"...reef: awe." :)

[Casi Paolillo]

I found the first four chapters of “The Enchanted Braid” to be very interesting and informative. I enjoyed reading about the history and nature of the coral reef. Darwin’s adventures sucked me in and made me wonder. When Darwin described how he found sea creatures on the mountainside in the Andes I was intrigued. ‘“[A]t the height of a few hundred feet old-looking shells are numerous,” he wrote, “and I found some at 1300 feet.”’ (26) I was somewhat confused after reading this so I pulled out my Marine Biology textbook and researched him. I found that Darwin is most famous for presenting the theory of evolution by natural selection, but he also had a theory of atoll formation. After reading about his theory in my textbook, I was starting to understand the Darwin in Paradise chapter. An atoll starts out as a fringing reef around a volcanic island. The island sinks very slowly causing the reef flat to get broader and deeper until it develops into a lagoon. The fringing reef is now a barrier reef. The atoll forms eventually after the island sinks and leaves only a ring of living and growing reef.

“It was the world’s first hydrogen bomb…” (35) The last paragraphs in the chapter, Darwin in Paradise, were very well written with great imagery and diction. If only the subject wasn’t so depressing. When Davidson spent a paragraph describing what the marine life would have been doing at dawn on the morning of the explosion, it was beautiful and magical. “Parrotfish would have been emerging from their mucus cocoons to begin their daily hunt for algae.” (36) The next paragraph ended that feeling for me with its first sentence. “In nanoseconds they were all vaporized, transformed into a swirling, purplish cloud of unimaginably hot gases.” (36) The diction to portray this explosion was phenomenal. Words like “complex,” “vaporized,” “fiery,” “seismic,” “tremendous,” “blast,” and “holocaust,” (36) were used. After three chapters of immense detail, the most interesting part was yet to come. The part I’m referring to is the “father of the H-bomb’s” comment to this friend after the blast: “That’s very nice.” (36)

The part that was the most fascinating to me was the paragraphs spent on describing coral bleaching and the damage humans are doing to the coral reefs. My sister (marine bio class of 2008) would always rant to me and my family about coral bleaching. She felt very strongly about it and always seemed disgusted with humans for destroying the coral reefs. I never really understood what she was talking about, but after reading page eleven, I was outraged as well. “…we are doing a rather good job of destroying coral reefs around the world.” (11) I immediately started doing research on bleaching and I found that there are several ways that humans are threatening the coral reefs. Some of these include pollution from sewage, agricultural runoff, and overfishing. My sister used to tell me how harmful it was to the coral if the water was too warm or was cloudy, preventing some light to reach the corals. One of the most shocking things I learned while reading was how humans use dynamite and poisons such as bleach and cyanide to fish, which obviously is going to harm the coral. Everything that my sister had told me started to connect!

I think that everyone in St. Joe could read the opening sentence of chapter four and automatically connect. “It started to rain in the spring of 1993 and never let up.” (37) Even though I was only one at the time of the flood, my parents still like to tell stories about it. I wasn’t exactly sure where Davidson was going with this chapter since it was after all a book about coral reefs and marine life. (Not Midwest life) After reading about the fossilized coral reef that was discovered in Iowa City and the piece of fossilized coral that Davidson found, I understood. Not to mention that I was totally jealous of Torin! “Three hundred seventy-five million years ago…the dark, pointed end was anchored in the sea floor.” (39) I’ve known Torin for years now and I can honestly say that he did deserve to receive such a cool gift. :)

I decided to do an animoto video to illustrate some of the parts in the four chapters that I personally felt were the most important. I hope you like it :)



Heres where I got the pictures (off of flicr)

-Bleached Coral by CybersamX http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybersam/234971550/
-Coral Bleaching by algaedoc http://www.flickr.com/photos/by-ken/876246000/
-Bleached Coral by mjar81 http://www.flickr.com/photos/markrickert/3180809069/
-0613 by Pachango http://www.flickr.com/photos/pachango/290876749/
-Staghorn bleaching by spiderman (Frank) http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiderman/3597581356/
-Coral Bleaching by Ria Tan http://www.wildsingapore.com/
-Red Sea Coral Reef by Sam and Ian http://www.flickr.com/photos/sam_and_ian/104285707/
-Coral Reef by Sam and Ian http://www.flickr.com/photos/sam_and_ian/89250252/in/set-72057594078624465/
-Corals in the Red Sea by utnapistim http://www.flickr.com/photos/utnapistim/84807783/
-Philippine Coral Reef by queenkv http://www.flickr.com/photos/queenkv/3433024842/
-And I also borrowed pictures from my sister, Tori Paolillo :)

