For those of you working with students creating their own films with claymation, you’ll enjoy watching the following two films available now on YouTube.

The first, Spontaneous Generation, won Best Animated Film at the 2008 Ann Arbor Film festival last spring

Spontaneous Generation

And I love this new film which won the Guilt by Association Music Video Contest to the song, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Devendra Banhart

Don\’t Look Back in Anger

ENJOY!

What’s in your backyard?  One fabulous thing about blogging is that I can so easily connect to people across the country and across the world.  And most of these folks I have no idea where they live or what their back yard looks like.  In fact, I get a better sense of what’s in their virtual backyard than their real one.

So, feel free to take this time to let me know, what’s in your backyard.  Goodness knows, I’m not leaving this bed anytime soon, so I’ve got lots of time to read your posts and comment too!

Here’s a peek into my backyard.  A few days ago it looked a lot different.  It’s amazing how ten minutes can change your world.  My yard is usually an acre of grassy soccer field, vegetable garden with a long row of ripe raspberries and blueberries, a wooded area with a lot of tall trees, and just beyond the yard a many acred field with deer, hawk, and fox that abuts UMass, Amherst.  At the moment, in my yard there are at least ten felled trees: a pin oak, a sugar maple (so sad as it produces much maple syrup each spring), a line of four white pines (really tall, really big), a line of 6 Hemlock, another maple and a nut tree.  Okay, that’s more than ten.  What didn’t fall?  Thank goodness we still have plenty of trees including the four largest trees–two Tulip Poplars, a very old oak, and a clump of white pines.  Not only would it be sad to lose these trees, but losing these would most likely mean losing our house too.  But, a momma deer and her two babies seem to find solace and comfort amidst the rubble and for that we’re thankful.

Head on over to Just One More Book to hear the podcast review of The Goat in the Rug I submitted to them and they published! Why don’t you try recording your own book review and send it over to the folks at Just One More Book and see what happens.

Here’s what we discovered or reminded ourselves we can do:

Walk to work (1/2 hour each way)

Walk to the bus and take the bus to work (about 2 hours each way)

Walk to the bus stop and take the bus to tutoring, orthodontist appointments and other events in town (about 1/2 hour each way)

Carpool with others either half way, then took the bus, or others went out of their way to drop us off

Schedule meetings at home

Ride our bikes (a bit tricky during this time of year when the sun is down by 4 pm & the heavy traffic on our road)

Schedule meetings in the city my husband works and coordinated them with drop off or pick up times and drive tog.

Give up attending activities.

It’s been good for us. It takes more time, but sometimes that’s a good thing. And, we hope to continue to use public transportation and our own body power a bit more than we used to even after tomorrow when it looks like we’ll be purchasing our second Toyota Corolla. Wish is was a Prius, but when both cars die in the same year that just doesn’t fit in the budget. So, thanks to everyone who kicked in to help.

Walk on!

While exploring these creations on the Tech Stories blog, I ran into this video of Ira Glass talking about storytelling. Kevin suggested that it might help them as they create their Alphabet Stories. It’s actually quite interesting to listen to because he talks about how telling a story for radio or TV is quite different than what we were all taught telling a story was in our H.S. English classes.

He suggests, there are two basics–the anecdote (a sequence of actions) and a reflection. I couldn’t help thinking that there are some similarities there to blogging. Blogging quite often is a sequence of thoughts, that build on each other, often spurred from another’s thinking on their blog or (like this blog entry, my thinking spurred on by listening to Ira Glass’s thinking that I stumbled upon through Kevin’s thinking) with reflection. I’d like to suggest that the best blogging entries include both as well! A good story, built on a sequence of thoughts, followed by reflection. Not just the thinking. Not just the reflection.

I’m ready to go out and buy a mini portable video camera and jump into this exciting world of digital storytelling. Although, as you’ll notice when you view some of the other Letter movies, digital storytelling can be done with still pictures as well. These folks have links to some great tutorials. So, come along! And check out these links and kid digital stories at Lakeland Schools, WOW! My favorite is The Phone Call on the Streetside Stories link. Now, that’s some kinda voice!

During graduate school, my job in Harvard’s African American Studies Department  brought me in contact with my first computer.  Thank goodness!  I can’t tell you how many late nights I snuck into my office to use the computer to transcribe all the interviews I was conducting and write all my thesis papers.  It quickly became hard to imagine all those undergraduate English papers I wrote on the typewriter–talk about a hindrance to revision! 

Over the next ten years, it seemed like every new teaching job brought with it a new wave of technology in computers.  Sounds like a great thing, and it was in many ways, but it also meant that all the teacher files I had created over the years were no longer accessible–stuck on floppy disks (real floppy) or on software that could not be transferred to the newest and latest technology.  Frustrating!  I still have all those old files on floppy disks and I wonder what they say?  One set even contains half of a book I started to write one summer.

While teaching in Seattle, I remember getting a computer from the school!  And it was portable, if you call stuffing a Mac into a 2 x 3 foot suit case (without wheels), throwing it over your shoulder and toting it back and forth to work, portable.  Of course, this was before laptops!  It certainly did help free me from those late nights and Saturdays holed up in my classroom.

Taking the next few years off from teaching proved to be a lifetime in the world of technological advances.  When I returned to Massachusetts from Washington and New Mexico, I returned to a world of email and internet.  Wow, did I have a lot of catching up to do.  I’m a pokey learner–but I’m learning.  Having adolescent children helps!  But my most important mentor in the world of technology is the National Writing Project.  Look at me now I’m blogging!  What next?!

tech