Torbay RTC: Introduction to Theatre Control Software

Live blog from #torbayrtc

Introduction to Theatre Control Software from Mark Hartley - JAM Theatre Company. They are a professional theatre company who aim to bring people into the theatre. Their workshops look at theatre, music, animation, … creative arts generally.

They showed some video clips to demonstrate the range of techniques and skills, including stop motion animation, musicals, pop videos, … The iLife software meant tey didn't ha to worry about the technology.

Looking at Arkaos (not supported any more?), Catalyst (a bit too high end?), Keynote (great way of doing live animation and text effects during a production), BoinxTV (looks amazing but add supported). For sound, they are investigating QLab - a free sound control program. Design the sound effects, timings, order, fade cues, etc. and then trigger through the software. The software allows you to control what speaker sound comes out of. The latest version of the software allows the triggering of video cues as well as switch between live camera feed and other outputs.

DMX is the new way of controlling lighting and fairly cheap USB to DMX devices will allow you to control lighting from Macintosh. See for example miniStage Console (another free package).

Using Macintosh technology to control live performance not just for recording events! See their website http://www.abiteoftheapple.co.uk/

Torbay RTC: Cambridgeshire RTC

Live blog from #torbayrtc

David Fuller and Paul [Didn't Catch it] are talking about what they are doing formally and informally in their school - Thomas Deacon Academy.

For example, they run an animation club (informal) where the pupils created "stages" using cardboard boxes for stop motion animation. Also run Digital Cre8tor and showed great photo slideshow with You Got A Friend In Me as the background music.

Also showed some Illustrator work that used live trace to produce impressive results. Also, used Illustrator in Literacy Day activities to illustrate a poem. Young children (year 9?) also producing Julian Opie style portraits (see this photoshop How To...) which they said was a great way to introduce layers.

They have a fantastic looking school newsletter (although "newsletter" does not do it justice) which is pupils produced and a radio station which the children not only host but also do the technical stuff.

Clearly a school that is using technology in very creative ways.

CAL 2009: Rethinking educational digital tools as means for fostering student creativity

Live(ish) blog from #cal09

M. Ott, F. Pozzi (Presenter), Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche - CNR, Italy

Is it possible to foster creativity through an educational activity? One model of learning puts creativity at the top of a hierarchy and so there was a desire to develop and test a model for evaluating creativity.

How do we define creativity? No agreement and multiple views of what it means. Some aspects this research group thought were important care illustrated by Archimedes and Alan Turing because they were creative in different ways. Archimedes has the flash of inspiration where as Turing reasons, links and assembles. Revolutionary creativity verses evolutionary creativity. A creativity of product rather than creativity of process. There is also a distinction between individual and social creativity. However, these terms should not be seen as dichotomies but rather aspects that interact with each other.

The model they came up with concentrates mostly on the creativity process and divides into three dimensions:

• Affective
  - Involvement /immersion
  - Satisfaction
• Meta-cognitive
  - Self-evaluation
  - Process monitoring
  - Awareness of Outcome
• Cognitive
  - Generation
  - Plan
  - Production

The model was tested in two contexts:

• School education - Children in a school involved in game based learning over three years to promote logical skills but the desire was to see if the logic games also promoted creativity. Children worked as individuals.
• Lifelong learning - An online course where people worked collaboratively to perform role playing activities.

They found that the model could be used to investigate the creative process and can shed light on the creative process both at individual and group level but it needs further refinement, for example the indicators are not yet stable enough.

CAL 2009: Technology and creativity at the Brighton creativity centre

I was hoping to live blog much of the CAL 2009 conference but unfortunately not all of the rooms are networked. :-( Here however is a cut and paste of what I typed during this session. It will need tidied up as there will undoubtedly be spelling misteakes ad typos. :-)

R Morris, Steve Kilgallon (presenter), P. Martin, and A. Rogers; University of Brighton, UK

University of Brighton have a Creativity Centre with two learning spaces/rooms/ One is called called Leonardo and the room can be divided in different ways using the whole space or different sections as appropriate. Have floor to ceiling whiteboards, rear screen projection area and lots more. A second room, Gallileo, with audio links to other room also has a 3D projection system.

with Leonardo you can theme the room in any way you want. For example project jungle scenes, pipe in jungle sound effects and jungle smells. (Yes... smells!) Bean bags, chairs or walk about, the choice is yours.

The whileboards can easily be moved around which the researchers thinks takes away some of the fear of writing on the board. In fact because the room is a blank space that you can organise in any way you want, the is researchers think this leads to more creative uses. For example, one group lined all the whileboards up, blacked out the windows and created a camera obscura. Even just interacting with the students while they are standing up changes the dynamic and the learning.

Two types of users:

• Hands off
• Want it all

Also two types of use:

• Passive
• Active

Give the students time, very creative uses are possible.

Hurdles:
There are institutional hurdles. For example, "Moving walls - No!" say Health and Safety". Or IT Services taking a month to open a Firewall port. In many institutions, the culture is that if you use the handed down solution there is no problem. For example, courses on Word, Powerpoint etc. - no problem. However, if an individual wants to do something innovative or unusual, it can be a different story.

