Kevin’s Meandering Mind

This is a nice montage of writers in films.

Just for your entertainment. (I like the quote: “It must be wonderful to be a writer.” )

Kevin

I came across a version of this video in my Bloglines and was laughing my socks off, as it most humorously shows us all of the ways that Powerpoint is completely misused.

Now, in the comment section of YouTube where I got this video, was this interesting comment:

oh my god. teachers in my school make EVERY SINGLE MISTAKE. in fact, every ONE of them is capable of committing ALL those mistakes in ONE single presentation! and people wonder why the students are comatose in class…

Peace (in bullets and slides),

Kevin

This is another one of those waste-your-time-yet-slightly-amusing sites where you answer a series of questions and your answers generate which Star Wars character you most likely resemble. How did I fare?

Apparently, I am very hairy but loyal.

Who are you? Head to the Star Wars Character site and find out.

Peace (in space and beyond),
Kevin

So why has “participatory media” become the buzzword at newspapers? ‘Cause they are scared of the real power of the new media. This is a very funny take on responses from newspaper editors and columnists (George Won’t, anyone?) and how they are taking steps to bring more regular Joes and Josephines into the mix (yeah, right).

Peace (with participation),
Kevin

This is a fun little quiz to see how addicted you are to blogging.

Here is how I turned out:

Yikes!

Peace (in 7 steps),
Kevin

Peace (with waves and sand and family),
Kevin

I used my loop remix of my song, Get Up, with some pics from a Creative Commons search engine (plus PhotoStory as an editing tool) and put together this music video:

Peace (with truth),
Kevin

This is slightly amusing, but also instructive, as a site called Human Brain Cloud seeks to gather intuitive word associations from as many people as possible and then collate that data through a connected web. It’s social data gathering, with a fun twist.

.	(c)2007 Kyle Gabler

The site gives you a word or phrase, and it asks you to quickly write down the word or phrase that comes first to your mind, and then your response goes into the database. Then, after you’ve done a few, head to the cloud itself, which fans out before you like a great big growing tree. You can even search by words or terms.

Peace (with association),

Kevin

I have been running a claymation animation summer camp this week for middle school students (mostly fifth and sixth graders) as a new experiment (and more next week). Kids have been using Pivot Stickman, MovieMaker, Stop-Motion Animator and other tools to create mini-movies. I am working on writing up my curriculum (for myself and for anyone else who is interested) and will share that later.

I have a blog up and running so that parents can view some of the daily work (the blog is at http://masswp.org/claycamp/)  and the final movies (with a sci-fi theme) are being worked on right now and we are inviting parents in tomorrow to view the showcase premieres.

Also, I have used TeacherTube for sharing videos because it is quite easy to use and seems to be a safe way to share video without any qualms about kids wandering around to different, inappropriate links.

But here are a few of the creations so far:

Download Video: Posted by dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.

Download Video: Posted by dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.

Download Video: Posted by dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.

Peace (in the hot classroom),
Kevin

This had me chuckling:

Dave Walker allows you to freely use his cartoon. Awfully nice of him.

Peace (with tech),
Kevin