Category: movies
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…