educating for the journey

François Truffaut defined a great movie as a perfect blend of truth and spectacle. Now it’s become bifurcated. Studio films are all spectacle and no truth, and independent films are all truth and no spectacle.
-Howard Franklin

It seems the web has gone movie crazy – i realize this does not qualify as breaking news but the video content that is out there is just incredible. When Warlick informed me this morning that videos could win Emmy’s, i had to think about the future of student created films. We have just completed two more documentary style projects in the advanced tech classes here; the first is a look into the robotics rotations done in PT2. The end result was great; to be honest i assigned it because the student joined the class too late to be put into a robot group. He achieved a lot and the DVD that he left will make for a nice launching point for future robotics rotations. Speaking of launching points the pending release of the Senior Extended Essay (S.E.E.) documentary is much anticipated around the school here. The creation of this DVD involved hundreds of hours of capturing and the results show some hard work. The also support a huge chunk of our budget going to get microphones, better cameras, tripods … the works. Don’t think we are up for an Emmy this year, but look out…

In other news here at CMS we are in the process of reworking our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to include social networking and offsite, online behavior. This has been a hot topic with ISTE recently and recent activities here are forcing us to clearly state to students that any activity (regardless of location) that affects the climate and comfort of students at school can (and will) be dealt with by administrators.
A huge thanks toMedagogy for your sharing of information with respect to this – can’t wait to see you and KT this summer.

Finally a new crop of almost seniors has begun searching for content advisors for their S.E.E. my student’s topic deals with privacy in the 21st century. The search for articles vaulted me into the Allison Stokke situation and it was clear immediately that my candidate would have little trouble finding postings and writings on her topic to read this summer.
(vids and links coming soon but it is Friday after 2:15…)

GaDeV