Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Here’s my mother’s day tribute.

I’ll likely use this in church on Sunday.

Technorati Tags: mothersday, mothers, video, shareski

24 hours of Flickr inspired me to recreate a previous post I did over 2 years ago. That post featured a photo every hour on the hour. Here are just some samples of my day…I have till May 21st to submit one photo to be considered for the 24 hours of Flickr book. Which one would you submit?

The List

Cleaning Gutters

Washing Windows

Help from Martha

Mowing the Lawn

Watching Golf

Board Game with Family

Technorati Tags: flickr, 24hoursofflickr

If you want to show kids the power of editing and music in storytelling, show them this remix of Dumb and Dumber as a horror movie. This would be a great assignment for students to remix video to change the genre.

This song’s likely very familar to anyone from Saskatchewan. Here someone adds it to their rather uneventful drive down Main Street in Moose Jaw. I think it says something about people who can laugh at themselves. Not sure what but it says something.

Technorati Tags: moosejaw

I love NFL Films. They can make the most boring, insignificant game seem like an epic battle. With great cinematography, authoratative voice overs (Gene Hackman, Alec Baldwin, Lawrence Fishborne, to name a few) using well crafted scripts and adding the perfect sound track, to me it’s storytelling at its best. Even if you’re not a football fan, you have to marvel at the mastery of their form.

Recently the produced America’s Game, chronicling the past 40 Super Bowl Champions. I didn’t miss one episode. Yes, I’m a huge football fan but when you look at the craft of storytelling, it just doesn’t get any better. I love the emotion of the individuals recalling events that happened years ago. In many ways the elements of these stories are quite reproducible. No fancy graphics or effects. Just a great story. I guess winning 92 Emmy’s should tell you something about quality.

If you’re a football fan but do not get the NFL Network, you might have missed this. I’d suggest buying the DVDs or buying them off itunes for $1.99 an episode. If nothing else, kids need to see examples like this to see what digital stories can be.

Technorati Tags: digitalstories, NFL, AmericasGame, NFLfilms

This from David Jakes touting the beauty and power of Doritos latest campaign of using user-generated video for their SuperBowl commercial. This video is one of five finalists and it cost $12.79 and none of the creators was over 22 years old.

I’m sure we’ll see more and more of a trend towards validating user generated content. We’ve already seen this with blogging and journalism; this is a natural progression.

It also tells me that people are learning this stuff on their own. The tools used to be the hard part. Now the focus is on content and in a flat world everyone’s got a shot at success.

You can watch all five finalists here…you can also find them on youtube and probably a jillion other sites as well.

Like much of the western part of North America, we got hit with a pretty nasty blizzard. For my Australian readers, a blizzard is defined as “severe winter storm condition characterized by low temperatures, strong winds, and heavy blowing snow.” But what does that really mean? Rob posts some photos from outside his school, like the one to the left.

While my part of the province didn’t get quite the same weather, I was certainly paying close attention. Daryl Pearson’s class in Meadow Lake posted some very interesting videos of what they did as a result of a depleted school population as well as some weather updates.

“We took the morning to divide our 13 student class into four groups to create a project about the effects of the blizzard. We had a podcast group, a newsletter group, a video group and a digital story group.”

This is what school should be like everyday. Kids creating and publishing content based on what’s important to them and the world. After reading Alec’s post about Lessig, it clearly demonstrates:

Anybody with a $1500 computer can take sounds and images and remix them in ways that say things differently, in ways that express ideas more powerfully than any written text could ever, given the character of the cultures we’ve become. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. They represent a new potential to speak, a new potential to learn, they are a new literacy for the 21st century, doing for images and music and film what we took for granted growing up, were our freedoms with the pencil and the typewriter. The freedom to capture and share and remix ideas in ways that express them differently.

Too bad it sometimes takes a blizzard to get this.

I uploaded my Extreme Makeover Video to Revver to compare. I think the quality is better but you be the judge.