Week 5 - A Post Considering "The Tech Savvy Educator" (required)

"The Tech Savvy Educator: And Now For Something Completely Different..." by Ben Rimes

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

What:

This is a post from the blog, "The Tech Savvy Educator," which actually, is a very short post. It includes a video by Blu and David Ellis, followed by some ideas of classroom applications for different subjects: Language Arts, Math, Science, and Fine Arts. The suggestions were very basic, but they got me thinking a lot.

So What:

So... I never really considered using Vimeo or YouTube videos for assignment "inspiration." It's totally a great idea - even for English/L.A. teachers. Not to mention that this particular video is completely creative, extraordinary, and entirely refreshing. The results of using this video as a prompt are endless. My mind is exploding.

Now What:

Well, as a result of all the ideas that are firing off in my head, I am going to write them out here for your own reading/viewing pleasures.

As a complete Project/Assignment (perhaps even semester long)

• First show this video in class
• Have the students research "video murals" and write a paragraph or two response on what they learned, what they think about the idea, or this specific video mural versus other ones.
• Students write a poem or song that they want to base a video mural off of.
• Students write a project proposal outlining their plan for their own "mini" video murals.
• Throughout the semester they would work on the video murals (perhaps this would be done in groups, and instead of writing their own poem, a poem would be assigned to each group - using an existing poem would create opportunity for the students to analyze the poem which is an opportunity in itself for an analysis paper).
• At the end of the year, students could invite parents/family/friends to a class movie night in which we would have food and watch all the videos - I'd like to think that there would be a great, building anticipation for this event, but who knows. Perhaps, we could even present awards for different videos - like the Grammy's or something

Well, that's that.

Until next time.