I have an app called Fragment that does all sorts of odd things to photographs. I used it this week for two Daily Create assignments over at DS106. The first was to “app up” a silhouette, but I abandoned the shadow idea in order to play around with the “app up” part of things. I […]

I’m not sure how it happened but sometime around Thanksgiving, I fell off the DS106 Headless Course Wagon Train and bumped my head. Prior to that, I was deeply engaged and deeply involved in the creative storytelling adventures that unfolded, from audio podcasting to gif creation to … well, the gamut of ideas ran far […]

I attended an interesting session with co-facilitated with friends Ian and Greg (whom I met when they were facilitating the Massachusetts New Literacies Initiative). The session dealt with documentary poems (see Ian’s post about the session), and how to guide students to research a historical figure or time period, write a poem, and then use […]

The Daily Create for DS106 was to create a video promo for DS106 Radio. I am still getting used to the updated iMovie, which comes with expanded “movie trailer” options. Here, I took clips from the radio-infused Air Heads and popped it into a trailer template, and created this bit of video anarchy: Peace (in […]

This was more for fun than for anything else. But in Seattle a few months ago (sorry, this post was in my draft bin for a long time, I guess), a friend of mine (Janet Ilko) from the National Writing Project joined some family members who lived in Seattle. She was with some young cousins, […]

As part of the Make/Hack/Play mini-course I have been participating in, I wrote a song and then created this reflective video of my writing process. Well, a friend from the summer’s Making Learning Connected MOOC — Bart Miller, who is also a musician — took my song and remixed it with some composition software. I […]

A few weeks ago, after we aired our Merry Hacksters Radio Show for DS106, my colleagues and I agreed that we would also release most of the individual radio files and segments so that in the spirit of the show — which is about hacking for change and remixing for good — anyone could take ...

Yesterday’s Daily Create for DS106 asked us to use mixed media, with the topic of eyes and stars (actually, the prompt read: Ode to your eyes: the stars of today.). I took both eyes and stars sort of literally but struggled for some time with the mixed media element of the prompt. In the end, ...

I’ve been swamped with prepping for two workshops this week — last night, I did a three hour session around digital citizenship and today, I am helping to lead a session around digital storytelling — that I have lost track of where we are in the DS106 Headless Course (still working with video, I think). ...

We explored the concept of the Learning Walk this summer with the Making Learning Connected MOOC — the idea that you walk with a camera and take images of what you see. In DS106, the term was PhotoBlitz. It’s sort of a visual Slice of Life. You pay attention with a level of detail you ...

As I continue my exploration of video as text via DS106, I was intrigued by a growing collaborative document that was started in a previous DS106 group that examined the various genres of videos on YouTube. Going through the list reminded me again of how vibrant and creative people are in making videos, and how ...

I am bit behind in my DS106 assignments (I know, that’s OK) and this week’s theme is all about “reading movies” by having us analyze video clips from films. I love that they shared out Roger Ebert’s classic “How to Read a Movie” piece, which really digs deep into the contextual and compositional art of ...

A glimpse at some writing I did this weekend in between baseball games, Halloween parties, assessing student writing, and being a father. The Daily Create at DS106 yesterday asked us to begin a story about the “sky never being the same” and I had this idea of our perceptions of the solar system being upended. ...

Two of this week’s Daily Create for DS106 built off the theme of the Open Web, and the main assignment this week for the Headless Course was to create a story inside the web. I did share out my work around revamping some of the frontpages of large newspapers now owned by powerful men. The ...

Over at DS106 this week, the theme is telling stories “inside the web,” using tools such as Mozilla’s XRay Goggles to remix websites and retell the news or information. I decided to take three newspapers and tilt the front page towards the owners, sprinkling in news and product names as if the newspapers are being ...

On Tuesday night, the collaborative radio show venture that I was part of — The Merry Hacksters — had a premiere on DS106 Radio. I represented our group during the chat with Alan Levine and Christina Hendricks. The collaborative experience was interesting, to say the least, as we worked almost exclusively off Google Docs, Twitter ...

I’ve been working with three other folks on creating a collaborative radio show for DS106. Our name is The Merry Hacksters and our 25 minute show is about hacking and remixing in the world, for good. We have pieces about toy and game hacking, a view of Minecraft and remixing from a kid viewpoint, how ...

I am tinkering with an software program called, eh, LICEcap that allows you to create animated gifs for screenshots. I hosted the animated gif in Flickr, but to share the animated version from there, you have to navigate to “all sizes” and copy/share the original. A typical embed in Flickr doesn’t do the trick. And ...

Over at DS106, the Daily Create the other day was to create a fake news story in the vein of The Onion., with satire dripping off the page. How could I resist that? I decided to poke fun at Connected Educator Month, particularly with the idea of technology and what seems to be an overabundance ...

Tapestry, which is a neat online and app tool that allows you to create “tap-able” stories, just released a new tool called HieroGlyphy yesterday that me intrigued. You can now embed animated .gifs into the story itself. I adapted a #25wordstory of mine that I posted on Twitter earlier this week and used the new ...

This week, at DS106 Headless Course, I’ve been a little less active publicly and more active behind the scenes. Let me explain. I feel like I let more Daily Creates float by this week, given a hectic week at school and life. Now that the Daily Create idea is part of my daily cycle, not ...

My sixth graders have been working in collaborative groups to hack the game of chess, with new pieces and new rules on how to play. I’ll share more later as part of a larger collaborative DS106 radio project but this collage nicely captures some of the work they are doing to invent new board games ...

One of this week’s Daily Create assignments for DS106 was to write a haiku about Autumn. Well, Autumn has kicked into full gear here in New England, and the day I wrote this one was the blustery kind of day that even Pooh and Piglet would recognize. Winds begin to kick - I crouch and ...

Tapestry is a lovely site for making digital stories. When we talk about the power of minimal design, what I like about Tapestry is the simplicity of the storytelling, for both the writer and for the reader. The ability to set up “taps” creates a certain rhythm of the story. The simple fonts and background ...

(Created with Mozilla’s XRay Goggles) Yesterday’s Daily Create for DS106 asked us to “Write an intro for a documentary on culture and traditions of a fictional country.” Since we are kneedeep into Connected Educator Month, I thought I would amuse myself (at least) with a spoof intro for a fake documentary about The Connected Country, ...

The other day, the Daily Create asked us to list 20 ways that we document our learning. Sure, I could have gone the serious route. But … I didn’t. So, here using Haiku Deck as a way to connect to themes of “design practice” this week at DS106, is my Top Ten Ways to Document ...

One of this week’s assignments at DS106 this week is to summarize a movie, using only four visual icons. Since I went to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 with my son, the movie was on my mind. Finding four symbols to summarize a movie is difficult. You leave a lot out, and ...

Some folks at DS106 were posting the results of an assignment called a “photoblitz,” but I recognized it as our “learning walk” idea from the Making Learning Connected MOOC. In either case, the idea is the same: take your camera for a walk and collect photos of what you are seeing. I went out early ...

What have I been up to this past week with the Headless DS106? Other than watching my son create freeze-frame zombie scenes all around the first floor of our house with his Lego collection (Seriously, they are everywhere, and none of them have heads right now, and they all look like they are about to ...

Someone over in DS106 had created a rap for the Headless Course a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try, too. I’ve made the audio file of the Gone Headless song shareable and downloadable, so feel free to remix it and mess with it and do what you want with it. ...