Tag: YouTube

Posted on

School’s out Friday

A couple of week’s ago I featured Frozen Grand Central because I loved how it used the power of the mob to create something joyous. This was the work  of improveverywhere, whose mission in life is to create chaos and joy. That video has now had over 6.8 million views and they’ve garnered the attention of  the media worldwide.  They created Improv Everywhere Global and put out the call to agents everywhere to create their own scenes of chaos and joy. Since Frozen Grand Central was posted on YouTube there have been 26 freeze missions conducted in 11 countries. What follows is the mission in Trafalgar Square, London, where over 1000 people (recruited via Facebook) assembled to freeze for 5 mins. No music accompanies this video, and you can feel the eerie quiet that descends.

Have an inspirational weekend – it’s my son’s birthday – turning 9 – party tomorrow! 

Posted on

School’s out Friday

Here we are again. Another School’s out Friday post. Time for a chuckle to lighten our mood for the weekend. This time it’s home grown product from ‘The Chaser’s War on Everything’, a comedy program produced on the Australian Government run ABC network. They got themselves in trouble last year when they got through security at the APEC conference in a car pretending to be from the Canadian Embassy and with an occupant dressed like Osama Bin Laden. A student in my Yr 7 class is a huge fan of the Chasers and sent me the link to their videos on YouTube as potential material for School’s out Friday. It’s great when your students are engaged with what you are doing and get what your intentions are.

This is the Chasers at a Bunnings Warehouse, living life as if it were a musical. Very funny stuff!

Posted on

Did you ever wonder? Did you know with an environmental edge.

Thanks to Clay Burrell at Beyond School for the alert to this video. Just as ‘Did you know?’  became a viral video with an enormous viewing audience, the hope is that ‘Did you ever wonder?’ will reach similar viral proportions. The video was created by Bill Warren from ed4wb.org (education for well-being). On his about page Bill says, “Education For Well-being was started as a response to what is happening (and not happening) in schools today. There needs to be a rethinking of the purpose of education–one that moves away from students as support systems for economies–to one that moves toward education as an instrument of well-being…………Ed4Wb seeks to foster, through the collaborative nature of the Web, the notion that education should help improve our ability to live well, not degrade it.”

The video highlights the notion that we need to be conscious of our responsibility to educate our students that the focus shouldn’t be on economic growth to the detriment of sustainability of earth’s resources; resources being people and the environment. It’s a good message and one that would compliment studies of Globalisation and Global Warming in our schools today.

Thanks Bill for creating another useful tool that can be used as the springboard for lively discussions in our classrooms.

Posted on

School’s out Friday

Time for the weekly dose of School’s out Friday. Here’s David Lee King singing his Web 2.0 song, ‘Are you blogging this?’ I think my friends who don’t get blogging are getting sick of me mentioning my blog! Perhaps I’ll annoy them further by singing this loudly around them. Enjoy your weekend – make the most of it – Monday seems to arrive way too soon!

Posted on

Sorry to our indigenous people

February 13th 2008 was an historic day in Australia’s history. Today our elected Government said sorry to our indigenous people, the Aboriginal population. This is our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and part of this historic speech to the nation. Thanks to crikeymedia for uploading it to YouTube. Many students across Australia watched the apology live, but if you missed it, this would be useful to use with your students.

Posted on

Technology in Education – what should we be doing?

  

Todd Ritter from Download Squad attended the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference and heard David Pogue speak. He was amazed by the reaction of the audience to ideas David expressed about technology he feels would be usefully applied in educational settings. Todd made this comment about audience participants;

 “it became clear from the audience gasps and collective jaw-dropping that educators are not keeping up with technology changes. Demonstrations of technologies that have been around for more than two years were causing the educators to feverishly put pen to paper so they can take things like Skype back to their schools to use in the curriculum.”

