My Journey Through the Progressive Supper of Multi Media Sharing & Mashups

Have you ever been to a progressive supper?

It’s the best of all culinary worlds as each host at every house pulls all the stops to bring out their very best dish. You, the lucky guest, get to pick and choose the location, and the depth and breadth of your grazing.

For example, you can start with the fabulous colourful tequila sunrises, at Jane’s house, then you hop back on the party bus and drive to Sam’s place where he has whipped up a tapas-style buffet of Japanese wings, asiago and artichoke dip, Imperial cheddar cheese ball with 6 kinds of crackers and chutneys. Next you stagger over to Amanda’s where she has busted out her 24-hour salad, and the Japanese salad, the one with the ichiban bits. As the bus wheels into Alex’s house, and you are sure you cannot manage another bite, you walk through the door to the unmistakable richness of delightfully Ukrainian baked ham and perogies with all the fixings. Patricia and Alex have created their imitable specialty as if it were a Christmas feast! Hours later, while lesser hearts are flagging and calling it quits, you gamely board the bus for the last port-of-call, Jenny and Franks’ place for homemade chocolate cheesecake with a fresh raspberry coulis and newly whipped cream. Three kinds of coffee and four kinds of liqueur and your wretched school lunchtime memories of noodles in a mug, slurped while you patrol the hallways on supervision, have faded into the dark of the night in a mist of satiation and the smile lingers on your face for the entire weekend.

At least that’s the wonderful image I had put in my head as I approached yet another unfamiliar term and task: multimedia sharing sites and mashups.

A cursory look did support the progressive supper metaphor as teachers can pick and choose, from a variety of Web 2.0 tools and immerse widely or deeply to create, edit, annotate, collaborate and then share their work with the world. The results of this “pick from the best approach” can result in a satisfying tech feast, custom designed to the user's goals, abilities, and personal tastes.

This site defines multimedia sharing sites as those sites that “facilitate the storage, sharing, and sometimes creation of audio, images/photos, and video. “

Why are multimedia sharing sites exploding in popularity?

Storing audio, pictures, videos and multimedia files on your computer eats up a lot of your storage space. Sharing these files from your computer is slow and your computer could stall or crash while you are waiting. But by uploading media onto large storage capacity web-based hosts, you can directly post your media into your social networking sites. This service eliminates the worry about expense, site maintenance, and your personal files crashing from too many downloads.

A mashup takes multimedia sharing to the next level as it combines functionality or content from existing sources such as Web Services (through the use of API’s), RSS feeds or even just other Websites (by screen-scraping). This mixing and matching of media gives users many more possibilities for customizing and presenting their messages.

Lucking (2008) for example, explains how he uses a variety of tools in a map-making class.

Mashup is a new technology term used to describe a web application that combines data or technology from several different sources. You can apply this concept in your classroom by having students create their own mashup maps. Google Maps provides you with the simple tools, map databases, and online help you'll need to quickly master this web-based application. All you'll need is a collection of student data that you'd like to translate into a high-tech, interactive, multimedia map (p. 58).

The beauty of the mashup is that students can collect data in a variety of visual, auditory, or print formats them choose from a variety of tools to contribute to a giant collaborative project, or to create their individualized one. This then can be archived on a web site and shared with other communities. When Dad comes home and asks Matt, “What did you do in school today?” he can show him on his home computer.
The Pedagogy of Multimedia Sharing

According to Johnson (2009) “postliteracy is a return to more natural forms of multi sensory communication speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats” (p. 21).

While our students have always had access to the web, the emerging Web 2.0 tools have transformed it from a read only source into a read-write medium (Richardson, 2006). Ten years ago digital editing required expensive software and expertise. Which has changed with the availability of free video editors on personal computers. (Hammond, T., & Manfra, M., 2009). They explain:

Between both Web-based and locally housed software applications, fluent technology users can create multi media collages that can be treated with video effects, uploaded to video sharing services and tagged with descriptors, and commented on by friends and strangers alike. The toolbox for student creations has expanded the curricular possibilities for making content. Students can now share their conceptions beyond the classroom (p.59).

