If you’re an educator in or near Oklahoma City, please mark your calendar for / tell your friends about / and RSVP for the next FREE “Playing with Media Meetup” at Northwest Library at 9:15 am on Friday, February 8, 2013. Our topic will be “Creating Games & Simulations with Scratch.” The meetup description is:

Come learn how to create stories, simulations and games with Scratch software in this FREE 3 hour, hands on BYOL (bring your own laptop) workshop. Scratch software (FREE for Windows & Mac) is a wonderful program for creativity and computational thinking. This FREE workshop will be led by Dr. Wesley Fryer, who has led several “Scratch Camps” for students as well as adults in the Oklahoma City area. This meetup is open to students 9 years and older, parents and educators. Homeschoolers are welcome! Scratch is a fantastic program for digital creativity, developing “STEM” skills like problem solving and computational thinking, and also having FUN! No prior knowledge or experience with Scratch is required for this workshop.

My first “Playing with Media Meetup” last Friday at Northwest Library went very well. We had 13 attend and participate. I’ve shared the recorded audio from that meet up on the “Fuel for Educational Change Agents” podcast channel in two parts: Part One and Part Two. Resources from the session are available on wiki.wesfryer.com/Home/handouts/ebooks.

I hope to see you on February 8th to learn more about using Scratch software!

If you live in or near Oklahoma City, please join me tomorrow morning at Northwest Library (5600 NW 122nd, Oklahoma City, OK) for a free, 3 hour, hands-on workshop learning how to create multimedia / enhanced eBooks on the iPad. Complete details and links to RSVP are available on Meetup.com/playingwithmedia. The full session description is:

Bring your own iPad to this FREE 3 hour, hands-on digital workshop where we’ll learn how to create and share enhanced eBooks. Enhanced eBooks can include recorded audio as well as images and text. These kinds of eBooks are perfect for parents and grandparents to create with young readers, or for learners of any age to create! Check out some examples on ebooks.playingwithmedia.com. We’ll use two different apps to create enhanced eBooks in this session, which you’ll want to purchase/install on your iPad in advance. They are:

• Book Creator for iPad ($5)
• Creative Book Builder ($4)

This is a FREE meetup/workshop led by Dr. Wesley Fryer. Homeschoolers, classroom teachers, parents, grandparents, and anyone interested in creating enhanced eBooks as well as helping kids create enhanced ebooks are welcome to attend. Students 10 years old and older are also welcome to attend WITH a parent. More information is available about Wesley’s ebook “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” (2011) and “Mapping Media to the Common Core” (Feb 2013). More resources and links about creating enhanced eBooks are also available on Wesley’s wiki for this workshop: wiki.wesfryer.com/Home/handouts/ebooks

I’m very excited that the latest version of Book Creator for iPad (version 2.4) now supports hyperlinks as well as combining multiple projects into a single eBook. This is GREAT news for many folks, including students and teachers creating eBooks in the classroom, for class projects, or just for fun! I hope to see you tomorrow morning at Northwest Library in Oklahoma City for this fun morning of eBook learning, playing, and creating!

Yesterday I worked with a librarian who is going to help 4th and 5th grade students next week record “narrated slideshows” to practice their oral communication skills telling stories with “story cards” from different perspectives. (1st person singular, 1st person plural, 2nd person, 3rd person singular, etc.) This is an excellent Common Core-aligned language project. She helped me record a 4.5 minute video tutorial about this, in which I show the steps for creating a narrated slideshow using the free iPad app “ShowMe.” We recorded this with my iPhone, as I demonstrated the required steps on an iPad.

I added a link to this video tutorial on the “Narrated Slideshow / Screencast” page of the Mapping Media to the Common Core project. I’m going to add similar “Tutorials” sections to each of the 12 media product pages in the Mapping Media digital literacy framework website in the weeks ahead. For another version of this, see my February 2012 post, “Narrate a SlideShow with ShowMe [video tutorial].”

