There was a time when I knew exactly how many digital pieces I had created, but not N any more, especially after our ABC movie collaboration last year. Thank God Kevin and I were able to expand the community for the project but we still took on a large number of letters each… A is for…, B…, C… Last year at this time we were wrapping it up. Remember, Kevin?

For this piece, I was commissioned by the NWP ELL network to document their TESOL pre-conference workshop focused on ELL writers in the digital age.

Judy Rance-Roney, a member of the ELL network of the NWP and a buddy at SUNY and our writing project, invited me to participate in this conference day when the group was in its earliest planning stages.

At first I was asked to collaborate on a digital storytelling workshop and document the day as well. As I sat with the group for an initial planning session last November at the NWP conference in NYC, I realized that I could not do both and everyone seemed to agree that wearing both hats would be just impossible to do justice to either work. So I moved to observer role happily.

This pre-conference day kicked off the TESOL conference and what was I thinking? Tuvia and I returned from Israel the day before and of course, I was just beginning to suffer from Jet Lag. As I rode up 6th Avenue in a taxi cab I was kicking myself for not planning differently. Oh well, next time, I have to remember, more down time to adjust.

But the group was a great one to work with,very sympathetic as I dragged myself up to the hotel room where the last minute details were being shared. The conference would be held in typical conference rooms just two floors away from us and even though the lighting was terrible the number of participants,30, made the setup perfect for documenting . I spontaneously abandoned my still camera for the video recorder and the inner lighting worked better than the odd external flash on my advanced point and shot, which has been put on the shelf when I moved to my Nikon D60 SLR with an external flash.

I knew I was taking a risk and walking around with the camera, not always resting on my tri-pod caused some shake but these days, with You Tube, it’s not as much of a problem. So I left the conference not filming everything but with almost a full hour of video and some photos. Given the comfort with presenters and a good group of 30 participants, and an clear plan to document their movement throughout the day with this hands-on experience with technology and its power for ELL’s, I had a challenge that could be achieved and thinking about what I have almost finished,

So here’s my request. Just below this post is my video draft. If you have a few minutes, 7 minutes, 15 seconds to be exact, I’d love some feedback. My goal was to move with the participants from start to finish and to see what they left with, so comment away.

I’m going to include some of the comments I already received via email.

Here’s the You Tube link if you can’t access it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0HROCVB05k

Bonnie

  This computer keeps me very connected to life back home: to upcoming projects and the unfinished elements demanding attention.  Somehow the TO DO list grows smaller and then larger.  I finish one digital piece and then there’s another demanding attention.  So here in Israel I’ve been working on one that will become a Voicethread if all goes well.  I’ve been writing drafts, pieces of drafts. a few sentences, then walking away, closing the document, doing something else, returning, writing more, moving to another draft and now I’m almost satisfied with the bulk of the body and working on its conclusion.  I see visuals in my head, I now I have to find the real photos to use.

My digital process is becoming comfortable, knowable.  It’s so powerful to reflect.  And Kevin is out there, ready to complete this project as well.  He’s calling…get it done, get it done.

O KKKKKKAYYYYYYY!

There’s always the next one.  Fantastic!  I spent the weekend working on my big DS piece for our renewal and making time for Tuvia.  After my conversation with Kevin yesterday I had a new piece to create as I began the burning of DVD’s for all the new TC’s from SI’07.  This morning I spoke with Tom and Dana at BOCES and moved the conference for November on and it was good.

I invited a small group of our ABC collaborators to share their reflections on the project and wow, three out of four responded immediately, feeling honored to be asked.  I was blown away.  Kevin too, I’ll bet.

And began my “how it all began” piece.  I have a long first draft, with everything and more that I will soon cut away.  More is better right now. My juices are flowing again.  So , do I take my big computer or small one to Israel?  What do you think?  I love having the choice.

Enough for now.  I’ll be back.

It’s ALWAYS a great feeling to complete a piece, although I have more and more under my belt, especially working on the ABC Collaboration with Kevin, where I had 4 pieces done in a few months. But this piece is always a work of the heart. My 3rd anthology pieces after a Summer Institute. I didn’t know if I would get to this one. I had a piece done for the group for the last day of the SI, recounting the life of a TC, but somehow, I changed my mind, especially when a new version of Ilife appeared on my birthday in August and I knew I’d be needing the really know the version for my upcoming inservice at Monroe Woodbury Schools.

