GEECS blog: workshops

Showing posts with label workshops. Show all posts

Social Media Workshop for TPAS Cymru Conference

GEECS jointly delivered a Social Media workshop at the TPAS Cymru (Tenant Participation Advisory Service) conference on Friday with Novas Scarman, one of our Communities 2.0 project partners.

The session focused on the benfits of social media, and used Tumblr - a powerful & simple personal publishing platform - as an example of the scope and potential of using social media. To support the workshop we created this blog http://tpascymru.tumblr.com/ which demonstrates posts of all kinds, incorporates an RSS feed which posts to the blog automatically, and includes information on using Tumblr & its benefits. We posted to the blog during the session to demonstrate the speed, simplicity & effectiveness of the platform.

It was an enjoyable session to deliver - many of the participants weren't well versed in the potential of social media, but were enthused by the session and left intending to make better use of the tools that are freely available to them.

Digital Photography Course PT1

Here's the PDF our Digital Photography course Part 1 - Introduction to cameras and composition.

If you want to download it click the link below which will take you to scribd.com and download to your computer from there.

Digital Photography Course Pt1 PDF

Tumbled Tales

GEECS have recently developed a new storytelling blog & blogging workshop for community groups. Building on the social media workshop that we already offer, we can now deliver tailored & creative sessions around blogging using the Tumblr platform. A very popular and extremely easy-to-use personal publishing tool, Tumblr, is one of the simplest ways to publish online.

The new story blog, Tumbled Tales (http://tumbledtales.tumblr.com), is a space for its authors, Angharad & Mog, to capture/showcase the ‘stories’ we see all around us which intrigue, enthral, inspire, touch and make us laugh. Our stories will be posted in any media format – showcasing digital stories in the broadest possible sense of the term.

We hope that Tumbled Tales will not only help generate interest in storytelling generally, but also foster a better understanding of the variety of digital storytelling-based training options that are available to community groups from GEECS, for free. We’d welcome your stories too - please feel free to submit your own via the submit section on the Tumblog.

Apart from developing this new workshop, Mog and I have been mulling over a number of ideas for new workshops recently, and we'd love to hear your opinion on them...

Having worked on the Our Bridgend project (see here for our post) we're very keen to use similar mapping technology in our storytelling workshops. We're currently looking into developing our own online GEECS map which will allow workshop participants to upload content, or stories, of all sorts to a specific place on the map...Watch this space!

We're also considering developing a workshop around E-readers / I-books. I-books are an interesting emerging field that uses new technology to deliver traditional & familiar content, often at a fraction of the cost of a printed book, and sometimes for free. Users can browse an unlimited library of publications and download them directly to their 'reader'. Given that we're from a Storytelling centre of excellence, I thought it would be remiss to not cover one of the most exciting developments in reading & story disemination in our suite of workshops!

I'd like to develop a workshop that looks at two or more sides of any given story, since there is always more than one side! We have also discussed a Picture-Poem workshop, and seperately I recently discovered www.nevver.com, all of which has got me thinking about associative storytelling techniques and ways to run workshops that generate associative content... Do let us know what you think.

Ecodysgu

Last week Mog and I delivered a 2 day Digital Storytelling session to a very interesting and wonderfully hospitable organisation in Bridgend called Ecodysgu.

Ecodysgu are an environmental education centre offering workshops in creative expression. A not for profit community, Ecodysgu operates as an holistic education centre. Set in 42 acres of beautiful countryside it delivers a model of education called ‘Learning to Heal – Healing to Learn’.

The group (which included our first canine beneficiary in the form of a dog named Mouse) accessed our training as part of a wider package of support from the Communities 2.0 project. The staff receiving the training were enthused by the workshop and are planning to train their own service users to create their own stories. The team also intend to work with the local community to capture stories about the historic site which has many dilapidated buildings, such as an old Pit Pony Hospital.

The staff and volunteers at Ecodysgu created some brilliant stories, a few of which are available to watch below, plus more over on the STORIES page

THE DANCE OF LIFE from chris mog on Vimeo.

The Nuthouse from chris mog on Vimeo.

Ysbyti Tri Chwm

Mog and I delivered a hugely enjoyable 2-day Digital Storytelling session to staff at Ysbyty Tri Chwm recently. The staff involved aim to use DS in their work, cascading DS as a health tool amongst colleagues and patients. We were rewarded for our training with plenty of tea and cake, and were presented with this HUGE tub of Celebrations at the end! Thanks guys :)

We loved the stories that were produced by all the participants, which were of a very high standard - moving, funny, and jam-packed with social history. But what was particularly striking for Mog and I was the fact that two of the stories that were created here really represented the extremes of possibilities for stories, bookending the spectrum of emotions that often spill out of participants during this work. Symbolically these were the first and last stories we watched with this group. You can get a clearer picture of what I mean by watching the two stories below. One is funny yet touching, the other is honest and warming. You can watch more stories form this workshop over on the STORIES page.

dad and the burglar from chris mog on Vimeo.

