Tag: Jim Gates

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School’s out Friday

Jim Gates shared this video on Twitter earlier in the week, and I knew instantly it just had to be the focus of School’s out Friday. I worked in a bookshop from the age of 15 through to 22, and I can’t imagine the hours it took to create this stop motion video. Sean Ohlenkamp and his wife own Type, a bookshop in Toronto Canada. They, and 25 volunteers, spent quite a few sleepless nights it seems reorganising these books to create the effect we see above. I love the little touches, like the textas and plastic figurines getting into the act too.

I’m sure a video like this evokes a response in people who love reading. Some will see it as a homage to the printed book, and the bookshops that are facing troubling times as we see  ebooks begin to make inroads into the way we consume reading matter. I think it’s a very clever marketing tool for this bookshop, and with over a million views on YouTube, I do hope the owners are seeing an increase in foot traffic to their store. They should do, it’s also been featured in the Toronto Standard and The New Yorker.

I’m in the process of writing a post about our school’s decision to use Overdrive, a platform for downloading borrowable ebooks and audiobooks to devices. I’m sure there are many out there who see the move to files for borrowing as a threat to libraries, but I’m very comfortable with what we are doing. Look out for the post. I hope to have it up in the next couple of hours.

We’ve seen a few grey days here in Melbourne this week. The prognosis is for a sunny weekend. Bring it on I say! It’s my husband’s birthday tomorrow – we need some sun so we can crank up the barbie for family and friends.

Enjoy whatever comes your way this weekend. : )

 

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Can my students explode walls too?

When I watch Mr.Mayo’s class discuss their exploding walls project I get excited. What they say echoes my feelings about education and the power that can come from allowing our students to explore the possibilities beyond the classroom walls. I know how motivated I feel about writing this blog and how empowered I feel when I realise that people are reading it. Hopefully the people reading are learning something too. It makes me think that the students I teach would feel equally empowered. So what’s holding me back? I’ve made connections with a teacher in Shanghai and my students are excited by the possibilities of communicating with students in another part of the world. What’s holding me back at the moment is the time factor in setting up a multi user blog and getting permissions organised so that my students can participate. I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get moving. I’ll keep you posted – structural damage could occur soon!

Thanks to Jim Gates and his Tipline blog and kjarrett for the alert to this YouTube video. 

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YouTube: handy tools

I just love YouTube. Sure, it’s got some iffy content, but there is also a wealth of fantastic content that we can use in our classrooms as impetus material. I love the fact that the videos are often less than five minutes and can be used to springboard class discussion. I use keepvid to convert the videos to flv files that can be saved to my hard drive. (I’ve downloaded a free flv player from the keepvid site) This ensures that I can play the videos without having to worry about loading problems or blocks.

Jim Gates at Tipline  has written a post with a link to Digital Inspiration. There you can find a set of YouTube tools that are incredibly useful and yet very simple. I’ll be trying out Scenemaker.net where you can select specific scenes of a YouTube video by defining the in and out points.

Just for a bit of fun have a look at the hahaha video from YouTube. This would lighten any classroom – we all need a good laugh sometimes!