A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary
This is a great example of how technology can be used in a simple, yet well crafted way to tell a story: By playing with projections and the range of focus, it is easy to create a sense of depth and adds a new dimension to the flatness of 2D animation.
This is the sixth year that we have organised our Art, Photography and Modern Languages trip to Berlin and it is difficult to see why we would go elsewhere; It combines the best of contemporary art and photography within a city that is (relatively) easy to navigate but also provides cheap accommodation and always has interesting events peppered around the city. Here is a slideshow of our October 2009 trip that involved 40 students and 5 teachers:
For the past 15 years I have been involved in setting up international exchange programmes with Grassroots Theatre Company (GTC), a Zimbabwean performing arts company that specialises in Theatre for Development. In the past two years, the company has been running a festival called Sangansai Children’s Festival (SCF) in Masvingo, a rural district of Matableland in Southern Zimbabwe. The aims are to work with disadvantaged rural communities helping to raise awareness of social, health and general developmental issues affecting poverty, whilst also providing children with a sense of cultural pride and, of course, enjoyment. Children from local primary and secondary schools work with Grassroots’ facilitators for six weeks prior to the festival in preparation for a series of performances to a local audience of around 3000 people.
The festival is an ideal platform for developing international links between children in the UK and Zimbabwe since GTC visit the UK every year, currently visiting Wales, Yorkshire, Norfolk and Scotland, and could help to facilitate communication. I was imagining the opportunity for a video-sharing project, where children could create a short 1-minute clip sharing a talent, which could be collated and projected during intervals during the festival. Likewise, our partnerships in the UK could help to build up a database of videos that could be continually added to.
Below is a short video of a parade with some of the participants from the festival singing through the village:
To find out more about GTC, visit their website or blog. If you are a teacher and interested in such a project or have other ideas, please get in touch.
This was a quick and easy slideshow using PulpMotion that transforms your pictures into a virtual gallery. I enjoyed showing this to my Year 7s using images of their own sculptures. You can also include video and a soundtrack.
Kiel Johnson’s Cardboard Twin Lens Reflex Camera Time Lapse from Theo Jemison on Vimeo.
My A-level students can only just about create a pin-hole camera using a pringles can….
Goollery is a site that documents the many projects that have been created using google-related applications. Below is an example of one such use where the user has created alphabet shapes using Google Earth. Please click here to visit the Gollery site.
Ollie Bray recently posted this useful video of himself discussing uses of Google Earth in a Teachmeet conference in Havering.
Love this response by one of my A2 Photography students, Amaryllis Garland, to the work of Laura Letinsky and her exam theme ‘discord’. You can see more of her work here.
The tradition genre of still life often bores students rigid, but by using more contemporary artists, the world of objects becomes far more interesting. I particularly like the work of Peter Fischli & David Weiss and Alina Szapocznikow, who is currently showing the The Photographers Gallery in London.
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
This is a good example of how animation can be used to help explain difficult concepts using real-time footage and underlying invisible elements such as magnetic fields.
This is a beta application called 280 slides that has all the signs of being an excellent free online piece of software that acts like keynote or powerpoint allowing you to create presentations online and post them to sites such as slideshare. Microsoft are already working on a free online version of word – however, there are already a growing number of open source applications such as Google Docs that are already offering free online word processing that MS are a bit behind …for a change.
