My One Day on Earth Experience

[Dominic A. Salvucci]

I came across the One Day on Earth project via my Twitter network. The One Day on Earth project is a world-wide collaboration where people documented various happenings on October 10,2010, or 10/10/10.

I turned it into a mandatory lesson for my 12th grade POD class and my 9th grade Honors Civics class. I left it as an optional assignment in my other classes, although I introduced the social media lesson to
all of my classes. I believe the students need to understand the power
of the social media sites they already use.

My own participation as a documentary filmmaker was to be recording my family's day on Sunday, October 10, 2010. I needed to come up with something fun to do on that day, something that would show what goes on
in Western Pennsylvania in October. The weather looked as if it would
cooperate for outdoor activities. We decided to go to a childrens'
hayride and fall festival at the Triple B Farm inn Elizabeth, PA. They
have many neat things for younger children.

I started the day by taking pictures of the sunrise and various stages of the morning. While we were getting ready to leave I quickly set up a Twitpic account and checked my Flickr account to make sure I
could send pics from my cellphone to my Flickr account. I linked my
Flickr account with my Facebook account, that way any pictures that were
sent from my cellphone to Flickr would automatically post to my
Facebook account. I wanted to expand my own use of social media to show
the students what you could do with the various tools.

As we left for Triple B Farm, I asked my wife to take pictures en route. She ran the camera on the trip down to the farm. We tried to get a variety of shots that showed off the region. Once there, I took
over only to find out that the camera battery was low from being on the
entire way down to the farm. I used the camera until the battery died,
then I switched to my cellphone camera. My wife also was snapping
pictures of the day, I could pull some of them if needed. My daughter
had our hand me down digital camera, which she used to take pictures
during the trip. On the way back home we tried to take pictures close
in location to were we did on the way down. This would give us a mirror
image at a later time in the day to compare and contrast with earlier
images. Throughout the day I posted notes in my phone or sent pictures
to Twitpic to help me keep the pictures organized.

I did not upload the images to my computer until Tuesday in class. My goal was to work along with the students and model the process to complete the project. The pictures were organized within iPhoto on my
Macbook, then uploaded to my Flickr account for online storage. My plan
was to use my Animoto for Education account to turn the still pictures
into a video journal.

Overall, I am happy with the process of the project. My topic and the capturing of images went well. I probably should have charged the camera battery to full power the night before, but it was recently
charged. I also picked up on synchronizing my various social networking
accounts, something I will continue to use well into the future.

As for the students, they picked up on the overall process quickly. I had tried to encourage them to use their existing sites such a Facebook and Twitter as a platform to communicate their efforts about the
projects. That effort did not work as well as I had hoped for. I do
not link to current students' accounts, so I cannot check first hand if
they posted their efforts, so I took them at their word. A number of
them were honest about not wanting to post school, or academic items on
their site, so be it. I believe their efforts showed them the power of
social media and how it can be used for more than just saying "hi."