haven’t heard of him, Mr Meadows was quite something back in the seventies. He basically bought a bus and set off round the country on a bus taking photographs. He took no names. Years later, he set about trying to track down everybody down by putting the original pics into local newspapers, and quite a few people made themselves known. Fascinating.

Still trying to think of a modern day equivalent, but I’m not sure that anyone will loan me a plane.

So, Daniel was brought in for a lecture on digital storytelling. He showed us some great ones from a project he ran called Capture Wales, including lots of examples from my lovely (ahem) home town of Wrexham. A rather funny one about (*SPOILER ALERT*) shoes, A Quest for Understanding, has to be my favourite. I’ve already started messing around a bit myself with some movie software, with the result below. Blink and you’ll miss it as it’s only about a second long, but that tiny clip is made up of 17 individual photographs. I do love stop-motion, but I think it’s going to destroy my hard drive.

Yes, I know it’s rubbish. It was supposed to be longer but my camera died.

What struck me about Daniel was how different he was. The issue at the moment is that plenty of people – a lot middle-aged, to be entirely honest – are spending a lot of time trying to convince us how fantastic online and mobile media is. And they’re being met with a lot of reluctance from us students. The problem is that they didn’t grow up with it. But we have. And still are.

That’s why Daniel made such a difference. He grew up with photography and doing it all the first time round and putting those pictures together. People discovering online halfway through their journalism careers just don’t see it the way we do. They’re all excited about it because Twitter and Facebook and everything else are a load new load of toys to play with.

Trying to get young people genuinely enthused about using online for journalism is a bit like trying to get an old-school journalist 30 years ago at the beginning of their careers excited about using a typewriter. Letting them figure it out for themselves, with the new things that are actually new – that’s where they’re going to get excited.

Karolina Kryczka i Piotr Brożek w ramach działań Koła Metodologicznego Historyków UMCS zorganizowali niedawno w Lublinie pierwszą edycję warsztatów digital storytelling. Karolina i Piotr są pracownikami Laboratorium Edukacji i Animacji Ośrodka “Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN”… całość

artykuł pochodzi z portalu historiaimedia.org

This is about Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt, which was mainly filmed in my hometown, Santa Rosa.

Meadows and his Free Photographic Omnibus

An interview with photographer

Daniel Meadows…

Ask Daniel Meadows where he is from and he will reply, “I really don’t know. Except that I am English.” His work as a photographer over the years has documented England at its most real, whether it was touring the country on a Double Decker bus in the 70s and taking portraits of the people he saw, or photographing Ian Curtis and Joy Division in 80s Manchester during their rise to fame…

Meadows was born in Gloucestershire in 1952. He studied at photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970-73. Interesting projects from that time include The Shop On Greame Street in 1972  as well as collaborations with renowned observational photographer Martin Parr with Butlin’s By The Sea in Yorkshire in 1972 and June Street in Salford in 1973.

In 1973 and ‘74 Meadows, a self-confessed hippy, started his Free Photographic Omnibus. As Meadows puts it himself, “Once upon a time I lived in a double-decker bus, reg. JRR 404, better known as the Free Photographic Omnibus. She was my home, my travelling darkroom and gallery. We were an unlikely couple; she with her crash gear box and temperamental ways, me with my bushy hair and homemade flares. But we got along okay and, during 1973 and ‘74, we travelled about making a national portrait of the English. We covered 10,000 miles shooting pictures and giving them away.”

Some of Meadows' Photobus portraits in 1973 & '74

The free spirit of the 1970s meant that Meadows didn’t take a record of who he was photographing; no name, no age, no location. Just a photograph for them, and a photograph for his own archive. Which was unproblematic until 25 years later when Meadows decided he wanted to find his previous subjects and re-photograph them for his book The Bus.

Famous for not only taking photographs for Joy Division’s album artwork, Meadows has also been celebrated for taking a rare, albeit accidental, shot of Margaret Thatcher’s handbag and untidy office at No. 10 in the 80s. Yet these days, Meadows says that he no longer takes any photographs. His work now lies in the world of research, with particular focus on the ways of exploring the depth and range of his photography archive through storytelling using multimedia. He was awarded his PhD in 2005 for his innovative work with photography and participatory media.

Meadows was the creative director of the BBC’s Capture Wales Digital Storytelling project from 2001 until 2006, a project which has been described as “the most ambitious of all the BBC’s user generated content offerings”. Not only is the method of Digital Storytelling a brilliant way for Meadows to showcase his archive of photographs, it also allows access to a more personal world where photographs can take on a new life and meaning.

