The Teacher Toolbox

Love, Death, Rhetoric & Half Life – A Blog Post in Two Parts.

1. Why do it?

- …because we can and because it is very, very EASY!
- Exposing students to ‘real’ 3d animation is cost prohibitive and rather complex. This is cheap and readily available.
- So much of schooling is ‘about’ stuff. Kids are required to write about, ‘the explorers’, about ‘the planets’ & about ‘what they did in the holidays’. Where do we encourage them to create new stuff? Where do we encourage them to produce stuff that has never been produced before?
- In my experience, ‘I can’t draw’ gets in the way of adults and children cartooning so this form of digital story telling eliminates the excuse.

2. To Foster Creativity

- How might you adapt it to make your own creative product?
- What might this sort of experimentation lead to if this type of thinking and experimentation is encouraged and celebrated?
- Do new with the new and encourage our students to do the same.
- Think and Question -  Compare the lines from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with the Half Life context. How are they alike and different?
- Hypothsize the events before and after this graphic.
- Substitute other famous quotes for the dialogue in this comic. What new meanings can be created? eg ‘It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. It is a far, far better rest…’

So how did I come up with this idea? Bits of SCAMPER.

Combine – Half Life 2 screen shots, with Comic Life with a quote from a Tom Stoppard play.

Eliminate – I had heaps of other alternatives that I eliminated as they didn’t have the impact this idea had.

- So where does the thought to combine famous quotes come from? In my mind I seem to run very quickly through a heaps of possibilities and then I eliminate the ones of lesser worth or impact as I go. It is sort of like brainstorming without the butchers’ paper

For the people who aren’t into gaming or don’t know how to do screenshots I’ve put together a collection of images you can use for your own creative digital storytelling.

Enjoy

Adrian

I do so love playing with this technology with Samuel (Mr 10)!

Spore has a video capture function built into it so we just grabbed a heap of video shots of one of the characters and put them together in Movie Maker with his current favourite joke. Too easy!!!

Another of the things I love about machinima is the irreverent humour. Feel free to make humourous suggestions for the dialogue of this comic

Plus, I think I mentioned it before, I love leaving these sorts of things on display in classes for a week and having the students think about what should be added to the language bubbles. Mulling it over for a while tends to produce great results.

In the coming weeks I’m flying off to Mackay to run a whole day Gifted & Talented workshop on machinima.

I’ve been working on ideas for this workshop for the last few months and am just about to launch an online image bank that will not be blocked by school filters.  (If you know what I mean hehehe).

I’ve already completed a collection of Dawn of War, Second Life and, thanks to JoKay, World of Warcraft images. I anticipate that these collections will go live in the next few days.

Call for Help - If you can help out with PG rated images from your favourite video game feel free to email them to me so anyone can have a go at this type of story telling.

After a long day I was just having a little play with my Oddfellows , my new Digital Camera &  Comic Life

I recently took my son to a ICT in Education Conference where he led a group of
teachers through three half hour workshops on video game making, stop motion
animation & movie making using a Flip video.

Whilst I had a few reservations about this the experience turned out to be a
wonderful learning opportunity. Real audience, sense of purpose, connection,
planning, rehearsal, networking, value of his talents and soooooo much more.



He received some great feedback from those that attended his session and here is an email
a delegate sent to his school and to me.

Good Morning

I attended a National Computer Conference ( ELH ) in Lorne over the weekend. I am from a
school in Perth Western Australia. There were 250 professional teachers and technicians
attending from around the country. The conference is a well known and very highly regarded
by professionals in the area on Education and IT. One of your students Samuel Bruce was
co-presenting with his father Adrian. The presentation went all day from 9.30 - 5 pm
and he was inspirational. Samuel demonstrated programs and assisted IT teachers in many
of the applications he has used and mastered. I was in awe as this young boy spoke with
authority and passion about his presentations. He and his father's presentation was one
of the best at the conference sessions and I would love it if you could commend Samuel
with a merit award or commendation in front of his peers.

It made me reflect on my own teaching and how I can accommodate children like Samuel
in my class sessions when they have far better skills than I have and can teach us
all so much.

Thank you for allowing him to attend. 

Mrs Jo P

Mr 10 (Samuel) will be co-presenting with me at Expanding Learning Horizons next week and today he has been working flat out on his parts of the workshop. Amongst other things he will be taking a group of teachers outside with their laptops, a flip video and a couple of puppets.

Last week one of his mates came over and they filmed this little gem. Do drop by Samuel’s blog and leave him a little ‘comment love’ – Hints, tips & tricks appreciated.

cheers

Adrian

Over the last few years I have found myself more and more in tune with the concept of  ’slow knowing’. I tend to take a long time to make up my mind about some things. I find I might experiment with an idea for a week and then think about it on and off for a few months and in some cases, even years.

Machinima (machine cinema) is one of those concepts. When @mizminh I were working together in Byron Bay five years ago we started our initial experiments with the genre. We started discussing and exploring the emerging artform with the kids. We also started looking into some of the tools that were around at the time but found our hardware sadly lacking the power to use the software effectively.

In the last month or so I’ve discovered Fraps99. It’s a piece of software that allows you to take screenshots and video captures from within video games. Fraps is free to download and use but if you want added features you can upgrade for a fee. So far I’m very happy with the free version.

So now when Mr 10 and I are playing our latest favourite RTS game we take captures while gaming. When we are finished the game we crop the images in Paint.Net and then drop them into Photostory 3 or Comic Life to see what creative storytelling options we can come up with.

Over lunch yesterday a second year uni student asked me why I’d want to do this ’stuff’ with students. Instantly a heap of half formed ideas came flooding forth…

1. Attitude development – It is worthwhile to tinker. It is worthwhile to experiment with using things in new and different ways. How do we celebrate creativity, innovation and alternate forms of thinking?

2. Forced Creativity – by supplying alternative stimulus different narratives will be created i.e. moving beyond ponies, rainbows and what I did on the weekend

3. Demonstrating how to rise above the defaults of software?

4. Educational outcomes are the floor not the ceiling. Do we really need to continue being apologist when it comes to exploring the possibilities of ICTs?

5. Teaching organisational strategies and problem solving – How can we get more captures to work with? Where can we store these captures so everyone can access them? Many real problems will need to be solved and this is worthwhile.

6. ICTs can be integrated but often the rigid insistence on integration is stifling on so many levels. Insistence on integration often eliminates the possibilities of celebrating advances in technologies.

7. The tools for making the stories are free (or cheap) and the students already have the games at home.

8. Transference of skills – cliche I know, but the software people will use in five years doesn’t exist yet. Activities such as this teach how to view software in new ways & celebrate innovation.

9. Get the students to narrate a video trailer with the voice of that guy that does the cinema previews. They know the guy and they love it. Use a very deep voice and pause in all the wrong places to make the trailer sound like you must see this film.

10. I like the notion of irreverent humour that is often added to machinima films eg narrate the above film from the point of view of forgetting to put out the bin or spacesuits that do not have adequate zippers

I was cleaning up some files today and came across this gem. Shame to leave it on my hard drive. Well done lads it still brings a chuckle!!!

I have become very fond of using puppets as an introduction to movie making. The students have to organise the creation of their puppets, they have to write the  script, learn the camera, explore the software, resolve conflict, discuss production values, entertain, etc, etc.

Here is a rather open ended task that you are welcome to have a go at.

‘In groups of three you must create a 2 minute video to showcase to the world how intelligent, articulate and creative you are. The video must not be contrary to school ethos and you are only able to use puppets. What will you do?’

NB This is a repost of an earlier article as I’ve been experiencing some difficulty streaming from Teacher Tube.