Posterous is one of the best, free websites to use for sharing a variety of multimedia files with others on the public web. Posterous is the only website I’ve used to date which will let students EMAIL media files including text, images, ePUB ebooks, and videos to a class website that permits teachers to MODERATE submissions before they appear for others to access on the site. Unfortunately, however, Posterous has had some glitches in recent months since it was purchased by Twitter in March 2012. One of the most recent glitches is that new accounts (as of today) can’t be created by clicking “SIGN UP” on the Posterous.com homepage. In this post, I’ll explain a simple workaround that will let you and your students still create new Posterous accounts.

According to the official Posterous blog:

You can get a Posterous Space just like this by emailing post@posterous.com or signing up for a new account.

Creating a new Posterous account is literally just as easy as sending a new email to post@posterous.com. This method DOES still work as of today. (I tested it.) Remember when you send an email to Posterous with this method that the text you use as your email SUBJECT will become the title of your post. Whatever you include in your email message body will become the content in your new post, so be sure to remove your phone number or any other information you normally include in your email “signature file.” A minute or two after sending that email, you should receive a new email from Posterous letting you know your post has been shared online. That email will include a link you can click to visit the new Posterous site you’ve created.

To set a password for your new Posterous account, click FORGOT PASSWORD on the Posterous.com homepage. You’ll need to enter your email address in the provided field, and then Posterous will send you another email with a link you can click to set a password.

That’s it! Now write down your Posterous address and your password in safe place. You’re ready to start using Posterous to share rich media files! For more details about using Posterous to share multimedia online, check out my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” You can also check out the following past posts:

1. Post an eBook from an iPad to Your Class Blog (Feb 2012)
2. Configure KidBlog for Safe, Moderated, Interactive Student Blogging & Commenting (Jan 2012)
3. Mirroring a Cohort WordPress Blog with Posterous (Sep 2011)
4. Configure Autoposting to a WordPress Blog from Emails via Posterous (May 2011)
5. Moderate comments on a Posterous Blog (Mar 2011)
6. Set Up a Moderated Class Blog on Posterous (Sep 2011)
7. 365 Photo Blog: Posterous, WordPress or just Flickr? (Dec 2010)
8. iPad Blogging with Posterous (Nov 2010)
9. Share your 5 Photo Stories on Posterous! (Sep 2010)
10. Quickstart guides for Posterous and iPadio (Jul 2010)
11. Quickblogging Options: Comparing tumblr and posterous (May 2010)
12. How We’re Reinventing the Blog by Sachin Agarwal (Posterous co-founder) (May 2010)

This morning our church had a congregational “town hall” meeting. Since this was a very important meeting and not all our members could attend, I volunteered to record the event and share it online on YouTube. Expecting the meeting to last about an hour, I came prepared with my iPad2, a Makayama iPad Tripod Mount, a standard camera tripod, and an iRig microphone. Instead of a traditional camcorder, I opted to record with my iPad because its “quick editing” features substantially accelerate the workflow required to both edit and share a video like this. In this post I’ll describe some of my lessons learned from this experience, which built on my July 2012 adventure using an iPad with Ustream (and eventually YouTube) to share a 1.5 hour lecture at our church. See my July 2012 post, “Webcasting with Ustream, an iPad, a Tripod & an XLR Boundary Microphone” for more details about that formative experience.

Lesson 1: iPad Video Clips are Limited to 50 Minutes

The biggest surprise and “lesson learned” from today’s video recording and sharing experience was that iPad video clips are limited to 50 minutes. I bought a 64 GB iPad2 for the specific purpose of having enough flash drive space / local drive space to record LOTS of video when needed, in situations just like today. Last night I spent some time deleting old, unneeded videos both from my iPad camera roll as well as the applications iPad for iMovie and Pinnacle Studio. That cleared out a little over 17 GB on my iPad, which I thought would be plenty of space for our hour-long meeting today. Fifty minutes into the presentation, however, my iPad video camera stopped working. I didn’t actually read the error message which popped up, and just assumed that the flash drive space was full. I pulled out my iPhone5 and used it to record the final twelve minutes of the presentation.