Think about that last statement for a moment. Here is a group of tools that are expanding curricular possibilities. Or here is technology creating curriculum. This is a profound shift from content driving curriculum, the paradigm from the previous two decades. In turn, these tools that create possibilities for making content are driving 21st Century learning. It is in this expansion of curricular content that multimedia sharing is changing pedagogy.

For some educators, this may be akin to feeling overwhelmed by the salad stop during the progressive supper. For others, it may be the most delightful course of all; tasting and sampling from a variety of tech delights that no one individual teacher could ever cook up on one’s own.

Tools or Teachers?

Hammond and Mantra (2009) discovered that despite the smorgasbord of continually emerging the tools, their effective use still comes down to the individual teacher’s pedagogy, rather than the classroom just having the technology.

For example, the new Alberta social studies curriculum calls for students to interact directly with primary source material. In this model, the teacher’s role becomes that of a guide for the student’s interactions with the material. Although technology is infused into the curriculum, and provides a vehicle for communicating, representing, inquiring, making decisions and solving problems, the student must be still be taught the processes of
• gathering and identifying information
• re-representations of dominant texts
• expressing and creating
• classifying and organizing
• analyzing and evaluating
• speculating and predicting.


Hammond & Mantra (2009) also noted that as the teacher is prompting students to interact with the content and as they are actively engaged in concept formation, the instruction is more learner centered. Additionally, as teachers prompt students through thoughtful questioning they help their students develop analytical skills and deeper conceptual understanding. They offer the caveat however, that

the success of the instructional strategy hinges upon the instructor’s ability to locate appropriate materials and structure their use for students. Technology greatly expedites this process, but—unlike using technology to transmit information in the giving mode—the prompt succeeds or fails based on the teacher’s ability to manage the students’ investigation of the material (p. 60).

So the lesson from the research is that a key to managing this multimedia feast is by beginning the process with intentional reflection on how the tools being explored can open the curriculum, and rather than merely becoming the curriculum.

The Cocktail
My personal journey to learn Voicethreads was one of more painless of my new tool learnings. I was so taken with Tara's that she posted early this week, that I wanted to try it out. Thanks Tara!

The Appetizers
First I went to Wikipedia to see what it was I was about to attempt. There was too much detailed info there so then I went, as rookies are wont to do, to Google. There I found teachers’ blogs and class examples. This was much better. Thankfully there seemed to be only one Voicethread host so I went there and looked at all the tutorial videos. Looks easy enough. But haven’t I said that in every posting about a new tool?

I gathered my photos, clicked record and started making my dogs talk. (The OPPT girls would love doing this part with their baby collages!) Then I wanted to have Odin mark with the Doodle stick thing where he thought the rabbit went.

Well there was a snag. I returned to the tutorial three times and still could not figure this one out. Why do I always think that I am to blame as a first response to something not working…well probably because 90% of the time it is. Remember my trouble with remote controls? As I had skimmed along the explanations, I thought I had read something about paying. Is the doddle stick an upgrade? I really don’t have time to figure this out now, so I put a mental yellow sticky on this question and hope one of you can help. But in the end the dogs told their story and that was a good start.

I also asked my family and emailed a lifeline. Nobody had ever used Voicethread. Dead end. But it was a lot of fun to do and my students will love it. Sadly, it is blocked from our server, yes, nerd that I was, I went to my desk today. Most of this fun stuff will be, and yes it can be unblocked but our techs are so overworked as it is, I feel it will have to be a "movie and dinner" type request.

Oddly though when I went to research multimedia sharing /mashup sites I had trouble finding anything current on the typical Alberta sites. Yes I did the rounds: ATA, AB ED, (Note that their graphic is a kid at a chalkboard!!!) in Specialist Councils: the ED Tech one is shockingly empty and not kept up: PDF files empty, last year’s conference info, and the newsletter link empty! Shocking.

Even the Alberta School Library Council’s wiki had that “store is abut to close “ empty feeling. But Dianne Galloway-Solowan’s (my former librarian/colleague), Joanne De Groot's and the library staff's blog was great and I harvested the blog list for one I had not yet seen. The ASLC newsletter was very good but there was only one available and nothing current. Our own division was terrible and none of our AISI projects were about media literacy.

