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Tips for Skype Author Visit: Be Prepared

Before I did my first Skype Author Visit today, with a school in Arlington, VA, I went through several fine-tunings of my setup. These are all small tweaks, but I felt like they were important to let me relax and enjoy the presentation.

Turn Your Office into a Video Studio

Lighting. My office is a dark attic, perfect for writing, but not good at all for a video studio. Looking around for tutorials on lighting for video shoots, I saw that it was important to have three types of lights.

Main light at about 2 o’clock to light one side of the face. It needs to be strong enough to light up your face without glare. Because I have an attic office, I just use a shop light and bounce it off the nearby ceiling.

The main light is about 2 o'clock from my face, bouncing off the ceiling.

The secondary light just bounced light onto the opposite cheek.

Camera. With the lights in place check the camera settings.

• Tilt. Is it capturing your full face? I also position the screen showing small shot of myself as near the camera as possible, so I am mostly looking at the camera.
• Reverse Image. I also found it better to reverse or flip the image that I’m seeing of myself. That way, if I reach up to touch my hair, it looks right to me.
• Zoom. Zoom in or out until you get a shoulder shot. I like it zoomed out enough so you can easily see my gestures, because I talk a lot with my hands. It also gives a small window into my office and sometimes, I got questions about my unabridged dictionary which is on a book shelf behind me.
• Color balance.
  • Set the white balance first.
    Click on Auto-focus on the white balance. Hold your foam core or other white object about where you’ll be seated. Let the auto-settings work. Then, click OFF the auto-focus, forcing it to stay at that setting. My office has windows, so I do this check each time I do a video, to allow for differences in light coming from the windows.
  • Then set brightness, contrast and color balance to your liking. I like to balance the color closer to the b/w side, so it’s not glaring.

Turn Yourself into a Movie Star

Make-up. With 3-4x the light, you’ll need makeup. I’m a m

Author, Darcy Pattison has posted a list of 24 Tips & Settings for Skype Author Visits at her blog, Fiction Notes. Most districts have this capability now.

Her tips are WELL WORTH your time. She is so smart to consider lighting, appearance, props and the setting in general. Especially important... is her tip to LOOK AT THE CAMERA not the computer screen.

These tips are excellent for anyone making use of this technology in any capacity. Go read it now.

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I'm offering a free Skype with any classroom who wants to learn more about my new book, How to Raise a Dinosaur, and talk with me, the author! So if you're a teacher, please contact me at natashawing@gmail.com. Or pass this post onto a teacher who might be interested.

I love doing Skype visits - they're so easy, and free! And I'm excited about my new book, so I'd be happy to chat with students about where I got the idea for the book, and the writing of it. I'm open to answering their questions, too.

So pass it on!

Slowpoke has gotten a couple more positive reviews, from Booklist :

“Pearce’s succinct text will amuse emerging readers with her only slightly exaggerated references to the hectic pace of modern life. Ritchie’s fluid, cartoon-style illustrations are equally adept at conveying the story’s speedy absurdities…and its more relaxing moments”

and from School Library Journal (scroll down after clicking on the link).

Also, I just found out that Slowpoke now has an Accelerated Reader test (you have to enter the title into the search feature to see it).

Last week, I did a Skype author chat with Carver Elementary School in Florence, SC. It was really fun. The students are third-graders and had all read Slowpoke ahead of time. Their teachers helped them compile questions about the writing process. I missed being able to interact in person with the kids, but it was a good experience. The learning goes both ways with these kinds of things, and it’s always great to hear from readers. I’d like to do more of them in the future. For tips on hosting a Skype author chat, check out this article. If your school wants to host me, please contact bettyasmith (at) bellsouth (dot) net and put “author visit” in the subject line.

The picture above is me on the big screen in Carver’s library. Special thanks to librarian Debra Heimbrook for working with me on this inaugural Skype chat.

Barbara O'Connor Skypes With 4th Grade from MJGDS Classrooms on Vimeo.

Welcome to the last day of Teens & Tech. I hope you enjoyed it. Sorry for the delay in getting this last post up. I was having, of all things, technology issues. Today’s topic was suggested by the Tech Integrator at my school, Allison Lundquist.

Dear YALSA:

Thank you for all of the great suggestions. Here’s my problem. I’m totally blocked. I want to share awesome YouTube videos with my teachers, but YouTube is blocked. I want to create a Facebook page for my library, but Facebook is banned, too. Skype-An-Author? I’d love to, but Skype is verboten. How do I get around these filtering issues?

All Blocked Up

Dear ABU:

I feel your pain, I really do. Nothing is worse than seeing that SonicWall come up to stop you in your tracks.

Really this is an issue of intellectual freedom, the same as a book challenge. If we feel that a site has merit, we need to fight for it. The ALA office of Intellectual Freedom has a very useful page about filters and filtering.

Getting access to these sites may be a long, uphill battle. In the meantime, there are work-arounds. For example, at my school we’ve convinced the tech folks and administration of the educational value of Skype. So, if a teacher wants to Skype an author or another expert, the service can be unblocked from a given computer for a set period of time.

Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers recently offered 47 Alternatives to Using YouTube in the Classroom. This is a list of 47 other sites for free online video content: a really great resource.

For Social Networking, Edmodo is a “free and secure social learning network for teachers, students and schools.” The challenge is getting students to use it.

So, YALSA readers, one last time, share your expertise and let us all know how you work around restrictive filtering.