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E² – Entertainment & Education : At Home Entertainment Magazine ~ Edition 1

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Escape into a world of stories, calming moments, and cultural adventures, all from comfort of your living rooms and kitchens.

Phew!  What a couple of weeks it has been as we all settle into self-isolation.  To give those who wish it an escape to the land of the nerdy, Lori and I are focusing on sharing fun, calming, and educational distractions.  Some of these are things we are creating, and some are things that we find that other creative individuals and educators have crafted. 

E² – Entertainment & Education Newsletter : An At Home Entertainment Magazine

Over the coming weeks, we will regularly share a new E² – Entertainment & Education Newsletter with fun, calming, and educational things we find or create.

Sign Up for the Newsletter

You can also tune in throughout the week, as we share positive, calming, and uplifting content to the following Facebook pages and groups:

  • StoryToGo – live virtual concerts, poetry, bedtime stories, storytelling tools, music, and anything that is arts and storytelling related
  • Watch and Learn – educational videos
  • Roamancing and Women Who Love to Travel – anything related to learning about a culture or that take people on virtual adventures
  • Ahimsa Media – a mix of educational tools, remote work tools, and just plain light-hearted moments in Lori’s and my workday

We invite you to join us in these spaces and to share posts of your own. 

A Virtual Children’s Yoga Adventure Story to the Seashore

On the note of calming, Lori created a beautiful and relaxing children’s story using Elementari this past week. The story takes children on a virtual yoga adventure to the seashore.  While this is the perfect activity read to enjoy with your kids, my Mom and I enjoy it too and have read it several times.

To begin the story below, hit the play button on the image that follows. As you watch, read, listen, and enjoy the story, wait for the flashing white arrow. Click on it to turn the pages. If it does not appear, then click the left arrow on your keyboard to flip the page. Also, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for things to click on within the story itself.

As I mentioned in last week’s email, Elementari is at present offering teachers and parents free premium access to their interactive storytelling platform.  It is a great tool for teaching reading, writing and coding to kids and is an awesome creative outlet for people of any age.  Have you always wanted to create a children’s book?  Now is your chance!

Teachers and parents that wish to request premium access, can do so via this link.  There is also an open educational teacher’s guide to Elementari, that is a work-in-progress.

Finding Your Undiscovered Potential

Lori also wrote this great article on The Apple: A Lesson in Finding Your Undiscovered Potential, this past week.

This article very much echoes our approach to this time of at-home-adventures, by taking on new challenges and trying new things.  In my neck of the woods, I am finally teaching myself to play the Nuu-Chah-Nulth drum that I was given by the Tseshaht First Nation. I am proud to have thus far attracted an audience of Ella (my cat), Linus (my Mom’s dog), and Hugo (the cat that lives next door). Ella and Linus have also both expressed interest in being part of the band.

Meanwhile, not having any human yoga students to teach at present, Lori has taken to teaching yoga to her dog, Mango.

Naturally Salt Spring on Seeka TV

Finally we are thrilled to share that Season 1 of Naturally Ours, Naturally Salt Spring just launched for free on Seeka TV!  If you are like us, escapes into nature are what you need at the moment, so we hope this virtual one to visit the people and parks of Salt Spring Island helps.

Tune in on Seeka TV

LIVE From Your Living Room

We have been so impressed by all the live concerts and sharing of storytelling resources for free that has been going on this past week or so, as we all work to #FlattenTheCurve.

Below is just a tease of what’s online, waiting for you to discover:

  • Seeka.TV – this is a great source of indie web series, that you can watch and enjoy for free.
  • Vancouver Singer-Songwriter Jody Quine has been doing random live jam sessions on Facebook throughout the week, and recently did a live concert on Fresh Magazine’s Facebook. You can watch a recorded version of the concert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfJprCU4glE
  • Isabella Mori tuned us into the #vss365 storytelling hashtag on Twitter. From Isabella, “#vss365 stands for ‘very short stories, 365x a year.’ Each month, a person is responsible for giving prompts, and off you go!” This month the theme for the stories is #cosy.
  • Patrick Stewart is reading Shakespearean Sonnets on Twitter.

School at Home

It has been heartwarming to see all the resources that people and organizations are providing for parents and teachers, as students move to schooling from home for the time being. 

Toronto Zoo

Aside from Elementari, we have listed other free resources that we’ve found for parents and teachers to aid in students learning from home:

Courses for Teachers

Below are a few free courses for teachers and other adult learners that colleagues at BCIT and UBC have sent us this week:

If you know of an artist, artistic community, educator, or educational community that are sharing things to help entertain and educate us as we self-isolate, please let us know about it, and we will share what they are up to in one of our upcoming E² Newsletters.

Online Exercise Classes

As parks, gyms, and exercise studios close for the present, we have to thank organizations that are offering free at-home exercise solutions.

