Stop Motion Remix Examples

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Benjamin J Sheridan

My kindergarten students made a stop motion movie that they shared with the world (which you can read about here). They asked people to take the video that they had made and to create their own version, or remix, and share it back with them. We had a very good response with people sharing examples and resources for creating stop motion movies. If you are interested in making a stop motion movie definitely check out the comments to my previous post as people have shared a number of stellar resources.

We have gotten a couple versions that I wanted to share with you.

Here is a great version from Mr. Hodgson a sixth grade teacher in Southampton, Massachusetts called “Escape from the Dark Side: The Cupcake Thief Remix”.

Here is another awesome version made by Miss Pana’s kindergarten class at ISS International School in Singapore.

Definitely check out her blog for great ideas and examples of the stellar things she and her kindergarteners are doing in their classroom.

Here is a very hip and musically eclectic version by a student named Chris at Korea International School Jeju campus. Definitely watch to the end…

Here is a version made by Chad Sansing a humanities teacher in Central Virginia called “Are You my StarWars?”

Here is the version my kinder students came up with.

We have heard from a few more classes that they are working on creating a version of their own. I will share more as they come!

I also wanted to mention again the series by Kirby Ferguson called “Everything Is a Remix“. You can check out his website to learn about the work he is doing.

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Building Collaborative eBooks on an iPad via DropBox and Book Creator App

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Benjamin J Sheridan

Right now I’m lucky enough to be collaborating with the amazing educators, Michelle Hiebert and Jason Graham. They’ve invited my class to work on creating a collaborative book. The idea is for one class to write a bit and then pass it on to the next class who in turn adds a bit and then passes it on etc. We’ve decided to use the Book Creator app on the iPad to create our book. My kinder students have had success in creating books with this simple to use app. We have decided to use DropBox as a way to share the book back and forth with each other. (I recently learned this process from @KLirenman, another awesome educator.) What I thought I’d do is provide a simple how-to on this process.

First thing you need is to have the Book Creator and the DropBox app installed on your iPad.  (You will also need a DropBox account, but don’t worry it’s a free cloud based storage app that pretty slick.) Once you have these two things you are all set!

First, someone needs to create a new book in Book Creator.

Tap the “+” box to create a new book.

Next you will be asked to choose a book shape (portait, square, & landscape) this is a personal preference and totally up to you. After you have chosen your book shape you’re ready to start creating your book! To start adding text, audio, and images simply tap the “+” icon in the upper right hand corner as seen in this picture.

Tap “+” to add text, audio and images.

Take some time to play around with the “i” button as that allows you to change font type/size, page color, alignment as well as some other editing features. Once you are at the point you want to send the book to DropBox you can do it one of two ways. You can either do it from the book view screen or from within the book itself. It is my experience that either way is pretty much the same. The below screenshots were taken when I shared the book while I had that particular book open. If you have the book you wish to share open go to the upper right hand corner and look for the box with an arrow coming out the top . This will allow you to open/send this file in DropBox where you can then share with other classes/people.

Click “Open in DropBox” blue and white icon.

After you click on the DropBox icon you you will be taken to the DropBox app where you will be prompted to “Save to DropBox”.

Save to your DropBox.

You are almost done! From here you just need to share this with whomever you are working with. As you can see in the image below you must choose the file you wish to share (right side) and then choose to share it via our friend the square with an arrow poking out of his head icon.

Choose the book you wish to share and choose to share it via email.

Now you have officially shared your book with another person/class. You are on your way to completing a collaborative project that will undoubtedly bring joy and learning to you and your students. The benefits will be far reaching and vastly surpass the creation of book itself.

The person on the other end must simply open DropBox on their iPad and select the book from the list of DropBox items on the left hand side. Once they select the book they must then look to the upper right and choose the blue and white icon of the arrow pointing down into a little tray. As you can see the screen is very similar as to when you shared the book.

Choose to “Open in Book Creator”.

They must simply choose to “Open in Book Creator”. Once they have done this they will automatically be taken to the Book Creator app where they can add/edit the book. They simply follow the steps above to share the book again!