Auburn Angel from chris mog on Vimeo.

Our Bridgend...continued

Continuing from Angharad's post regarding the ourbridgend.com site, we were in Bridgend town centre on Saturday at the just@sk project running a workshop aimed at producing content for the site - specifically some digital stories.

The map over on our bridgend.com has been developed by NativeHQ and the National Theatre of Wales who have been keen to extend the reach and remit of community theatre by investing time and energy into a social media strategy that seems to be paying dividends at the moment.

For us at GEECS, the potential of the map presents us with a great opportunity to continue to develop this resource as a tool for digital inclusion workshops: the concept from the user point of view is so simple - pick a place and add your content, simple as that.

However, from a DI angle, there is so much potential not only to display user generated content that is not necessarily driven by workshop attendance but also to map activity at a national level.

The map has the potential for us to examine digital activity plus a chance to develop innovative and dynamic cross-project and inter-organisational data that can deliver sustainable DI activity based on communities of place.

Just a quick look at the map can stir stories based on place e.g. my first kiss or even as shown on the map "this is where i lost my gerbil down a drain".

This tool offers a powerful storytelling "jumping off" point, it can help participants to develop media rich content and post it quickly, plus perhaps most importantly, it promotes ownership and therefore a level of self-promotion and sustainability through a variety of social media platforms.

After the workshop on Saturday it is becoming apparent that the people involved see the relevance of this tool and posts are now appearing as far north as Caernarfon and Holyhead. I think it is this sense of relevance that creates a great opportunity to promote DI activity, after all, we all like to sit down and reminisce about the places we grew up, the places we went, the places that hold emotion and hold those stories of experience that prove themselves to be so content rich; not to mention the places of gossip of course!

Hopefully this map will be available for our use and development soon.

As an extra I'd just like to extend our thanks for inspiration, help and vision to Tom, Guy, NTW and of course everyone who came on the weekend.

Meantime, if you're in Bridgend any time soon why not go along and see NTW's production Love Steals us from Loneliness running from October 7-16 in Hobos, Bridgend and then post your thoughts over on ourbridgend.com.

Meantime, check out some of the content from the weekend...(there's a story from me too, but you'll have to scroll north to Maesteg!)

Llanelli Communities First

Team GEECS have been busy working with Llanelli Communities First this week.

We've spent an enjoyable 2 days delivering a Digital Storytelling training session to C1st staff taking an 'all you need to know' approach to Digital Storytelling covering everything from history & background, theory, capturing and editing audio and photos to finally putting it all together. This training will now be rolled out with support from GEECS to community members across the 5 Communities First wards in the area.

They aim is to capture the human side of the work and achievements of Communities First through stories made by the wider community. These will be featured at a community event in Llanelli on November the 4th.

The training was well-received, and Mog and I are very proud of the stories that the< group produced - a couple are available to watch below and are also available over on the STORIES page...

Asten would fall off her chair... from chris mog on Vimeo.

Then And Now from chris mog on Vimeo.

All you need to know about Mobile Phones - Aberfan

This post is for todays workshop with Aberfan and Merthyr Vale Darby and Joan Club.

We're setting up a SMS wall and hoping the participants will text in their thoughts around new tech....

Full post follows...

Here's the results of the text wall that we set up for the Mobile Phone workshop at Abervan & Merthyr Vale Darby & Joan Club.

The Darby and Joan club is a well-attended group. A good number of its members owned mobiles with varying degrees of familiarity with their handsets. Mog and I enjoyed this session a great deal - it's always rewarding to be able to answer questions, demonstrate new tricks and show people how to do things they're stuck on. However one member stumped the GEECS - we couldn't work out how to delete sent text messages from a Sagem handset! (We have since discovered that there isn't a way to do it - phew!)

Nina the group leader has invited us back to do some further sessions with the group, and one lady in particular had a huge amount of interest in our work as she had worked with the BBC's Capture Wales project previously and made her own Digital Story.

We'd also like to wish Betty a happy birthday, and say thanks ever so much for the birthday cake! We like cake :)

The Minister's Visit

GEECS delivered a special workshop on animation in Llandysul for the Pont Tyweli Silver Surfers last week. It was a fun afternoon, and the group were wonderful to work with.

The workshop itself was rather special for a number of reasons, which variously include:

Minister's visit
The Minister for Social Justice Carl Sargeant visited during the session, providing a great opportunity to showcase the invaluable digital inclusion work that GEECS and the Communities 2.0 project is carrying out.

Animation is go!
This session was the first time that GEECS had delivered this newly developed workshop. I felt that the workshop was a success with the class producing some lovely one sentence story films using newspaper clippings to form the stories - we'll upload some of these for you shortly!

Harri-Solo
This workshop was my first without my compadre Mogs who was on annual leave, though that said Karlis (Communities 2.0) and Chris (CCC) were on hand providing invaluable help with the set-up and support during the session - thanks guys!