A photograph that was used Meadow's exhibition There's No Such Thing As Society...

When Meadows gave his lecture on Digital Storytelling last week, I knew I wanted to interview him within the first 5 minutes when he showed a video featuring a beautiful Rolleiflex camera. Considering that Meadows is an award-winning documentarist and photographer, and has hung out with some of England’s finest musical talent, he seemed completely humble and, well normal. He says that he enjoys looking at other peoples’ photographs more than his own, quotes Bob Dylan in an American drawl, and was not at all patronizing when I had to take a photograph of him, with my far inferior camera skills. In fact he seemed genuinely interested in my Polaroid camera, and wanted to watch the photograph spring to life. As you’d expect, his office is wall-to-wall with photographs (some his own, some not) and photography books, and during the interview he was constantly moving from shelf to shelf to illustrate his answers with photographic evidence. He even has the souvenir books that he bought at a Bill Brandt exhibition in 1970 when he was just 18 and beginning his interest in photography…

10am Wednesday 11, 2009.

H: I’ll start at the beginning. What attracted you to photography in the first place, and was it something that you always wanted to do?

Daniel Meadows today...

D: “It wasn’t something I always wanted to do. There were two really big events I think.  Well there were three actually. One was that I was crap at everything at school. And if you were crap you were allowed to do art. You know, our education system is so bad that instead of encouraging you to be creative from the moment you enter school, they discourage it. So creativity was the idiots’ class. So when I failed exams they ended up putting me in the art class. Then they discovered I couldn’t paint, so they said why don’t you try photography, cos it’s kind of easy. The second thing was I saw a wonderful little film, a BBC Omnibus in 1968 called Beautiful Beautiful and there was a New York photographer called Bruce Davidson, he’s on Magnum photography, and he did a project called East 100 Street which is in Harlem. And we’d all been led to believe that Harlem was big, bad and dangerous, and, you know, full of black people. And here was this white middle-class Jewish man, with a huge view camera, play camera, photographing people in their homes. And he made beautiful pictures, and he said something that stuck in my head, which is, ‘I poise, not pose, people… People have an innate dignity and they will set themselves before the camera in a dignified way. And they will choose what they will give.’ I remember thinking, ‘Ah this is a different way of working. I like this.’  And the third thing, there was a very famous British photographer called Bill Brandt, who’s dead now, who’d been brought up in Germany but lived in England. He is one of the greats. And there was a big retrospective exhibition of his work in 1970 at the Haywood gallery, and I went there on a school outing when I was 18. And I remember thinking ‘Wow photography’s wonderful.’ He made these wonderful documentary pictures around Great Britain from the 30s onwards. What was lovely about Brandt was that he did documentary pictures which I loved very much, but he also did portraits. He did nudes; I thought that was pretty exciting. If you take photographs you get a passport to do all sorts of things, you meet famous people, women take their clothes off for you, and you get to study the world we live in and for me at 18 that seemed pretty exciting.”

H: Was it Bill Brandt then who inspired you to do the Photobus project then? The fact that he’d gone around documenting Great Britain?

D: “Well the inspiration for the Photobus was more Cliff Richard, I hate to say. How tacky is that? There was a film, probably the first film I ever saw, Cliff Richard, 1960 Actually it wasn’t the first film I saw, the first film was Snow White. But one of the first films I saw was Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. It was 1961 and I was nine. Or it could have been 63 when I was 11. And he lived on a Double Decker bus. So I guess it was a mixture of that, of Cliff and Brandt and Bruce Davidson. But also the other missing connection there is this guy called Sir John Benjamin Stone who was a Tory MP in the Edwardian era who travelled England and tried to make a record of the English. He travelled about and he did lots of portraits, cos he was an MP he had an ‘in’ to photographing famous people. He was photographing major events. But his real enthusiasm was for dying, fading, disappearing, rustic festivals and so on, and there’s this picture Harvest Home Kern Baby of 1901. You could look at this picture for a million years and you’d never fathom what it is about. One of the things I really, really love about photography is that it describes things perfectly and it explains nothing. And that’s what I love about photography. There’s always some mystery. And so for me those two things are the things I learnt from Stone.”

Then and Now... Meadows re-photographed his Photobus subjects once he found them 25 years later...

H: Do you think you’d still be able to do something like the Photobus today?

D: “No. The Criminal Justice Act in, was it 1980? The one that the Tories brought in to beat the Crusties, makes it almost impossible. I mean the gypsies and travelers are given a very hard time. I mean it was hard enough living in a bus, parking up and so on in 1973 and 74. You wouldn’t be able to do that now.  It’s not possible in the modern world.”

