by the Lost Bottlecap Collectors of Penrith PS
This digital story was conceived, storyboarded and photographed by Stage 3 students working with me in the library as part of the Shaun Tan book rap. Please feel free to comment. See the earlier post re using Photo Peach slideshows with students.
The four pages of storyboard are also uploaded for comparison with the final slideshow:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4.
A great new rap for Stage 3 and 4 students is about to commence:
Click HERE to view it or participate!
Bear and Chook Book Trailer by Marcus from SLJ Trailee Nominees on Vimeo.
This wonderful book trailer is currently nominated in a competition being run by the School Library Journal in the USA. Marcus Graham, son of a teacher librarian colleague I’ve only ever met online (via the NSW DET book raps) is ten years old and recently won the CBCA Book Trailer competition. He is now in the top four for student-created trailers for elementary (primary) students. His trailer is based on “Bear and Chook by the sea” by Lisa Shanahan & Emma Quay.
The winner is chosen by a an online voting facility. The link for viewing the nominees’ trailers and voting is here and is open until 21 October, 2010. Thanks for the tip Stacey and Marcus. And good luck in the Trailee Awards!
I’m really getting the hang of converting students’ collaborative Keynote presentations into video podcasts – and I’m *really* loving adding “Creative Commons” music as soundtracks!
I started to investigate “Creative Commons” sites last year, and found a few pieces of music that would have worked (the Stage 2 students wanted copyright free music that you could cha cha or belly dance to, and we did find one example of each!) but it all seemed too tricky last year, so our PowerPoints stayed mute. However, the ccmixter.org website is well laid out and it is quite simple to search for “Creative Commons” music by theme, musician or style. (I’ve found “scary”, “happy” and “circus” style pieces via the search engine – but beware of possible unsavoury lyrics. Stick with instrumentals only, unless you’ve previewed all the songs you will “listen to” with students). The site tells you the exact wording to place in the credits of the video podcast, movie or whatever media. After you’ve uploaded the podcast, you can relay the URL to ccmixter.org and they’ll add the online link to their searchable database.
So, just in time for Book Week, you might like to use my students’ “Mr Chicken” book trailer, and/or our “Across the Story Bridge” video podcast, and/or a revamped (from two Flickr slideshows) “Bear & Chook Adventures”. Click HERE!
According to feedback, these video podcasts may require installing the latest version of Quicktime or, at least, clicking that you agree to MIME being associated with Quicktime on your computer. I’ve had the video podcasts working on Mac and PC, and they look really great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB). One teacher colleague had an earlier version of Quicktime on her IWB to enable her to run Kid Pix, and the podcasts did refuse to run on her machine.
Meanwhile, Happy Book Week!
Here is Stage 2’s latest “Book Week” video podcast, which works best with the latest version of Quicktime. Click HERE to view the podcast.
I was able to play this new trailer to a group of students who were contributors to a brainstorm, only a week earlier, for many of the sequences, character suggestions, dialogue snippets. But the final shot list and script had been developed by a different group. It was such fun watching individual faces light up when “their” suggestion was suddenly up on the screen, as part of the cohesive whole. The power of collaborative writing, producing a final work which is greater than the sum of all the already-great smaller parts.
If you have trouble viewing Quicktime podcasts, please try the Flickr slideshow instead. When the slideshow opens, click “Show info” to read the captions.
A small class of Hearing Support students at my school joined the Learning for sustainability rap today. The boys are very excited about rapping and hope there will be other classes, from around Australia, joining the rap (“Welcome aboard, too, Canterbury PS!”). This afternoon, we got a whole lesson out of deconstructing the official “Year of Sustainability” logo. Our other Stage 3 students are deep into a “Gold” unit this term, but I went in search of a keen group to have a blogging experience. Thanks Mrs Coote and SCHC.
Hosted by the NSW DET’s School Libraries and Information Literacy Unit, this rap is aimed at Stage 3 and Stage 4 students. 2010 is the Year of Learning for Sustainability. We hope to share and learn from others about ways of living more sustainably. Teaching resources are available for downloading at:
www.schools.nsw.edu.au/raps/learnsub/teachingideas.htm
and the first rap introductions can be found by clicking on “Task 1” at:
http://rapblog9.edublogs.org/
Even if you don’t join the rap, I hope you take some opportunities to follow its progress throughout the rest of the term. Rapping is a great way to incorporate ICT and Web 2.0 into CPPT, T&L, S&T and HSIE (to toss around a few abbreviations).
Thanks Lizzie Chase (at School Libraries and Information Literacy Unit, Ryde State Office) for this great learning & teaching activity.
Congratulations to author Lisa Shanahan and illustrator Emma Quay!
Last week the news broke that their picture book, “Bear and Chook by the sea”, has been shortlisted in the annual CBCA awards, in the Early Childhood category. The winners of this prestigious competition are announced in Book Week (in Term 3).
The students at my school remember the book’s creators and characters so well from last year’s Bear and Chook books rap and wish them all the best. Meanwhile, I understand that Bear and Chook themselves have been taking separate vacations:
Bear at Sea World, on the Gold Coast
and…
Chook at the Royal Easter Show, Sydney.
The February 2010 issue of the teacher-librarians’ professional journal, “Scan” (vol 29 no 1) features a photograph I took on my iPhone late last year, as we were wrapping up the Bear and Chook books rap at school. Note the presence of a ubiquitous Bear and Chook in the lower left hand corner.
Term 4 has seen about 200 class groups of Kindergarten and Stage 1 (Years 1 and 2) students, across NSW and beyond, participate in the Bear and Chook Books Rap. A book rap is a discussion between schools about a selected literary topic, conducted via a blog. This particular book rap focused on two picture books, Bear and Chook and Bear and Chook by the sea by Lisa Shanahan and Emma Quay, who contributed generously to the blog discussion as special guests.
In NSW, book raps are hosted by the Department of Education and Training’s School Libraries and Information Literacy Unit, and are supported by online programming and teaching notes and a concurrent Teacher Rap. This rap also featured a streamed video of the creators reading Bear and Chook by the sea. Students, their teachers and teacher librarians, enjoyed exploring the relationship between the written and visual texts of these excellent picture books, and the theme of friendship. Groups of students created digital stories based on the main characters, and posed questions to the books’ creators.
The book rap is “wrapping up” this week, but the discussions are archived for viewing at: http://rapblog6.edublogs.org/
I just wanted to share a picture of my new Max doll, from the classic picture book, “Where the wild things are” (by Maurice Sendak) – just in time for the release of the new live action movie.
The Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students created three more adventures for Bear and Chook and I uploaded the photos as a another Flickr slideshow:
As before, you can request to read the captions while the slideshow plays, or just watch the pictures. They (and I) hope you enjoy this digital story.
