CC Image - Brendan Wilkinson - A-NC-ND

I’m going all gooey about AudioBoo at the moment. It’s sat around in the perpiphery of my vision for a while now but in the last month or so I’ve started to see it as a really useful addition to my network of tools, especially now I’m a JesusPhone user.

If you’re not familiar with AudioBoo have a look at their site and check out the video intro.

Here’s why I’m gushing:

It’s simple – Using the iPhone you can go from recording to publishing in a matter of clicks. The audio record function allows you to pause during recording and append. It won’t allow you to chop your audio around in an Audacity stylee but adding too much functionality would get in the way of the simplicity. I can live with that.

It’s social – There aren’t as many people using AudioBoo as Twitter, for example, but it still has the same mechanisms for following and you can also comment on Boos bringing your network in on the act.

It’s fun – Sound is overlooked, I think, but still plays a massive part in our lives. I love the idea of taking sound snapshots and sharing them. Listening forces you to take things more slowly and experience the world differently.

It’s mobile – I’m surprised by the quality of the audio you get from recording on an iPhone (none of that compressed MP3 gurgle you get with many online audio recorders). The fact that it’s mobile means that you can record your thoughts regardless of location and allows you to easily bring in other sounds and voices where hulking round large amounts of equipment or dragging someone near a laptop aren’t feasible. I find it really useful for reflecting on conferences or other events where I’m likely to be on the move or in a hotel room immediately after. The iPhoen’s great but trying to type an extended blog post on it would make me want to cry. It also helps you to capture serendipitous bits of discovery or random thought in awkward places bringing informal and formal learning together.

It’s personal – Hearing someone’s voice, especially when they’re speaking conversationally and not off a script is a great way of feeling your getting closer to someone. It gives you more clues about emotion and personality than you would get from written text.

It’s spatial – As a failed geographer I still love the idea of landscape and space and I’ve done work with schools before where students have captured sounds in a location and then mashed them together in Audacity to create soundscapes. AudioBoo geotags your recordings but it will also let you export your recordings as mp3 for use elsewhere (see handy tip)

It’s connected – Boos are public, sharable, embeddable and you can link to other apps like Twitter, Facebook to get your recordings out to your network quickly and easily. Adding a hashtag into an AudioBoo title when you’re linked to Twitter automatically hastags the Tweet which saves retweeting later.

Oh, yes. It’s free!

As a learning tool it’s something powerful to include in the arsenal for capturing formal and informal experiences and introducing a sense of play into things.n I’m going to be investigating more about the possible applications of digital storytelling in FE and HE soon and AudioBoo is likely to figure quite prominently.

You can listen to my Boos here. Also check out Doug Belshaw’s Thinking Digital conference chats here.

Right, I’m off to run through a sunny cornfield hand in hand with AudioBoo while recording the pretty birdsong.

Hallam Cascade by shanerounce (CC)

I can’t quite believe that we’re already through our first semester of the MSc at Sheffield Hallam. It’s been a challenging few months in which the learning has come thick and fast. It’s been tricky trying to get back into the mindset of a student, particularly difficult in the last month or so as the family is going through a bit of upheaval (more later – it’s all good).

The final piece of work was to do an evaluative case study on a work-based project or around 3,000 words, backed up by the literature. It was originally going to be about using Glogster as a way of improving year 9 students’ skills in examining character development in a Benjamin Zephaniah novel with a teacher from Handsworth Grange Community Sports College in Sheffield.

It looked like it was going to be quite a cool project but in the end OFSTED descended and we had to can it.

Luckily we were able to try something different fairly quickly with the same teacher. Instead we had a group of Year 11s come in to do an exercise using photo-story software to reflect on their responses to the poem Vultures by Chinua Achebe.

This sort of digital media work has been our bread and butter at the CLC for years now in lots of different contexts so it was nice to be able to examine it working in more details and get some data.

I don’t claim any great insights here but in the interests of sharing feel free to have a read and give me any constructive comments. I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license (first time I’ve actively done this).

Link to the document here.

Digital Visual Literacy and Photostories by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.electricchalk.com.

Image Credit - Tom Barrance

Film Education’s CP3 conference is a routinely excellent occasion and well worth your attention if you are involved in using digital media in education. I’ve blogged about it before.

The last event was in Liverpool (way back in July) and CP3 has now completely revamped its site and updated it with the resources from the event. Have a look…

This is extraordinarily good value! You can download podcasts and transcripts of the keynotes and the materials from the many workshops (the best bit of the conference). The quality is as high as ever.

Have a look at James Durran’s Keynote and Tom Barrance’s Image, Text and Sound workshop as good examples.

Keep your eye on the website for details of next year’s conference.

Did you attend the Liverpool conference? Review it for us…

York Minster

I was invited last week to support a creative session at the Sheffield Primary Headteachers’ Conference in York on digital imaging. It was run by Rob Walker from Playing for Success with me tagging along and throwing in my tuppence-worth.