It turned out, however, that I had plenty of iPad flash drive space left. The 50 minutes of 720p iPad video took up about six GB of space, leaving me with about 11 more to spare. It worked out OK to record the remainder of the presentation on my iPhone5, since there wasn’t too much more, but if I’d realized the iPad has a 50 minute video clip limit I would have just pressed record again on my iPad after the first clip ended and continued recording with it instead of the iPhone. When I returned home and was ready to edit the video together, I transferred the 12 minute iPhone5 video clip to my iPad wirelessly using the PhotoSync app. Even though the iPhone5′s video was 1080p and the iPad2′s video was 720p, iMovie for iPad let me import both into the same project and combine them together for publishing on YouTube.

Lesson 2: iMovie for iPad Won’t Upload Videos Longer Than 15 Minutes to YouTube

Even if your YouTube channel is approved for video uploads longer than 15 minutes in length, as mine is, there is no way to overcome iMovie for iPad’s default restriction on YouTube uploads.

Since I couldn’t directly upload the final 61 minute video directly to YouTube from my iPad, I chose to save the final video to my iPad camera roll. I then used the free Mac app “Image Capture” (which comes pre-installed on all Apple computers) to import that video onto my laptop, and uploaded to YouTube via the Chrome web browser. If you know of an alternative way to upload videos longer than 15 minutes directly from an iPad to YouTube, please let me know. The app PixelPipe used to allow this, but it was discontinued / pulled from the app store in March 2010. Google has released a new YouTube Capture app for iPhone, and it does run on the iPad, but (from what I can tell) it does NOT allow you to combine more than one video together before uploading as iMovie for iPad does. I was VERY pleased with how speedy editing was with iMovie for iPad in this project. We had lots of questions from the audience during the second half of the presentation, and I was able to use the app’s “video split” features to isolate portions where people were asking questions without the benefit of a microphone. I then boosted the audio level of those clips to the maximum permitted by iMovie for iPad. The result wasn’t a perfect audio track, but it did make a big difference in making those audio portions more intelligible.

Lesson 3: Stick with 540p for Long YouTube Video Uploads

Even though I could have exported today’s video in 720p (high definition) I opted for 540p. This decision drastically sped up not only the time required to export the video to my iPad camera roll, but also the time required to upload it to YouTube and for it to convert for online viewing.

The final, combined video I made is 2.5 GB in size. That is HUGE, but it’s amazing this is a “workable filesize” given the capabilities of the iPad2, YouTube, and my home cable modem Internet connection. It took over an hour for this file to upload and convert on YouTube. (I’m not sure of the exact time because I went to the grocery store after I started the upload.) Since my home Internet bandwidth isn’t “metered,” however, all of this cost me exactly ZERO dollars to do and share today.

I recommend you stick with the 540p video quality setting at this point for most YouTube uploads, but DEFINITELY when you’re uploading something longer than an hour as I was today. I have published a few high definition videos to YouTube from my iPad (like our family Christmas card this year) but generally I have found the quality of the lower resolution settings to be more than adequate for my needs / purposes.

Lesson 4: iRig Mic is Great for Lecture Recordings

I probably could have obtained a very decent video recording today on my iPad without an external microphone like an iRig, since the built-in mic on the iPad is high quality. I chose to record with an iRig on the “high sensitivity” setting today, however, because in the past I’ve found it produces a higher quality sound. If you have an iRig and use it like this, you do NOT want to move it around a lot. I’ve made the mistake of moving a stationary iRig placed on a table around during video recording, and that can produce loud, distracting noises. Today I just handheld the iRig during the presentation and it worked well.

