Making Learning Connected: Introducing … the Animated Me

  We kicked off the first day of the Making Learning Connected MOOC with a flurry of activity. It was so energizing to see the variety of ways that folks are diving into the first cycle of making, by creating representative media to introduce themselves. We’ve already had audio, video, artistic, interactive, and more examples. […]

Remembering Composing My First Multimedia Poem

It was a fair number of years ago (back in 2006) now that I hopped on a plane and flew across the country to Chico, California, to take part in an Advanced Technology Institute with the National Writing Project. It was one of those weeks that forged connections that remain powerful and strong even today. […]

App Review: Animation Desk

It’s no secret that I love stopmotion animation (See my website resource for teachers: Making Stopmotion Movies). I love watching it as magic on the screen and I enjoy trying to make my own, too. I’ve always often brought stopmotion animation into the classroom. So I was intrigued by this app called Animation Desk, which […]

Digital Writing Month: The Zombie Factory Movie

My son was hounding me to create a stopmotion movie yesterday and so I finally agreed, after dinner, to help him get set up. As he started to talk about his “story” (which is something I require him to have in mind – a mental storyboard — before we get started so that it doesn’t […]

Video Talent: My Son and Friends Take First Prize

My older son has really become a whiz with shooting and editing video. He does it for school projects; he works on short movies with his friends; and he does it to enter contests to gain recognition and cash. While I can take some credit for getting him behind the camera at an early age […]

Summer of Video: The Bike Trail Project

The other day, I shared out what my youngest son has been up to with a flip video camera, but really, he has been mostly inspired by his 14 year old brother, who has developed a real gift and feel for video. This stretches way back to when I taught him about stopmotion. (see his […]

Making/Creating a Making/Creating Collection

Thanks to the gentle pushing and suggestions from my National Writing Project friend, Christina Cantrill, I made my first curated collection over at the NWP Digital Is site. I’ve created a handful of resources, but never a collection that pulls resources together under one “big idea.” My new collection — Making and Creating — was […]

The Stickman Quidditch Video

Each year, as we approach our annual Quidditch Tournament, a member of our staff works on a video that will get burned into a DVD for all of our sixth graders. Until this year, he has had a group of fifth graders come around and interview us classroom teachers, asking a set series of questions. […]

The Meta-Slice about Slice of Life

  (This video is me, as I was writing this morning’s Slice of Life. I used a stopmotion capture, in time-lapse mode. My eyes move a lot! I guess it must be all that thinking! It would be funny to have the camera trained on my fingers one of these days. You’d see a lot […]