H: Did it take you a long time to embrace digital photography?

D: “I was a very early adopter of digital storytelling. I ran a digital storytelling class here for undergraduates in the mid to late 90s and people thought it was pretty wacky. And when I first started teaching you lot, you know, mainstream journalists, about the coming of the digital age, we were very unpopular. I mean you were all very welcoming last week, but 10 years ago I used to get, you know, people used to complain, ‘Why are we having to learn all this rubbish?’ I was a very early adopter of all of that stuff. But, for me, the digital age is ultimately not about technology. Photography has always changed; every five minutes there are new innovations and there have been throughout the history of photography. So photographers are used to embracing innovation, which I guess it why I was kind of into it a bit early. But it actually wasn’t the photographic side of things that excited me, so much as the fact that we had some new tools that looked like opening out media to become a much more democratic activity. So that was, for me, the thing that I really liked about it, that you could tell your own stories and publish them and didn’t have to go through the filter of patronizing big media professionals who basically were setting themselves up as gatekeepers. And I would still argue that that is the case. We have too many commissioning editors and people in the way between good ideas and good television.”

Ian Cutis photographed by Meadows in Manchester, January 1980.

H: What’s been your favourite photography project of your own over the years?

D: “I did love doing digital storytelling at the BBC. Every time you ran a workshop, people would bring their photographs in, you had such a window onto other peoples lives, and for me that was kind of humbling, but also very exciting and intriguing. And I began to enjoy looking at other peoples’ pictures more than I enjoyed making new pictures myself. There are pictures that are a fantastic trigger to memory; you can learn to listen to people. A photograph is a great place to begin listening to people. If that doesn’t sound bizarre!

H: Has there been anyone in particular who has been your favourite to photograph?

D: “No, but I can think of some people I really hated photographing!  The problem with doing anything out on a limb is that you have to finance it. And whilst in the early days I did manage to get a bit of funding from the Arts Council when I did my bus project, most the projects I’ve done, I’ve just gone and done them, and then tried to sell them to get some money.  Throughout the 70s I was thinking up stories like the mental hospital story, and going and doing them and then selling them to magazines. But when I started having children and I needed more stable income I had a long period working in the film industry as a stills man, taking pictures in the film industry. And there were some actors who were just bizarre. They’d stand and pose in front of the video cameras all day, then when I’d come on, I’d be sent off the set. They’d do silly things, like when they were rehearsing, which is when you could get your pictures if you were intelligent and you’d work with the actor rather than against them. You could say to them, ‘Well I think we could probably get the stills during the rehearsal, but make certain you’re wearing the right costumes.’ And then John Thaw- Inspector Morse- I did some stills for him, he would come out carrying a newspaper and rehearse with a newspaper in his pocket, or he’d put a hat on that wasn’t in character, just because he couldn’t stand the stills man. And Alec Guinness always had me sent off the set when I worked on the film of Little Dorrit in the 80s. I’d always rather liked Alec Guinness’ acting but I have to say he was a very difficult person to work with.”

Joy Division photographed by Meadows in Manchester, January 1980.

H: Would you mind telling me about your experiences in the Factory Records days?

D: “Factory Records! Well, for a period in the 70s I worked as a researcher in television and even then, it’s quite interesting now when I look back at the experiments with photographs. There’s a little film I made where I work as a kind of TV reporter reporting on my own photographs as events, which is very like a digital story. Anyway, so I went to work as a researcher at Grenada TV and, you know, I learned a lot about how television was made, which was later extremely useful when I came to doing digital storytelling. Grenada had big open plan offices and for a whole, well one long summer I shared a desk with Tony Wilson. Well I mean the desk had about 13 or 15 people all around it and Tony Wilson was one of the people around that desk. He was then a presenter on Granada Reports, and I was working on an arts program called Celebration. And it’s difficult for you lot to imagine it, but television was just as difficult to get into in those days, but it was incredibly over-manned. You could sit around all week doing very little, then suddenly the bit you had to do you’d have to do it very well. There were far too many people, and the unions were very, very strong, and as we well know there’s a whole trade union history of what happened with that. And so there were times when Wilson and I were sitting around twiddling our thumbs and he knew about my ventures on the bus and stuff and knew I was a photographer. In fact I carried a camera around with me all the time, or camera bag all the time with several cameras in it. And he just used to say ‘Come on Daniel, I’ve got a new band or a new act’ or this or that, you know, and the arts program I was working on made a little film about the Factory shortly after it opened, Factory Nights Down In Hulme. So I went and photographed and made a documentary about John Cooper Clarke. I loved John Cooper Clarke. I still love him. And then Joy Division were getting going and he needed some pictures for Joy Division and stuff… “

H: You did some of their album artwork as well didn’t you?

