Found this on Dan Pink’s blog:

I mentioned before how much I love the idea of turning assignments into creative briefs.

So what happens if you take a fairy tale that’s near and dear to all our hearts, and give it a new spin? While this wasn’t done by a student, just imagine if you allowed students to take the same story, and remix it with other genres. As film noir. As claymation. As series of commercials. As GoAnimate cartoon. As an episode of 24. As a Cloverfield/Blair Witch style movie. And so on…

Watch the video and see. By the way, I highly recommend you view this one in full screen mode.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

One of the nuggets that stood out to me from PETE&C was a comment made during a presentation by the two EdTechInnovators, Ben Smith and Jared Mader (I listed Ben first because he was left off the poster at the conference). They were describing how technology can be seemless in the classroom, not something you teach, but something that just… is. And one thing that they mentioned (I think it was Ben), was that he doesn’t feel like he gives assignments anymore, he gives creative briefs.

For example, if the students are expected to learn about different types of waves, he wouldn’t ask them to write a report, or to create a powerpoint, or to make a collage. He would ask them to demonstrate their knowledge. If they chose to create a video podcast with original music and lyrics, then so be it. If fact, so much the better.

I love the idea. Make it clear what the goals are. Make it clear what you’ll be assessing them on. And then give them some freedom. I think they’d certainly appreciate having the freedom to do some self-expression, and who knows what they might learn in the process….. in addition to the actual curriculum they were supposed to learn. Bonus perk, you aren’t wasting extra in class time on this. It’s up to them.

One other example, so long as we’re on a musical kick. Check out this video Lisa Thumann shared on Twitter.

You may say, “But the video doesn’t truly demonstrate their knowledge! I mean, could a student really learn anything just from this YouTube video?” I’ll let the author of the video respond, by sharing a comment he left someone asking that very question on YouTube.

This video was a project to summarize trig formulas and to create a song parody. It’s not intended to be a a study guide.

Here’s a suggestion for doing well in trig. Read from your textbook; don’t go on youtube to get your answers.

Warning: Once again, these are notes that I’m taking during a meeting which has a few presentations in it. Forgive the grammar mistakes, forgive the seriously informal voice, and most of all forgive the tangents. It’s just the way I interact with material I’m experiencing. Just go with the flow!

I’m taking notes at the NICE meeting, which stands for Northern Illinois Computing Educators. I haven’t been to one of these meetings for about two years or so. Some of the same crew and several people that I know from other places. In particular, I recognize a lot of faces from the Tech Forum conference I attended last week. Joe Brennen is going to be doing a Digital Storytelling presentation and Tom Donavan will be covering blogs and 21st century online tools. I think he’ll be doing a similar presentation to the one that I did with him at the SNAC meeting a few weeks ago.

I’m not sure the last name of the person who is presenting Digital Storytelling with Joe, but his first name is Guy and he’s doing a fantastic job of describing what it is and why they found it to be so signficant. They regisreted the name DigitalStories.org and have a website where students and teachers can put up their own digital stories. It has resources for creating digital stories and strives to provide a repository to provide inspiration for budding storytellers. It looks like there’s only around 10 stories right now, but every site has to start somewhere. It looks like it’s got a solid structure though.

Joe is on now and once again he’s starting off with an interesting example. He just showed the Fed Ex logo. He pointed out how there’s a subliminal arrow in it. We’ve all seen it, but we might not have noticed it consciously. He points out that the arrow is going to the right, which is good because that’s going ‘forward’. If it was going to the left, it would be ‘backward’, hardly fitting for a company that specializes in sending things out (do you see the arrow between the “E” and the “X”?). He’s also showing the IKEA commericial with the lamp. He used that example at Tech Forum, but I didn’t have enough battery to write about it. I’ll have to see if I can find a link. It’s amazing how well written it is, how subtley it gets to you. I don’t want to spoil it, but it really sends the message home that a Digital Story can be much more than just a voiceover.