[Abby Lucas]

I like the music, too. If a slide went away too quickly, I just clicked the pause button....Anyway, I like the video just the way it is. The pics were great and the music seemed to set the mood. =]

[Casi Paolillo]

I did use the spotlight feature but I wasn't sure if that was all you could do to make them stay on the screen longer. Would using a longer song make the slides remain longer? Although, I really kinda liked the music that I used...

[Sean Nash]

I don't think the text is that bad, really. However... it does make sense.

Did you use the "spotlight" feature in animoto? You can spotlight images to make them remain on the screen longer and/or show more special transition effects. I'm anxious to know if you tried spotlighting images.

I usually do that for all most of the text images... and the really detailed, or otherwise special images that I want highlighted.

[Casi Paolillo]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the comments. :) I have been working really hard on this project for a while now and it's good to know that it paid off! I really enjoyed making the animoto video even though I had no idea what I was doing!

Mr. Nash, I know that you told us that our work would be seen by people outside of our marine bio class, but I was still amazed when I read that someone reposted my video on their blog. The tech teacher who posted it said that the words were hard to read and so I went back and re-watched it and decided I needed to fix that. I made the words bigger but I am not sure how to slow down the slides since this was the first time that I used animoto? Any help?

I think that part of the reason why the words and pictures aren’t very clear is because I had trouble embedding the video onto my blog directly from animoto. I’m not sure what the problem was but after several unsuccessful tries I just had to export it to youtube. When I put it on my blog from youtube the quality of the video went down.

Thanks again for the encouragement! :))

[Dr. Westfall]

Casi, I enjoyed reading your work after seeing the link on Twitter. What I especially enjoyed is your connection of your study of reef work to your background knowledge of the flooding event in Missouri. It's great to see you using so many excellent literacy skills. Thank Mr. Nash for sharing this with us!

[Sean Nash]

Remember how I told you we wouldn't be working in a vacuum this year? ...That certain parts of our work would be open to a very, very wide audience? Here's perhaps example number one as we look forward to school staring back this week, and our first "official" meeting of class on the 24th.

So here's the example... the very same day this post went live, a link to this post was passed around, and "retweeted" by many people who shared your worth even farther. Here is an example of someone in North Carolina who liked the video to the point of adding it to their very own blog to share with their readers.

What do you think about all of this? Casi? Anyone??
;)

[Sean Nash]

Wow, Casi... I just sent a message out to Twitter for people to check our your video. I think you did a super job of taking text summary items that were powerful to you, and then remixing them with powerfully illustrative images (not to mention music). The result is so much better than a page of post-its. (not that you didn't have that going at one point in the process.)

I think this is a really good example of "how to hack a tech tool for learning." Animoto was not purposed for education. Those educators who are "early adopters" fell in love with the video creation tool. It really is ahead of its time in being able to generate an emotional product tying music and images together.

However, few people have taken the time to add new things into the process. For example, your use of PowerPoint (or Keynote) to create beautiful text slides taken Animoto beyond its "out of the box" capabilities. Sure, you can add in text there now... but it is nowhere as dramatically effective as what you've created here.

This is one super first blog post. Good text take-aways... and a very effective and entertaining synthesis with imagery in the embedded video. I commend your work here.

ps- I also appreciated the effect Osha's telling of the a-bomb testing had on you. I too, left a similar way when I read it... and I already knew of the details of the story.

[Sean Nash]

@Brett... when you click "embed" in YouTube... you get options for size of the screen, border, and color of embedded player.

Not... off to watch the Animoto!
;)

[Brett Gilpin]

I'm really wondering how you got the youtube video to have the bottom as pink and what other colors you can make it.