D: “It’s difficult for your generation to imagine how kind of crap it all was. You know, you live in an age of digital artwork and stuff, with things produced to a very high standard, but at that time Wilson had really good ambitions for the style of Factory Records, that they should be well designed. And he used this young guy called Peter Saville to do all the design. But Wilson was also hugely informed by the Situationists, the French avant-garde movement. And one of his bands was called Durutti Column, whose name came from a Situationist group. The original Situationists, they were kind of radical freedom fighters in the Spanish civil war who basically went around killing the bourgeoisie. I mean they weren’t very pleasant! Anyway, there was a sweet little guitar player called Vini Reilly who was in Durutti Column, and he wasn’t very well, he had some depressive illness and he was physically very unwell. But he played this sweet, kind of angelic guitar, and Wilson thought it would be amusing to have a sandpaper record sleeve.  I went down to Wilbraham Road, Wilson’s partner in Factory had a flat down there, and I went to photograph Vini Reilly, for I think it was Sounds magazine, when the return of the Durutti Column album came out. I photographed him mainly downstairs, in the garden and in the porch by the house, and then upstairs were several of the members of Joy Division sitting around gluing together these sandpaper albums.  The Situationists produced not only a book but also a magazine that had sandpaper covers. And the idea was that it would destroy everything around it, so they made an album with sandpaper covers. I still have mine somewhere. But I actually glued one or two together that afternoon. But you know we were just young people sitting around, making things. And it became quite a legendary album, a) because it was a good album, and b) it talked about what Wilson was trying to do with Factory. I photographed Joy Division in the studio, and photographed them at a gig in Oldham, so yeah it was an interesting time.”

Joy Division producer Martin Hannett, photographed by Meadows in Manchester, January 1980.

H: Have you found that observing people and places through photography has taught you anything about people and places that ordinary people wouldn’t necessarily see?

D: “Well, as Dylan used to say ‘It depends what you mean by all those terms, man.’  Ordinary!” (Laughs a lot)

H: Ha, Sorry I know ordinary is a bad choice of word…

D: (More laughter) “No it’s not a bad choice of word. It’s a very good choice of word, I’ve been guilty myself of using the word ‘ordinary’. So it depends what you mean by all those terms, man. But obviously I’ve learnt a lot. I think the thing I’ve learnt most is how bad we are at listening to people. Journalists from big media tend to make their mind up what the story’s about before they go and shoot it and that’s a sadness to me because what it doesn’t allow for is serendipity, and surprise and wonder. The more I spend time with ordinary people, man, the more I realise how wonderful we are, and watching television today makes me think how crap we are. And in that gap is the place where I do my work. You know, I have such an intolerance for reality-based television, I mean it’s shite with a capital S. And it’s as though we can’t do anything now on TV without it having a reality element. And it’s shite cos it’s cruel, its fundamentally based on a cruelty that people are set against each other. It’s like the entertainment of the playground, we’re all gathering around to watch an execution that can be picked over by a media that’s gradually losing credibility. You know fewer people are watching television programmes. Like if a television programme gets five million viewers, the makers go ‘Hey we had five million viewers’. But I say wait a minute, we live in a country of 60 million people, that means 55 million people had the intelligence not to watch your crap programme… “

To find out more about Daniel Meadows, have a look at his website www.photobus.co.uk or his Cardiff University profile…

All photographs have been used courtesy of Daniel Meadows…

I don’t know why but I just cannot get enthused about digital story-telling as much as our most recent guest lecturer, Daniel Meadows. If my last Lecture just left me confused, then this one left me nonplussed. Mr Meadows was an interesting lecturer, and his stories about his time spent travelling round the country in a double-decker bus taking photos of people were engaging, but I didnt feel like any of it was any use to me.

The basic premise of Digital Story-Telling is that you can give people a platform to tell their own story, through the use of narrative, videos and pictures. The idea was picked up by the BBC and Meadows oversaw Capture Wales, that gave Welsh people a chance to make a short video and have it appear on the BBC’s website. Meadows showed us a couple of them in the lecture, but I just felt that they were pretty amateurish. I know thats the point but I’m trying to learn how to be a professional journalist, someone who doesn’t make films that look like they’ve been made by someone who’s barely computer literate. I think that such a platform for people to express themselves and their stories is fantastic and a worthy project, but its relevance for me? I’m not sure.

