Jul

25

More from DEN National Institute

July 25, 2008 |  Tagged |

First, we’re going to start off with the video interviews I did with various from DEN including Lance Rougeaux, Hall Davidson, and Scott McKinney and from the DEN Stars themselves:

The important ideas are about building relationships, and building integration between streaming and Web 2.0 to help us learn, and lead to students being engaged and learning.

This was not a great stream due to me be stingy about bandwidth, and lowering the video quality. This was foolish, as the next day’s video of Steve Dembo shows that I could have gone ALL the way up on video and audio quality with no problem.

I’m also featured on a video from the Art Guy, Aaron Smith, on Academic Aesthetic:
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My favorite session so far was the one on geo-caching because it was so new to me. Bridget Belardi did a really great job explaining it to us, then taking us on an expedition to find a cache.
Here is our find:

We were taken on a tour of Washington, D.C. Wednesday night that started with sweltering temps and ended with a thunderstorm.

We had to go to the Kennedy Center since it was an indoor tour, but took a soggy trip up to the Lincoln Memorial to cap the evening.

We went to the “Green Screen”, “Chromakey”, or what Discovery calls the Insertion Studio. Mr. Foley (I know the irony of that is not lost on him) who is the cameraman there shared some fantastic tips for successful green screening (which you can do in Adobe Premiere Elements):

  1. Avoid corners or edges to prevent shadows, etc. which make the green background 3 dimensional.
  2. Light the screen (green background) and subject separately (2+ stop difference). The background should be lighter. They use fluorescents in the studio.
  3. There should be 8-10 feet between the background and the subject.

I took some shots for a new project doing a film on cyber-safety; watch how you are presenting yourself.

Tonight, we saw a preview of an upcoming series on comets. The producer, John Grasse, produced The Human Body, Pushing the Limits. We were all pretty tired, and probably were not as thoughtful as we could have been when he kindly offered up a conversation about how to tell non-fiction stories in a way that is appealing and understandable. The comet series (which started with BBC), used the hook of discussing how humans have viewed comets through the ages (anthropomorphizing things).

We’re working on projects on lessons that integrate Discovery Streaming. The projects, including mine, are here.

I’m having a great time, and meeting some great folks. We finished our last night together by finishing up our projects, and playing Wii bowling. I bowled a 175 the first time, but was pretty tired by the last round, and only did 119.


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