At the Apple Distinguished Educators Conference in Houston, I witnessed a fascinating showcase presentation by Ben Mountz and his visionary use of applying Keynote magic move to our own classes. Inspired by this, my students developed a great idea: Trivids. One day, last Spring, we toyed with the idea of an interactive presentation where we […]
Read more "Trivids"In our media classes, we make digital stories in lieu of testing as our product after each module or lesson. This allows us to focus on the process of designing. Through this process, we have learned multiple hacks by simply using one software program to enhance another. The hacks add allure and originality to our presentations, […]
Read more "Hacking Digital Storytelling: Cartoon Yourself into a Presentation"Five years ago, in English and Media classes, we investigated how to integrate technology meaningfully into lessons and assessments that posed challenging and differentiated outcomes. When a student accidentally exported a keynote slide as an image, we had a thought: we could use this to create digital stories. Keynote allows us to duplicate slides, and […]
Read more "Accidental Animation: Using Keynote to Enhance Digital Storytelling in the Classroom"In media, setbacks and frustrations during the process of creating actually bolsters production; in other words, the process often enhances the product because the process is rarely perfect, filled with imperfections. We, the audience, embrace the imperfections not knowing we are viewing them. The product displayed to us emerges as nearly perfect, ironically from countless […]
Read more "I’m-perfecting the Process"A student approached me and asked, “why do you think our generation is being looked down upon by employers?” The question arose from a media segment discussing the possible adverse effects technology has on millennials. My answer: look at how employers view process and product. In our media classes, assessment occurs very differently, […]
Read more "Disconnecting Millenials"We learn from flaws and failures, yet we spend much of our lives hiding them. This is the system in which we live, a system in which media thrives. We spend a lot of time and effort on making ourselves appear as that which we are not. In media studies, we discussed what we called […]
Read more "Flawless"Originally posted on Teaching and Learning 2014:
This article appeared in the March 2013 Newsletter of the 1:1 Institute. “To be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas, to conduct original research in order to answer questions…
During a discussion on media outliers, one of my media students asked about a film called “The Blair Witch Project.” She wanted to know why it stood out as an outlier. I told her because it made 2500 times what it was actually worth, and its whole concept could be summarized with one word: […]
Read more "Scarcity and the Unknown"The 10 best food service scenes in movie history. That was the banter of choice between me and a media student, well, that and the movie Dinner for Schmucks. Why? Simply, food scenes in movies often portray points in life when critical conversations occur. These critical conversations focus on making the viewer feel a bit […]
Read more "Exploding Expositions"
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