Now of coures this is not the only way to do such a project but it’s a process that we can all commit to. Since the kids can drive an iPad this process provides the possibility to puts the kids in the drivers seat every step of the way. I’m excited to see what the kids come up with!

Do you think this type of project is something worthwhile? What other ways have you found success in doing similar projects?

 

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Creating a Stop Motion Remix

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Benjamin J Sheridan

One of my goals this year was to work with my students to make a stop motion movie out of one of the stories they created. We had a story last fall that I though would be good but it proved too difficult (logistically) to make. With the year starting to wind down we had some time in our schedule to give it a go again. We talked again about stop motion and how it works.  I put a free but basic stop motion app on my students iPads called iMotion HD. It’s a very simple to use app that allows you to create stop motion movies.

The first couple we made didn’t turn out well at all… which is to be expected! As we revisited and revised they got better and better. (This was a perfect opportunity for us to revisit our discussion about “drafts” in writing.) The kids decided they wanted to do something centered around Star Wars. (One of the students just had a Star Wars themed birthday party and they were all about it.) I wanted to ride the excitement so we got right to it and started coming up with ideas for a plot. They came up with a simple story line and started working on story boarding. They then started on set design, as well as character, and prop selection. Once they designed the set they worked out the specific dialoge for each scene. They timed how long it took to deliver the dialoge so they would know how long each scene needed to be. We even went so far as to find out how many frames were needed to make 1 second of video. We then multiplied that by the number by the number of seconds we needed to make the scene. This gave us the number of frames we needed to shoot in order to have the correct scene time. This part was a bit of a stretch for them but I thought I’d throw it out there anyways.

Then came time to film. For this we used iStopMotion 3 by Boinx Software. I really liked this software for a number of reasons. First it has a really cool preview feature that allowed you to see what the next frame will look like before you actually take it. The software leaves the last frame taken up in the window and then superimposes the current frame on top so you can get an idea of what it will look like before you snap the shutter. This is also good if you accidentally bump or move a figure as you can see exactly where it was before and move it back in place.  The other feature that I thought was super cool was the ability to use my iPhone as a remote camera. We could set up the scene and use my phone as the camera as we controlled it remotely from my computer.

This is our workspace.

I think this may have been the most fun they’ve had all year. We worked on this for hours!! They loved every minute of it. As their skills improved throughout the project they scrapped a scene and chose to reshoot it because they felt they could do better. Very cool to see them taking such ownership.

We talked it over when we were done shooting and decided to share it out without adding any audio. They would like other classes to add their own audio and share it back with us. They want to see how many versions of the movie can be made. We even talked about having people remix the video as well but that may be a bit of a stretch. We’ll see if any one take that approach. Here is the movie without sound.

They learned a ton throughout the whole project and they are jazzed  up on story creation. Four or five classes have said they were going to add their own audio and share it back with us. We are very excited to see what they come up with. Please feel free to do the same, any and all ages welcome!

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Publishing Young Authors

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Benjamin J Sheridan

Lately I have been more and more impressed with my student’s writing. I decided that it was time for us to think about publishing their work. I shared this with my students and it led to a discussion about what a good topic for a book might be. After some deliberation they decided to write a counting book as we were discussing ordinal counting in math. I thought this was a great idea!

I gave them a short tutorial on how to use the Book Creator for iPad app ($4.99USD) and off they went. The app is so easy to use they literally did everything themselves. Since they were using the app on their iPads they could take pictures and pull these pictures right into their book. We worked on what we should say in the book. Since the writing in the book would follow a pattern they wrote a skeleton sentence on a whiteboard and they filled in the different words each time they came to a new page. I helped them with their spelling but they did everything else on their own. They decided that they wanted the book to have audio as well so I told them to figure out how to add it, and they did.

