The Teacher Toolbox

I love to have a performance focus in my classrooms and the Free Harvest Sound Effects Player software adds a whole extra dimension to any play, readers’ theatre or poetry recital.

I’m with @BernajeanPorter when she says that when telling & performing stories we are looking for more than ‘polite listening’ from the audience. I believe we need the audience to engage with the performance and the actors need to explore the production values that will make an ‘ordinary’ piece of text ‘extrodinary’.

I also believe the message we send to students when we are prepared to get outside our comfort zones, tinker with new tools and be seen to be doing ‘new with the new’ is very, very important in developing confident creative thinkers.

Check out a few of the tips and tricks I’ve worked out for using this sound effects software and the link to the download over on my website.

Enjoy!

Adrian

My machinima interpretation of Macbeth is finally complete. It has taken a lot longer than I had anticipated but in the end I’m very pleased with the way it has turned out. I am also really pleased with the amount of problems I’ve overcome and skills I’ve learnt along the way.

Do have a look at the interpretation and forward it on to anyone you think can use it.

Thanks

Adrian

PS What personal project are you currently doing?

I firmly believe the mark of a person is not what they do when they are knocked down once and get back up. It is what they do when they are knocked down a fifth, sixth & seventh time.

I tip my hat to all the educators who are fighting the good fight to make Education relevant to our children in the face of massive ignorance on the part of government & traditional media.

The Haunted House Poem – (click on this link to hear it)

In schools a poem is often ‘finished’ when  it is ‘published’. Publishing often involves ‘typing it up’ ensuring the text is centred, has a lovely font (that usually takes ages to select), has a nice piece of clip art to support the text and some sort of clip art border.

The poem is then either added to a wall display for a few weeks or put into a display folder to be sent home at the end of the term. Oh, and it often has a shiny sticker on it. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that there are many other creative ways to celebrate poetry.

The poem above was a joint construction between my son and I using this poetry scaffold from my website. The audio production has been done with the free software  Audacity and using sounds from Soundsnap.com

…and if you are wondering, the spooky voice was achieved by dropping the pitch of my voice by -20.

Love, Death, Rhetoric & Half Life – A Blog Post in Two Parts.

1. Why do it?

- …because we can and because it is very, very EASY!
- Exposing students to ‘real’ 3d animation is cost prohibitive and rather complex. This is cheap and readily available.
- So much of schooling is ‘about’ stuff. Kids are required to write about, ‘the explorers’, about ‘the planets’ & about ‘what they did in the holidays’. Where do we encourage them to create new stuff? Where do we encourage them to produce stuff that has never been produced before?
- In my experience, ‘I can’t draw’ gets in the way of adults and children cartooning so this form of digital story telling eliminates the excuse.

2. To Foster Creativity

- How might you adapt it to make your own creative product?
- What might this sort of experimentation lead to if this type of thinking and experimentation is encouraged and celebrated?
- Do new with the new and encourage our students to do the same.
- Think and Question -  Compare the lines from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with the Half Life context. How are they alike and different?
- Hypothsize the events before and after this graphic.
- Substitute other famous quotes for the dialogue in this comic. What new meanings can be created? eg ‘It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. It is a far, far better rest…’

So how did I come up with this idea? Bits of SCAMPER.

Combine – Half Life 2 screen shots, with Comic Life with a quote from a Tom Stoppard play.

Eliminate – I had heaps of other alternatives that I eliminated as they didn’t have the impact this idea had.

- So where does the thought to combine famous quotes come from? In my mind I seem to run very quickly through a heaps of possibilities and then I eliminate the ones of lesser worth or impact as I go. It is sort of like brainstorming without the butchers’ paper

For the people who aren’t into gaming or don’t know how to do screenshots I’ve put together a collection of images you can use for your own creative digital storytelling.

Enjoy

Adrian

I do so love playing with this technology with Samuel (Mr 10)!

Spore has a video capture function built into it so we just grabbed a heap of video shots of one of the characters and put them together in Movie Maker with his current favourite joke. Too easy!!!

Another of the things I love about machinima is the irreverent humour. Feel free to make humourous suggestions for the dialogue of this comic

Plus, I think I mentioned it before, I love leaving these sorts of things on display in classes for a week and having the students think about what should be added to the language bubbles. Mulling it over for a while tends to produce great results.

In the coming weeks I’m flying off to Mackay to run a whole day Gifted & Talented workshop on machinima.

I’ve been working on ideas for this workshop for the last few months and am just about to launch an online image bank that will not be blocked by school filters.  (If you know what I mean hehehe).

I’ve already completed a collection of Dawn of War, Second Life and, thanks to JoKay, World of Warcraft images. I anticipate that these collections will go live in the next few days.

Call for Help - If you can help out with PG rated images from your favourite video game feel free to email them to me so anyone can have a go at this type of story telling.

After a long day I was just having a little play with my Oddfellows , my new Digital Camera &  Comic Life

I recently took my son to a ICT in Education Conference where he led a group of
teachers through three half hour workshops on video game making, stop motion
animation & movie making using a Flip video.

Whilst I had a few reservations about this the experience turned out to be a
wonderful learning opportunity. Real audience, sense of purpose, connection,
planning, rehearsal, networking, value of his talents and soooooo much more.



He received some great feedback from those that attended his session and here is an email
a delegate sent to his school and to me.

Good Morning

I attended a National Computer Conference ( ELH ) in Lorne over the weekend. I am from a
school in Perth Western Australia. There were 250 professional teachers and technicians
attending from around the country. The conference is a well known and very highly regarded
by professionals in the area on Education and IT. One of your students Samuel Bruce was
co-presenting with his father Adrian. The presentation went all day from 9.30 - 5 pm
and he was inspirational. Samuel demonstrated programs and assisted IT teachers in many
of the applications he has used and mastered. I was in awe as this young boy spoke with
authority and passion about his presentations. He and his father's presentation was one
of the best at the conference sessions and I would love it if you could commend Samuel
with a merit award or commendation in front of his peers.

It made me reflect on my own teaching and how I can accommodate children like Samuel
in my class sessions when they have far better skills than I have and can teach us
all so much.

Thank you for allowing him to attend. 

Mrs Jo P