Search Stories Makes Documenting Research Fun

The keynote speaker for NCTIES was my friend Ken Shelton. I've known Ken for a few years now and one thing that I know for sure about Ken is that he knows how to design a presentation (more on that in another post). In his keynote, Ken shared a great idea for getting students enjoy documenting the research process instead of groaning about having to document it. Ken's suggestion is to have students create Google Search Story videos.

The Google Search Stories Video Creator allows you to create a short video about the searches that you perform on Google. To create your video you enter your search terms, select some background music, and let the creator render a video for you. Ken showed a video of a search for North Carolina barbecue restaurants. Below is a search story about an Internet-famous wedding dance.



Applications for Education
As mentioned above, having students create short search story videos could be a good way to get them interested in documenting at least a part of the research process.

Make Stop-Motion Movies With JellyCam 4.0

Last spring I discovered the free stop-motion movie maker, JellyCam. I was instantly impressed by JellyCam even though at the time it had limited features beyond capturing images with a webcam and playing them back in stop-motion. JellyCam has made a couple of nice improvements in the ten months since I wrote my initial review of it.

The biggest improvement to JellyCam is the option to up include a soundtrack in your movies. When I first tried JellyCam I could only use images that you captured with my webcam while JellyCam was running. Now you I upload images that you have stored on your computer, camera, or phone. Another nice enhancement in the latest version of JellyCam is the removal of JellyCam watermarks on your videos.

JellyCam runs on the Adobe Air platform. If you don't have Adobe Air Runtime on your computer, you will be prompted by JellyCam to download it. The download is free and it takes just a couple of minutes to install.

JellyCam was created and is developed by one man. You can keep up with his latest work on JellyCam here. I like JellyCam so much that I included it in my best of the web presentation at NCTIES.

The video below will help get you started using JellyCam.


Applications for Education
One way that JellyCam could be used in the classroom is to create a time-lapse video of a lengthy process like osmosis. Take pictures of raisins in water over a period of time to create a time-lapse stop-motion video of the process of osmosis. Your students could also attempt to make a video like this one in which stop-motion is used to show how food is processed by a cow from start to finish.

What's Your Story? - Internet Safety Video Contest

What's Your Story? is a student video contest being hosted by Trend Micro. The contest asks students (age 13-18, in the U.S. and Canada) to produce a short video on the topics of taking action against bullying, maintaining a good online reputation, and wise use of cell phones. The producer of the overall winning video will receive $10,000. Smaller category prizes will also be awarded. Videos should be no longer than two minutes and must be submitted by April 3.

Here's a sample contest video.


Applications for Education
Producing videos for What's Your Story? could be a good way to get students to stop and think about what good digital behavior is.

H/T to Jackie Gerstein for sharing this on Twitter.

A Last-Minute Valentine's Day Project

In case you forgot, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. If you need a quick way to send for your kids or students to send Valentine's Day greetings to family members, take a look at the Valentine's Day themes offered by Animoto. Have the kids grab a handful of family pictures and put them together with some cute text to form a video greeting that can be emailed to family members.

Applications for Education
Aside from possibly bailing you out for Valentine's Day, I've always liked using Animoto as a way to introduce some basic video creation methods to students and faculty. I often use Animoto at the beginning of my introductory workshops on classroom video projects because it gives first-timers a quick boost of confidence before we delve into more challenging video creation projects.