By Aislinn Malszecki, Digital Media Specialist, MindShare Learning
It’s Canadian Media Literacy Week Nov. 7 – 11, 2011. And I wanted to highlight several interesting video and animation resources to help connect your classroom to the positive, creative and pleasurable dimensions of the moving image, including out own 21st Century Classroom Video Challenge. Media-production skills are essential in this pop-culture world we live in to fully understand media and or digital literacy, so get inspired and discover your inner filmmaker with these resources.
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has some fantastic resources for Media Literacy Week including Out My Window: Interactive views from the global high-rise, an 360-degree interactive “documentary” inviting students to hear stories of those who live in the high rises of four cities. Emphasising the concept of Digital Citizenship, a theme of this years Media Literacy Week. This resource will help students explore the hopes and challenges of the inhabitants of high-rises and the experience surrounding the rapid urbanization phenomena
Deconstruct complicated Shakespeare plot-lines with Comics and Animation!
CliffNotes Films recently launched with animated interactive video summaries of Shakespeare. So far they have Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, and Julius Caesar each 6-minutes in length, created to help students understand the plot-lines of the classics. A perfect supplement to the readings. Produced by the Survivor creator Mark Burnett, nonetheless.
To create your own comics in class check out Canadian company BitStrips
Take part on November 11th, (11/11/2011), across the Earth, documentary filmmakers, students, and others will record the human expience over a 24-hr period and contribute their voice to the 2nd annual global day of media creation called One Day on Earth. It’s about people in nearly every country on the planet pointing a camera at that day in their lives, things that mattered the most. Last year over 3,000 hours worth of footage from thousands of participants. The project lives online as a social network for filmmakers of all ages and background. The organizers calls One Day on Earth “the amazing diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that occur in one day.”
Here at MindShare Learning we have our 21st Century Classroom Video Challenge! It’s our 4th annual contest and like previous years we’re looking for tech savvy teachers to share their classroom story on video for us on how you integrate technology into your classroom to support student success. Great prizes to win and a wonderful activity to do with your students during Media Literacy Week.
The NFB offers a beautifully crafted interactive portal to learn about the stories and perspectives on the iconic Montreal landmark with digital video and map, named Holy Mountain! Contemplating Montreal’s Mount Royal. This one is definitely worth a look at, especially to dive into seethe pinnacle of digital-production looks like, Canadians are certainly leaders in this realm.