Of course it took hours to select a piece for each participant(18) and then begin to use the software with the help of some one-on-one at the mac store with Gene and Ken. On Gene’s suggestion I created the voice over in Garageband where I had so much control of the editing. Control over audio is a real problem in Imovie. There is a VO option in Imovie, but I tried using it and it was clumsy. I created the full VO on one track (40 minutes) and the prepared it for use in Imovie. Little did I know but that preparation would totally take away any chance that I could edit it further, to fit with my individual sections in Imovie. UGH! Eventually, I redid the VO, creating 18 separate pieces. Okay, that’s what it’s all about, learning and experimenting and I love using my new mic, thanks to Kevin’s suggestion: Blue Snowball with a pop filter to avoid Pand T pops, thanks to Nevin. But at first I was holding the filter over the mic as I read my pieces, very awkward. I didn’t realize that there was a stand for hook onto the mic included in the box. FREEDOM for the hands, fantastic! My second attempt at the vo’s was even better than the first.

Now to the work on Imovie: bravo to the new duration for editing. Now you want to increase/decrease the length of for a photo, just click on the photo and change. Instantly it’s changed, immediate rendering. You can’t even begin to appreciate this feature unless you’ve lived without it on Imovie and Premiere Elements. What a pleasure! And the transitions work the same way. The Ken Burns Effect is also much improved.  Just leaving it up to the default setting provides for lovely movement with a subtle variety.  And when you want to adjust a photo that has become much easier as well.

The whole look of the workflow has changed and that’s basically cool although again, you can’t really see the volume controls with this format and that’s important. You can’t see the tracks in depth.

It’s easy to add a title but there aren’t yet, many choices. I’m sure that will change.

But you do have to move the whole piece all edited, back to Garageband to lay down the music for a soundtrack, again if you want control over the whole piece, if you want to adjust the volume of a piece to work with a VO, louder before, softer when the VO begins.

There’s also an issue with the video editing and that’s why this new version was created. If you want to separate the video from its voice, you have to do that in Garageband and then it’s impossible to sync the voice with the video. There’s only a trim function and that allows you to select all or a piece of the video piece and you can’t even have it all some footage at the start and end will be lost. I wanted the very end of one my clips and couldn’t get it. UGH!

Okay, then when it’s ready, you can bring it back to Garageband but this will take a while to prepare, because in this sharing you cant’ send it to Garageband. I sent it to disk and that took an hour, but my piece is 40 minutes. Once in GB I was able to use the music I had downloaded from Itunes and then burned to a CD. Thanks to my favorite FM station, WFUV, just the night before, I found a group, new to me and perfect for my piece: Zap Mama and some great Spanish singers. Perfect for the flavor of this SI and ideal for a VO in English. Music in another language doesn’t distract from the VO in English, unless you know the other language. I didn’t think of that. Anyway, once in GB it was great to see all the tracks and CONTROL the volume of for the music and moving the VO if I had to. But as for any changes to the Imovie piece, no way now unless you wanted to move it back to Imovie when the Soundtrack was completed and that would entail waiting the hour again to have it prepared for sharing. I did miss a title and would have liked to redo the end credits to include Zap Mama. Oh well…we are moving on.

It took very little time on GB to create the piece as a quicktime movie and now it’s ready to include with my SI DS on a DVD. On to the burning. IDVD, BTW is so much easier than previous versions. I hope it will work. More about that but I’m feeling good, ready to talk with Kevin about our upcoming collaborations.

I was trying to stay in bed this Rosh Hashanah  but I’m in the midst of my latest DS project and it took its hold and forced me to my computer.  I began by organizing my photos of the SI into albums in Iphoto, one for each of the participants (18) then I worked on my voiceover in Garageband, selecting a piece for each of the 18 in our printed anthologies, mostly in the Stories from the Author’s Chair, the teacher pieces were just too long.  And then I read each one and created on full piece in Garageband, but once it was compressed for Imovie, it’s been hard to manipulate, there’s no longer a tool in Imovie to edit audio so if I didn’t leave a good break between pieces there’s nothing I could do.

I have small video selections for most of the participants throughout the SI, some even reading the pieces I selected.  In my movie, I use some of those clips and had my vocal under their’s but I couldn’t break up the audio in Imovie, so this morning I realized that if I was willing to redo the voiceover, I could created separate tracks for each participant, mixing their VO and then adding mine to have a fuller piece and a nice way to share the VO in a “symphony of voices, something new.

Now I just need to do it!  Cant wait!  I am SO nuts!