Storychasers

We've moved this learning community into a subdomain of our website (community.storychasers.org) and installed a Wordpress blog as our main landing page / content management system for our site. See the latest post for more details. Our learning community isn't going away, it's just moved. Look for more updates here soon. :-)

We're thrilled to announce today the formation of the non-profit corporation, Story Chasers, Inc. of Oklahoma. Story Chasers, Inc. has been created for the following educational purposes:

John Peters, Vicki Allen, and Rob Jacklin joined me this evening for a sixty minute online meetup via Ustream.tv and Skype (thanks again Ryan Gordon for the instructions) to discuss the StoryChasers project.

I've posted a podcast recording of our August 21, 2008, brainstorming session about StoryChasers.

Our next brainstorming session will be Wednesday, August 27th at 9 pm Eastern / 8 pm Central / 7 pm Mountain / 6 pm Pacific time. Again we'll convene via Ustream.tv and Skype. Please join us if you can!

Interested educators are welcome to join our third web-based meetup and brainstorming session for Storychasers this Thursday, August 21st. The past two meet-ups have taken place at 7 pm US Central time, this time we're going to move our meeting time back to 8:00 - 9:00 pm US Central.

It worked! We successfully used Ustream and Skype to have an online webinar and brainstorming session for Storychasers last night. Here is the archive on Ustream:

I'd like to invite everyone to a second Storychasers project brainstorming session this week, again on Wednesday evening. We'll meet online at the same time (8 Eastern / 7 Central / 6 Mountain / 5 Pacific) but this time meet in Elluminate instead of using a Skypecast. We had some mixed experiences last week with our Skypecast, so meeting in Elluminate sounds like a better option.

I would like to start a conversation about whether StoryChaser project participants should have a code of ethics. If we can be certain of anything in our digital world, we can be sure that the mainstream media is going to jump on any opportunity to amplify and showcase bad / inappropriate / destructive uses of digital technologies by kids to further reinforce the commonly held public perception that all technology is evil and kids shouldn't be on the Internet at all.

I have two books on Digital Filmmaking that have been helpful. They are:

"The Director in the Classroom" by Nikos Theodosakis

"Digital Filmmaking for Teens" by Pete Shaner and Gerald Everett Jones

Here are a few of the regular segments my students do during our weekly broadcast. Some of the segments are weekly and some are rotated every other week or so. (Our broadcast mascot is Mibby our school mascot is the Mustang)

Weekly Segments:
>Announcements
>School Happenings
>Birthdays
>This week in History
>Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader
>Local/National News (depends on what's happening in the world such as major weather or news, etc...)

Rotated Segments:
Mibby's Believe It or Not (Think Ripley's ...)
Mibby's Mythbusters (Think Mythbusters)