Edmonton Catholic 's was one of the better resources for media anything, at least in their online course info. Bites and Bytes, Winnipeg’s tech teachers’ newsletter seemed to have died when the editor retired two years ago!

And for LearnAlberta site you needed the district password and I don’t have it. Sorry not going back to the office a second time! But they did feature on their front cover “NEW” teacher workspace with a nice little video about how to use it so that could actually be a good place to start to collect and store tools that you want to pull from the site.

And just when I was finishing this up today I stumbled across the mother of all main courses.

Don’t’ You Just Hate That?

You took too many buffalo wings, ate far too many samosas, the baked brie with cranberry was yummy and warm and after three glasses of wine you want to call it a night, but then you get to the entree home and it’s your all time favorite! Janice’s BBQ slow roasted prime rib! Oh my, if only I ‘d have known ahead of time, I would have saved room!

Well this is what I felt like after having already chosen and reviewed my four little favorite mashup sites late into last night, and then today found the grand feast of summaries.

Gosh, I wish I were a more efficient searcher. What do I do with all those “great” booked marked sites that now just seem well, good, How can I ditch a day’s searching?



Well loosen that waistband because you will need room for this.

The Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition, was completed this March and identifies six emerging technologies that will transform education within the next one to five years.

This report is remarkable as it details not only the hot new tools but describes applications for schools, links to current examples in schools and additional readings. I will give you bits of it here but it is worth a taste, especially for you advanced types. For me frankly most of it was over my head, but just understandable enough to freak me out a little.

Really, don’t the Smart Objects applications (as fully described in the report) sound a bit like the application for 666?

Here are excerpts from their summaries..they will get shorter as we peer further into time!

Coming In One Year or Less: Collaborative Environments
The report defines this as anything from simple web-based tools for collaborative work to multiplayer gaming environments, and from social-networking platforms to virtual worlds. The common features that unite collaborative environments are that multiple people can work within them at once; that users can leave evidence of their thoughts, and reflections on the thoughts of others; and that they can support users in any location at any time. The benefit of using these tools, the report states, is to foster teamwork and critical thinking skills. The challenge is for educators to be able to assess these types of skills in real time.

Application
As noted above, collaborative environments foster teamwork and collaboration, but students can also develop individual skills in such spaces. By practicing critical thinking in a more or less public forum, students can benefit from seeing what their peers have to say and from critiquing each other’s work.

In a world where factual information exists side by side with incorrect or misleading statements and opinions stated as facts, students must learn to critically examine what they see and hear. Collaborative environments provide workspaces in which such activities may take place in an open, constructive way, linked to classroom content. For example, social studies classes use iCue (http://www.icue.com/), a site produced by NBC News, to “collect” news stories, share them, and reflect and respond to the perspectives presented by the news media.

Social Studies example:
U.S. History. An 8th grade history teacher at Del Mar Middle School in California uses a wiki customized with primary source material, polls, videos, and images as a workspace for his students to investigate and analyze U.S. history. The students do research online, prepare their arguments collaboratively and singly in the wiki as homework, and then discuss their findings in class (see http://delmarhistory8.wikispaces.com/).

In One Year or Less: Online Communication Tools

The tools for remote communication that are used by professionals are easily adaptable to teaching and learning, and indeed we are seeing an increase in classroom use of programs for that purpose. Such tools make it easy for students to move past the classroom walls and connect with their peers around the world as well as giving them access to experts in fields they are studying. Online communication tools may be synchronous or asynchronous; based in text, audio or video; and enable one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many communications. Many may be used either from a computer or an Internet-enabled mobile phone, and some can be used from almost any mobile phone.

Application
The types of experiences made possible by online communication tools give students opportunities to learn in nontraditional ways. Debate, dialog, demonstration, conversation, and other means for exploring the many sides of a topic are all natural ways to interact using these tools. While a shorthand form of writing is commonly used in text messages, students still need to develop their ideas in order to express them; and tools that make use of audio or video encourage students to articulate their thoughts clearly in order to be understood.

