Interview with Jaley B, Silver Medalist, Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award

Welcome to an interview with Jaley Bruursema,  one of the winners of the first-ever Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards. Jaley B, age 14, and a student at Augustus H. Burley Elementary School in Chicago, IL, won a Silver Award for Narrative Video. Jaley's project, Gone, was created in conjunction with co-authors Anna Gould, Teagan Letscher, Elyssa Saldana, and Avery Weiland. The students were provided with professional-grade tools and were encouraged to make compelling digital media projects that spoke to the issues they most cared about.


1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? My name is Jaley B. The Aspire Awards project I worked on with a group is called Gone (It is in the narrative section).

Silver Award for Narrative Video: Gone
Jaley Bruursema, Anna Gould, Teagan Letscher, Elyssa Saldana, Avery Weiland

2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? The project is a story in stop motion addressing the issue of child soldiers in Africa. There is no talking but music accompanies the motion and in between scenes are slides reading the written pieces of the story you are watching. The purpose of this project is to inform viewers about child soldiers.

3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people take away a thirst to help. As a group, we wanted the video to be horrifying enough to feel compassion and sympathy for these children, but not gruesome, so that audiences have no need to look away. We also wanted to demonstrate the great losses and sadness that happens in this situation but leave viewers with a sense of hope and a sense of obligation to donate money, protest, and do anything they can to recover areas that are influenced by this devastation. Of course it would be nice to win the competition, but it would be far better to lose and have a bunch of people do something than to win and have no one do anything.

4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do? I hope that they will be adequately informed and that they will not just walk away and think about the issue but walk away and do something about it.

5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?) We took a LOT of photos and piecing them together on the computer was a big portion of the project. Some had to be longer than others for a dramatic effect. We did not create any graphics digitally but we did traditionally. All the artwork that appears is something we made with paper. For our audio we used general tracks from Garageband and downloaded free instrumental and choral songs from the internet. We displayed our video on a school media gallery website and at Adobe’s TechXpo.

6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? The Aspire experience has given me a background in creating media that many people will view within a deadline. It has given me a little glimpse into what the world of professional media looks like. Now, going into high school and possibly doing more high quality media projects like Gone I’ll know what I’ll be doing. I am not entirely sure what my next steps will be but this project has been very fun to create and exciting to watch grow and I will definitely explore creating more media and media like this in the future.

Interview with Anny Liu, Adobe Aspire Award Winner

Welcome to an interview with Anny Liu, one of the winners of the first-ever Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Awards. Liu, age 17, and a student at Balboa High School in Redwood City, CA, won a Silver Award for Animation. Her project, LOOK, was created in conjunction with her co-author Janice Lee.

Here is the text of E-Learning Queen's interview with Anny Liu.


1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? 
My name is Anny Liu, and my Aspire Awards project is titled "LOOK". It's basically about how a conversation between two friends awakened a bunch of little creatures/spirits that represent the creativity that is put into designing everyday objects. 

LOOK
Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award Silver Award: Animation
Janice Lee and Anny Liu, Balboa High School

2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? This project is actually a collaboration with a few friends. We all thought that people usually think of art only in the spectrum of "fine art" and do not see how artistic elements can be found in almost everything around us. We hope to express that with "LOOK," and inspire people to look at the world around them. Using little cute creatures popping out of common objects and such, we tried to do that in a fun and interesting way so the viewers will smile and make their own realizations instead of us preaching to others about our ideals of art.

3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
 I hope that people will learn to appreciate the work and thought put into making everything around them beautiful. And I wish to show through the video that even mundane things actually are designed by someone. The video doesn't try to enforce any type of thinking to the viewers, but it would be great if it made them happy or inspired them to look at the world with a fresh perspective.

4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do?
Just "LOOK" :)

5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?)
 The videos were shot in HD with a flipcam. Since about half of the footage were picked spontaneously around the city and we wanted as much footage as possible to choose from, the camera had to be pretty mobile. The audio was actually a song that was made by Can Nguyen, who makes awesome electronic music and kindly let us use his track in our video. The creatures in the video were created in Adobe Illustrator and then placed into the footage with Adobe After Effects in 3D space, after I did some 3D camera tracking of the footage. It was a bit laborious, but the outcome was pretty neat. We shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to gain publicity. Thanks to the support of my friends, although "LOOK" was put up on the website many weeks later than the other videos, we still managed to generate a good amount of votes.

6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? I learned a lot through the Aspire project, and I will definitely keep in touch with all the amazing people I have met and worked with. My next steps are college and then into the real world, hopefully I will be able to work in a media-related field because I really enjoy the type of work and being with other amazing people who share my interest.

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Free download for E-Learning Queen readers: E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers

Interview with Dantorie Reeves, Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award Finalist

Welcome to an interview with an Adobe Youth Voices Aspire Award finalist, Dantorie Reeves, age 16, from Mt. Pleasant High School, San Jose, California. Adobe Youth Voices aims to empower youth in underserved communities around the globe with real-world experiences and 21st century tools to communicate their ideas, exhibit their potential, and take action in their communities. You can vote until June 8. 

1. What is your name and what is your Aspire Awards project? My name is Dantorie Reeves and I have two projects up for awards. One of the projects is a documentary called Martha's Soup Kitchen and the other one is an animation called The Ball Game. 