Lesson 5: An iPad Tripod Mount is Mandatory

The #1 most important accessory for my iPad event videography today was the Makayama iPad Tripod Mount. This is the only iPad tripod mount I’ve seen to date, and while it’s relatively costly ($70 US) it’s worth every penny. I have tried to handhold my iPhone for extended conference sessions that I’ve recorded in the past, and I can promise you that gets old FAST. Back in 2007 I tried a “guerrilla tripod setup” at CoSN in Austin using my iPhone with Ustream, and the results were mixed at best.

My advice: Get an iPad tripod mount like the Makayama if you’re going to video extended events. I bought a Glif tripod mount for my iPhone4 a few years ago and have been very happy with it. If you’ve used other standard tripod mounts for the iPad or iPhone I’d love to hear about your experiences. Those are my iPad event videography lessons learned! If you’ve tried iPad video recording for longer events, what other recommendations have I left out that you’d share with others?

Yesterday I facilitated an hour long iPad app exploration session for “Tiger Club,” which is an after-school program our church offers for students at Central Middle School in Edmond Public Schools. I wanted to introduce the students to some fun apps which can be used for musical creativity as well as eBook creation. The three musical apps we started with were:

• BeBot ($2)
• Singing Fingers (free)
• JamPad Plus (free)

BeBot is a fun musical app which doesn’t require any prior knowledge or experience with instruments to use playfully. The same goes for Singing Fingers, except it helps if you can sing a little! JamPad is mainly a keyboard app but it includes some accompanying beat/musical track options, as well as an electric guitar. For folks who are less instrumentally experienced (I fit in that boat) it might be easier to create dissonant noise with JamPad than pleasing melodies. All these apps are definitely fun to play and experiment with, however.

After playing with those apps for about thirty minutes, I showed the students how to use PhotoBooth (free, comes with the iPad) to take some photos with fun effects, and then how to insert them with audio to make a creative story using Book Creator for iPad ($5). The students didn’t have time to actually finish their eBooks, but everyone seemed to have fun getting started and playing with the apps.

Ever since I attended an amazing TCEA conference breakout session circa 1998 called “Bridges to Musical Creativity,” I’ve been enthralled with digital music software, apps, and peripherals. David Warlick became one of my digital learning heroes years ago for multiple reasons. The first time I saw David present at NECC in Seattle, he was traveling with a small MIDI keyboard and composed his own music on his laptop, on the go. I don’t often make time to play with musical apps like we did yesterday, so this was a fun opportunity.

Creative play with digital music apps is inherently a good thing! (It can certainly keep a group of middle schoolers entertained and engaged for quite a while, too!)

What are your favorite musical apps for iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch? I created a new linked list of my favorite, creative iPad musical apps on Appolicious.

I need to give a BIG shout and thanks to Brandt Schneider for recommending I check out MadPad as well as Six Strings, Voice Jam, DustBuster, and Beat Wave. I removed the apps Magic Piano, PocketGuitar, Video Star, Virtuoso Piano Free 2 HD and Voices 2 from my original list so I could add Brandt’s recommendations. Those other five apps no longer included in my list are also cool, but I think the addition of Brandt’s apps makes this list MUCH better! I’m eager to try these new five apps myself. Here are direct links to them:

• MadPad HD ($3)
• Six Strings ($7)
• VoiceJam ($7)
• Piano Dust Buster (free)
• Beatwave (free)

For some additional iPad-related / after-school club related info, check out my posts from last spring after I taught a 5 week series of classes for Tiger Club: “Lessons Learned Using Puppet Pals on iPads in an After School Program” and “Teach Your Students to be Digital Artists (and learn from Kevin Honeycutt)“.