Examples of the tools used to create these environments include Voicethread, which allows users to collect multiple voices and viewpoints in a single package, and Ning, which lets teachers set up workspaces that include web feeds to pull in relevant resources, chat spaces (synchronous or asynchronous), forums, profiles, shared documents, calendars, music, and many other tools--all with a few clicks.

Social Studies example
Students in Worcester, Massachusetts used Skype to communicate their experiences at the inauguration of President Barack Obama to fellow students in Massachusetts and Maine, and to a TV crew at WBZ in Boston, in real time. The middle and high school students at home asked questions using both video and chat in Skype.

In Two-Three Years: Mobiles: ( See my previously posted article on cell phones for schools)
Mobiles are already in use as tools for education on many college and university campuses. At the secondary level, nearly every student carries a mobile device, making it a natural choice for content delivery and even field work and data capture. New interfaces, the ability to connect to wifi and GPS in addition to a variety of cellular networks, and the availability of third-party applications have created a device with nearly infinite possibilities for education, networking, and personal productivity on the go. The combination of available applications and a device that our students carry anyway provides an opportunity to introduce them to tools for study and time management that will help them in later life.

Application
One recent feature — the ability to run third-party applications — represents a fundamental change in the way we regard mobiles and opens the door to unlimited uses for education, entertainment, productivity, and social interaction.

For example, language learners can look up words; practice listening, speaking, and writing; and compare their pronunciation with a native speaker’s. Graphing calculators display 3D graphs that can be rotated with a finger on the touch screen or viewed from different angles by tilting the phone. Detailed reference materials for science or astronomy include the ability to supplement information and illustrations with online sources. The variety and quality of educational content is growing at a fantastic pace.

The implications for K-12 education are dramatic: the potential for mobile gaming and simulation, research aids, field work, and tools for learning of all kinds is there, awaiting development.

Social Studies example
Students will be using Mscape (http://mscapers.com) to create media maps of historical sites in and around the Holburne Museum and Sidney Gardens. Using cameras and mobile devices, the students will develop materials that can be used to raise interest in the site among the community.

In Two to Three Years: Cloud Computing
The cloud is the term for networked computers that distribute processing power, applications, and large systems among many machines. Applications like Flickr ,Google YouTube, and many others use the cloud as their platform, in the way that programs on a desktop computer use that single computer as a platform.

Cloud-based applications do not run on a single computer; instead they are spread over a distributed cluster, using storage space and computing resources from many available machines as needed. “The cloud” denotes any group of computers used in this way and is not tied to a particular location or owner, though many companies have proprietary clouds. “Amazon’s cloud,” for instance, refers to the computers used to power Amazon.com; the capacity of those servers has been harnessed as the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and can be leased from Amazon for a variety of purposes.

Applications
We are just beginning to see direct applications for teaching and learning other than the simple availability of platform-independent tools and scalable data storage. This set of technologies has clear potential to distribute applications across a wider set of devices and greatly reduce the overall cost of computing. The support for group work and collaboration at a distance embedded in many cloud-based applications could be a benefit applicable to many learning situations.

Education example
CloudTrip is a fledgling directory of cloud-based applications, sorted into categories. The Education listing includes applications for testing, student portfolios, digital storytelling, and more.


These last two are so far out there I can barely understand what they are. Pretty mind-blowing! School Divisions have a lot of catching up to do in their filtering policies!

In Four to Five Years: Smart Objects
Whatever the technology that makes a smart object smart, the thing that makes it interesting is how it connects the physical world with the world of information. A smart object carries with it much more information than is obvious to the eye: smart objects can be used to digitally manage physical things, to track them throughout their lifespan, and to annotate them with descriptions, opinions, instructions, warranties, tutorials, photographs, and any other kind of contextual information imaginable. Smart objects that can be used to control computers are beginning to enter the market, opening the door to a range of new interfaces shaped like everyday objects.

Application
For Social Studies: Students examining tagged cultural objects brought into the classroom could use handheld devices like the iPod Touch to call up a wealth of information, including photographs, maps, video and audio recordings, related to the object they are holding.