I thought I’d share the results with you.

The aim was to demonstrate what could be achieved with a few simple guidelines on taking decent pics and different technologies. It would have been nice to give the Heads that took part a chance to try out the technology but in the end we only had 1.5 hours, enough for a pleasant, sunny walk round York.

We did a rudimentary Photostory of the best images the delegates took for the evening meal but I spent the following morning negotiating with BT Openzone to create the following (they’re just speedy sketches to get the delegates thinking so don’t expect high production values…

Animoto – an quick and easy way of stitching photos and video together with a bit of text to create something really engaging. See my previous post on Animoto for more.

Click here to see the video…

@Trip – we took along a wee GPS tracker mentioned previously so we could log the photos in Google Maps and upload to the @Trip server.
Click here to view (embedding isn’t really effective).

Photosynth – This was the first time I’d tried it and for a Microsoft product I was pleasantly suprised. But as Andy Bush, a colleague pointed out, what’s the educational benefit? Maybe not much by itself but as part of a larger project it makes for a high impact element. All you have to do is take as many pictures as you can of one location from plenty of different angles, upload them and some fancy algorithm stiches them all together. Frightfully clever! You can view it as a slide show or “walk around the semi-3D environment.

Needs Silverlight to run.

Soundscapes – we didn’t get a chance to do this due to time constraints but consider sending students out with sound recorders instead of cameras. When they get back to base, use Audacity, Garageband or Myna to create an abstract soundscape using loops and effects. The results may be a little “out there” but it’s a great way to shift your perspective on a location by thinking aurally, not visually.

Here’s a soundscape created by some Y9 students a while back in a location in Sheffield. I’ll send a Wispa bar to anyone who can correctly identify the location!

Myna from Aviary

Aviary has recently released a web based audio editor called Myna and it’s well wrth a look regardless of what area of the curriculum you’re from.

Aviary already has an established web presence with its fantastic suite of image and graphics tools (all named after birds – go see!) and this is a welcome diversion from them. It’s getting to the stage where they are seriously challenging the likes of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Illustrator for the education market.

Anyway; Myna…

Picture a halfway house between Audacity and Garageband, add in that it’s a web tool and so comes with easy options for sharing and embedding and you have Myna. Here’s the demo video…

The interface is intuitive if you have used loop-based audio editors before and is reasonably straightforward for neophytes as well. It certainly looks more engaging than Audacity which, athough a thoroughly excellent tool, isn’t the friendliest-looking thing.

The Garageband-like functions are interesting. You can create pieces of music quickly and easily without much musical know-how using intro’s, loops and endings. The production values on the original clips are high so the results are highly listenable.

You don’t have as much flexibility to mix instruments as Garageband. Essentially, they’ve chopped up ready-made pieces of music and you just reassemble the chunks in the order you want. For most uses that’s as much flexibility as you need.

I did have problems trying to record audio using a mic because I couldn’t get the server to respond when I tried it. It may be to do with being behind a proxy server at work. I used the feedback tool in Myna to flag it up but haven’t received a reply yet. I’ll update the post when I know more.

At the other end, saving and publishing work is a breeze. You save your work as you go then select Mixdown when you’re ready. It gives you an option to save the MP3 or copy the URL and embed code of the finished audio. A lot more painless than getting a class to export an MP3 using Audacity with it’s Lame encoder complications.

The possibilities are huge with this. It’s easy for a class to create podcasts in the classroom or at home, flex their creative muscles and then share what they’ve done. If you have class blog or use a VLE then htis could make homework very interesting indeed.

There’s no cost to set up an Aviary account but a pro subscription is available for $25 a year and there’s education pricing too which isn’t clarified on the website.

See Danny Nicholson’s earlier blog post for another review…

Adobe Premiere CS3

Clip Notes has been available with Abobe Premiere since CS3. I saw it demo’d when CS3 was launched 2 years ago but haven’t got around to trying it out till now. There are plenty of possibilities for using it in education.

In short, Premiere allows you to render a movie to Quicktime or Windows Media and embed it in a pdf. When you share the pdf it allows you to play the video and add annotations at specific points in the movie. Many users can add comments so you can build up a converstation about a particular video clip.

Have a look at this example I’ve put together using a video I produced for one of our schools last year.

Click to open Clip Notes

 You can download Adobe Reader here.

The comments sometimes zip past quickly but use the goto buttons and pause to catch them.