(Cross-posted from iPad with Wes)

If you want to edit and create videos on your iPad, consider using the Pinnacle Studio for iPad app. It may seem expensive for an iPad app at $10, but my formative experiences with it this weekend were VERY positive. IMHO it’s worth the money. While iMovie for iPad is half the price ($5), Pinnacle Studio offers better options for integrating still images as “B-roll” video on top of audio originally recorded AS video or “plain” digital audio. It also supports multiple audio tracks (up to three total) from different sources, and adding a wider range of transitions as well as text titling/captioning options than iMovie. I love using iMovie for iPad for “Quick Edit Videos,” but strongly recommend Pinnacle Studio for true “digital storytelling” on the iPad. I’ll be leading a two day iPad-based digital storytelling workshop for Storychasers in about a month on December 7-8, and had been planning (along with our other Storychaser workshop curriculum writers) on using iMovie for iPad for project videos. My thoughts about which app we should use for the workshop have CHANGED based on my videography experiments using Pinnacle Studio on Saturday, however, and I’m hoping we’ll use it instead of iMovie. Pinnacle Studio for iPad offers more control and editing options than iMovie for iPad, and should definitely be considered if you’re wanting to create digital stories on an iOS tablet.

Before I explain some of the features and reasons I’m loving Pinnacle Studio for iPad-based video editing, I need to mention that the app was previously called “Avid Studio for iPad” prior to September 2012. If you see references for Avid Studio or find tutorials for it, understand it’s the same app but is now Pinnacle Studio. It’s also important to know the same company (Pinnacle Systems) makes a “family” of Windows-only video editing software by the same name. If you’re a Windows user you can export projects you start with Pinnacle Studio for iPad and edit them further with the desktop version. This isn’t an option for Mac laptop or desktop computer users, but in my view that shouldn’t deter Mac users from giving Pinnacle Studio for iPad a try. Many thanks to Bill Rogers who enthusiastically recommended Pinnacle Studio for iPad to me last week when we met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, thanks to Bob Sprankle.

The screenshot below shows the main editing layout in Pinnacle Studio. If you remember “the good ‘ole days” of editing video on a Mac with iMovie ’06 and older versions, you’ll feel right at home with Pinnacle Studio. It’s similar to iMovie for iPad, but unlike iMovie you can import and use MULTIPLE audio tracks. You can also add images as “B-roll” video over video clips, which is something that’s not possible in the current version of iMovie for iPad. I found the razor blade tool for “cutting” video clips in Pinnacle Studio to be VERY intuitive. I also like the “storyboard” menu which is sandwiched between the media source menu (upper left corner) and the preview window (upper right corner), and the “timeline” at the bottom of the screen.

When you click the HELP button on the initial Pinnacle Studio home screen, a 52 page tutorial help guide is displayed which is VERY thorough. After scanning through that document, I had all the knowledge I needed to create some iPad edited videos which included still images, video clips, montage image intros, text titles, and video transitions.

As you work in Pinnacle Studio for iPad, some of the video effects you build will require rendering. You can postpone this process if desired, but I found it worked great to “render as I went.” The process was quick on my iPad2, and I just tapped the ‘gears’ icon to start the rendering process when the app indicated it was required. If you don’t render, preview playback is a bit jerky but still viewable/workable.

After I finished editing my videos, I opted to export them in high definition (1080p) instead of uploading directly to YouTube. A direct upload was an option, but since I was “out and about” on Saturday with access to lower speed Internet connections, I opted to transfer the videos (using Image Capture on my Mac) to my laptop and upload them on my home cable modem later.

While I usually upload “quick edit” videos with iMovie for iPad using standard resolution, for these videos I decided I’d try sharing the high def versions. I shot these videos originally on my iPhone5, and transferred them using PhotoSync to my iPad. (This requires a wifi hotspot with open ports, most home wifi networks should be fine, but many hotel/organizational hotspots may be locked down and prevent media transfers with PhotoSync.) I edited and saved two videos on our flight from Boston back to DFW on Saturday, “Ferry to Peaks Island, Maine” and “Cooking Lobster in Maine.” The second video (about “Lobstah”) has the most effects from Pinnacle Studio which are not possible with the current version of iMovie for iPad.

