Two of my former professors at Harvard have described "understanding" in ways that I consistently go back to when I think about this word.  David Perkins has said that understanding is knowing both the parts in the context of the whole while also recognizing the whole as the sum of its parts.  Stone Wiske has defined it as being able to think freely and flexible with what one knows.  Yesterday when my brother sent me a New York Times article about Star Wars Uncut and its recent Emmy Award, this notion of true understanding immediately came to mind.

This amazing example of crowd-sourcing was started by someone at the online video site Vimeo.  The original Star Wars (A New Hope) was broken down, start to finish, into 15 second clips.  Then, users were allowed to pick a clip and recreate just those 15 seconds in any way they desired - animation, live action, claymation, flipbook - and submit it back to the site where the Star Wars Uncut team would pick the best ones and put it back together.

If you are even a casual Star Wars fan, it is easy to see that the people who participated truly understood Star Wars.  I think it would be great to see school projects designed this way.  This fall I'm going to talk to a French teacher about trying something similar with her students, perhaps recreating a play they normally do: Les Trois Petits Cochons (The Three Little Pigs).

I think the MiTube app was released very recently. You can now save videos from YouTube to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch for offline viewing.  It's a free app that is super easy to use.  Simply search for a video, choose whether you want to stream it or download it, and choose the quality of the video.  The videos then get saved to a library contained within the app (not to the "Videos" native application).

So far I have downloaded 5 videos, with only one video giving me a problem (the app crashed) as it neared download completion.  I canceled the download of this video and then the program continued to work without problem.  I'm not sure if it was the video or the app that caused the crash. So far, it seems to be a pretty elegant solution for offline viewing of YouTube videos.

I learned a great trick in iMovie for making digital photo and video stories with accompanying music.  The folks at Alas Media showed how when you open a music track in iMovie and view the "clip trimmer", you can play the song and press the 'M' key to mark keyframes where the photo or video would change.  This is much easier than trying to line up clips or photos with the audio wave form (as I used to do in Windows Movie Maker).  The result is a movie that has similar effects to those autogenerated movies from Animoto.

Alas Media does a really good job leading workshops about media production.  They have a ton of resources and tips and tricks at www.alaslearns.com.

One of my recent research projects has involved screencasting, the process of capturing computer screen video with audio narration.  I've specifically been observing 5th grade math teachers using it in a project-based learning environment.  They had their students produce tutorial videos explaining how they used different types of graphs to represent the distribution of colors in a skittles package.

First, students had to collect their data (i.e. count number of total skittles and respective colors of skittles in the package).  They then worked out all of the math: fractions, decimals, and percents of skittles in the package.  They then made graphs showing the distribution.  The students then began designing storyboard slides using SMART Notebook, a slide-based program not unlike PowerPoint that is made by the company that makes SMART Boards.  The students also wrote scripts for their presentations.

The screencasts were recorded using TechSmith's Jing (free program Mac/PC - www.jingproject.com).  You don't even need to record audio if you just wanted to do a silent video tutorial.

This project generally spanned 4-5 days, and their projects can be viewed on the school's internal website.

Here's a sample: http://www.screencast.com/t/NTllMzhl