The main purpose of the tool is so that video producers can get a client’s approval on a cut of a video prior to final production but it would work equally well in an education setting. What about:

• Media – students can get detailed feedback from a teacher on their assembly, rough and final cuts before they hand the work in. Also good for digital video projects in ICT.
• PE – students can film a phase of play (in rugby for example) and then analyse patterns, outcomes and choices players could have made.
• History – download a clip from an archive site and then ask students to comment on aspects of the film.
• Science – film a reaction or process maybe using time-lapse or super slo-mo and get students to comment on what is happening.
• And so on…

It does require someone in school to have access to Premiere CS3 or 4; not cheap so it isn’t a universally accessible option (look for en educational supplieras there is a discount). Also, it’s not easy to use this online so it requires cumbersome saving and exporting on the school network.

Nevertheless, as Adobe Reader is free and already has a wide user-base it makes it a useful tool for education.

NOTE TO SELF: Include instructions on how to make it, fool!

• In Premiere, make sure the correct sequence is highlighted in the timeline
• Click on File – Export – Clip Notes
• Use the following screen to change the compression settings (QT or WMV, screen size, frame rate etc) click OK.
• Choose a location for the file
• Click Save

A further point is to make sure that you’re not running another pdf reader. Only Adobe Reader has the video codecs embedded in it (as far as I know). See my reply to Catherine’s comment below.

A recent Guardian article pointed to the decline in literacy skills of new recruits to the media industry. I thought it was interesting that Skillset talks about competence with  multiplatform media being important but that “traditional skills” like literacy and communication are part of that.

It struck me that studying media can be quite an attractive proposition for young people as its usually associated with technical skills like graphics, video, audio, web-design etc but all these things are basically empty containers for words.

Media studies is foremost an extension of creative writing. You can argue that choices about images, camera angles, film edits, sound design can be achieved without recourse to words buy they are all part of the narrative and so come under the creative writing banner.

The main question is “what is my message?”. Without any narrative substance then content is meaningless and will not survive (and so will not be paid for) and that has to come from words.

When I started this job 4 years ago I assumed that students were going to be quite media-savvy and be able critically read what they come across in the media, wrongly as it turned out. What the majority are good at is recycling cliches.

I reckon I’ve helped students produce around 70 short films for media and given the choice most of them choose to make a trailer for a horror movie. About 5 of those have been truly creative.

Considerng audience seems a minor point to most of them so they don’t ask “how can I tell this story in an interesting way?” or “how can I subvert this cliche to make it interesting” which is all about creativity.

The majority of the films our students make are technically competent and get good grades. I just wish that there was more of an emphasis placed on originality in the syllabus.

To finish with a quote from Gail Rebuck…

“To take advantage of the great opportunities to create and deliver compelling content to educate, engage and entertain readers, the industry needs a workforce capable of combining traditional skills with a new digital and technical capability underpinned by a renewed emphasis on creativity.”

Am I mispresenting this? Tell us your stories…

Image – adambowie on Flickr

BECTA’s done quite a helpful article on it here. It puts some useful numbers on the topic but I think the general advice is there are too many problems with moving data round the network. Basically, the size of the files needed to work in HD are MASSEEEEEV! and are likely to reduce your servers to blancmange if you try to do it on the network.

The simple solution is to use the biggest, most powerful PC you can get your hands on in school and work on your HD project off the hard drive. Not always easy if your systems manager has locked users out of making changes to the local machine but it’s worth negotiating with them to find a solution. Our systems guys have installed a product called Deep Freeze on our network which preserves a machines settings to prevent any tinkering (rebooting a machine sets everything back to a pre-ordained point) and it also give you a partition of the hard drive you can save to called Thawspace. It’s neat.

The other question you should ask yourself is why do we we need HD? Not many people can actually watch it at home and rendered HD videos still take up a fair bit of room. Also what’s the educational value of doing something in HD rather than standard definition? The process of making an HD project is pretty much the same for  normal DV, although you might engage students more in something they see as being “prestige” and cutting edge.

In short, is spending time and resources on adapting your systems to HD actually going to be worth the expense?

For us, that answer is still no for anything other than landmark projects.

Credit - Niv on Flickr

I can’t really justify putting this in an ed-tech blog but it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want. Apologies if you can’t get YouTube where you are but it’s worth a look if you are interested in what happens when social networking meets creativity.

Kutiman, Ophir Kutiel, an Israeli musician has scoured YouTube for music/video samples of all those amateur videos of people playing instruments or singing and mashed them up into a heavenly mix of…well go and listen.

My fave is track 05. Someday for it’s wierd mix of vintage synths and baby-sitting.

The educational lesson? There isn’t one really other than what is possible with Web 2.0 and imagination.

We only starting to use this technology at our place about 18 months ago even though the it has been around for a bit mainly due to issues about pedagogy and our own levels of confidence. It is, however a really useful and fun thing to use in teaching and learning. Seeing people students have filmed magically transported to far away times or places creates a real “ooh” moment and can enhance teaching about storytelling methods or appreciation of place or period.

This is a piece we put together with one of our partner schools to help them introduce Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Y10′s. The actor is the school’s head of drama and the images are all Flickr Creative Commons. The sound effects came from the Freesound Project and the music from the Audio Network Library (schools’ license).