In Four to Five Years: Personal Web
The personal web refers to both a collection of technologies and a way of thinking about online content. Described in the 2009 Horizon Report as part of a trend that began with simple innovations like personalized start pages, RSS aggregation, and customizable widgets, the personal web is a term coined to represent a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it; but part of the personal web is the underlying idea that web content can be sorted, displayed, and even built upon according to an individual’s personal needs and interests.

Application
For student research: Using a custom social networking application like Elgg, teachers can create a class- or school-wide student network where research links, discussions, notes, media files, and other information can be shared in a protected environment.

Are you full yet?

So which course in the progressive supper is your favorite?

In my research I came upon list after list and quickly realized I would have to limit my discussion to a few that I would actually use in my OPPT Program. There are strengths and weaknesses to each site so there is no one-stop shopping. You have to determine your teaching objectives and begin using and evaluating those that fit your context the best. Rather than me using blog space and talking about sites I haven’t tried, you can check out another great find that is very recent and pre-vetted for you!

Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning



The "Top 25" Web sites foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, Web-based sites that are user friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover.

My favorite demonstration of 50 tools has to be Alan Levine’s COGDOGROO
where he takes a story of his dog, Dominoe and presents it in 50 different ways using 50 tools. Amazing!

But let’s zoom back from what’s possible to what’s actually doable.

My students work on their core subject as well as on their CTS parenting courses for high school credit and because they are only on site two afternoons a week, time is precious and we have to maximize their contact. Therefore, I am always encouraging them to create a demonstration of their learning in a way that could be used for more the one subject.

For example, if they need to write an essay on “My Parenting Style”, for the Parenting course, they could also submit it for their English Language Arts course as a personal essay. I can envision however, huge opportunities in using multimedia and mashups for multiplying their course responses with much less effort than a written revision, and gain web skills at the same time. The tools I have chosen all provide for learning in multiple modalities, developing a public voice, making connections with others around the community of the world, and comparing their own ideas with those of their peers.

Thanks to Naomi Harm for presenting links to these four sites as well as many other mashup/multi-media sites.

Here you can see 4 of Levine’s 50 versions of the Dominoe story!

Animoto

This tool analyzes an uploaded set of images and creates a "professional" music video based on a secret artificial intelligence logic. It’s very easy to create elegant picture shows.

In June I took my girls to a petting farm in the country and they brought their toddlers along. We had a fabulous day petting and feeding and picnicking and riding the hay wagon. Between all of our cameras we must have had 500 photos. The best I could do in the time we had left in the year was to say, here is the iphoto file, make a file for yourself and burn it. Well like that happened!

So Aminoto would be ideal as a visual reflection of that trip. The students would have to make some hard editing decisions to pick only 15 photos for their slide presentation. Also the music, which is automatically synched to the pics could be their own or chosen by the program. Their choice of music would provide another layer revealing their interpretations of the trip.




One True Media
This effortlessly combine photos and video clips with words and music to personalize your story. Students can quickly share in the online slideshow or get as creative as they want with the video montage. They can also upload images and audio for a story track. They can then embed in blogs or directly post to YouTube/Google video, mySpace, Google Groups. There are also great template choices.


In OPPT we have weekly workshops with guest speakers that address topics that are reflective of our particular group’s need at any given semester. One True Media could be used as a log for the workshops. Let’s say the topic at hand is choosing appropriate toys fro your toddler. The students could video the speaker from their cell phones or our cameras, they then could research additional photo or video examples of the toys discussed that would be relevant for their particular age and stage of child. Finally, they could add a podcast or home video of their personal experiences with the toy. These could then be posted and provide a customized resource for the next group of students in the same toy stage for the next semester.



Zentation
This might be called a mashup- it allows upload of Powerpoint files to Slideshare and synchronization to video uploaded to Google video. My OPPT students could use this tool when they do their presentations of our program to the school board. This could be posted to our wiki and they could add to this presentation. Also the board would love this!