Quote from Lucas, “If people aren’t taught the language of sound and images, shouldn’t they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read or write?” Before I go on, I know this is a day late, but Happy Star Wars Day! May the Fourth be with you! (sorry, but that cracked me up.)

Joe had Harold Ramis at his school giving a speech. One thing he said is that when he’s writing a movie, he usually writes no more than a page or two per day. If he writes five pages in a day, he takes the next day off. He really emphasizes just how important the scripting process is to the actual movie.

The seven elements of Digital Storytelling: Point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, the gift of your voice, the power of the soundtrack, economy, and pacing.

This is interesting, he has listed the Digital Storytelling Process. Write, Write some more, Storyboard, Locate Resources, Create, Share. He points out that only “locate resources” and “create” would take place in the computer lab. The rest of it is really beyond just sitting at the computer.I suppose the writing might be done in a word processor, but most student’s first instinct would be to open up iMovie first.

Going through David Jakes’ site right now and his resources. No question, David has a ton of stuff to browse through. Just a ton of content. JakesOnline.org Go visit there right now!

Every been to Kitzu? Looks like an interesting site. “Digital Kits for education.” Looks interesting, another site to explore (as if I don’t have enough to check out already).

Ok, storytelling time is over, time to move on to blogs/online tools. During intermission, a quick thought. I’ve never taken the time to create proper categories. I really have to do that. I mean c’mon, Musings and Grips? How lame is that?

This should be fun. I love seeing a group of people get introduced to this stuff.

Ok, I just got introduced and did a brief introduction to podcasting. They pulled up my blog and showed my podcast feed. It really looks awful! gotta fix that one quick. Ok, wow, that was easy to fix. Looks much nicer now.

As I was saying, I really love this stuff. I love seeing educators at the edge of their seat as they start to realize that they’re seeing something really new. Something that just might change the way they think about education. Lightbulbs popping up over people’s heads. We’re talking a ton about podcasting and I think we might have put the cart before the horse. We probably should have gone through the RSS thing stuff first. I’m not sure the people in this room who haven’t been introduced to blogging before quite understand the concept. It really does reimpress upon me the need to get EduCasters.net going. A podcatcher preloaded with select educational feeds would really lessen the learning curve.

Now we’re backing up to the beginning. What is a blog? “The unedited voice of a person.” Not to say that a single person doesn’t edit their own posts, but that there isn’t a 3rd party who goes through and edits something before it gets published. That’s a good way to put it.

Tom is talking about comments right now and saying that having a weblog that has the ability to permit a conversation to occur but turning it off sort of defeats the purpose. I do agree with him, but there’s obviously a ton of issues there. Someone is raising the point about Xanga that studnets are putting up photos and sharing too much personal information. I’m not sure which side of the fence she’s standing on though, whether that’s a teachable moment or whether it should all be turned off. It’s really a tricky situation. Tom is tackling the teachable moment issue, that it really represents an area that we need to be introducing in a formal way. We need to teach students how to interact in public areas in an appropriate, safe way.

Blah. Battery life dwindling. There’s something seriously wrong with this laptop. I really need to send it in before the Applecare expires. I just hate to be without it for five business days. Hopefully it will last through the end of the meeting.

Tom’s talking about RSS right now and explaining a bit about how it works. I just realized just how poorly my site identifies the RSS feed for the blog and for the podcast. I really should have more detailed instructions regarding how to go about subscribing.

Alright, the laptop died so I’m finishing this post from home. It was a great meeting. There’s some real bright people in that group who got right to the essential issues. I really have to get to more of those meetings. Big kudos to Guy, Joe, Tom and Charlene for some great presentations.

I didn’t mention her too much in my notes, but Charlene did a fantastic job of doing a quick recording, some instant editing and throwing it up a blog to show just how easy it is to podcast. I may have to steal that process if I ever do a planned presentation about podcasting!