Next up is Rory Cellan-Jones of off the Beeb, I’ll keep you posted.

A big thanks to Cody for letting me share his work on my blog. He did a great job!

Reflecting on the digital storytelling experiences I have recently had in several classrooms, here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

• For the first project keep it simple. Possible strategies include:
  • Select short, basic content, ie a poem/paragraph that the student has written.
  • Use Photostory.
  • Use only copyright-free, free images found online, not any student originals.
  • Don’t require narration.
  • Have students use the music provided in PhotoStory, or don’t require music.
  • If using Windows Movie Maker, use the AutoMovie feature to automate the process.
• Experienced digital storytellers strategies:
  • The student’s content/story can be a longer, more than just a poem, etc.
  • The students can bring in their own images.
  • Use Windows Movie Maker and include video.
  • Include narration.
  • Include copyright-free, free, music downloaded from the Internet.
  • Edit the transitions.
  • Edit the Photostory animation.
  • Create original music using the free site Aviary: Myna.
• Each day tell the students what they are expected to accomplish, referring to a project checklist or a scoring guide.
• During the lesson, display a list of tasks that they are to be completing.
• Using a project checklist or a scoring guide, assess students’ progress every day or two. This could be done during class by checking with students as they work, or by accessing the students’ project folders on the server after class. Students could also reflect on their progress at the end of hour, making notes on the project checklist.
• Students have limited storage space on the server. If they receive messages indicating they are out of space, they may need to delete old files, or move the project folder to a flash drive. (Be sure to copy the project folder, not just the files in it.) It is a good idea to have a couple flash drives available.
• Insist that student stick to using only copyright-free media.
• Bookmark Fusion: Finding Copyright Free Media on all the stations for student use.
• Insist the students create a project folder and store all source files and the project file there.
• If Windows Movie Maker can’t find the source files for the product, right click on a missing file (big red X), and choose Browse for Missing File. Then navigate to the . This typically occurs when sources files aren’t stored in a project folder, or source files are moved after being imported into the project.
• When using Windows Movie Maker, if students do not want to use the audio included with the video and want to record new narration and also include music, they will need to use Audacity. Movie Maker provides only one audio track. So the narration and music will have to combined into one track in Audacity.
• Xtenda machines won’t work with such a project. Windows Movie Maker runs on only one station at a time, and there are not ample USB ports available to plug in head sets.
• Don’t allow students to check out headsets until after the projects due date. Otherwise you have fewer headsets available during class time.

Sample Lesson Outline

Day 1 Project Folder, Images, and Source Document

1. Share an example photostory project.
2. Demonstrate how to create a project folder.
3. Demonstrate how to locate and download copyleft/creative commons licenses images.
4. Discuss aligning images to narration and how many images are needed (illustrate big concepts).
5. Demonstrate how to collect source documentation while downloading media.
6. Students create a project folder, find images, and document sources in a Word document, saving everything to their project folder.

Day 2 Images and Source Document

1. Student continue to find images and document sources.

Day 3 Title Image, Images and Source Document (depending on the length of the written material, more days may be needed to collect images).

1. Demonstrate how to create a title slide in PowerPoint. Save as jpeg instead of a PowerPoint file.
2. Students create title slide in PowerPoint and save and jpg file in project folder.
3. Students finish finding images and documenting sources.

Day 4 Sequence and Edit Images

1. Demonstrate how to import and sequence images into Photostory and some image basic editing features (crop, effects, color adjustments).
2. Students import images, sequence, edit, and add text.

Day 5 Sequence and Edit Images, Rehearse

1. Students finish image editing.
2. Students match narration to individual slides, rehearsing reading.

Day 6 Narration

1. Demonstrate the headset controller for volume and mute. Also show how mic flips down on left to be placed between mouth and nose.
2. Demonstrate how to record narration with headsets.
3. Students will record narration.

Day 7 Music (Depending on the length of the written material, more days may be needed to record narration.)

Supplies: headsets

1. Play 3 videos, each with different music to demonstrate how music overrides images.
2. Demonstrate how to use provided music or import a music file, and set volume for music.
3. Students finish narration and add music.
4. Students create Source slide in Powerpoint, copying text from the Source document, and saving it as jpeg file in project folder. Import the Source image into the project.

Day 8 Finish and Produce

1. Demonstrate how to finish/produce the project.
2. Students will finish and produce project.

Day 9 Share Stories

• This can be done in the classroom with a projector. You will need Windows Media Player 10 installed on the station.
• If you want to allow students to comment digitally on each others’ projects, embed the videos in a blog.

