Category: sister

Role Playing Annabeth Chase in St Louis (The Lightning Thief)

books, movies, sister, travel

Sarah created the following digital story today before school using VoiceThread about the book, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.” She role-played Annabeth Chase in a video we shot last Wednesday in St Louis using my iPhone. This is the first VoiceThread we’ve created which includes an embedded video and not just still images. Several of the photos in this VoiceThread were created using the $3 iPhone application Pano. She was required by her teacher to create some type of supplementary “teaser” about the book, which she also wrote about in a traditional book report she’s turning in today at school. All of the photos we used, with the exception of the book cover and movie poster, are included in this Flickr set.

If you’ve seen the movie version of The Lightning Thief, you know the writers changed the plot so Percy, Annabeth and Grover visit Nashville instead of St Louis. Sarah and I were VERY disappointed at this theatrical setting and plot change, since the scene at the St Louis arch was one of our favorites!

I’ve added links to this VoiceThread on both the Great Book Stories project wiki, and the Voicethread4Education wiki in the grades 3-5 category.

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Dad’s first episode for The International Cooking Show: Fondue!

dad, food, littlesister, sister

This evening my kids helped me create my first contribution to “The International Cooking Show,” sharing our favorite family recipe for fondue.

We recorded this in one take on my iPhone, and I edited it in iMovie ’09. I used the iMovie settings shown in Steven Sande’s post, “How to make iPhone videos sparkle with iMovie.”

The unedited version of the movie was almost 14 minutes long, with the stirring portions sped up the final video is 8 minutes and 14 seconds long. The free “royalty free music” I chose for this video was “Shiny Tech” from Incompetech.com. I noticed that in the video titles I actually misspelled the name of the recipe, it should be “Yodler’s Fondue” rather than “Yodeler’s Fondue.” I’m not going to go back and make those changes, however, since it would require recompressing and uploading the video again to YouTube!

Sarah recorded the entire video except the last two minutes, which were filmed by Alexander. She still needs to work on keeping the camera still and stable, but this is an improvement over some of her past recording efforts. We’re all continuing to learn together! It’s so fun to be able to put together a quick video like this on the fly, add a few edits, and then publish it online.

Apple technology makes multimedia authoring so easy!

If you have any gourmet chefs or aspiring chefs (we have the latter) in your house, please join The International Cooking Show wiki and add your own contribution!

Cross-posted to “Moving at the Speed of Creativity.”

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Fun playing in our record Oklahoma City snowfall

brother, littlesister, sister, weather

We shared a live webcast over Ustream yesterday on Christmas Eve of our front yard, as a record-breaking 14 inches of snow fell on Edmond and Oklahoma City! We recorded two segments during the day. The “Peaceful Christmas” Pandora channel was streaming as the audio channel for these webcasts.

18.5 minutes: Playing in the snow during the day

2.5 minutes: Playing in the Christmas Eve Snow at Night (with our camcorder’s “Night Shot” feature enabled)

Today we enjoyed a bit of sledding and more playing in the snow in our front yard. This was an image of PURE delight on Rachel’s face as we got ready for another sled run together!

Christmas 2009 - 097

If you’re wanting to order a hat like mine in this photo, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this was a custom creation I made several years ago when we lived in Lubbock using a stocking cap and a puppet. 🙂

Christmas 2009 - 117

Here is the Flickr slideshow of all the images we took on granddaddy’s camera yesterday and today. His Sony camera ROCKS. Someday we’ll get a camera that takes images this good! We’re fortunate he’s willing to share with us now!

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Cooking Holiday Sausage Balls (Int’l Cooking Show)

cooking, littlesister, sister

Sarah recorded episode #3 of “The International Cooking Show” today, demonstrating how to cook holiday sausage balls. Her sister, Rachel, joined in this episode which runs 7.5 minutes.

Background music for this video is “Malt Shop Bop” from Incompetech Royalty Free Music.

We used the same recipe for these that we’ve used since 2007.

