Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Transmediated Story-Telling

A friend and I are currently teaching students about transmediation as part of a research project we are working on. The basic idea is to see how students engage with the writing process, if they are allowed to create prototypes of their narratives using more than just text.

We've been playing around with a few tools that are age-appropriate for students under 13, including Scratch, PiZap, Pixlr, PowToon, ThingLink, DoInk Animation and Drawing, and Piktochart. Here are few examples I made using a story I wrote a few years ago.




Thursday, February 11, 2016

Puttering with Raspberry Pi Zero

Today I took the plunge and got my Pi Zero up and running for the first time!  I haven't gotten it connected to wifi yet, but that's my next step.

First, I need to get a USB hub, because I don't have enough ports to accommodate a wireless keyboard and a mini wifi module.

Although I haven't created anything useful yet, I was able to create a silly Scratch program and experiment with Pi's version of Minecraft.  The biggest challenge, so far, has been using the tiny keyboard!




Thanks to a couple of blog posts by Lucie deLaBruere, I knew that I could hook the Pi up to a projector as a display output.

Since my projector was old, I needed to use an additional VGA to HDMI adapter, but it worked like a charm.

Lucie's advice to plug the projector in first and the power to Pi last allowed me to get up and running on the first attempt!