Hoeben’s Blog

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….

Thomas Tallis School is a specialist Arts status college in Kidbrooke, South East London, and have recently made the decision to set up YouTube throughout the school. They have set up a profile called Tallis Tube, where videos from all departments can be posted. I particularly like this video, which shows how mobiles might be used in lessons such as biology to explain processes – although this student needs to be taught how to hold the camera still…

It is inspiring to see a school prepared to adopt the use of web 2.0 applications so enthusiastically and, in particular at a Senior Management level. At Thomas Tallis college, Jon Nicholls, the Assistant Head, who I met for the first time at the BETT show in Olympia earlier this year, has been at the forefront of pushing the school towards the use of popular open-source applications such as Flickr and YouTube. Click here to visit his school blog.

To The End Of The Pencil And The Edge Of The Page from Green Thing on Vimeo.

A great way to encourage kids to use the whole page in their sketchbook! Some great doodles.

Our year 12 photography students start their next unit of work on the theme of identity this week and I came across this video work/documentary on how we based our judgments on appearance. It might be a bit risky to do with students from the same school, leading to bullying, but it might work as a confidential exercise using videos of students from other schools. I imagine that most students would be very embarrassed at making such statements in public, and this might spark a debate about public and private opinion.

Perhaps, Oscar Wilde was right: “Always judge a book by its cover: Only the shallow judge by more than appearances.”

This will be particularly useful when I start explaining the principles of the camera to my Year 12 Photography students next half of term.

This great animation was recently produced by director Josh Raskin and animator Alex Kurina and uses the original interview recording between a 14 year old and John Lennon in 1969. I particularly like the way it is a continuous animation with few scene cuts, allowing the illustrator to playfully mutate from one scene to another.

A simple project might be to get students to create an animation of a famous speech using a combination of their own drawings and photographic images to illustrate some of the key concepts, eventually exporting as a video podcast. Alternatively, they could just create a simple animation based on the notion of metamorphosis; the transformation from one form into another.

If you cannot afford Screen Flow, then Jing is a great application that can be installed on your computer as a remote application and then shared online, in your blog or downloaded to your computer

Here is an example of a simple tutorial using Jing to record:

GoAnimate, the web 2.0 free animation software site, is excellent and very easy tool to edit with. I had a little play this morning and wasted the last two hours trying to tweak it. Here’s my result… albeit not the funniest of comic animations:

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