In the next couple months, I’ll be updating the media product pages on my “Mapping Media to the Common Core / Curriculum” website for both “Quick Edit Videos” and “Digital Storytelling.” Lessons from my December Storychasers workshop on iPad Digital Storytelling will make there way into those links and tutorials, I’m sure.

Have you tried using Pinnacle Studio for iPad lately? If so, what were your impressions and experiences?

In her recent review of my eBook, “Playing with Media, simple ideas for powerful sharing,” Barbara Brown wrote the following paragraph which inspired me to literally jump for joy. Barbara wrote:

After reading the book and paying close attention to the ideas about media creation and media sharing, I decided to move some of the course assignments for the graduate students to public spaces instead of keeping everything contained and password protected in the course learning management environment as I have previously done for courses.  Students will post public blogs during the course and will share media creations through Posterous, one of the new (to me) technology tools discussed in the book.  I’m also considering using Posterous for a 12 week photo build with students.  Each week two students will add a photo with caption to the Posterous site depicting one or two ideas they would like to share with classmates regarding the weekly assigned readings.  For example, the ideas can include key concepts, new questions that arose from the readings, connections to professional practice and research or memorable quotes. This will help build a synthesis of the major themes and concepts highlighted in the course.    One of the benefits in using Posterous is that students can directly contribute to the blog by sending an email message with the attached media.  Posterous automatically embeds and formats the media on the site using the accompanying text provided in the body of the email message.

I am  SO THRILLED to learn Barbara is making this change in some of her course assignments for her graduate students! The tendency today in most college and university courses is to “lock up” all student work behind a password-protected learning management system like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, or other system. Certainly there are good reasons to password protect confidential information in a course and course activities like quizzes and tests, but EVERYTHING we create and share in our courses today should NOT be “locked up” in a LMS. As I’ve heard others comment during educational conference sessions, “If Facebook was like learning management systems we’d have to delete all our ‘friends’ every fifteen weeks!” That’s no way to build a digital footprint online, and certainly not a “best practice” for pre-service and in-service teacher educators designing digital learning experiences which will have lasting value for students. Way to go Barbara for embracing public, online idea and media sharing for some of your student assignments!

Dr. Cyndi Danner-Kuhn at Kansas State University is another pre-service educator who is regularly encouraging her students to share their ideas and work publicly online. All of Cyndi’s pre-service teachers register a personal domain and setup a WordPress blog instead of purchasing a textbook for her class. A large number of her mandatory class assignments require students to post reflections to their blogs. This is similar to the reflection assignments I’ve used in my “Technology 4 Teachers” courses I’ve taught in the past at the University of Central Oklahoma. For a bit more and a story about how  students publicly sharing their reflections can lead to transformative digital learning interactions (those not possible without the technology tools) see my August 2012 post for iThemes Education, “Why WordPress: The Power of Trackbacks & Pingbacks.”

What are you doing to encourage students in your courses to personally experience the positive potentials of public, online idea sharing? I’m an advocate for giving students lots of CHOICES, and this also extends to online publishing. I’ve had several students in the past balk at this idea and state “There’s no way I’m going to post anything online for others to see.” In those cases, I give students an option to privately submit their assignments on our LMS, but I also explain they can use an alias and post anonymously rather than using their real name. My hope is that students are going to see so many examples of the POSITIVE power of public professional sharing by educators as well students, during the course of the semester, that they’ll change their minds about the value of open sharing and “taking credit” for work as well as websites they’ve created.

I’d love to start or participate in an Internet meme in which educators share stories about the positive power of open sharing. Does anyone know of a hashtag already in use for this? I’m thinking of something more specific than #eduwin. Alan Levine‘s 2009 “Amazing Stories of Openness” and 2010 “Amazing Stories of Sharing” are the best projects with this spirit that I’ve seen to date. I am sure “Connected Educators Month” last month led to some good discussions about how to further encourage more teachers to both understand and embrace open sharing and collaboration. If you know of a related project or initiative encouraging educators to share personal, positive stories about online sharing please let me know via Twitter or in a comment.