Ingredients:

3 cups Bisquick
1 pound uncooked Jimmy Dean pork sausage
4 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp. dried rosemary leaves
1/2 tsp parsley flakes
Steps:

Cook the sausage in a pan, breaking it up into small pieces.
Combine all ingredients in a large bowl “meatloaf style.”
Form mixture into small balls, and place them evenly on a greased cookie sheet.
Bake for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees F.
Share and eat!

Please create your own cooking videos and add them to The International Cooking Show project wiki!

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Signing the Declaration of Indepandence

school, sister, socialstudies, technology

In my social studies class we got to sign the Declaration of Indepandence! You get to pick what type of writing you want. You can choose Colonist,American or Patriot. You can choose black and white or color. It will give some background info. too. Also you will need a printer for this activity. I think this will get the students involved in history and it is a very cool activity to do in class.

Here is the address for this site.

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Bremen Town Musicians featured in Edmond Sun

sister

Our local paper, the Edmond Sun, published photos in its print edition today of the youth involved in last weekend’s performance of the musical, “Bremen Town Musicians.” The November 20th article, “Animals come to life in FAI musical,” provides more background and one photo of the cast.

Bremen Town Musicians

Additional photos are available (thanks to Graddaddy) on my Flickr set for the performance.

Hopefully The Edmond Sun will run the photos from the print paper today online. Generally I’ve noticed The Edmond Sun doesn’t do as good a job as The Oklahoman / NewsOK to digitize all its content and make it electronically available.

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Sarah’s creation with Animation-ish at ACTEM09

sister, technology

Deborah Barrows’s took the following short video of Sarah at ACTEM09, sharing a quick animation she made for Cheryl Oakes using the software program Animation-ish by FableVision.

Way to go Sarah! Now I’m going to need to find time for Sarah to show me how to use Animation-ish, as well as her brother and sister!

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What Is your favorite Girl Scout Cookie?

poll, school, scouts, sister

I’m doing a survey for math and my survey is on What Is your favorite Girl Scout Cookie. I thought it would be cool if I could see the worlds point of view. The different kinds for my survey are Tagalong; Thin Mint; Trefoil; Samoa; Lemon Creme and Dosidos. I’m a junior Girl Scout. I have been in girl scouting since Kindergarten or a Daisy. If you have any questions about the taste of the cookies or if you have any questions about anything please feel free to leave a comment.

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YouTube Honors for Sarah’s video response to President Obama’s speech (<24 hours after posting)

sister, technology

Wow. I had no idea Sarah’s YouTube-posted response to President Obama’s speech would receive such a response. In the 35 hours that have passed since we posted this online, it’s been viewed over 26,000 times, commented on over 350 times, rated over 600 times. And we’re not even 2 days out. Here are the current “honors” given by YouTube, it’s a top “education” category video in over 20 countries presently.

YouTube Honors for Sarah's Response to President Obama's Speech

Thank GOODNESS I chose to moderate comments on this video. Good grief there are some heartless folks out there, commenting on YouTube. I’ve tried to filter just those comments which use profanity or are disparaging. I let some of the critical comments through too, if they weren’t too critical of Sarah directly. It’s good to see many people commenting in her defense in those cases.

At some point I may turn commenting off for this video, but for now we’ll let it ride. Is this a good idea to have put Sarah on YouTube? Bad things can certainly happen that are tied to the Internet, but overall I think predator danger fears are overblown.

Will Oprah see this video and want to interview Sarah? Will NewsOK? Will President Obama see it? Who knows… It is great so many people have watched it, and so many have left edifying and supportive comments. In moderating those comments, I’m affirmed more than ever that we are on a holy mission in education, and our work is SO important. In addition to helping people learn FACTS and IDEAS, we also must help others learn RESPECT and understanding. It’s really sad to see how cruel and mean some people can be. Thank goodness for comment moderation!

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Watch and Respond

brother, sister, socialstudies, technology

Alexander: Since you were not able to join Sarah and I to watch President Obama’s speech today “live,” I’d like you to watch the speech and then compose a response you can either post here on Learning Signs, record as a video on YouTube, or record as an audio message via AudioBoo. Let me know if you need help with either option 2 or 3. 🙂

Also check out Sarah’s response, and the comments others have left for her there. She may need to record a follow-up video to answer some of those questions!

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