While I think it’s true that many classrooms are not exploring technology to its full potential, I wouldn’t be so damning in my criticism. Many teachers are flat out trying to meet curriculum demands and the emotional needs of their students. While I agree that new technologies can make the learning experience more engaging, many teachers do not feel confident enough to try new things out. One of the things I’m trying to do with this blog is to highlight some of the new technologies available and empower teachers to feel confident enough to tackle something new. I had a wonderful experience with a colleague today. Our Electronic Services Librarian had set up a Wiki for her class and I was helping my colleague learn how to edit pages and link text to websites. I then suggested we find an appropriate YouTube video and embed it in the Wiki. We clicked on the plugin button and selected insert YouTube video. We copied the embed code from the YouTube video and pasted it into the box that had appeared on our screen. We clicked save and voila! YouTube video embedded in Wiki. She was thrilled and felt empowered. This was a teaching opportunity for me and my colleague will pass this on to her students. Winners all round! This is what we need to be doing to support our colleagues in feeling comfortable with new technology. Once they realise things aren’t so difficult to do there will be more uptake and our students will have the opportunity to learn technologies that will assist them in becoming the lifelong learners they need to be.

Todd Ritter suggests Five ways to improve technology in education. Read his post – he has ideas that I think all educators should be considering.

Posted on

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. 

Posted on

Wikis – We’re on our way

It’s 2am in the morning and I can’t sleep after my son woke me up. I’ve been lying in bed thinking about all manner of things. Do you remember ‘The Proclaimers’? They were two geeky looking Scottish guys with guitars who wrote a couple of catchy songs that were hits in the 80’s. (Still going strong according to their official site – they’ve even got a myspace page!) I was thinking about Wikis and their song, ‘I’m on my way’, came to mind. The title reflects how I feel about our adoption of Wikis in our School Library. We had pathfinders which were a static page of dewey numbers, keywords, and links that we devised for projects that teachers had set. They were great, but were limited because our Electonic Services Librarian was the only one who could make changes to these pages. They’re so much better now that we’ve started moving them over to Wikis. Now they’re a dynamic collaborative tool and everyone can have input – our Library staff, other teachers and students. Once again, the Lefevers at Commoncraft can explain a Wiki better than I!

I’m working with our Yr 11 Literature class on Monday morning to help them learn how to edit the Wiki our Library has set up for their class. The Wiki has pages for the texts they are studying and each student has their own page to chronicle their reading throughout the course of the year. I’m hoping the students are going to embrace this tool and that other teachers will see the benefits of this for their classes. We’re using PBwiki to create these online spaces and are making them password protected for privacy.

If we get time we may even lift our spirits watching this YouTube video featuring the song ‘I’m on my way’. Maggi137 has cleverly used the song to create a fanvid for the new Doctor Who, David Tennant.  

Posted on

School’s out Friday

End of another working week and I’m tired. I work in a wonderful environment with fantastic students, many of whom shared with me their delight over ImprovEverywhere‘s mission at Grand Central Station. So why not enjoy another of their efforts so that we can revel in the chaos and joy they create over our weekend – share it with a friend and double the enjoyment factor! This time they’re at a Home Improvement shop – it was done in August 2006 and you can see how their filming has become more sophisticated when you compare it to Frozen Grand Central.

Enjoy your weekend!  

Posted on

Frozen Grand Central – Brilliant!

I just love this! It’s the work of Improv Everywhere. This is what they have to say about themselves on their blog;

Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 70 missions involving thousands of undercover agents. The group is based in New York City.

I love watching and hearing the reactions of bystanders unknowingly experiencing the event. My favourite part is the end, and the spontaneous reaction of the crowd. Ain’t humanity grand.

I can’t wait to find an opportunity to use this with a group of students and see their reactions. You could use it for drama, psychology, or as a writing prompt for a creative writing piece. Watching it reminded me of the Orson Welles radio play of Jules Vernes ‘War of  the Worlds’ in the 1930’s, when unsuspecting listeners who tuned in after the broadcast had begun thought that the Martians had landed and were invading Earth.

The video is posted on YouTube, but you can also find it on their improveverywhere site. It’s worth going there, because they provide background detail about how they set the improvisation up and how it was filmed and recorded. Now they’re going global – they’ve set up a ning – Improv Everywhere Global – where they are encouraging others to join with them around the world to create scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Can’t wait to see where they show up next!