Dantorie Reeves, Aspire Award project

2. Please describe your project. What is it? What is the purpose? Well, [for Martha’s Soup Kitchen] my project was basically a couple of my classmates and I volunteering at a soup kitchen by serving drinks ,cleaning up, and also getting to know some of the clients. The purpose of my film was to open my community's eyes so that they can see that it doesn't take much to give back or help out our community or people that are less fortunate then us.

3. What do you hope that people will learn from your Aspire Awards project? What are your primary goals for the project?
I hope that people will learn that anybody can help other people. You don't have to be rich or even an adult because I'm not rich and I'm only a sixteen year old high school student. My primary goal is to get lots more people involved in the community and help get the hungry feed.

4. What do you hope people will learn from your project and ultimately do? I hope that people would ultimately just stop avoiding the homeless and hungry people and start trying to help them instead because even the littlest thing might help.

5. Describe the digital aspects of your project -- what kinds of video, audio, and graphics did you create? Where did you display them? Any social media sites? (Facebook, Google sites, Tumblr, Flickr, Orkut, blogs, your school's website, podcast sites, etc.?) On this film we used Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects to make the words in the background. After we finished the film I put it on Facebook, twitter, the school website. It is also on YouTube and our podcast on channel 28.

6. How will you use the Aspire experience to do more things? What are your next steps? This experience was really great so I am going to take this and hopefully make even better films. I loved seeing something that I made in a theater shown on a big screen [at the year-end event] and I really enjoyed watching films made by other students.

Free Resources for Community-Building / Youth Activities / Teacher Materials
Are you interested in activities that you can implement in your own community or school? Check out Good Deeds Society activities! They are available free and can be downloaded and shared.

E-Learning Success: From Courses to Careers -- 400-page e-book version totally free.
Printed library / personal copy version also available.

Kindle version here.

The Adventures of Tinguely Querer -- NEW reviews

Interview with Aashita Jadhav, School in Mobile, Innovators in E-Learning Series

Mobile learning via smartphone has been a possibility for learners since the earliest smartphones (T-Mobile Sidekick was an early example), but the the recent explosion in apps, access, and the essential ubiquity of mobile devices, there is a growing demand for instructional content that meshes with the learner's lifestyle and learning habits. In a smartphone world, developers can no longer simply try to make their content mobile-friendly (early example: smartphone science class). Developers have to think of the mobile environment first, and then make it also accessible via laptop. The best schools now must incorporate new strategies for delivering m-learning. One innovator in mobile learning is Aashita Jadhav, whose SchoolinMobile.org has developed a platform to enable expanded access to instructional content that is both engaging and effective. 

What is your name and relation to elearning / mlearning?

My name is Aashita Jadhav, the founder of the SchoolinMobile.org 

What is School in Mobile? 

School in Mobile ( SchoolinMobile.org) is a FREE educational platform (accessible by web and as an FREE Android App)

OUR MISSION - Every Student in the world to have access to learning material, the green way.

School in Mobile provides the following benefits:

•                Fast - Students can learn a chapter in less than 30 minutes including test.

•                Useful - Helps students pass the STAR test and thus helps improve the school rating.

•                Fun - Students get cool badges for getting good score from the quiz.

•                Green - As the content is in digital format , it helps the environment.

What needs does School in Mobile address?

I consider that we are fortunate to be at the time of  three big revolutionary shifts - - mobile, social and cloud. Every industry is trying to make the best use of these advancements. School in Mobile is helping the Education sector with this shift to make learning an engaging process.

Students have been caring heavy textbooks around for decades. Today technological advancement make it possible to change this.

School in Mobile provide ease of access , speed of completing a chapter and finally helps them pass the grade tests.

What kinds of devices does School in Mobile work on?

School in Mobile is practically available on all devices.

•                A FREE Android app is already present on Google marketplace.

•                For all other devices ( including Apple devices) , it can be accessed through the web link

•                We just launched FREE Chrome Web Store app

What are the underlying learning strategies and philosophies in School in Mobile?

School in Mobile is not just provider of content in form of books or videos.

It is an end-to-end platform for student to learn as well as test their knowledge.

Proven research shows that students learn by going through summary notes and retain the knowledge for longer duration.

School in Mobile provides

•                Ready to use summary notes in text as well as movie format. 

•                Once the students have studied a chapter at school. They can revise it on School in Mobile in less than 30 minutes including quiz test.

•                Engagement is increased by this quick and easy tool. Also the cool badges which students get from test makes it fun.

How can you overcome the problems of access to the cloud? What happens when students do not have wifi access to the cloud or wifi connectivity?

Currently School in Mobile is available on the cloud and accessible everywhere. We are working on the next phases to make it easy to download on the device making it available without wifi connectivity. This is crucial for developing countries.

What are the next steps for School in Mobile?

The  steps are really exciting for us.

We are working on enhancing  the platform by several ways like

•                Making  more grades, subjects and chapters available

•                Add capability to login using facebook and google accounts

•                Open the platform to allow teacher add content. We are partnering with more teachers . Any teacher can reach us at info@schoolinmobile.com

Also we are working to deploy this to other countries.

How can students and teachers try out School in Mobile?

You can download the Android App from Google marketplace.

OR 

Access the web version ( for all devices including Apple) from our website ( SchoolinMobile.org)