Letter to an Unknown Soldier

A while ago I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Kate Pullinger on digital storytelling entitled ‘Beyond the Book.’ In addition to Inanimate Alice, Kate also mentioned other projects with which she has been involved, including ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier,’ part of the ’14-18 NOW’ commemorations. The stimulus was the cast figure of the Unknown Soldier in Paddington station and people were asked to write in a letter, imagining they were sending a message to the soldier from our place in the future with what we know now.

Kate took us through some of the amazing letters people had sent in, providing a snapshot of the range of people who were inspired to write; over 21 000 in all. As were in a digital storytelling session, I too was inspired and thought about other possibilities; other ways in which the letters might be presented digitally. Although digital storytelling can be delivered through a variety of media, I felt the words that the contributors crafted deserved to stay centre-stage. Inspired by a video I once saw (which for the life of me I can no longer remember), I thought I might attempt what I now know to be called kinetic typography. If you search under that term, you’ll see lots of examples.

Having chosen a letter from the repository on 14-18 NOW, I then needed an application which could generate the text. It appears that the majority of professionals use Adobe After Effects … which I don’t have, nor would want to buy. There are alternatives, including Wax which is free, but whilst there are plenty of tutorials, none of these applications appears to have a shallow entry point. Searching for other possibilities, I came across a couple of posts which suggested PowerPoint, which in the later versions has an export to video option. Here then was something I could certainly cut my teeth on.

So, about four hours later, here’s the result:

(Not sure whether the jerkiness is down to my wireless bandwidth or the YouTube compression process; maybe it’s OK for you. The final video was fine, so a big up to PowerPoint for that.)
Have to admit this was incredibly time consuming and I shudder to think how long it might have taken in an application with which I was less familiar, or if the text had been substantially longer. There are no shortcuts. It’s a matter of adding the text, adding animations, then making iterative small adjustments until you’re satisfied with the output.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think next time I’ll output an audio-free video file, then edit in a video editor so as to get better synchronisation between the animations of the text and the beats/rhythm of the music.

Stop – Go

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Arpingstone (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Arpingstone)

In a staff workroom the other day, a colleague turned and asked how she could make a traffic light image image on a PowerPoint slide animate between the different colours. Nothing fancy; just to enhance the message she was trying to convey.

Creating a traffic light graphic in PowerPoint took a few moments; the different colours of the individual lights could easily be swapped using different fill colours of course. I then tried to wrangle the animation feature in PowerPoint to produce some sort semblance of the lighting sequence. Oh dear! I spent far longer than I should have … all to no avail. Confident I would have the wherewithall to bend PowerPoint to my will, I’d neglected an alternative and (if I hadn’t been fixated on PowerPoint) blindingly obvious solution – the animated GIF.

Using the graphic I’d already produced, I exported a sequence of four images, each having a different lighting mode, as GIFs. Then a quick search found Picasion, an online GIF maker. The four images were uploaded, a couple of settings were adjusted and voila – an animated GIF available to download, link to or as an embed code, all in a mere few minutes.

I guess there’s a lesson to learn there. Since the original request came from the context of PowerPoint, an application I’m  intimate with , I failed to step back and consider other possibilities. I guess there’s a lot to be said for standing back and taking the helicopter view?

How to make a “How To”

It’s a truism that these days if you want to know ‘How to’ do something, whether it be improve your guitar fingering, replace a spark plug or quickly get the seeds from pomegranate, a quick web search will probably find you a wealth of potential solutions. They might be videos on YouTube, blog posts or increasingly making use of an app designed to help you do just that. Whether you’re on the iOS or Android platform, there’s an app for that! Although browsing through their online galleries from the comfort of your monitor and computer is indeed possible, because they can also be viewed from within the app on your mobile device of choice, you can often taken your newly found guide to the task itself. A much more efficient and effective way of working.

So as a consumer, theses apps are an absolute boon, but do they have a place in the classroom? Well I’d argue yes, but first we need to spin them around and rather than having our students simply consume information, we need to think of them using the apps as creators … requiring a much higher level of demand and hopefully more powerful learning.

The first requirement is having access to mobile devices onto which the apps have been installed. This may be possible if you’re one of the increasing number of schools with class sets or even 1:1 access to mobile devices. Or perhaps you’re on the BYOD/T route and can ask your students to obtain the apps themselves? (The apps are both free). Thinking forward a little to when their completed guides are published and shared, demands a little forethought and will depend on which of the domains you’re in: school devices which are shared, 1:1 or user-owned devices. Will they be using generic or personal accounts and how will these need to be set up in the first place? How will the completed guide then be shared with peers and/or teachers? Perhaps by bunching together links to them all or maybe embedding them on a central page on a school website or blog?

But what would students actually use them for? Well perhaps they should be given the choice; an alternative or antidote to producing a written account or presentation? Here are a few possible options:

• Science – replacing the standard diagram, method, results, conclusion-style lab report.
• Drama/Theatre – showing/discussing how a particular scene might be set.
• Food Tech – there are plenty of exemplars already in the libraries.
• Languages – create a guide on any topic in the language being studied.
• Art – illustrate a particular technique, or provide a walk-though of a gallery.
• Geography – provide a description of a geographical feature, actually in the field.
• PE – make a guide coaching a beginner in a particular technique.
• History – create a narrative of a historical location.
• Maths – generate some ‘real-world’ mathematical exemplars.

As always when students are publishing to an open platform, this kind of activity has to come with a health warning. Hopefully your students will be sufficiently literate to appreciate the consequences of posting to the Web; if not, perhaps this provides an ideal teaching opportunity?