• Embed only 1 video per post.
• Take the class to a lab if you don’t have adequate station access in your classroom. Watch the videos as a class. You can view the videos from the student folders on the server, even though they are available online, to avoid using bandwidth and ensuring that the video plays quickly and smoothly. You should not have students watching videos individually in most cases, because this will use significant bandwidth. Also, all students would then need earbuds/headsets to hear the audio.
• After each video, have students leave a comment on the blog post. A lesson on commenting will result in better feedback.
• It will be a simpler process if students are not required to have accounts in order to leave comments, but yet comments should be moderated before they appear on the blog.
• I would recommend creating a free account at Vimeo to upload the videos. Register for a WordPress.com blog to post the videos and allow moderated comments.

See the Fusion: Digital Storytelling webpage for more resources.

Daniel Meadows talked to CJS about Digital Storyelling.  He lectures at Cardiff University but used to be involved in Capture Cardiff – an  impressive multimedia project.

It got me thinking about my teenage years and the reason why I started getting interested in journalism. It was because of something called The Rural Media Company.

The Rural Media company, based in Hereford was way ahead of the rest when I was growing up. 

Nowadays, large-scale community films are their speciality. You can act, direct, film, script write, animate and design. Industry trained professionals will guide you and there isn’t an age limit. The results are outstanding.  See for yourself.

I got involved with  their Youth Times when I was seventeen. We were an E-magazine called InSite and we wrote articles, made films and animated . No ideas were turned away. This was a magazine for young people written by young people. 

 We were led by a woman in her twenties called Kate. I remember coming to her and asking if I could do a feature on Ketamine use in Hereford. She smiled, thrust some recording equipment in my hand and told me to do it.

A month later The Ketamine Kraze Uncovered was finished. Once online it started getting a lot of hits. Then, the BBC News rang.

“We’re doing a programme on Ketamine use in rural areas. Can we run the story?” they said.

I was seventeen. Baffled. The BBC taking notice of me???!!!

Peter Wilson, BBC Home Affairs Correspondent came to The Youth Times to interview me.  I was surprised there was no camera person with him. He explained they did it all nowadays.

A week later my family and friends watched the Ketamine feature go out on the 6.30 Midlands Today News. The feature contained heavy bass music, interviews with the police, interesting statistics….AND Me.

Shortly afterward an internet forum, hosted by a nightclub in Hereford, started a post about the programme. Over one thousand people visited it. The comments were mainly negative and aimed at me…”did you see that minging wench’”, “she’s only seventeen”,  ”doing it to further her career’”, “i’ll kick her teeth in’”.

It did hurt. I did cry. But then I got over it. I’d caused a reaction. People were talking. This had to be a good thing.

The mainstream media started talking more about Ketamine. Then the government did. At the time I wrote the article, Ketamine wasn’t classified. But now it is and my article was part of that.

So, it was this experience that whet my appetite for broadcast journalism.  I understood it was a job that can make you unpopular.  And that was a toughy for me. I like to be liked. But then I thought, if you can write something that gets people debating, that’s important.  So, I carried on.

Would this have happened if The Rural Media wasn’t there? I don’t believe it would have.

This summer, I think it’s quite meaningful because I learnt a new way to present stories from Paul in his Digital Storytelling (DST) Workshop.  We can simply use Movie Makers or Photo Story 3 and the stories can be presented interestingly with nice background music and special effects. 

The first story I made is called You are Special written by Max Lucado.  This story is especially good for those who come from shattered families with poor self-image.  If you or your students are longing for important others to assure your self-worth and success, don’t hesitate to read this book!  I hope you will like it!

Picture source: (Lucado, 1997, p.20)

Click here for my 1st DST http://ihome.cuhk.edu.hk/~s0803018/urspecial.wmv

pictures & scripts taken from:  Lucado, M.  (1997).  You are special.  Illinois: Crossway Books.  

*******************************************************************

Reflection on my 1st DST

Well, when I listened to my first digtal story again, I’ve found that there is still a lot of room for improvement.  At least two areas I should pay particular attention to:

I should…

1.  practise reading the scripts until I am fluent enough for recording and

2.  check the correct pronunciation of words especially proper nouns that I am not sure of (sorry for the mispronunciation of the name Eli, it should be pronounced as /elai/).