Watch my favorite example (besides Dominoe):

What Old People Do For Fun

What old people do for fun 0:40 A comical how-to-guide for drivers

Zoho
Part of the Zoho suite of online productivity tools, Zoho Show provides a clean PowerPoint like interface for creating slide shows. Or you can directly import a PPT file.
Applications for my OPPT students: a jazzed up power point. The best advantage is editing from their homes. From the photos they have taken in our photography class, the students could compile their portfolios. Other students and I could critique them. This has great potential for our non-attendance student-directed program, the brand new moms who loss a semester, and for my travelling students. They could contribute, post their portfolios critique theirs and others, and basically complete the class from afar.

For this Zoho only I have pulled list that demonstrates the virtues of this program.

1 Access, import, edit and share presentations from anywhere and anytime
2. Simple, easy to build, edit and share
Build and edit presentations on-the-fly using WYSIWYG editor.
3. Share and Collaborate
Share your presentations with your friends/colleagues and the shared presentations can be viewed/edited with just a browser.
4. Maintain versions of your presentations
Maintain multiple versions of your presentations and track the changes.
5. Present from Remote
Give a presentation to a client who is half a globe away. Do your demos while at your seat.
6. Create slideshows and embed in your blog or website
Make your presentations public. Embed them in your blog or website for easy viewing of your readers.
7. Draw using Shapes, Symbols and Flowcharts
Draw diagrams using hundreds of symbols, flowcharts images stocked in our design gallery
8. Apply Cool and Elegant Themes
Apply some pre-built cool and elegant themes for your online presentations
9. Use Extensive Editing Capabilities (Text, Image, Bullets etc)
Images can be rotated/flipped and there are lots of bullet types to choose from
10. Flip, rotate and position your images
Flip, Rotate and position your images as wish in your presentations using Image Properties.
11. Jazz up presentations with ClipArt images
Jazz up your presentations with some nice ClipArt images spanning across various categories
12. Chat with a participant
Chat with a participant as and when required during the course of presentation.
13. Choose from variety of slide views
View your slides with three different slide views offered in Show 2.0
14. Import presentations
Import your presentations with better quality and without formatting issues
15. Export to HTML
Export to html for off-line viewing.
16. Import images from Flickr
Pull publicly shared images from your Flickr account into your presentation.
17. Manage your presentations
Organize, Share and Tag your online presentations
18. Search for texts in presentations
Search a text on slide contents, titles, headers and footers.


These tools are ideal for my program. The features of remote access is critical and the formats are easy and rewarding. Connecting these tools to students' interests is motivating and the social benefits of collaboration would spill over into the students’ shared parenting/student/peer roles. And these are such fun tools to use. I could see the students also using them at home for their personal use as the line of school/personal work fades.

The cautions I would note are the same as for any of our public sharing tools that have been discussed in many places on our blogs and readings: Privacy, inappropriate postings, time, always time, to learn and practice, and internet access for some. I think that the self-directed constructivist aspect and collaborative spin offs would far outweigh these concerns. The growth of self worth would also be rewarding to see as students, with the help of these tools, produce quality presentations. Plus these presentations would be valued keepsakes for the students and their families. These projects could also be shared with the other Parenting Teen Programs such as Terra in Edmonton.

Finally, these tools aid in the development of these often marginalized students’ 21 st Century skill development of organizing and managing, content collaboration, curriculum sharing, media sharing, virtual environment, social networking and communication.

After all, it’s time my girls were invited to the progressive supper!




References

Hammond, T. C., & Manfra, M. M. (2009). Giving, prompting, making: Aligning technology and pedagogy within TPACK for social studies instruction. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [Online serial], 9(2). Retrieved July 28, 2009, from http://www.citejournal.org/vol9/iss2/socialstudies/article1.cfm

Johnson, D.. (2009, July). Libraries for a Postliterate Society. MultiMedia & Internet@Schools, 16(4), 20-22. Retrieved July 28, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1800924611).

Lucking, R., Christmann, E., & Wighting, M. (2008). Make your own mashup maps. Science Scope, 31(8), 58-61. Retrieved 28, July 2009, from Education Full Text database.

Richardson, Will (2006). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.