The Teacher Toolbox

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

One of the big hits in my recent workshops has been CoolIris. Teachers like the way that it strips away all the text from around images giving a ‘gallery like’ feel to the images being explored.

I recently used the software successfully with a group of 5 year olds as we explored the work of Franz Marc together. My plan was to use Voicethread to record their responses but alas the computer had other ideas.

I’m currently putting together a collection of reflection questions for art. I’ve included many of my favourites and am working on some new ones. I’ve placed the draft of this document online and left it free for anyone to add to. Feel free to add your favourite art reflection questions to it.

Edit the Google Document Here NB no log in is necessary (I hope)

cheers

Adrian

I’ve just finished a couple of posters for the lil guy I’m working with on the difference between prisms and pyramids. You can print this pyramid poster out A4 from my site. There are also ten other maths posters on the page which were viewed 11 506 during October. Feel free to see if you can use them.

I’m currently doing a favour for a friend of mine and working with her son because the lad is ‘beating himself up’ about his maths knowledge.

Here is a game I’ve made for him that encourages him to reflect on how mental computation is often more efficient than using a calculator. NB Over the years I’ve found that adding a little ‘competition’ with boys often provides them with a little extra motivation to learn the basic facts than constant worksheets

Download Beat the Calculator

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!!!

A few years back after giving a keynote to a rather large group of educators, one of the ‘invited officials’ beckoned me over.

“I like you & I especially like your quote,  ‘Subversion is a major part of innovation and it is our job to subvert’. Come sit by me.”

This conversation has always reminded me of Dorothy Parker’s, ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.’

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When it comes to Farmville sheep wandering across my Facebook news feeds I’m starting to believe catharsis is so much more fun than rationality

Feel free to send this to anyone who you think needs to see it. hehehehe

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.

With the passing of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon Landing Google has added the Moon to Google Earth. So last night I added a few Moon Exploration Ideas to my website that you might like to explore.

I’m also looking forward to the LCROSS impact and data being added to the software in the coming weeks and months.

So how will you celebrate the current Moon missions with your class? Surely you can’t wait until they ‘DO SPACE’ in Yr 6!

cheers

Adrian

PS The last few Tweets from the LCROSS spacecraft caused a small chuckle.