Lights, Camera, Learn!

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the popular saying goes. The poetry of that statement belies the underlying truth of just how powerful images can be. A picture can show a view of reality, but the objectivity of that reality can be profoundly affected by how that picture is framed, how an individual's eye travels across the image, and how that image is interpreted by a viewer's own point of view and life experience. How an image is composed, read and interpreted can give that image the power to inspire and arouse great passion and sometimes great change. I wanted to develop a lesson for my ROP Video class at I-Poly H.S. that would challenge my students to 'read' a picture and to really think about how they use, and often misuse, editing tools such as transitions and effects. First, I set up a series of photo buckets with my Picasa account containing some historic photographs by Dorthea Lang and Lewis Hine from the Library of Congress' collection....

This week I was honored to be among a group of invited educators, technologists, district IT gurus and some of the leaders in the space where technology and learning collide...often with unintended results at the DELC 'Let's Go Hollywood' Conversation. The world famous Magic Castle was the site of an amazing kick-off reception on Wednesday night where conference opening speaker Mark Seigel dazzled the crowd not with his inspiring insights about the possibilities for education but with...wait for it...Card Tricks! The conference room at the Hollywood Renascence Hotel may have been small but the ideas were big, from Mr. Seigle's quite elegant connection to a quality education today solving the problems of tomorrow to Matt Federoff ' s demonstration VICCI , a beautiful, simple and intuitive online curriculum management system he created for the Vail, AZ School District. Matt told us how they made Empire High School a textbook free zone. Sounds radical right? Well,...