Two such organizations that we’ve found this past week, include:

  • Down Dog Yoga App – which is free for everyone until May 1st, and to school and health care communities until July 1st with your school or health care email. I initiated BCITs free access this past weekend, so those of you in the BCIT Community can sign up with your my.bcit.ca email.
  • YMCA 360 – The YMCA are offering their On-Demand Exercise Videos for all ages for a limited time.

Virtual Travels

While sadly, we are not able to travel and explore distant lands at present, there are ways for the time being that we can learn about cultures around the world from our own living rooms, while we #FlattenTheCurve by staying at home. Below are just a few virtual travels that we’ve recently enjoyed:

Stay safe and well, and reach out if you need help.

With healthy wishes from Erica, Lori, Ella, Mango, and the rest of our Ahimsa Media, StoryToGo and Roamancing team.

Launching a new YouTube Channel on the Art and Business of Storytelling!

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We are most excited to share more of the thought provoking material we have been building up through our storytelling adventures, via the new StoryToGo YouTube channel that we have just launched! This is for all Storyworld creators, whether you work in traditional, digital media, marketing, or education, and whether you are an at the forefront or a behind the scenes person. Or perhaps you are even someone who would just like to grab a story to go! Take a look at our teaser video of what’s to come, hosted by our very own Erica Hargreave.

Ringing in 2020 with Storytelling and Digital Media Courses at BCIT

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As we ring in a new year, it had me reflecting on what is important to me, and this old proverb …

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Photographed by Cristian Palmer, care of Unsplash.

There is no greater gift that you can give yourself or another than learning a skill that helps pursue one’s passions. This is the reason why sharing knowledge is an important part of what we aim to do here with StoryToGo.

The Importance of Sharing Knowledge For Us

When I started speaking in 2008 about bridging the worlds of media, interactive and cross-platform storytelling, and digital media, it occurred to me that while inspiring people through my talks was great and all, to truly help people to take action, they needed a course giving them guidance and support while they build and craft their storyworlds.

Interactive Storytelling
Erica Hargreave and Caitlin Burns on a Panel on Convergent Storytelling.
Photographer: Liz Kearsley

A year later, after pitching the local post secondary schools, my first post-secondary school courses launched at BCIT and Capilano University. Since then my team and I have also built courses and workshops and taught community, undergraduate and graduate courses at Ryerson University, Humber College, and NVIT. In addition, we’ve helped build new programs and revise old programs. It has both been an honour to teach and share with others, and fulfills a passion of ours. We love teaching.

Creating Our Courses Online

In 2011, after speaking in Egypt, we recognized that to truly make a difference to people that could most benefit from our courses, we needed them to be available online.

Erica Hargreave speaking on ‘Real Time’ Storytelling at the UNWTO Conference on Working with Media in Challenging Times in Marsa Alam, Egypt.

Thanks to BCIT and our colleague Kevin Ribble, they were by 2013. This has also allowed Lori Yearwood to help build and teach those courses with me.

2020 Courses at BCIT

I am happy to share that as we move into 2020, we now have 2 online post-secondary credited courses and 2 intensive community courses offered through BCIT’s Broadcast Media and Communications Part Time Studies. All of our courses are project based, in which our students come out of them having built or built upon projects of their own that they are crafting for their future endeavours.

For those of you who are looking to give yourself and someone in your life the gift of learning this year, these are a few of the courses that we will be teaching in 2020:

Photographed by Ian Schneider, care of Unsplash.

More Coming on StoryToGo

Also keep your eyes peeled here as we will be launching the StoryToGo Classroom site later this year with mini online courses, and tailored online and blended courses for organizations from us and our rich group of storytelling friends and colleagues.

If you have a course that you would love to see offered through StoryToGo, please let us know in the comments, and if you wish us to tailor create a course for your organization, please send us an email.

Photographed by by Danielle Macinnes, care of Unsplash.

Raising a glass of whatever your preferred beverage to a happy and rewarding new year and new decade, rich in learning!

Learning Stop Motion Filmmaking With Lego

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As some of you may have guessed, we wear many hats. We are storytellers, educators, technologists, scientists, dancers, and marketers. We love that the work we do allows us to put on those many hats, and enjoy the different experiences and facets of our work, including still getting a little bit of kid time with Ahimsa Kids.

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Loving this book.

Recently with that, I had the opportunity to work with an intelligent and engaging 10-year-old, who once he finished his school work, we were able to dive into the world of edtech and stop motion filmmaking together. Stop motion is something he has a keen interest in, along with lego, and he’d just been given the Klutz: LEGO Make Your Own Movie book. It didn’t take long after flipping through the book, which was a 2018 Toy of the Year finalist, for me to become just as hooked as he was on the process. So the two of us embarked on making our own first stop motion lego film together.

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Leafing through the pages.

This was a fun cross-curricular project to embark on. In the process, my young student developed and wrote a story, learned to storyboard …

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Laying out a scene from the storyboard.