When they thought they were done they brought their book to me and we talked about it and decided on ways to improve it. Some things we talked about: pictures should not overlap text, text should be relatively the same size on all pages, it should not look sloppy, each page should follow roughly the same format. After a couple revisions they were good to go! It was incredibly simple really, made me wonder why I hadn’t done it earlier in the year. After they finished the final draft they zapped it to my computer and I uploaded it to the iTunes bookstore. The whole process from starting the book, to it going live in the iTunes bookstore took about 2 weeks. I wrote about the actual process involved with publishing to the iTunes bookstore here.

I started thinking of so many cool books the kids could make. I was talking about it with a coworker and we decided we were going to make alphabet books with the 4yr olds. We’ll have them find things that start with each letter, take pictures of these things to use as illustrations for the corresponding letter page. They can then add the matching letter sound as well as the word each picture represents as audio on each page.

As I walk down the halls of my school I wonder why more kids don’t make books. I see their stories stapled together and hanging from bulletin boards outside of classrooms. Most all of these stories are typed and illustrated on a computer, why not take the extra step and make them into a book? I see how proud my students are at seeing their books displayed in the iTunes bookstore. They get so excited to learn that someone took the time to write a review of their book. (Even if it was their mom or dad.) Talk about building excitement and motivation towards writing!

You can download the books my students made, here, here, and here… for free!

Are you making books with your students?

Do you think 5 year olds are too young to be making books like this?

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Goodbye SmartBoard… Hello Apple TV

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Benjamin J Sheridan

I’ve finally ditched my SmartBoard. I have to admit that I’ve never been a big fan of my SmartBoard to begin with, so parting ways with it wasn’t particularly difficult. To be fair though I have to say that I have enjoyed certain things it has allowed me to do with my class. I have seen some people doing some cool things with SmartBoards but I think the interface/software isn’t great and it’s never really excited me that much. The proverbial straw that broke the camels back came when I was prompted to update the “notebook software”, which I did, and then the board immediately stopped working. I thought (for about 5 seconds) that I might try to trouble shoot the issue, but (after 6 seconds) decided it was a sign, and after an honorary moment (3 more seconds) of silence came to terms with my loss. The funny thing is I actually don’t feel like I have actually lost anything really worthwhile, just worth a lot of dinero. This year I installed an Apple TV in my classroom. For those who don’t know it’s not an actual TV but rather something quite different. From the Apple Website:

Apple TV gives you access to the best 1080p HD content — including blockbuster movies, your music and photos, and more — right on your widescreen TV. You can even play content from your iOS devices on your TV using AirPlay. Apple TV requires one HDMI cable (sold separately).

The last bit is the most important to me. If you have read some of my other posts you know that I use our class accounts for Twitter, blogs, Instagram, Skypeetc almost daily in my classroom. We are engaged in various projects at any given moment and we use these tools as a way to communicate with other classes and people all over the world. Each student in my class has their own iPad which they use at various times during the day to engage with a variety of tools, apps, people (often times using social media), their environment, and each other. What the Apple TV allows us to do is to share what we are doing on our iPads at any given moment with the whole class. Anyone in the room with an iOS device can choose to “Airplay” their iPad screen at any time. Since I have the Apple TV hooked up to my VGA projector, any student can choose to show the whole class whatever is showing on their iPad screen. Airplay works with both audio and video simultaneously.

Turning on Airplay screen sharing on an iPad.

Before Airplay I was bound to using my computer via projector to show examples to the class but now anyone in the class is free to share anything they have on their iPads. We can tweet, read our blog, add pictures and check our Instagram feed, work through math problems, share documents we are working on, share games we are playing, share movies we are making etc, using this method. Another little gem I’d like to share is the fact that you can sync the Chrome browsers on both your computer and your iPad. For example, if I am looking at something interesting on my computer I can pick up my iPad, open the Chrome browser and it will give me the option open any tab I have open on my computer and share it with the class using Airplay. Here’s a very brief explanation on how to do it.

I always thought the Smartboard was a little too teacher centered for me. I think the ability for any student to share what they are creating on their iPad via Airplay has empowered the students as well as allowed them to express themselves using a variety of tools and mediums.

How are you using Airplay in your classroom?

Are you using your SmartBoard in a way you think you couldn’t live without?

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