Frankenstein Introduction from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.

Tips for getting a good “key”

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert and our first forays into it were pure excrement. The following is what I learnt from making mistakes and advice from other, wiser types.

Use green or blue as your background.
The reason these 2 colours are used is mainly because it is furthest away from natural skin tones (unless you are hungover!). This way, when you remove the green, say, from the clip you don’t make your face transparent. It is possible to key out any colour, though. Just make sure that the object you are filming isn’t the same colour as the back. I’ve been told also that green screen works best for people with dark hair and blue screen for blond but I’ve never had problems with either.

You don’t need to spend thousands on professional equipment.
The best results I have had for doing chromakey work were filmed against a wall we had recently painted a lurid green (see pic).

Green screen painted wall

So long as the surface you are filming against is smooth and uniformly coloured and lit you can get away with most things. If you are using fabric, make sure that it is kept in a way that minimizes creases. Hoover it occasionally and I never let students on it with their shoes on!

Find out how to set the white balance on the camera.
You may have noticed when using digital movie cameras that if you change from filming in natural light to indoors light the hue changes slightly. This is the automatic white balance kicking in. Briefly, white light comes in different “temperatures” depending on the lighht source. Ever noticed that old-style light bulbs seem to give a warner glow than their energy saving brethren? There you go. The camera guesses the type of light it’s filming in and tries to compensate to keep all the colours looking natural, only sometimes it doesn’t quite work. Setting the WB manually tells the camera what white actually looks like so it can adjust the colours properly. How to do it? Once you have set up the screen and the camera and sorted your lighting get someone to hold a clean piece of white paper on the spot they will stand when being filmed. Zoom the camera right in so all you see is the white page. Now set the manual WB. You may notice a distinct change in the colours when you zoom out.

It’s important to do this so that green or blue are truly that colour on the clip. Otherwise you may have problems with the keying later.

Lighting – You can get away with rudimentary lighting so long as you obey a few rules:

• The backdrop needs to be evenly lit. If one bit is brighter that another then it won’t key out evenly and you’ll be left with fuzzy bits on the screen in the wrong place (called “Artefacts” apparently)
• Get as much natural light as you can. I once set up a screen facing a huge glass wall in a gym and that seemed to get good results (despite lousy audio)
• If you can get a light to shine on the actors from behind. This helps to outline then well against the backdrop and makes the shot look more professional.That’s all we did for the embedded example.
• Make sure the actors stand at least 2 feet from the screen to avoid shadows on the backdrop. Shadows make keying really tricky as your screen in no longer evenly lit. Also, remove any reflecting jewellry, glasses, props. If they reflect the bacground colour they’ll go transparent.

Clothing.
Obviously, avoid wearing the same colour as the background unless you want to look like a floating head. I’ve also found that wearing black or white is a problem for some software as it goes a little transparent.

Movement
The easiest way to act against green screen is to not move at all. If you watch the clip above we use the positioning of the camera to create a bit of dynamism in the footage. Walking on and off the shot always look rubbish as it’s all done in profile and nobody’s face looks good in profile apart from Liv Tyler. When your students are storyboarding they need to think cinematically, not theatrically. In other words, think how it will look on the screen, not how it looks then and there in the room.

Film in a quite place with as little echo as you can manage.
Audio is one of the bits which a lot of people forget about but can make real a difference to the outcome. Imagine footage which looks like someone is walking in a forest but sounds like they’re in a toilet. You can always add reverb an’ that later.

Use decent software.
It’s worth spending a bit of cash on software if you are going to do it seriously. I’ve already stated a preference for Adobe Premiere Elements as you get the same level of control as you do for their pro editing software (just about). We’ve used Ulead’s Videostudio 10 before which gives you results really quickly but not reliably. iMovie and Moviemaker can manage it but require extra downloads (imovie and moviemaker) and the results aren’t that great.

To make the editing job easier try to crop the clip so that all your are left with is a small area round the actor.
This means you only have to worry about keying out the area immediately round the actor. Watch though that they don’t move out of the cropped area or they will look like they are disappearing into thin air.

Setting the key
Some editors have an eye dropper tool which let you click on the image of the clip to tell it what colour to remove. For best results, follow the tip above about cropping then click on an area near the actor. Make sure you play around with the “similarity” settings. Basically, the lower the similarity the narrower the variation of pixels that go transparent. Conversely, if you set it way high all pixels will become see through and noby wants that, do they?

And finally – don’t worry about it!
You’re not George Lucas so nobody will care if it’s all slightly squiffy and looks like dodgy 70′s Dr Who. The experience of the process is often enough for kids to get excited about. I spend quite a long time getting things just right but that’s because I’m anal, it doesn’t make me a better person to talk to in the pub.