… and filmed a stop motion movie. We brainstormed and experimented with blocking and special effects. My young student’s huge assortment of lego helped with this, along with scene backdrops in the Klutz: LEGO Make Your Own Movie book and all sorts of items in the LEGO Movie Maker Building Kit (which he’d got for his birthday), from which we learned how to build an adjustable stand for our camera (aka smartphone).

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Utilizing one of the backdrops and our newly built camera stand.

Finally my young student troubleshot how best to record the various voice overs for the project, and he and I will eventually edit the stop motion film together – that piece we did not get to on-set, so are planning to get together to finish in the not so distant future. Lego does have a free movie making app to help with the editing process, called Movie Maker, but we decided to use iMovie for this, as earlier on the set, my young student had shot his first documentary and I’d taught him how to use iMovie to edit it.

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Setting up for a new shot.

I have to say, this was a lot of fun, and something I could see wanting to incorporate into my school, if I still taught in a school. With this, I could see this being a full language and media arts project, a station set up in the classroom for kids that finished their other work early, a makerspace activity, or an after school club. It is also a fun at home activity, as well as a great project for homeschoolers. I myself am now looking for excuses to play with making lego stop motion movies in our work – possibly in future tutorial videos for StoryToGo or for one of my Master of Educational Technology videos. My young student kindly gifted me the LEGO Movie Maker Building Kit, and I am going to buy the Klutz: LEGO Make Your Own Movie book for myself, my nieces and nephews, and a few of my friends’ kids, as this really is such a fun experience. I can see why Lori was so fascinated by her visit to the Laika Studios and learning about stop motion storytelling there.

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Using one of the backdrops to create the perception of flight.

If lego stop motion or stop motion in general is something that you’ve been having fun experimenting with, I’d love to hear any tips and tricks you may have, and to see your videos, if you want to drop your thoughts and links in the comments below. And if you have been creating lego stop motion or stop motion videos with your students, whether in traditional school or homeschool settings, I’d love to hear about how and what is working for you and your students, in the comments below.

Thanks! I hope you have fun with this!

Resource App for the Visually Impaired : Be My Eyes

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It makes us so happy to be able to highlight a FREE App that is of great use to the global community of the visually impaired, and uplifting to its volunteers. This app is accessible in more than 150 countries and in over 180 languages. The resource App Be My Eyes provides a connection between its approximately 113,800 blind/low vision and 1,919,500 sighted members. The blind can activate a call within the App using the VoiceOver accessibility feature. The call rings on a randomly selected volunteer’s phone that is matched based on language and time zone. The two are then connected via live video for the volunteer to help with a variety of possible scenarios. It is completely anonymous and users have said they feel relief knowing they are not bothering the same person over and over again for help, encouraging them to use it more.

A testimonial from the Be My Eyes App
Actually App user quote from the Be My Eyes press resources.

I myself (Lori) am a volunteer on the App and I recently answered a call where the visually impaired individual was about to put a big salmon in the oven, but couldn’t be sure that they had set the oven to the correct temperature. The individual held the phone up towards the oven where I was able to see that it read 420 degrees, instead of the 425 it was supposed to be. They adjusted the oven again and it was then 430 degrees. One more try and it was just right! The whole call took about 1 min and the individual on the other end was beyond grateful and thanked me for the work everyone is doing on Be My Eyes.

Visually impaired man video chatting to check the expiry date on a milk carton.
There is no way to check the expiry date on a product without the use of your eyes. Here, a visually impaired App user demonstrates making a call for help with that. (Image courtesy of the Be My Eyes press resources.)

There are stories featured within the App each week, sharing the many different ways the blind have used Be My Eyes for assistance. Some great examples include: reading the numbers on a blood pressure monitor, checking the colour of a tie, a call from a video transcriber to get context of the footage, distinguishing between shampoo and conditioner, helping to convert a PDF file into Word format, enabling a download to a phone where VoiceOver could read the document later, finding dropped items, and many other conundrums that many of us might take for granted.

With so many volunteers a call gets answered within a maximum time range of 30 seconds. As a volunteer you will not receive a call very often. Please consider becoming a part of this loving helpful community, but more importantly, spread the word within the visually impaired communities as human connection is so very important.

Nicole Hunter Making Radio Waves: A StoryToGo Student Success Story

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Nothing is more exciting than seeing your students’ projects start from scratch and then reach great heights. Nicole Hunter from BCIT’s Building and Engaging Communities course is doing just that! Under the guidance of instructor Erica Hargreave, Nicole set out to build a platform to share her family’s travel adventures and tips. Nicole has traveled all around the world with her four children, making her stories quite intriguing. Soon after building her website Go Far Grow Close, Nicole was featured on a radio interview with Martin Strong on Roundhouse Radio 98.3 Vancouver.

Nicole’s interview stresses enjoying family trips, not surviving them. She gives great advice on different styles of vacations based on the ages of your children. It’s clear she has a wealth of knowledge to draw on and is eager for others to share the same rewards her family has enjoyed through travel.

Take a listen for yourself and be inspired to try something new: http://cirh.streamon.fm/listen-pl-7874