Category: creativity
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Prepping for a week of stopmotion fun!
Ever since I first saw the Clay Animation Kit from Tech4Learning at the TCEA conference in the late 1990s, I have yearned for an opportunity to play with its contents and have fun making my own claymation videos! Members of our immediate family are BIG TIME fans of claymation movies like those of Wallace and…
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Praise for NeoOffice (OpenOffice) and SeaShore (GIMP)
I have had VERY positive experiences this past week with both NeoOffice (the Macintosh OS X port of OpenOffice) and SeaShore (a variant of the open source GIMP photo editor for Mac OS X which does not require X11.) For both of my presentations Saturday for the 2008 Survive and Thrive Single Moms conference in…
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A science fair project changing the world?
“Meet the Robinsons” is one of my favorite movies for many reasons. The way in which the film celebrates creativity, innovation, and perseverance in the face of difficult circumstances is wonderful. Louis, the hero, is an aspiring science fair inventor, who eventually realizes his dreams and creates (or discovers) inventions which help shape the world…
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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.…
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Taking notes on effective electoral video marketing
U.S. Presidential elections inevitably lead to interesting and thought provoking advertisements, but I am not sure previous elections generated as many opportunities to learn from effective electoral marketing ads as the 2008 campaign. The primary reason for this is user-created content: It continues to explode, and the variety as well as quantity of video content…
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Continuing dialog about creativity in schools, student technology skills and content filtering
I posted the following as a response to Corey White’s comment on my February post, “Advocating for differentiated content filtering.” This was a lengthy comment, and seemed to justify its own post. Hopefully my tone here is not too confrontational. Corey: Like many in IT in our schools, your comment reflects an assumption that part…
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Podcast249: Pimp My Ride (digitally) Southeast Oklahoma Style (An Interview with Lance Ford: Mac Jedi)
This podcast features an interview with Oklahoma K-12 educator Lance Ford, who has recently custom modded his Honda Element with an in-car 7″ touch LCD screen, a Mac Mini computer, and an AT&T wireless network card to create his own mobile commander: A vehicle for mobile computing, desktop videoconferencing, and webcasting. In this interview (conducted…