Here is a another in the series of Common Craft’s short youtube videos that explain key technologies. Now that BCC students have Google email “gmail,” it might be time to get familiar with the full range of google tools:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA

Reflection:

I think DST can play a vital role in helping ESL learners learn English as there are numerous potential benefits as listed here:

DST helps

1. enhance Ss’ creativity
2. faciliate autonomous learning as Ss have to learn how to solve different problems like:

• how to create an interesting storyboard with the proper use/match of pictures and scripts;
• how to add background music so as to build the mood in the story for the audience;
• how to add different effects to the pictures so as to make the story more attractive to watch;
• how to upload the file to a platform if they want to share their work with others and so on

             before producing their own masterpiece.

      3.   build confidence in speaking, narration skills in particular, as they can have more practice outside classroom to improve their oral fluency,  accuracy, intonation, etc.

      4.   facilitate collaborative learning and communication skills if Ss are asked to produce stories in groups.

      5.   enable constructive learning if they are asked to contribute stories under a particular theme. 

      6.   create the atmosphere of a learning community inside the classroom as Ss can learn a lot from the individual/collaborative work of one another.

In short, DST is worth-promoting in ELT.

My artifact today:  Lego Boy Story Board

In this post Sula Batsu co-ordinator Kemly Camacho talks about  the work her organisation is doing with communities in Costa Rica. Kemly gives a very good account of the value of reflection and reflexivity, as well as setting out her ideas about the importance of knowledge, self-knowledge, in communities.

About Sulá Batsú

Sulá Batsú is a co-operative of new-generation professionals, which has now been going for five years.  We are a group of 20 and are also interested in exploring the co-operative model though sustained reflection. Our organisation is partly a response to the unemployment problem in Costa Rica where graduates are unable to find jobs locally, or are sucked out to work in northern countries and institutions or multi-nationals. The co-operative offers employment opportunities for young professionals from two principal domains, social science and ICT.

When co-operative members reflect on the model they stop working and talk about the group interactions and what these mean for the work, since we all own the enterprise. We use a mentor who sits with us to collect our reflections twice a year during the two to three days that we sit together. We also take account of power relationships between us. There is a 12 month trial period before people can apply to be new members of the co-operative, which involves asking the existing assembly of members to be accepted. The collective decides everything. Currently we have more women members than men, since men seem to prefer to have more things under their own control and to manage contract workers rather than work with other co-operative workers. We also have a strong social dynamic in the co-op and spend time eating and partying together.

In the interim we have a strong capacity development programme for associates which can involve teaching languages, research training or supporting them to do MAs or PhDs. We have yet to decide as a co-operative whether putting people on academic courses means we should then oblige them to stay with us for a number of years.

Sulá Batsú is a research organisation that works as a collection of projects. We use a project management model that will draw on 2-3 people at a time according to what the project needs: no one ever works by themselves, and no team will ever be the same from project to project. We are action research oriented with a focus on knowledge sharing and connecting multiple knowledges. It is our intention to connect multiple knowledges by creating spaces for this to happen. Our goal is always to produce something: a policy, an action, a programme of work. Our aim is to enhance the collective, to amplify the social nature of communities and to develop new methods for achieving this. Our intention is to develop training methods and trainers who can work with these approaches and to be conscious of the centrality of power to these discussions.

We are not naïve that sharing knowledge is always a good thing for communities. For example Big Pharma has a habit of eliciting knowledge from indigenous communities and then commercialising it. We have to keep coming back to the question as to whose knowledge we are dealing with and how to respect it and not get caught in the middle of a conflict. We are interested in the question as to how to do business with open knowledge. On the one hand we publish everything we produce, put it online and believe in the creative commons: on the other hand we have to be a sustainable organisation. We have researched this topic and have explored our own model but we are still talking these issues through.

Nor do we think that local content is particularly helpful because the idea of content says nothing about the processes which have produced it: these are just as important. We are interested in the process of local knowledge production because we are concerned that local communities should come to understand themselves better and perhaps increase their self-esteem through hearing their own voices. The idea of local content is one aspect of this but is the product. In helping communities to develop more self-knowledge we are aware that ICT is only one medium for doing so. We are concerned also to help communities strengthen their own media.

Sulá Batsú and IKME

To do this we work with local infomediaries so that they can assist with the transformation of their own communities. With IKME we have three projects: in the first project we have been working with a group of children aged 7-11 in an urban area for the last nine months or so. In the second project we are working with housewives in a peri-urban area which has a large Nicaraguan immigrant population, and in the third project we are working with young people in a mixture of rural, peri-urban and urban areas which focuses on what life is like for young people in these areas.