Setting
Workshop venues vary so much from job to job, and the venue for this workshop was quite special. The session took place in the newly refurbished Powerhouse Community Centre in Llandysul; the building is a fantastic community facility for arts and lifelong learning projects nestled on the edge of the river Teifi - it was a pleasure to work there and meet the staff.

Animation Workshops are GO..!

Here's a couple of quick tests myself and Angharad made yesterday afternoon in about 10 minutes each in order to test out on of our new freeware based workshops.

Our new animation based workshop is quick, easy and most importantly a lot of fun. We found that after a quick test we were soon discussing the potential of this software with a little bit of time...

The workshop is based on freeware, namely PIXresizer and MonkeyJam, plus a minimum of kit that basically includes a digital camera, something sturdy to bolt or gaffer tape it to and some stuff to animate. For our examples we used words and pictures that were hanging around the office but as usual, imagination is the key.

I'll post our quick cheatsheet guide to using the software below.

While we're on the subject of animation, there's another free and very fun app called Scratch which as well as being free and offering great animations also introduces the user to world of code using "blocks" of "code" to control the environment. This is well worth checking out and I'm sure we'll find a way to incorporate this software into a workshop too.

Meantime please enjoy the software and if you need us to come and do some animation with you please get in touch. We'd also be very interested in featuring some of your work here too.

harri ani-MPEG-4 from chris mog on Vimeo.

Mogs' animation TEST from chris mog on Vimeo.

Animation Workshop

Wesleyan Chapel mobile phone workshop

Mog and I delivered a fast and fun mobile phone session to the Wesleyan Chapel Coffee Morning group on 19th August.

The session took place in a beautiful 180 year old church in Nantyglo - check out some of the pictures we took of what has to be one of the most impressive training venues we've ever seen!
The session focused on using SMS or texting as a valuable and vital means of communication, drawing on research that has found the medium to be as important as the 'garden fence' for knowledge exchange and the maintenance of relationships and healthy social interaction. The group used their mobiles to text their thoughts on issues in Nantyglo to our blog - their submissions are here:

We really enjoyed the session and hope that the group will make more use of their phones to keep in touch with friends and family following the workshop.

New Workshops

Mog and I have been busy developing some new workshops this week. We’re very excited about getting out to deliver the new sessions which variously cover animation, social game-playing and adding information to pictures.

The animation workshop is a lovely desk-based session which stimulates digital inclusion and encourages storytelling through simple animation.
T
The gameplaying session mixes traditional physical games such as hide and seek with mobile phone technology to encourage digital inclusion and storytelling through social interactions.

The final workshop that we have developed is a modern twist on the traditional picture postcard; where workshop participants will learn how to add information to pictures in order to tell a more holistic story about the chosen image.

All our new workshops are flexible in length and can be tailored to the time available to work with the community group receiving the training.

We will be running the animation workshop for the first time on September the 7th so we will be sure to write up how it went here on our blog!

Further information on the diverse range of workshops are available here: http://geecs.50webs.com/

All our work aims to encourage the development of community-based digital or IT skills in a fun and creative manner.

Please feel free to contact either Mog or myself via the blog if you are part of a community group that feels our work could benefit you.

In with the new...

We're very pleased at GEECS to welcome Angharad as the new outreach worker for the Communities 2.0 project.

Angharad started just Monday but is already hard at work producing her introductory digital story. We'll post it here on the front page as soon as it's ready.

We've already had a number of discussions about how we can take the project forward in terms of new and creative means of offering digital inclusion activities with a twist - pervasive gaming and it's application within social media is just one of an exciting range of workshops we'll be developing and offering over the coming weeks.

We've also been talking about how we can include geotagging and related technologies with a storytelling twist - always trying to make it relevant to the people that we're working with.

So hopefully you'll all be able to meet Angharad very soon and, let's be honest, it's a great change from my strange furry face!

In other news you can now find our calendar over on the resources page (HERE) where Angharad has already endured the agony of being turned into a "Wally"....

We hope the inclusion of our calendar will help everyone to easily see where we are, and as we've said, if we can do it we will - especially if it's just a quick hour taster session.

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New Workshops pt2

As part of our developing resources, I've been particularly interested of late in how we can utilise social media as a multi platform community engagement strategy that can allow community groups to become their own social reporters, activists, campaigners and new tech developers.

So I put together this workshop aimed at engaging groups using social media as a means of cascading training around digital photography, stortelling, film making etc. and encourage them to take ownership of their on and offline presence in a way that is relevant, sustainable and community led.

The full breakdown of this workshop is over on the resources page too.

SM presentationPDF

I'd also highly recommend taking a look at the social by social book (free pdf download) which formed a basis and inspiration for this workshop - thanks to them!

Also another inspiration in terms of trying to change the way in which we work is here, courtesy of DK and the original ReWork stuff from 37signals. A great resource that's been really inspiring.

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New Workshops pt1

Here's the PDF of one of our new workshops that aims to get people thinking about the potential of new technologies. There's a new and improved recipe card over on our resources page.

Get a TastePDF

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