Paul Hardt's Comments

Hi Paul,
I am a strong supporter of integrating technology in the classroom to facilitate learning and making lessons interesting for the students. You are invited to visit my website WordAhead where you can organize activities for the students and encourage them to make videos and upload them to the website and rate each other's work. Its a great interactive way to improve vocabulary. Do take a look!

Hi Paul,

With your interest in Education Technology, I recommend you take a look at Wiziq's virtual classroom and authorstream's power point presentation platform. Both are web based platforms, have a bunch of features and free basic service.

Hi Paul,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this classroom20 network is no exception. (I've also sent this out on other Ning networks you may be a part of.) My name is Alyshia Olsen; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham, MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. Since you are in the 'connecting content and technology' group, I thought you might be interested! Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, we hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2009, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975 . We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Alyshia Olsen
anotherdayaway42@gmail.com

Paul, excellent video!
Thanks so much.
Tim

Hi Paul,

Just been watching your video, "What's the Big Idea". Cool! There should be more of this in the classrooms.

Helen

Hi Paul,

Loved watching Smarty the Dog. Please let your kids know that someone from Australia watched it and thought it was cool.

You are right in saying that the best learning comes from the reflection and critical thinking about our work. After my class had their claymation “The Land of the Grunkerlunkers” screened at the Re@ct Film Festival, they then wanted to show the rest of their own school. Unfortunately because we were so tight with our timelines we just didn’t get a chance beforehand. Anyway it was a good chance for us to ramp up the movie and really promote it before we showed all the other classes.

In the past my kids have had a mini film festival in our room, but this particular year because the kids were still on a high from having their movie screened on the big screen, they wanted to do something bigger and better. So we started a mini inquiry into what makes a great Movie Promotion. We used the Internet and our own experiences with going to the movies to brainstorm all the possible ways the big companies promote their latest release.

So the kids got themselves into groups according to interest and went about researching, making, fine tuning their promotional product. These ranged from movie posters, standees, previews, storybooks based on the movie, competitions, quizzes, bookmarks in the shape of the characters and so on.

Once all was completed the kids went off in groups to promote their movie in each of the classes. The standee and the posters were displayed in the library for about a week before the ‘release’! This all created a buzz about the movie, which was about bullying in the school yard. Kids were asking questions and wondering when it will be their turn to see it.

My students were over the moon. What a thrill. When the time came to show it off to the school they were just as excited as when they had it screen in the film festival. Oh and by the way kids gave donation to watch the movie that went into our Graduation fund.

To cap off the experience my students reflected on not only the product but on the process and teamwork involved. They used mindmaps, whole part whole graphic organisers, and Art Costa’s Habits of Mind. Unfortunately we didn’t upload to the Internet at the time and it is probably too late to do so now as I don’t think I have the right permission.

I would love to hear more about your future projects.

Cheers,
Helen

Hello Paul,
Nice work! I took a look at the 9-11 memorial service and Good Morning East View pieces. The students look like they have alot of fun making the Good Morning Eastview videos.Have you looked at I2 video projects? This might be of interest to you.
Cheers, Arnie

HI Paul
Thanks for the comments and the connections.
I'd be interested to hear more about your documentary movie projects and how you move those ideas in the classroom.
Kevin