One aspect of this project is to encourage research about how these communities became: who is there and how did they get there? What are the most important events and places as far as they concerned in their community’s history? The intention of the projects is to develop the capacity of infomediaries both to research and retell these community histories. Because they are discovering information that is relevant to them and retelling it in their own way it has more meaning for them. In order to identify these infomediaries,  Sulabatsu has been working through local organisations which have an established presence and are recognised and respected by the local communities.

The training of infomediaries involves developing their ability to use Web 2 and oral and visual languages. They experiment with how to create stories using research methods which depend upon interviews and group interpretation. We accompany them so that they can do this. There are three stages: the ‘capturing’ of knowledge, the valuing of it, then the ‘return’ of this knowledge to the local communities who produced it. The infomediaries choose the topic of research: for the young people it was the history of the river which runs through the community. The housewives haven’t yet chosen their topic. To ‘capture’ knowledge there is a lot of work with digital cameras and other digital capture devices. To value it infomediaries organise community meetings to ask people what they value about what has been collected through discussion and argument. Each community has a blog and a research diary which tries to reflect the language and format which is appropriate to the community. The infomediaries and communities decide what is most relevant to them.

The children have chosen games as a topic. With them we have created three different games using photos which tell the history of the community. They have also been working on a performance as a way of ‘returning’ the knowledge to the community. Elsewhere we are using radio and big format photography. The young people want to develop a video but we are still negotiating how this might be ‘returned’ to the community. It is usually the ‘return’ to the community which is the weakest aspect of what we are doing.

The credibility of the local organisations ensures our credibility when we are working with local communities. In the project with children we are working with 3 schools and an environmental organisation. In the second project we are working with a development CBO and in the third project we are working with an organisation concerned with issues of liberty. The community blogs are linked to the websites of the local CBOs/NGOs.

One step of the project informs the next step, so in that sense we don’t know where the projects are heading, although we have a much better sense of what we are doing than we did when we first started. We need to spend time writing up what we are doing since we finish next August. We are developing emerging local knowledge-scapes. There are two degrees of reflexivity: we work with the communities to establish what has changed as a result of the work we are doing together, then as a cooperative we reflect on the work we are doing and the way we are doing it as a way of changing our own practice.

How Sulá Batsú became involved with IKME

As far as the IKME project goes, I came into this from meeting Mike Powell at a conference in Europe. He remembered me when he put the programme together and asked if I would be interested in joining. It is important for each of us in the programme to become more aware of what the others are doing – perhaps when we next meet up we could do a museum exercise with each of us exhibiting what we have been involved in. Would it be useful to develop a glossary of terms as a programme to try to explain what we mean by what we say?

• Canadian Education Association Extensive Research on Transforming schools through social, academic and intellectual engagement.

• Digital Libraries – Goodbye to Books? | Discovery2.0 Post discussing the future of books in libraries.

• Welcome to MySafeSurf! Kevin Honeycutt’s Cybersafety and Cyberbullying Programs for GR K-6 and 7-12. 

• Differentiated Instruction | Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age This post offers a long list of links to ideas for or about differentiated learning 

• http://ulearn.netsafe.org.nz/blogging-guidelines/files/Blogging-and-Web2.0-Considerations-for-Schools.pdf 

• Filtering Discussion : Filtering in Schools A NZ site (netsafe) where they are trying to develop guidelines for schools and government on filtering internet content (and the tension between being safe and having opportunities to learn)

• Listen and Write – Dictation A site that can be used to improve listening skills and hear about the news. Listen-and-write.com is free listening practice.
  Simply select a recording from provided audio library and click play. The app will then start to dictate the text so that you can type it in. There is a tool which examines and grades the quality of your transcription so you can keep track of improvements. Offers he service in a number of languages.

• Geocube – The world of Geography at your fingertips Really cool application for Web 2 using Geo teachers. Similar to youcube – search engine with visualization and click and watch/listen to each square. 

• Creating Comic strips from your photos 

• Comic Strip Generator (Over 750 Toon Choices), A Custom Cartoon Maker One Comic Book Cel At A Time – Cartoon Generator, Send As Free Ecards & Mask Email (Hide Text) 

• World Wide Words A facinating site on ‘Words’ (British. It offers more than 2100 pages on the origins, history, evolution and idiosyncrasies of the English language worldwide.

• Mr. Picassohead Mr Picassohead is a fun website. It allows users to create their own ‘Picasso’ by selecting different types of faces and facial features, colours and so on and dragging them onto a canvas. It is a great way to begin a unit of work on Picasso, Cubism or abstract art with students.

• Featured Videos | dotSUB dotSub is another site beyond YouTube that makes available a wealth of video resources. This one is unusual in that it offers the facility for those who upload their videos to create subtitles in any language.
  Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.