Chronicles of a Group project: Cyber Camp PSA

Week 3:
My being overseas while the rest of the group is in Texas didn't make the slightest difference in our ability to work together on this project. It actually gave a new dimension to the meaning of distance education.
This experience is one more proof that distance education is not distant at all, technology has annihilated physical and mental boundaries that were traditionally attributed or caused by the geographical distance between teacher and student or students collaborating together.
That said, I was concerned at the beginning of this project, because of the 6 hour time difference between the location where I am spending my vacation and Texas. But, as a group we were able to coordinate our efforts and overcome this challenge.
First, we used email to initiate contact between team members that had not worked with each other before, and got things started.
Second, we set up a wiki for our project at: http://lamar-group-5363.wikispaces.com, and started collaborating.
Then, I suggested that we have brainstorming sessions via video conferencing using Oovoo which is a free video calling software that allows for up to 6 people to video conference at the same time.
There was an initial apprehension from some group members about installing a new software in their pc, but after the first conference everyone was excited about video conferencing, for it allowed us to meet our team members for the first time, "put a face to the name".
In the second conference members of the group one interacted productively with other members in real time, brainstorming, typing and editing our proposal and script while getting to know each other a little more.
Throughout week 3 we constantly communicated via email and Wiki, everyone was looking forward to the third video conference.
Our third video conference of the week was even more productive, as everyone got comfortable with video conferencing, we managed to assess our progress, discuss our work, while collaborating in the wiki and editing the google doc all in the same session.

The Singing Dancer

In order to edit a 58 second video I spent two days trying 5 different video editing programs, and 5 different video converting softwares.

After different trials, I settled for download helper to download and convert web clips, and windows movie maker to edit my video.

I tried Wax 2.0 but it wasn't able to read the video files that I converted from flash to avi, and neither could Jashaka. I also, gave up on using Avid FreeDV after a few trials, because it was too complicated, and I could not work with Adobe elements since my computer did not have a strong enough processor to handle its needs.

So, I settled for movie maker which is the least attractive of the bunch, but it proved to be the most useful and, to the exception of a few crashes, it was solid enough to perform the task at hand and produce a decent looking video.

Digital Storytelling

My new post is about digital story telling. Of all the web 2.0 tools that I have used or learned about, it has to be the most powerful given the fact that it requires no costly software or hardware. All that a digital storyteller needs is access to the internet to download the free software to use and to search for pictures to use for the story.
The program itself is very intuitive and is the easiest software I have used so far, because it makes it fun to build a story even for even for the most computer-phobic among us.
The hardest part about creating a digital story is finding a story and following the steps and requirements detailed in Lambert's "Digital Storytelling Cookbook". the technical part of putting together is the easier part of the project.
The collaborative aspect of this educational tool and the effort it takes to create a coherent and captivating story provides teachers with a powerful educational tool to engage and challenge students to sue higher level thinking skills and collaborate with their peers in constructing knowledge that is relevant and rigorous.