Archive for the ‘movies’ Category:


Why We Cancelled Our Hulu Plus Subscription

Today we cancelled our family trial subscription to Hulu Plus. Last week I shared my excitement at being able to use the free Hulu Plus iPad app and “mirror” from an iPad2 on Apple TV to watch TV programs on our television. In the end, however, the regular ADVERTISING in Hulu Plus (along with the

(Read More…)

Awesome Brickfilm

This is a guest post by my 13 year old son, Alexander. So I don’t normally write things up but but dad asked me to share this. I love building and playing with legos. It is always fun to build fancy ships but the lego minifigure is also one of the best tools to make stopmotion films

(Read More…)

The Changing Face of Home Media Consumption

Media access and media consumption behaviors are changing in our homes. A few weeks ago, I received an email (via Flickr) from the Interactive Project Coordinator of the National Building Museum‘s “House and Home” exhibition. She was asking for permission to use and license the photo, “Laptops at Home,” which I took in June 2009

(Read More…)

Digital Storytelling and Writing with the Story Arc and Freytag’s pyramid

Many good stories, whether we read them in books, hear other people tell them, or watch them in movies use the “story arc” or “dramatic structure.” This is a photo I snapped last week in Holland, Michigan, of a story arc drawing a teacher was using. Freytag’s pyramid is a five part model also referred

(Read More…)

Waiting For Superman: A Good Film to Provoke Conversations We Need

Since I was already in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex to teach my “Computers in Classroom” course at UNT today and had a free evening, I drove about 45 minutes to a wonderful independent movie theater in Plano, Texas, and watched the movie, “Waiting for Superman.” I’ve read quite a few articles and blog posts in

(Read More…)

Coming in November 2010: Harry Potter 7 (Part 1)

I can’t wait for November to get here and part one of the final Harry Potter movie series: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The movie trailer looks great! In case you’re wondering when the movie creators are going to split the final book to make the two movie segments, the “Story” section of the

(Read More…)

Embedding Video in a VoiceThread: Role Playing Annabeth Chase from The Lightning Thief (book)

Cross-posted to Learning Signs. Sarah [my 9 year old 4th grader] created the following digital story today before school using VoiceThread about the book, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.” She role-played Annabeth Chase in a video we shot last Wednesday in St Louis using my iPhone. This is the first VoiceThread we’ve

(Read More…)

Netflix streaming coming to the Nintendo Wii

This is GREAT news for Nintendo Wii owners and Netflix subscribers: Later this spring the Wii will begin supporting Netflix streaming in standard (not high definition) resolution. If you’re already a Netflix subscriber, you can apply on their website to receive a Wii disk which will enable the service / functionality when it becomes available

(Read More…)

Who can run our living room TV anymore?

The complexities of running a living room television set have really increased in the past few years. How many different video and audio sources do you now route through your television and living room entertainment center, if you have one? For us, the list has grown to include a DVD player, a computer (mainly for

(Read More…)

Chinese Parental Expectations, Creativity, and Chinese Film Recommendations

Early this morning (thanks in part to the delayed effects of jet lag) I finished reading Shouhua Qi’s outstanding book, “Bridging the Pacific: Searching for Cross-Cultural Understanding Between the United States and China.” Dr. Qi is currently a professor of English at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. I shared a few ideas I gleaned

(Read More…)

Hi tech Disney demos for A Christmas Carol

This past Friday after I picked up my son from school, we stopped by our downtown Oklahoma City Amtrak station for a free tour of the Christmas Carol Movie train. One of the most interactive portions of the tour was being able to use provided HP touchscreen computers (which regularly displayed application crash error messages,

(Read More…)

Streaming Netflix videos in the car over 3G

A couple of years ago, my middle daughter was using a laptop in our car on a trip and asked me how to spell “Disney.” “Why do you want to know?” I asked. She was trying to visit Disney.com. I patiently had to explain to her that “the Internet isn’t everywhere” and we couldn’t access

(Read More…)

Go Green! Go Electric! (A Film on the Fly! Earth Day Video)

Today I took two of my children to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the Miles Automotive Group where we learned about electric vehicles and shot our Film on the Fly / Earth Day cell phone video, “Go Green! Go Electric!” The description for this video which we included on YouTube was: The children have the answer! Tomorrow

(Read More…)

Erewhon, Mt Sunday (Edoras) and the Rangitata Valley

Today was another marvelous day in New Zealand. Thanks to the generosity and kindness of friends, I had an opportunity to realize a dream: I saw and stood near the actual landscape setting for “Edoras” in the film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.” Mount Sunday is located near Mt Potts Sheep Station in the

(Read More…)

Filmmakers document incredible courage of Liberian women

My knowledge of Liberia has been pretty limited to date. I learned about the Liberian Renaissance Education Complex talking to Dr. Dennis Harper (founder of Kijana Voices and Generation YES) at NECC in 2007 as part of a podcast interview. Before our conversation I had not heard of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the current president of Liberia

(Read More…)

Thumbs down for Indy Jones 4, thumbs up for Prince Caspian

WARNING: MOVIE SPOILERS AHEAD! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THESE FILMS YET, YOU MAY NOT WANT TO READ THIS POST. One of the best tests of quality for new, professionally produced movies these days, in our family, is whether or not we want to own the DVD of a movie we have seen at the theater.

(Read More…)

The Corporation documentary: A big eye opener

These are my notes I took this evening watching “The Corporation Film.” For more background on the documentary, check out the English WikiPedia page for it. The article goes through the film segment by segment, in a much more thorough way than I have here with my own notes. I added this video to our

(Read More…)

Historical and Current Abolitionists: Fighting to end slavery

I saw the remarkable film “Amazing Grace” when it was released in US theaters this past April, but for some reason I did not blog about it or the issues it raises before. That is an oversight I am pleased to remedy this evening. I adore NetFlix. Our use of NetFlix waxes and wanes, but

(Read More…)

Learning about documentary filmmaking and WWII from Ken Burns

I have only seen about 30 minutes of the latest Ken Burns documentary “The War,” but what I have seen touched my heart and moved my spirit. I am in the midst of attempting to facilitate several opportunities for Oklahoma teachers and students to utilize videoconferencing as well as online digital tools to get involved

(Read More…)

“Prince Caspian” and the Return to Narnia: Making the Journey to Literacy Through Fantasy

These are my notes from a session titled: “Prince Caspian” and the Return to Narnia: Making the Journey to Literacy Through Fantasy by Randy Testa, Vice President of Education for Walden Media, LLC. Randy shared this presentation at the 2007 EncycloMedia presentation in Oklahoma City on 8/29/2007. Because of copyrights on media materials Randy is

(Read More…)

© Creative Commons License