"The presence of a committed local champion continues to be the strongest influence on the rate at which Technology Enhanced Learning... [missed the end]." 2008 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning from Cambridge [? Missed the source and the end of the quote! Bah! I'll try to track it down later.]

More from the creative BEds

I have already posted a couple of the podcasts our BEd Computers, Creativity and Education class produced. I thought I would post some video this time.

We had already spent some time over the proceeding weeks looking at the whys and wherefores of digital creativity, so I cut the introduction to the bone and went, more or less straight away, into a demonstration of I Can Animate. (A stunningly useful piece of software!) But I also did a "here's one I prepared earlier" with videos from schools, previous years' students as well as some demonstration movies to give students a flavour of what the package can produce.

We then split them into groups of three or four and gave them just over an hour to create/assemble models and sets, to film a short section of animation and to import it into iMovie to add sound effects and music.

Here's the films that Amy Linzi and Donna (I think) produced:



So what do you think? Do you have any advice for the students? What are the best educational uses of animation you have seen?

Another podcast... and an explanation

There are some courses that I enjoy teaching, and the BEd 4 Computers, Creativity and Education class is one that I really enjoy. We talk about a whole bucket load of interesting stuff, for example: Telling Tales with Flickr.

Podcast Bear
Originally uploaded by blogefl

The classes tend to follow the same basic pattern. First we'll introduce the technology/tool and talk about it's value to education. In the podcasting class we talked about:

• telling stories
• giving children a voice
• using the technology pupils use
• giving children a (worldwide) audience
• encouraging co-operation
• supporting diverse learning styles
  
• allowing pupils to receive feedback from a variety of sources
• children staying on task and setting themselves high expectations

Then we let them hear some of the Radio Sandaig podcasts. {I think it's important to let theme hear pupil voices and pupil produced podcasts. In Higher Education, it seems people are pleased with themselves when they podcast an hour long lecture! I want students to see the pupils as creators, not just consumers of podcasts.} We also share my podcast related delicious links. {I think I need to categorise or prune that list. Too much stuff all mixed up together!}

This was followed by a brief demonstration of Garageband (about ten minutes) which left just over half an hour for them to produce their own podcast. They were divided into groups of two or three and assigned a topic at random from things we had already studied. {I used the Random Name Picker tool to assign topics - thanks to Ewan and TeachMeet for introducing me to this brilliant tool.}

I've already posted Cheryl and Gill's podcast in Podcast from BEd class. Here's another one, this time by Amy Linzi and Ailie. It is about delicious and the usefulness of online bookmarks:

Online Bookmarks

I especially like the sung version of the delicious URL at the end! What do you think? What advice should I give the students to help them improve their podcasts? What other podcasts should they listen to? Can you suggest ways they can use podcasts in their classes?

Podcast from BEd class

The BEd 4 Computers, Creativity and Education class created podcasts today. Here's one by Gill and Cheryl about Digital Video in the classroom.

Pretty good for only ten minutes tuition on GarageBand and 30 minutes to record.

Digital Video Podcast

ECER08 - Teaching uses and Innovations in a Virtual Educational Space

Live blog from a session at ECER 2008.

Presentation from Christian Derrien, Université de Rennes.

Christian talked about the new wave of digital spaces. Four broadband programmes have been operating since 2003.

Eduvisits: Online visits to sites of educational interest, for example castles, salt-marshes etc.

People of Brittany: A portrait gallery of people involved in social, cultural and economic life. Designed to challenge and inform. [Looks like video portraits from the screen dump - DM]

Oceanimages: A thematic video library. Includes documentary films, poems, etc.

thesite.tv: "right-free" online audiovisual programmes for use in schools.

A portal site links these four projects together. Teachers had input into the design of the portal. One of the functions the teachers had added were buttons that link teachers to collaborative projects. Teachers also wanted more training and the opportunity to add their own input.

Currently used in about 100 schools but about to be rolled out to every school in Brittany. Schools prefer creative programmes rather than content. The most popular is the Oceanimages. [Not clear to me what is meant by "content" verses "creative" as the Oceanimages looks like content to me. The next example makes more sense. - DM] However, the People in Brittany project inspired the teachers to create their own portraits - written, slideshows, ... [This seems to suggest that the People in Brittany site was envisioned as a kind of online encyclopaedia but creative teachers were taking the content as an example and then getting pupils to produce their own multimedia portraits. Of themselves, or other people in Brittany? - Not sure. Either way it would be good. :-) - DM]

[More detail on Oceanimage helps me understand - DM] Oceanmages is a toolbox of multimedia resources (images, sound, animation, video, ...) that schools used to create their own multimedia projects "audiovisual writing". For example, teachers set their classes projects and the pupils then use the resources on the Oceanimages site to create multimedia projects. The example given was creating a montage to illustrate a song.

One of the positive outcomes of the programme is the collaborations between teachers. The research highlighted the positive uses of the material - some expected and some (pleasantly) unexpected.

My comments: I like the term audiovisual writing. I'm not sure if this is a widely used term or a fortunate translation of a French term. However, it is a great term for what should be an important literacy skill for today's learners. It made me think of SCRAN and I must admit that I do not know how much research has gone into the classroom uses of SCRAN. There is obviously a lot of research going into the resources made available through the Ticeo portal and the research is feeding back into making it more useful for schools and teachers.