Once you've successfully submitted your application to participate in a COV workshop, these are things to do and facts to know!

1. REGISTER IN OUR LEARNING COMMUNITY

As soon as possible, please join our online learning community if you have not already. Access our learning community and sign up on:
http://lc.celebrateoklahoma.us/

2. OUR AGENDA AND START TIMES

Each day of our workshop please plan to arrive by 8:15 and start work at 8:30 am. The first two days we will conclude by 3:30 pm. On day 3 we will finish by 12:30 pm. The detailed workshop agenda (which is subject to minor modifications) is available on:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ds7w6vt_25c2jdr8fd

or
http://tinyurl.com/covagenda09

3. POST-WORKSHOP EXPECTATIONS

In the six months following your COV workshop, we expect you to facilitate AT LEAST one student-created video project which is submitted/published on our online learning community. This is one of the important goals of the COV workshop: Empowering Oklahoma educators to empower students to become digital storytellers themselves. Student-created videos should be submitted in our learning community following your workshop either by educators using their account, or by students who are at least 13. Students can create their own accounts on our learning community and submit videos, but students must use a graphical avatar instead of a photograph for their profile page. All submitted videos and new user accounts in our learning community are moderated.

Starting in May 2009, we are asking all COV workshop participants to join AT LEAST one of our learning community "groups," which you will find on:
http://lc.celebrateoklahoma.us/groups

These groups include:
1- Every Place Has a Story
2- Life Stories of Incredible People
3- Veteran Stories
4- Arts and Culture
5- Public Service Announcements
6- Service Learning Activities

By joining a group, we hope you'll be able to connect with other Oklahoma educators who are facilitating student video projects on a theme similar to yours. We encourage you to contact those educators directly using our COV learning community, so their students can become an "audience" for your student videos via comments and feedback left on our website. In addition, we encourage you to videoconference with other students and classes who are working on similar COV video projects and collaborate together.

4. MORE WORKSHOP INFO

COV workshops are led by a lead-facilitator and one or two co-facilitators, who are all past COV participants. An updated list of the facilitators and co-facilitators assigned to your workshop is avaiable on:
http://covproject.pbworks.com/workshops2009
 
For our summer and fall 2009 workshops, COV is NOT able to provide lunch on day 1 and day 2 for workshop participants. We encourage workshop participants to go out to eat for lunch together as a group during the first two days of the workshop, but the actual cost(s) for lunch each day are up to each individual participant.

Many other questions and answers are available on our COV project wiki. Click FAQs (frequently asked questions) for more information:
http://wiki.celebrateoklahoma.us

You can also stay up to date with COV project news by following StoryChasers on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/storychasers


5. BRING STORY IDEAS!

We encourage you to bring ideas for the digital story which you will create during this 2.5 day hands-on, minds-on workshop. We recommend you view at least 2 or 3 of the 600+ Oklahoma teacher and student created videos in our learning community to get ideas about the story you’d like to create digitally:
http://lc.celebrateoklahoma.us/video

Many of our participants bring photos (already scanned or in electronic format on a CD or USB/Flash drive) to the workshop to use for their digital story. This is not required, but can be a great help in locating media resources to use for your project you'll complete during the workshop.


Thanks for your participation in Celebrate Oklahoma Voices! Our project facilitators and past participants look forward to not only seeing the video you will create during your workshop, but also the videos your students will create following your workshop!